Justified True Belief

(●) The fisherman who swore he had never met Jesus, and who weeks later stood up in Jerusalem and told the city it had crucified its Messiah. + Every trade leaves its mark on a body. A man who has hauled wet nets out of a cold lake for twenty years has shoulders and hands you would recognize across a room, and Simon of Bethsaida was that man. He worked a boat on the Sea of Galilee with his brother Andrew. He had a wife, and a house in Capernaum with his wife’s mother living in it. When the temple authorities in Jerusalem finally got a look at him some years later, they summed him up in a phrase that was not meant kindly: uneducated and untrained (Acts 4:13). He is on a Christian apologetics shelf for a reason that has nothing to do with being impressive. The movement that began at the empty tomb had at its center a man whose worst hour is one of the best-attested things about him. All four Gospels record that Peter denied knowing Jesus, three times, under no torture at all, to a servant girl and a couple of bystanders warming themselves at a fire, only hours after promising to die with him. Nobody had to write that down. The church that later revered him as the first among the apostles is the same church that kept the story of the courtyard in all four of its accounts and never once cleaned it up. That is the pattern of the whole life, and it is the thing to hold on to. Few people in the New Testament have as much of their failure preserved: he sinks in the water, he says the wrong thing on the mountain, he is called Satan to his face by the man he has just correctly identified as the Christ, he swears he never knew him, and years afterward, an apostle for two decades by then, he is still capable of the small cowardice at Antioch that made Paul confront him in public. The tradition that grew up around him did not begin with a hero. It began with somebody who kept being forgiven.

(●) Before 28 AD: He fished the Sea of Galilee, kept a house in Capernaum, and answered to Simon. + Nobody recorded the year he was born, and nobody thought to, so the shape of the early life has to be assembled out of passing remarks. John says he came from Bethsaida, a fishing village at the north end of the lake: "Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter" (John 1:44). By the time Jesus meets him he is living a few miles west in Capernaum, where Mark puts "the house of Simon and Andrew" and mentions, without making anything of it, that Simon’s mother-in-law was in it, sick with a fever (Mark 1:29–31). That single word, mother-in-law, is how we know Peter was married. Paul confirms it decades later, and in a way that suggests the wife was still traveling with him: "Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?" (1 Corinthians 9:5). The fishing was a business rather than a subsistence trade. Luke has Simon in a partnership with James and John, the sons of Zebedee, which means boats, hired help, nets to mend, and a catch to sell (Luke 5:10). It was night work on open water, and the lake is famous for squalls that come down off the surrounding hills with no warning. His Greek was probably serviceable and his Aramaic was Galilean, which is to say it was an accent. On the worst night of his life it gave him away: the people around the fire told him he must be one of them, because his speech made it obvious (Matthew 26:73). Galilee was the provinces. Jerusalem was the city. A man like Simon walking into the temple courts to argue about Scripture with trained men was, by the standards of the day, out of his depth, and Acts records that the council noticed exactly that and could not account for how well he did (Acts 4:13).

(●) c. 28 AD: Jesus called him off the water and renamed him Cephas, the Rock, which was not a name at all. + The Gospels come at the first meeting from different angles, and the angles are not hard to hold together. John has Andrew hear John the Baptist point out Jesus, find his brother, and bring him along: "Jesus looked at him and said, You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas (which means Peter" (John 1:42). Mark gives the moment the fishing stopped, on the shore, mid-shift: "And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him" (Mark 1:17–18). Luke sets a great catch of fish just before it, and records what Simon said when he understood what was standing in his boat: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!" (Luke 5:8). It is the first thing Luke lets us hear out of his mouth, and it is an accurate self-assessment. The new name is stranger than it sounds to us. Cephas is Aramaic, kepha, a rock or a crag; Petros is the Greek for the same thing. To an ancient ear it was not a name at all but a common noun applied to a person, the way "Rock" would land in English if you started calling a man that at work. As an ordinary personal name it is close to unattested in the Greek and Semitic records of the period, though the evidence is thin on both sides and argued over: an Aramaic papyrus from Elephantine in Egypt, dated 416 BC, has been read as naming a man’s father Kepha, and scholars disagree about the reading and about what it would prove. The New Testament calls him Simon, Simon Peter, Peter, and Cephas, and the church settled on the nickname. He was, by every list that survives, first among the twelve. The four lists of the apostles, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts, all begin with him, and Matthew alone spells the ranking out: "First, Simon, who is called Peter" (Matthew 10:2). And along with James and John he is in the room, or on the hill, for things the other nine are not: the raising of a synagogue official’s daughter, the transfiguration on the mountain, where Jesus’ face shone like the sun and his clothing turned blinding white in front of the three of them, and the agony in Gethsemane, the olive grove outside Jerusalem where Jesus prayed on the night he was arrested.

(●) c. 29 AD: At Caesarea Philippi he said out loud who Jesus was, and minutes later was called Satan. + No Gospel dates any of this, so the year here is the conventional one, set roughly twelve months before the crucifixion. What the Gospels do give is the place, and the place is doing work. Caesarea Philippi sat at the foot of Mount Hermon, some twenty-five miles north of the lake, around a spring that fed the Jordan. It was a place stacked with other people’s gods: a grotto sacred to the goat-god Pan, older Canaanite worship in the same rocks, and a temple to Caesar built by Herod the Great. Standing in that particular spot, Jesus asked his disciples who people said he was, and then made it personal: who do you say that I am. Peter answered for all of them, and the sentence is the hinge of Matthew, Mark and Luke alike: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). Jesus told him that flesh and blood had not revealed it, and then said the words the church has argued about ever since: "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). What that sentence commits a Christian to is the one genuinely divisive question in Peter’s whole story, and Christians have never agreed on the answer. What happens next in the same conversation is what keeps the scene human. Jesus began to explain that he was going to Jerusalem to suffer and be killed and be raised, and Peter, still glowing from the commendation, took him aside and told him to stop talking like that. The answer came back without softening: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God" (Matthew 16:23). Inside a few minutes the same man is told he has heard from the Father and that he is thinking like the enemy. He had the identity right and the job description entirely wrong, and he would not understand the difference until after the tomb was empty.

(●) c. 30 AD: In a courtyard, warming his hands at a fire, he swore three times that he had never met the man. + He had promised otherwise, and loudly. At the last supper, told that all of them would fall away, he insisted that even if everyone else did, he would not, and that he was ready to go to prison and to death. Jesus told him that before a rooster crowed twice that night he would deny him three times. A few hours later, in Gethsemane, Peter did draw a sword and swing it at a man’s head, which is not the behavior of a coward. Then the arrest happened anyway, and the courage ran out. The year on this chapter is the conventional one: the sources fix the feast and the day of the week and never the year, and while 30 AD is the common reckoning, a substantial body of scholarship argues for 33 instead. What follows is the least flattering scene in the New Testament and it is told, with small variations, in all four Gospels. Peter followed at a distance into the high priest’s courtyard and sat down at the fire with the servants, close enough to see what was being done to Jesus inside. A servant girl looked at him and said he had been with the Nazarene. He said he did not know what she was talking about. It happened again. The third time, he began to swear: "But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, I do not know this man of whom you speak" (Mark 14:71). Then the rooster, and the memory: "And immediately the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. And he broke down and wept" (Mark 14:72). Luke adds the detail that undoes a reader: the Lord turned and looked at him (Luke 22:61). Historians have a name for a passage like this. They call it the criterion of embarrassment, and it means only that people passing a story on had every reason to drop it and passed it on anyway. Consider who was doing the passing. These accounts were written and circulated in churches where Peter was among the most honored names in the movement, and where, according to the oldest tradition about the Gospel of Mark, the man supplying the material was Peter himself. Nobody flatters a leader by preserving the night he perjured himself to a serving girl.

(●) c. 30 AD: The risen Jesus went to him early, and at another fire asked him three times whether he loved him. + The oldest surviving summary of the resurrection appearances is not a Gospel. It is a short formula Paul says he received and handed on, quoted in a letter to Corinth in the mid-fifties and older than the letter by a good deal, the kind of thing a congregation learns by heart. It begins with one name: "He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve" (1 Corinthians 15:5). Luke has the disciples in Jerusalem saying the same thing to the pair coming back from Emmaus, in the excited word order of people interrupting each other: "The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!" (Luke 24:34). Neither source describes the meeting. Whatever passed between Jesus and the man who had denied him, no one wrote it down. What did get written down is the scene at the end of John, on the shore of the same lake where the whole thing had started, over a charcoal fire and a breakfast of fish. Three times Jesus asked, "Simon, son of John, do you love Me?" Three times Peter said yes, the third time with an edge of pain in it: "Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, Do you love me? and he said to him, Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you" (John 21:17). Three denials at one fire; three affirmations at another. And each time the answer was not absolution but a job: tend my lambs, shepherd my sheep, tend my sheep. Then a warning, put gently and not explained: when you were young you dressed yourself and went where you liked, but when you are old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and take you where you do not want to go. John tells his readers plainly what it meant, "said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God" (John 21:19). Peter’s restoration and the manner of his death arrive in the same breath, and the last two words of the conversation are the same two words as the first: follow me.

(●) c. 30 to 44 AD: He preached the sermon the church dates itself from, then walked into a Roman officer’s house and could not unsee what he found there. + Seven weeks after the crucifixion the city filled up again. The feast was Pentecost, the harvest festival that fell fifty days after Passover, the spring feast of Israel’s rescue out of Egypt, and it drew Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem from every province they had settled in. Into that crowd, the man who had been afraid of a servant girl stood up and did the exact thing he had refused to do in the courtyard. He named Jesus in public, in the city that had killed him, within walking distance of the men who arranged it. The sermon in Acts 2 is short, built out of the prophet Joel and two of the Psalms, and its argument is a matter of public record rather than private experience: David’s tomb is here and occupied, and this Jesus is not. Luke reports about three thousand baptized that day, and the church has counted its own beginning from that morning ever since. What follows in Acts is a decade of a man growing into the job, and Luke tells it in scenes rather than in a summary. Peter heals a lame beggar at the temple gate, which draws a crowd, which gets him arrested. Hauled in front of the same council that had condemned Jesus, he tells them to their faces that he intends to keep talking. Not all of it is comfortable reading, either: he confronts a married couple, Ananias and Sapphira, over a lie about money they had given, and both of them fall dead, a scene that has troubled readers ever since and that Luke sets down without smoothing it over. Then, near the end of the decade, the state comes for him directly. Herod Agrippa I, in the last year of that king’s life, around 44 AD, has just executed James the son of Zebedee, one of the three who had been up the mountain with Jesus, and Peter is jailed next. He gets out in the course of a night the church spends praying. The turn that mattered most, though, was not a miracle. He was in Joppa on the coast when a message came from Caesarea, from a Roman centurion named Cornelius. A centurion commanded something like eighty men, which made Cornelius a career officer of the army occupying the country and a man of standing in it. Acts gives no year for the visit; the usual estimate puts it in the late thirties, somewhere between 37 and 40. Peter had grown up under food laws and table customs that kept Jews and Gentiles apart, a Gentile being anyone who was not a Jew, and going into a Gentile home to eat was not a small breach of etiquette but the crossing of a line his whole world was built on. He went anyway, on the strength of a vision of a sheet let down from heaven full of animals he had been raised never to touch, and told the room why he had come: "You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean" (Acts 10:28). Then the Holy Spirit fell on the Romans in the room before Peter had finished speaking, and he baptized them. He had to go back to Jerusalem and explain himself to the church for it, and the argument he made there is the one that eventually carried the day at the council in Acts 15.

(●) c. 49 to 68 AD: He argued for the Gentiles at Jerusalem, was rebuked to his face at Antioch, and died in Rome. + The council at Jerusalem, which the standard chronologies put at 48 or 49 AD by working backward from Paul’s movements, met to decide whether Gentile converts had to become Jews first. Peter spoke early and staked the argument on what he had seen at Cornelius’ house: God had given the Spirit to those men exactly as he had given it to the apostles, so nobody should load them with a yoke the Jews themselves had never carried. His conclusion put both groups on the same footing and left them there: "But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will" (Acts 15:11). James then gave the practical ruling and the meeting closed. And then, at Antioch, he lost his nerve again, and Paul published it. Peter had been eating with Gentile believers as a matter of course. When some men arrived from James, he began to pull back, and other Jewish Christians followed him, Barnabas included. Paul’s account is not softened for the reader: "But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned" (Galatians 2:11). It is a genuine failure and it belongs in the record, in part because of what it shows about the man in question: Paul told the story in a circulating letter while Peter was alive and widely honored, and there is no sign the church tried to bury it. The last stretch of the life is thinner and the sources change character. He appears to have traveled: Paul mentions a "Cephas" party at Corinth, and 1 Peter is addressed to believers scattered across five Roman provinces in what is now Turkey. That letter signs off from a place it calls Babylon, "She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings, and so does Mark, my son" (1 Peter 5:13), which Christian readers understood from very early on as a coded name for Rome. After that the New Testament falls silent, and the earliest witnesses take over. Writing from Rome around 96 AD, Clement says that Peter, through envy, endured many labors and, having borne his witness, went to the place of glory owed him. By the second century the tradition is settled: Peter died a martyr at Rome under Nero, whose persecution of Christians followed the fire of 64 AD and whose reign ended with his own death in 68. Origen, quoted by the historian Eusebius, adds that he was crucified head downward at his own request. The exact year is unrecoverable and the sources do not give one, which is why his dates are written as a range.

What He Taught

(T1) Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God. + Two of the words in that sentence have been worn smooth by use, so it is worth slowing down on them. Christ is not a surname. It is the Greek christos, "anointed one," a translation of the Hebrew mashiach, from which we get Messiah: the king of David’s line whom the prophets had promised and Israel was still waiting for, in an occupied country, under a foreign army. To say it of a village carpenter’s son with no soldiers was not a compliment. It was a political claim and a religious one at the same time, and the kind of claim that got people killed. "Son of the living God" goes further still. Israel used son-language for kings and for the nation, so the phrase did not by itself settle every question the later church would ask about the nature of Christ. But it puts Jesus on God’s side of the line rather than on ours, and Matthew reports Jesus receiving the confession rather than correcting it, which is the move a monotheist, someone who holds that there is one God and no other beside him, notices at once. Peter’s first sermon shows what he thought followed. He tells Jerusalem that God has made this Jesus both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36), applying to him a psalm about the Lord seating another Lord at his right hand. Notice, though, what Peter still had wrong that afternoon at Caesarea Philippi. He had the identity and not the job: a Messiah who suffers made no sense to him, and he said so, and got called Satan for it. Getting the title right is the beginning of the matter and not the end of it, and Peter is the case in point.

(Q) "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." + Source: Matthew 16:16 (English Standard Version). Peter answers on behalf of the twelve at Caesarea Philippi, after Jesus has asked them who they say he is. Mark and Luke record the same confession in shorter form (Mark 8:29; Luke 9:20).

(T2) God raised Jesus from the dead, and the men saying so were there. + Peter’s preaching in Acts has a shape that repeats: you know who Jesus was, you know what was done to him, God raised him, and we saw it. What he is claiming is not that the cause survived its founder, or that the disciples came to feel his presence in a new way. Those things happen after every great teacher dies and nobody needs a sermon to explain them. He is claiming an event with a date, in a city his hearers were standing in, about a body that had been publicly executed a few weeks earlier and buried by a man on the council. The word for that in his mouth is testimony, and testimony is a legal idea before it is a religious one. A witness is someone who was in a position to know and who can be questioned about it. Peter pushes this deliberately: he points out that David’s tomb is right there and still occupied, which anyone in the crowd could verify by walking to it, and he keeps saying "we" rather than "I." The earliest resurrection formula Paul quotes runs the same way, naming Cephas and the twelve and then more than five hundred at once, most of whom, Paul adds, are still alive (1 Corinthians 15:5–6). There is one more piece of evidence, and it is in the man himself. It has to be stated carefully, so that it is not asked to carry more than it can. Peter is a man we know to have lied about Jesus to save himself when the pressure was on. The same man spent the rest of his life saying the opposite in public and was executed for it. That does not by itself prove the resurrection happened; sincere people have died for things that were not true. What it does establish is that he was not running a confidence trick. Whatever happened to Peter between the courtyard and Pentecost, he was not making it up, and any explanation of Christian origins has to account for it.

(Q) "It is this Jesus whom God raised up, a fact to which we are all witnesses." + Source: Acts 2:32 (English Standard Version). From the Pentecost sermon, spoken in Jerusalem within walking distance of the tomb and of the men who had arranged the execution. Peter repeats the claim before the council a short time later: "we are witnesses to these things" (Acts 5:32).

(T3) God shows no partiality, so the door stands open to every nation. + Imagine being raised from birth to believe that certain people’s houses are not places you can eat in. Not disliked, not distrusted exactly, simply outside: their food is wrong, their tables are wrong, and sitting down at one would make you unfit to enter the place where God is worshipped. That was not bigotry as Peter had received it. It was obedience, grounded in the law he had been taught since childhood, and it had kept his people distinct through centuries of empires. Then a centurion named Cornelius sent for him. Cornelius was a Gentile, which simply means a non-Jew, and an officer of the occupying army as well. Peter went, and the sentence he opened with in that living room is one of the most consequential things he ever said: God has shown me that I am not to call any person unholy or unclean (Acts 10:28). He had barely begun to speak when the Holy Spirit came on the Roman household in the same way it had come on the Jewish believers at Pentecost, and Peter drew the only conclusion available: if God has given them what he gave us, who am I to refuse them water. It cost him. He had to defend the decision to the church in Jerusalem, and at the council years later he was still arguing it, and at Antioch he buckled under pressure from the other side and had to be corrected in public by Paul. The principle is not therefore weakened; it is dated and located and paid for. Christianity became a religion for the nations rather than a movement inside one nation because a Galilean fisherman walked through a door he had been taught to stay out of, and then had to keep walking through it.

(Q) "I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the one who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him." + Source: Acts 10:34–35 (English Standard Version). Peter, standing in the house of a Roman centurion in Caesarea, opening the first sermon ever preached to a Gentile household. The words translated "show partiality" describe a judge who decides a case by looking at the face in front of him rather than at the merits.

(T4) The price of a person’s rescue was not money, but the blood of Christ. + In the world Peter wrote to, buying a person out of slavery was an ordinary transaction with a going rate. You counted out silver, the paperwork was done at a temple or before witnesses, and the person walked away free. The Greek word behind "redeem" in his first letter, lytroo, is the word for exactly that: paying a price to get someone out. It is a word from the marketplace before it is a word from the pulpit. Peter takes the ordinary picture and then says the price was not the usual one. Not perishable things, he says, not silver or gold, but the blood of Christ, and he reaches for the image every Jewish reader would have known from childhood: a lamb without blemish, the Passover lamb whose blood on the doorpost meant a household passed the night alive. He also says what the ransom bought people out of, and it is not first of all hell or punishment but a way of living: "your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers." Futile is a strong word for the traditions you grew up in, and Peter, who had grown up in them, uses it. Christian theology later built a good deal on top of this, and the different branches of the church explain the mechanism in different ways, some emphasizing a penalty borne, others a victory won, others a life offered. What is here in Peter is earlier and simpler than any of those explanations, and all of them are trying to account for it: something was owed, someone else paid, and the currency was a death.

(Q) "knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ." + Source: 1 Peter 1:18–19 (English Standard Version). Written to Christians scattered across five Roman provinces in Asia Minor, most of them Gentile converts under social pressure from neighbors who thought they had joined something disreputable.

(T5) Be ready with an answer for anyone who asks, and give it with gentleness and respect. + The Greek word Peter uses for "a defense" is apologia, and it is a courtroom word. An apologia is what a defendant says when the charges have been read out and it is his turn to speak: a reasoned answer to an accusation, not an apology in our modern sense of the word. Socrates gave one at his trial and Plato wrote it down under that title. Paul gives one before Festus and Agrippa. From this word comes the whole later enterprise of Christian apologetics, the giving of reasons for what Christians believe. Notice the setting Peter has in mind, because it is not a debate hall. He is writing to ordinary people under low-grade, grinding social hostility: neighbors who thought they were antisocial for skipping the town festivals, employers who found them difficult, families who thought they had joined a cult. The question he expects is not from a professor. It is from someone standing in a doorway asking why you are not afraid, and why you did not retaliate. That is why the verse begins where it does, with Christ set apart as Lord in the heart, and why the answer is described as one about hope. And then there is the clause people quote least and need most. The answer is to be given "with gentleness and respect," and the sentence immediately following ties it to keeping a clear conscience so that abuse falls flat. A correct argument delivered with contempt has already failed the instruction it thinks it is obeying. Peter, who once cut a man’s ear off in defense of Jesus and was told to put the sword away, is a fitting person to be writing that down.

(Q) "but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, but with gentleness and respect." + Source: 1 Peter 3:15 (English Standard Version). The verse before it tells the same readers that if they should suffer for the sake of righteousness they are blessed, and not to fear what their neighbors fear. The instruction to be ready with an answer is given to people who were losing something by being Christians.

(Q) "Therefore, I urge elders among you, as your fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and one who is also a fellow partaker of the glory that is to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion but voluntarily, according to the will of God." + Source: 1 Peter 5:1–2 (English Standard Version). Peter addressing the leaders of the churches he wrote to, and describing his own office in the same breath: fellow elder, witness of the sufferings, fellow partaker. The verb he gives them, shepherd the flock, is the one that had been given to him on the beach (John 21:16).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The early church believed it could hear him talking in the Gospel of Mark. + Around 130 AD a bishop named Papias, in Hierapolis in Asia Minor, wrote down what he had been told by an older Christian he calls the elder, and Eusebius preserved the sentence two centuries later: "Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ" (Eusebius, Church History 3.39.15, McGiffert translation). Irenaeus, writing in Gaul around 180, says the same thing independently: "Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter" (Against Heresies 3.1.1, Roberts and Rambaut translation). Tertullian, in North Africa a generation later, puts it more bluntly still, saying that the Gospel Mark published "may be affirmed to be Peter’s whose interpreter Mark was" (Against Marcion 4.5, Holmes translation). Clement of Alexandria tells a version in which Peter’s hearers in Rome asked Mark to write the preaching down. Modern scholars divide on how much weight the tradition will bear, and there is no point pretending otherwise: some hold that Papias is reliable early testimony, others that the connection was inferred later from the mention of Mark in 1 Peter 5:13. What is not in dispute is that the tradition is early, geographically spread out, and unanimous, and that it has an odd feature for an invented claim. Mark is the Gospel that treats Peter worst. It has him rebuked, uncomprehending, and denying with curses, and it lacks the scenes in Matthew and John that show him being restored. A church inventing an apostolic pedigree for a book does not usually pick the book that makes the apostle look the least impressive. Whatever one concludes, the effect on Christian thought is hard to overstate. If the tradition is right, the shortest and probably earliest Gospel is, in substance, one eyewitness’ recollections written down by his assistant, and a great deal of what the world knows about Jesus of Nazareth comes through the memory of a Galilean fisherman.

(†) Rome claimed his grave, and the claim is early enough to take seriously. + No New Testament book records Peter’s death. The witnesses begin immediately afterward and they are not shy. Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth around 96 AD, within living memory, lists Peter and Paul together as men of his own generation who suffered and died because of jealousy inside the church, and says Peter, "when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him" (1 Clement 5, Roberts and Donaldson translation). Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be killed in Rome around 110, writes to the Roman church in terms that assume the two apostles are theirs: "I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you" (Epistle to the Romans 4, Roberts and Donaldson translation). Around 200 a Roman churchman named Gaius could invite a rival to come and look at the graves: "But I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church" (quoted in Eusebius, Church History 2.25.7, McGiffert translation). The word he uses, tropaia, means the monuments raised to mark a victory, and most readers take him to be pointing at the memorials the Roman church kept over the two graves. Gaius was inviting a man who doubted him to walk out to two named spots in his own city and look. The manner of death is later and softer. Origen, writing in the early third century and quoted by Eusebius, says that Peter came at last to Rome and "was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way" (Church History 3.1, McGiffert translation). The famous scene in which Peter, fleeing the city, meets Christ on the road and asks where he is going comes from the Acts of Peter, a novel-like work of the late second century that no church has ever treated as history. It is a good story about a real pattern in the man’s life, and it is a story. The Roman setting itself fits what else is known. Tacitus, a hostile pagan historian, describes Nero fastening the blame for the fire of 64 AD on the Christians of the city and killing them in numbers with deliberate cruelty (Annals 15.44). Excavations under Saint Peter’s Basilica between 1940 and 1949 uncovered a Roman cemetery, and at the spot the basilica was built to mark, a small shrine put up in the second century over an older grave. That is about as far as archaeology can go: it shows that the memory is old and fixed to a place, and it cannot identify anyone’s bones.

(†) His denial became the church’s standing picture of what a forgiven man looks like. + Preachers found the courtyard scene irresistible, and for a reason worth naming. Christian teaching claims that forgiveness is available to people who have genuinely done the thing, not only to people who nearly did it, and abstract claims of that kind are hard to believe until they have a face. Peter gave it one. Ambrose of Milan, preaching through Luke in the fourth century, noticed that the Gospels record Peter’s tears and no words of amends at all: I read of his tears, he said, I do not read of his making satisfaction (Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, book 10). Augustine, working through the last chapter of John, set the three questions on the beach against the three denials in the courtyard so that the tongue would serve love no less than it had served fear, and made the point that the flock was handed over to the man who had fallen (Tractates on the Gospel of John 123.5). Gregory the Great, preaching on Easter morning at the end of the sixth century, asked why the angel at the tomb named Peter separately, and answered that it was so a man who had denied Christ would not despair of coming back; the fall itself, he said, was permitted so that the one who was to shepherd the church would learn from it how to have compassion on others (Forty Gospel Homilies 21). The habit outlasted the fathers. The rooster became an emblem attached to Peter in Christian art, and the weeping apostle is one of the most painted subjects in Europe. The point being made in all of it is the same, and it is a point about the reader rather than about Peter: if the man who denied Christ with oaths on the worst night in history was given his work back over breakfast, the argument that some particular failure has put a person permanently outside is harder to sustain than it looks.

(†) Christians still divide over what Jesus meant by "on this rock," and Peter himself was rebuked to his face. + One sentence spoken at Caesarea Philippi has been argued over for the better part of two thousand years, and it divides the church still. Three readings of Matthew 16:18–19 have long histories and serious defenders, and every one of them is held by people who know the text well. - The Catholic reading. The rock is Peter himself. Jesus renames him Rock and in the next breath builds on that rock and hands him the keys of the kingdom, with authority to bind and loose. Binding and loosing was ordinary teachers’ language in that world for forbidding and permitting, and for shutting people out or letting them in. The office does not die with the man: it passes to those who hold his chair at Rome, where he ended his life and where the church he founded remembered his grave. On this reading the papacy is not a later accretion but the working out of a commission given at Caesarea Philippi. - The Orthodox reading. Peter holds a real primacy, and the ancient churches accorded Rome a first place of honor among equals. What Orthodox Christians deny is that this honor ever carried universal jurisdiction over the other patriarchs, the senior bishops of the other ancient centers of the church at Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, and they point out that the councils that settled the faith were councils, not decrees, and that Peter’s own confession is what is being built on. - The Protestant reading. The rock is the confession Peter has just made, or Peter precisely as the man who made it and who then opened the door at Pentecost and at Cornelius’ house. Christ builds on the truth that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and the New Testament shows no transferable office attached: Peter never claims one, and the authority to bind and loose is given to the disciples as a body two chapters later (Matthew 18:18). Then there are the facts about Peter that all three sides hold in common and that any honest account has to include. Paul opposed him to his face at Antioch and published the reason (Galatians 2:11–14). It was James, not Peter, who gave the ruling that closed the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:13–21). Peter describes himself in his own letter as a fellow elder among elders (1 Peter 5:1). And the second letter that comes down under his name has been doubted since antiquity: Eusebius listed it among the disputed books, its Greek differs sharply from the first letter, and Christians who accept it as canonical, meaning part of the collection of books the church receives as Scripture, are divided over whether Peter wrote it himself, dictated it, or had it completed by someone close to him after his death. None of those facts settles the question, and the disagreement is old enough that nobody should expect them to. What Christians who differ about the chair at Rome do agree on is what the man was: a fisherman who confessed the Christ, denied him, was forgiven, opened the gospel to the nations, wrote to frightened people that they should always be ready with a gentle answer, and died a martyr in a city that was not his own.