Peter

The New Testament never uses the word pope, never calls Peter the bishop of Rome, and never names him the head of the apostles. It calls him an apostle, a fellow elder, a witness of Christ's sufferings, and one of three men reputed to be pillars.

What Matthew 16:18-19 gives him has been read three ways since the church's first centuries, and every reading has held serious teachers in every age. Cyprian of Carthage, writing in 258, held both halves at once: the rest of the apostles were "endowed with a like partnership both of honour and power," and "the beginning proceeds from unity." John Chrysostom in the early fifth century called Peter "the chosen one of the Apostles, the mouth of the disciples, the leader of the band," and said in the same breath that what was handed him was care for the flock. John Wesley in 1755 read 1 Peter 2:4 as Peter's own answer, that Christ and not himself was the rock.

This site does not settle it. The three readings and their holders are laid out on the page for that passage, and the reader weighs them. Where a communion reads Matthew 16 as founding an office, that is named as the reading of a living tradition, and this page adds nothing against it. On one practice attached to the question the site does teach plainly: Scripture directs prayer to God through Christ, and prayer addressed to Peter or to any saint is not taught here.

Three questions answering three denials is the reading of the fathers almost without exception. Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century said Peter "is asked three times whether he loves the Lord in order that he may confess him three times whom he had denied three times before his crucifixion." Augustine put it the same way: "To the threefold denial there is now appended a threefold confession."

Whether the change between the Greek verbs agapao and phileo carries weight is a separate question, and it is open. Augustine argued that the two words mean the same thing in this passage, and pointed out that the third question uses the word Peter himself had been using. Later writers have argued the other way.

So the threefold structure is the reading of the church, and the verb question is a reading rather than a fact. This page presents it as one.

Luke 22:32 answers this before it happens. Jesus does not pray that Peter will not fall. He prays that Peter's faith will not fail, tells him he will turn back, and gives him work for the far side of the failure.

Adam Clarke marked the distinction exactly. Peter's faith did fail, but not utterly: "he did fall, but he did not fall off, apostatize, or forsake his Master and his cause finally, as Judas did." Matthew Henry grounded the same distinction in Christ: "It is owing to the mediation and intercession of Jesus Christ that the faith of his disciples, though sometimes sadly shaken, yet is not sunk."

This site's tradition holds that a believer is kept, and Luke 22:31-32 is the strongest scene in the Gospels for it, because the outcome is stated as fact while the failure is still ahead.

Yes. Mark 1:30 has Jesus healing Peter's mother-in-law in Peter's own house at Capernaum, which means a wife and a household. Paul confirms it decades later, defending the right of the apostles to travel with a believing wife and naming Cephas among them.

Scripture names no children, and the character record for Peter leaves that field empty. The house itself is one of the most worked sites in Galilee, and the account of what was found there is on the Capernaum page.

John 21:18-19 says only that when he was old he would stretch out his hands, that someone else would dress him and lead him where he did not want to go, and that this indicated the kind of death by which he would glorify God. It does not describe a cross, a city or a posture.

The earliest witness of all does not name a cross. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around AD 96, says Peter "endured not one nor two but many labours, and thus having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory," a suffering he blames on jealousy rather than describing.

The Roman crucifixion under Nero is early tradition. Tertullian, writing in North Africa in the early third century, says that "at Rome Nero was the first who stained with blood the rising faith. Then is Peter girt by another, when he is made fast to the cross." Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century reads the same verse as pointing to the place where those who condemned Peter "had fixed the cross." Eusebius is the patristic source this site cites for Peter's later ministry and death at Rome.

The inverted cross is a different matter. It is not in Scripture, and no source carried on this site supports it, so the page does not state it. The detail is older than the painters, though: Origen, in the third century, is its earliest witness, reported by Eusebius, who writes that Peter "was crucified head-downwards, for he had requested that he might suffer in this way," citing Origen's own Commentary on Genesis. Caravaggio painted the inversion around 1600, thirteen centuries later, and the picture shows the tradition rather than the text.

No. Galatians 2:9 has James, Cephas and John giving Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, with two commissions and one gospel between them. Galatians 2:11-14 then records a real correction: Peter had been eating with the Gentile believers at Antioch, drew back when men came from James, and Paul opposed him to his face.

The fathers read that scene in two ways. Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Theophylact, Oecumenius and Theodoret read it as an arrangement between two men who already agreed, staged for the benefit of those watching. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Jerome's own text, Wesley, Barnes and Matthew Henry read it as a real fault really rebuked. This page gives both and ranks neither.

The relationship itself is settled by Peter's own hand. His second letter calls him "our beloved brother Paul," and says in the same breath that some of what Paul writes is hard to understand.

Matthew 16:19 gives Peter the keys, and adds the words about binding and loosing. Matthew 18:18 speaks the same words about binding and loosing to all the disciples, and John 20:23 gives a related word about forgiving and retaining.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the keys through the book of Acts: Peter opens the door to Jewish hearers at Pentecost and then, at the house of Cornelius, to the Gentiles. Wesley reads the grant as given to Peter first and to the rest equally. A third reading treats the keys as the steward's authority over the household of a master who holds the house.

All three are on the site's page for that passage, with their holders, and no verdict is stamped on them here.

No. Peter is writing to scattered believers in five Roman provinces and applying to them the words God spoke to Israel at Sinai in Exodus 19:6. Nothing in the letter says Israel forfeited them.

The same New Testament that carries 1 Peter 2:9 carries Galatians 2:7, where Peter's own commission is to the circumcised and Paul's is to the Gentiles, and both are recognized by the same grace. Peter says it himself at the council in Jerusalem: God "made no distinction between us and them, for He cleansed their hearts by faith," and the Jewish believers are saved by grace "just as they are." Note which way round he puts it.

Replacement theology is condemned on this site. The language of Israel is extended to a mixed church here. It is never transferred away.

There are four readings and the site's page on 1 Peter sets out all of them. Irenaeus in the later second century read the passage as Christ's descent to the righteous dead. John Wesley in 1755 read it as Christ preaching through Noah to the people of Noah's own day, who are held now as in a prison. A third reading takes it as a general offer after death, which that page presents and marks as the least supported. The reading this site teaches takes the spirits to be the fallen angels of Genesis 6:1-4, held since the flood, and Christ's proclamation to be a declaration of victory over them.

That reading stands against a Second Temple background. 1 Enoch, a Jewish work of the centuries before Christ and a study resource on this site rather than Scripture, describes the same imprisonment in R. H. Charles's 1917 translation at 10:11-13: “And the Lord said unto Michael: ‘Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever.” Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 use the same language of angels kept for judgment.

The Greek syntax across 3:18-20 is disputed among commentators whichever reading is held, and the site says so plainly rather than resting an argument on it.