St. Peter

1. The Fisherman

Simon was a rough, blue-collar fisherman from Bethsaida. He was impetuous, loud, and often spoke before he thought. When they met, Jesus changed his name from Simon to Cephas (Aramaic) or Petros (Greek), meaning "Rock."

The details around him are ordinary and specific. He was the son of a man named John, or Jonah (Matthew 16:17, John 1:42). He had a brother, Andrew, who brought him to Jesus (John 1:41 to 42). He worked in partnership with James and John, the sons of Zebedee (Luke 5:10). He was married, and Jesus healed his mother-in-law at his house in Capernaum (Mark 1:29 to 31); Paul later mentions that Cephas travelled with a believing wife (1 Corinthians 9:5). He spoke with a Galilean accent strong enough for a servant girl in a Jerusalem courtyard to place him by it (Matthew 26:73).

Luke gives the fullest account of the call. After a night that caught nothing, Peter puts out at Jesus's word, takes a catch that breaks the nets, and falls at his knees saying, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8). The answer is that from now on he will be catching men. That exchange sets the pattern of everything that follows: Peter sees clearly what he is, says so at full volume, and is sent anyway.

2. The Keys to the Kingdom

In Matthew 16, Jesus asks, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter answers correctly: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Jesus responds:

This is the biblical foundation for the Papacy. In the Old Testament (Isaiah 22), the "keys" represented the authority of the royal steward, who administered the household in the king's name. Peter is appointed steward of the new kingdom.

The Isaiah passage is worth reading beside Matthew 16, because the parallel is close. Shebna, the steward of the house of David, is deposed, and the key of the house of David is laid on the shoulder of Eliakim, so that he opens and none shall shut, and shuts and none shall open (Isaiah 22:20 to 22). The office is transferable and it belongs to the king, who delegates it. Catholics read the promise to Peter against that background, which is why the office is understood to continue rather than to end with the man.

The saying is immediately followed by one of the sharpest rebukes in the Gospels. Peter takes Jesus aside and objects to his prediction of the passion, and Jesus turns and says, "Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (Matthew 16:23). Both sentences are spoken to the same man within a few verses. Matthew leaves them both in.

3. The Denial and Restoration

Peter's lowest moment came during Jesus' trial. He denied knowing Jesus three times out of fear. He wept bitterly.

The details make it worse rather than better. He had promised, hours earlier, that he would die with Jesus rather than deny him, and had been told exactly what would happen (Mark 14:29 to 31). He was warmed at a fire in the high priest's courtyard while it happened, and the third denial was extracted by a servant girl and some bystanders who recognised his accent. Luke adds that the Lord turned and looked at him as the cock crowed (Luke 22:61).

His story did not end there. After the Resurrection, Jesus met Peter by the shore of the lake (John 21). Over a charcoal fire, the same detail as the courtyard, he asked him three times, "Do you love me?", a threefold restoration answering a threefold denial. Peter was hurt by the third asking and answered that the Lord knew everything and knew that he loved him. Jesus then commanded him: "Feed my sheep", and told him that when he was old he would stretch out his hands and be taken where he did not wish to go, which John explains as an indication of the death by which he would glorify God (John 21:18 to 19).

The pastoral commission and the prophecy of martyrdom are given in the same breath, to a man who had just been publicly reminded of the worst thing he ever did.

4. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles

The first half of Acts is largely Peter's. He proposes the replacement of Judas (Acts 1:15 to 26). He preaches the sermon at Pentecost that brings three thousand into the Church (Acts 2:14 to 41). He heals the man crippled from birth at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, with John beside him (Acts 3:1 to 10), and is arrested and questioned by the council, which notes that he and John are uneducated and ordinary men and marvels at their boldness (Acts 4:13).

The decisive episode is Cornelius. Peter receives a vision at Joppa in which he is shown animals the law forbade him to eat and told not to call unclean what God has made clean, and he then goes to the house of a Roman centurion, preaches, and sees the Holy Spirit fall on Gentiles before they are baptised (Acts 10). His conclusion, that God shows no partiality and that in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him (Acts 10:34 to 35), is the hinge on which the Church stopped being a movement inside Judaism.

He is imprisoned by Herod Agrippa and released while the church is praying for him (Acts 12). At the council of Jerusalem he speaks for admitting Gentiles without imposing the whole law, and James then formulates the decision (Acts 15:7 to 21). After that Acts follows Paul, and Peter drops out of the narrative.

5. Peter and Paul at Antioch

Paul records a public disagreement with Peter, and Catholics should read it rather than avoid it. At Antioch Peter had been eating with Gentile believers, and when men came from James he drew back and separated himself, and other Jewish Christians followed, including Barnabas. Paul says that he opposed Cephas to his face, because he stood condemned, and that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:11 to 14).

The passage is often used as an argument against papal authority, and it does not carry that weight. What Paul describes is a failure of nerve in practice by a man who had already stated the correct principle at the council and in the house of Cornelius. Catholic teaching has never claimed that the successor of Peter is impeccable, and it has never claimed that his private conduct or prudential decisions are protected. The charism the Church claims is narrower than that, and it concerns definitive teaching on faith and morals.

What the episode does show is that the earliest Church argued in public, that Peter was corrected and took it, and that Paul thought his readers already knew who Cephas was.

6. The Letters of Peter

Two letters in the New Testament carry his name. The first is addressed to Christians scattered through Asia Minor who are suffering for the faith, and it tells them to be ready to give an account of the hope that is in them, with gentleness and reverence (1 Peter 3:15). It calls them a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), and it tells the elders to shepherd the flock willingly rather than for gain and not as lording it over those in their charge (1 Peter 5:2 to 3), which reads like a man who had been told to feed the sheep.

The letter closes with greetings from the church "in Babylon" (1 Peter 5:13), which is understood by nearly all readers, ancient and modern, as a code name for Rome. It also names Silvanus and Mark, which fits the early tradition that Mark's Gospel preserves Peter's preaching.

The second letter warns against false teachers and against scoffers who ask what happened to the promise of Christ's coming, and answers that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day, and that the delay is patience meant to give room for repentance (2 Peter 3:8 to 9). Its authorship has been questioned since antiquity on grounds of style and of the situation it addresses. The Church receives both letters as Scripture. Our page on the second coming takes up what 2 Peter says about the delay.

7. Martyrdom

Peter led the early Church, preaching at Pentecost and accepting the first Gentiles. Tradition holds that he went to Rome, where he was martyred under Nero. He asked to be crucified upside down, feeling unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. His tomb lies directly beneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

The strength of the evidence varies from claim to claim, and it is worth separating.

Rome and martyrdom: early and broadly attested

The New Testament does not describe Peter's death, though John 21:18 to 19 indicates a martyrdom, and 1 Peter 5:13 places him in Babylon, understood as Rome. Outside the New Testament the evidence begins early. The letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, written around the year 96, speaks of Peter and Paul as recent examples who suffered and bore witness, and links them with Rome. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Roman church early in the second century, appeals to Peter and Paul in a way that assumes they had authority there. Around the year 200 a Roman writer named Gaius, quoted by the historian Eusebius, refers to the trophies of the apostles at the Vatican hill and on the road to Ostia. Irenaeus and Tertullian say the same in the same period. No rival city ever claimed Peter's tomb, which in the ancient world is significant.

The upside-down crucifixion: later and legendary in origin

The detail comes from the apocryphal Acts of Peter, a second-century narrative that is not Scripture and that contains a good deal of clearly legendary material. Origen, quoted by Eusebius, also reports it. The story that Peter, fleeing Rome, met Christ on the road and asked him where he was going, and turned back on hearing the answer, comes from the same apocryphal text. Both are old, both are moving, and neither has the standing of the evidence for the martyrdom itself.

8. The Tomb Under St. Peter's

Excavations under Saint Peter's Basilica, carried out from 1940 into the 1950s, uncovered a Roman cemetery of the first and second centuries running along the slope of the Vatican hill, and directly beneath the high altar a small shrine built into a wall in the second half of the second century. That structure matches the monument the writer Gaius referred to around the year 200.

Near it archaeologists found a wall covered in Christian graffiti and, within it, a cavity containing bones. Pope Paul VI announced in 1968 that the relics of Saint Peter had been identified in a manner the Church believed convincing. Pope Francis displayed fragments publicly in 2013.

The honest position is that the archaeology establishes a great deal and stops short of proof. What is established is that a Christian community in the second century venerated that precise spot as the burial place of Peter, in a pagan cemetery on the Vatican hill, and that they did so early enough for the memory to be plausible. The identification of particular bones has been disputed by scholars, and the Church has never made belief in it a matter of faith.

9. The Papacy, and How Other Christians Read the Same Verses

The Catholic position is set out in the Catechism. The Lord made Simon alone, whom he named Peter, the rock of his Church, gave him the keys, and made him shepherd of the whole flock; the office of binding and loosing given to Peter was also given to the college of apostles united to its head; and the pope, as successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful (Catechism of the Catholic Church 881 to 882). Our page on the papacy works through the doctrine, its development and the objections in detail.

Other Christians read the same texts differently, and their positions should be stated accurately.

Eastern Orthodox

The Orthodox Churches honour Peter as first among the apostles and historically accorded the bishop of Rome a primacy of honour among the patriarchs. They reject the claim that the pope holds ordinary, immediate and universal jurisdiction over every particular church, and they hold that the Church is governed conciliarly, with the bishop of Rome as first among equals. Our page on the Eastern Orthodox Church sets out the difference and its history.

Protestant readings

Many Protestants read the rock of Matthew 16:18 as Peter's confession of faith rather than as Peter's person, or as Christ himself, and note that Augustine offered both readings and in his Retractations left the choice to the reader. They also point to Galatians 2:11 to 14 and to the leading role of James at the council of Jerusalem, and hold that the New Testament shows no office of universal primacy passing to successors. Catholic replies point to the Aramaic wordplay behind Cephas, in which the name and the rock are the same word, to the Isaiah 22 background of the keys, and to the second-century evidence for Rome's standing.

Stating the disagreement plainly is more useful than pretending it is smaller than it is. It is the central question dividing western Christians from the Orthodox and a live one in every ecumenical conversation.

10. Feast Days, Symbols and Patronage

Feast days

The solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul is 29 June, kept as a holy day in many countries. The feast of the Chair of Saint Peter is 22 February, which celebrates the teaching office rather than a piece of furniture. The dedication of the basilicas of Peter and Paul in Rome is kept on 18 November.

Symbols

Peter is shown with keys, from Matthew 16:19, often two of them, and with a boat, a fishing net, a rooster, and an inverted cross. The inverted cross in Christian iconography is a reference to his manner of death and carries no other meaning in that context.

Patronage

He is invoked by fishermen and net makers, by shipbuilders, by locksmiths and by harvesters, and he is a patron of the papacy and of the city of Rome. Patronages of this kind grow from imagery and from custom over centuries.

11. What to Take From St. Peter

• The failure is not the end of the assignment. Peter denied Christ publicly and was given the flock afterwards. Bring it to confession and get back to work.
• Say what you actually are. His first words to Jesus were that he was a sinful man and should be left alone. That is where he started, and he was called on the spot.
• Confidence in yourself is the weak point. He was surest of himself in the hours before he broke. Anyone who is certain he would never do a particular thing should reread Mark 14.
• Take correction from anyone. Paul corrected him to his face and it stayed in the record. He is remembered better for having taken it than he would have been for being right.
• Do not wait to be ready. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Peter was called out of a boat in the middle of a working morning and had to sort out the rest afterwards.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Peter?

Peter was a fisherman from Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee, originally called Simon, the son of a man named John, and the brother of Andrew. He was married and lived at Capernaum. Jesus called him to follow, renamed him Cephas, meaning rock, and he is listed first among the Twelve in every New Testament list. He led the Church at Jerusalem after Pentecost, opened it to Gentiles at the house of Cornelius, and according to early tradition died a martyr at Rome under Nero.

What does "on this rock I will build my church" mean?

Catholics read Matthew 16:18 to 19 as a promise made to Peter personally, giving him the keys of the kingdom and the power to bind and loose, and understand the office to continue in his successors, the bishops of Rome (Catechism of the Catholic Church 881 to 882). The background is Isaiah 22:20 to 22, where the key of the house of David is laid on the shoulder of a royal steward who opens and shuts in the king's name. Many Protestants read the rock as Peter's confession of faith or as Christ himself, and the Orthodox accept a primacy of honour for the bishop of Rome while rejecting universal jurisdiction.

Did St. Peter really deny Jesus, and what happened afterwards?

All four Gospels record the denials. Peter had promised hours earlier that he would die rather than deny Jesus, and he then denied knowing him three times in the high priest's courtyard, the last time to people who recognised his Galilean accent, and he wept. After the resurrection, by a charcoal fire on the shore of the lake, Jesus asked him three times whether he loved him and told him to feed his sheep, and foretold the death by which he would glorify God (John 21:15 to 19).

Was St. Peter crucified upside down in Rome?

The martyrdom at Rome is early and broadly attested. Clement of Rome refers to Peter and Paul as recent witnesses around the year 96, and by about the year 200 a Roman writer named Gaius, quoted by Eusebius, points to the trophies of the apostles on the Vatican hill and the road to Ostia. The detail of the inverted crucifixion comes from the apocryphal Acts of Peter, a second-century narrative outside Scripture, and is repeated by Origen. The fact of the martyrdom rests on much stronger ground than the manner of it.

Is St. Peter really buried under St. Peter's Basilica?

Excavations begun in 1940 found a Roman cemetery under the basilica and, directly beneath the high altar, a small second-century shrine matching the monument referred to around the year 200. Bones were recovered from a nearby wall covered in Christian graffiti, and Pope Paul VI announced in 1968 that the relics had been identified in a manner the Church believed convincing. The identification of particular bones has been disputed by scholars, and the Church has never made it a matter of faith. What the archaeology does establish is that second-century Christians venerated that exact spot as Peter's grave.

When are St. Peter's feast days?

The solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul is 29 June and is a holy day of obligation in many countries. The feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, which celebrates his teaching office, is 22 February, and the dedication of the basilicas of Peter and Paul is kept on 18 November. He is shown with keys, a boat, a net, a rooster and an inverted cross, and he is invoked by fishermen, net makers, shipbuilders and locksmiths.