Religion: The Petrine Puzzle

Seven years ago, at the close of the Holy Year, Pope Pius XII made an announcement of great importance to Christian tradition: Vatican archaeologists had found the tomb of St. Peter beneath the high papal altar of the cathedral that bears his name (TIME, Jan. 1, 1951). For most Catholics the Pope’s claim confirmed a belief firmly held since before the time of Constantine, but antiquaries and archaeologists were eager for more details. Vatican accounts of excavations beneath the cathedral−begun in 1939, when a fascinating honeycomb of pagan and Christian mausoleums were discovered during preparations for the burial of Pope Pius XI−were tantalizingly incomplete.

A thorough account in English of the discoveries beneath St. Peter’s is now available in a new book. The Shrine of St. Peter (Pantheon; $7.50). by British Archaeologists Jocelyn Toynbee* and John Ward Perkins. The authors were not members of the excavating team, but Scholars Toynbee (a Roman Catholic) and Perkins (an Anglican) pored over official Vatican reports, painstakingly examined the diggings. Their carefully independent conclusions fall short of the Pope’s flat statement, but they strongly buttress the traditional version of St. Peter’s burial.

Dionysus & the Good Shepherd. Roman Catholic tradition holds that in A.D. 64 or 67 St. Peter, as leader of a troublesome, outlawed sect, was crucified head downward by Nero somewhere in the area of the Vatican Hill, and buried in a nearby pagan cemetery. The objection of some Protestant scholars that St. Peter did not die in Rome, and in fact never lived there, is set aside by Authors Toynbee and Perkins, who point out that the tradition was accepted early in the 2nd century, and that such a serious error hardly could have gained credence within the lifetime of men who had known St. Peter. But a second objection is mentioned. The Romans frequently threw the bodies of alien felons, as St. Peter would have been classified, into the Tiber. Whether the Christians could have recovered the body openly is at least doubtful. However, the authors admit, a high-placed Roman official, secretly a Christian, could have greased palms to secure the body.

The authors first present a detailed description and analysis of the double line of some 25 tombs, underlying the cathedral, originally set into the side of a hill bordering a Roman road. Built throughout the 2nd century A.D. by pagan Romans to house the ashes of their cremated dead, the graves were gradually modified to fit the spreading custom of bodily burial, popularized during the 3rd century by the growing Christian cult. By the end of the 3rd century some of the pagan tombs had been taken over for Christian burial. Well-preserved mosaics, wall paintings, ornate stucco decorations and elaborately carved sarcophagi show, occasionally in the same tomb, the reveling satyrs, centaurs and maenads of the Dionysian cults and Christian representations of Jonah and the Good Shepherd.

Tomb & Church. Around 322, Christian Emperor Constantine affronted the wealthy tomb owners by ordering the construction of a great ramp of earth from the side of the hill against which the tombs nestled. Ruthlessly, though with great care not to disturb the dead, most of the tombs were sliced off to the level of the ramp, and their interiors were rammed full of earth. On this ramp Constantine began the construction of the first Church of St. Peter.

Unless Constantine wished to mark the exact spot of a very holy place, argue the authors, he would not have gone to such enormous trouble, since level sites unencumbered by tombs lay close by. Clearly, the argument runs. Constantine wanted this location because he believed he was enshrining the grave of St. Peter.

Within the Constantinian church, and buried under the high altar of the Renaissance church that succeeded it in the 16th and 17th centuries, is another piece of commanding archaeological evidence: a small, three-niched shrine set up between 160 and 170, roughly a century and a half before Constantine started building. Called the Aedicula (meaning little room or shrine), it was used as the focal point of Constantine’s church, and was the only structure not razed to ramp level by the church builders. As Constantine’s architects did 150 years later, the builders of the Aedicula had evidently gone to considerable trouble to place the shrine exactly where they wanted it, nested in the exterior wall of a sloping corridor, the Clivus (meaning slope). The authors’ theory is that, while laying this wall (called the Red Wall) in the area where St. Peter was known to have been buried, the builders found what was believed to be his grave, and the reigning Pope (probably Anicetus) ordered that a shrine be incorporated in the wall. No other theory, runs the argument, explains why the builders weakened the Red Wall by leaving a gap in its foundations wide enough for a grave, or why they cut two upper niches into its surface.

Bones & Devotion. Whatever it contained, the Aedicula was revered throughout the 1,200-year life of Constantine’s church, and became the heart of the present cathedral, underneath the twisting columns and great bronze canopy of Bernini. By the time Vatican archaeologists, burrowing from below, entered the subsurface grave, the shrine had been altered almost beyond recognition: the two upper niches had been combined to form the present Niche of the Pallia, two small chapels, the Covered and Open Confessio, had been added, and the whole shrine was encased by the present high altar.

What the excavators found was a looted grave, so despoiled (probably by the Saracens in 846) that much of it was a featureless hole. There was no trace of the bronze casket in which tradition said Constantine had placed St. Peter’s relics. All that remained, buried at the rear of the grave niche, were a few bones. The Vatican has said only that they are human, that there is no skull among them, and that they are those of a powerfully built person of advanced age but undetermined sex. With this intriguing information −pending further Vatican disclosures about the bones or about additional excavation −the account ends. Archaeologists Toynbee and Perkins conclude only that “at least since the 2nd century, the belief [that St. Peter’s bones lay in the Aedicula] has been, and always will be, a wellspring of devotion.”

*Arnold’s sister.