Religion: Peter & the Rock

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18

All Christians revere the Apostle Peter, but in varying degrees. Roman Catholics regard St. Peter as the first Pope, the “rock” on whom Christ built His church, to be ruled by him and the Popes who came after him. Protestants deny this. In! most Protestant circles, furthermore, Peter’s reputation tends to play theological second fiddle to the more dramatic personality of his contemporary Paul.

In his book Peter (Westminster Press; $4.50), just published in English translation, Professor Oscar Cullmann, of Basel and the Sorbonne, one of Protestantism’s most distinguished Church historians, gives his evaluation of the apostle’s work and stature. Lutheran Cullmann breaks with some of his fellow Protestants in insisting on Peter’s primacy in the original church, and on the genuineness of the disputed text from St. Matthew’s gospel supporting it. But he sharply rejects the Catholic claim that Peter began the papal succession. His finding: “In the life of Peter there is no starting point for a chain of succession to the leadership of the church at large.”

Apostle Par Excellence. Peter, as Professor Cullmann depicts him, was the “apostle par excellence.” He was the first to see Christ after the Resurrection, and the man whom Christ singled out in giving collective charges to the apostles, i.e., “Feed my sheep” (John 21:16).

Cullmann also gives Peter credit for being the decisive “mediator” between the “Judaizers” and the “Hellenists” of the early church. Where Paul, the “Apostle of the Gentiles,” wanted to leave his Greek converts as free as possible of the old Jewish Law, he says, other leaders at Jerusalem insisted that all new Christian converts be circumcised, or at least adopt Jewish rituals. It was Peter, says Theologian Cullmann, who eased these requirements and bridged the threatening gap between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

Cullmann has an easy time tracing the movements of Peter until he left Herod’s prison in Jerusalem to go, as The Acts of the Apostles unhelpfully has it, “to another place.” Catholics say that his final destination was indubitably Rome. They add that St. Peter took the leadership of the church with him, and that he was crucified there during the persecutions of Nero. In 1951, in fact, Pope Pius XII announced that the site of Peter’s grave had been definitely located during excavations beneath St. Peter’s.

Important Hints. Cullmann agrees with the Catholics on the evidence of Peter’s transfer to Rome, though he concedes that the evidence is indirect. Going further. Cullmann endorses the traditional version of Peter’s death. The early evidence for this, also, is no more than “hints,” for Christian writers did not begin mentioning Peter’s Roman martyrdom until the second and third centuries. But the hints are important ones, e.g., in all the church controversies of the early centuries, no one saw fit to deny Peter’s Roman martyrdom. As Cullmann observes: “Were we to demand for all facts of ancient history a greater degree of probability, we should have to strike from our history books a large proportion of their contents.”

Residence and martyrdom in Rome, Cullmann argues, hardly warrant the Catholic claim that Peter transferred the leadership of the church to that city. To begin with, “Peter was the leader of the entire church only at Jerusalem.” When Peter left Jerusalem, he turned over leadership of the church to James, the brother of Jesus,* and himself became merely the subordinate head of the “Jewish Christian mission.” It was his job to preach the Gospel to Jews outside the Holy City, just as it was Paul’s parallel mission to preach to the Gentiles.

Peter sent his public addresses to James, and in Antioch, as Cullmann notes, when involved in a church dispute, Peter had occasion “to fear the people who come from James.” Says Cullmann, answering the Roman Catholic view: “Peter does not leave Jerusalem in order to transfer the primacy elsewhere; he leaves rather to spread the Gospel.”

For Foundation Only. If Peter, to use modern Protestant terminology, was simply the head of a foreign mission board, who had formerly been moderator of the church, what of the Catholic scriptural claim about Christ’s promise to build His church on the “rock” of Peter, with his accompanying command to rule the faithful?† Luther and the Protestant reformers held that by “rock” Christ meant not Peter but Himself, or the faith of His followers. Many modern Biblical scholars insist that the text itself is either spurious or garbled.

Protestant Cullmann here seems to side with the Catholics. There is scant doubt, he says, that the Matthew text is both accurate and very old. Furthermore, the meaning of the original Aramaic is crystal-clear. “Kepha” was the Aramaic word for “rock”; it is also the name by which Christ called Peter.

But there Cullmann stops. To construe the text as warrant of the papal succession, he argues, is something vastly different from clearing its literal meaning. Peter’s leadership, he says, was an “example and pattern,” nothing more. It was not until the third century that a bishop of Rome cited the Matthew text in support of his primacy. Says Cullmann: “It is arguing in a circle . . . to assert that, since on the one hand the promise of Jesus to Peter exists and on the other hand the fact exists that Rome exercised a primacy from a relatively early date, we therefore must conclude that this primacy rests on that promise . . .”

Cullmann concludes that Peter, the original head of the apostles, was the founder of the church without being the founder of a visible church succession. Says he: “Foundation and building may not be interchanged . . . In so far as Peter is the rock, he is such in the temporal sense of laying the foundation as an apostle. In every generation, Christ intends to build His church on the foundation of the apostles,, and among them Peter is the most important . . . The significance of individual churches for the church at large comes and goes. But the rock, the foundation for all churches of all times, remains the-historical Peter.”

* As most Protestants have it. Roman Catholics hold that he was merely a cousin.

† “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”—Matthew 16:19.