Testimonies of Scripture and Christian antiquity.
What is said against the papacy
Like other Protestants, fundamentalists say that Peter was never appointed by Christ to be the earthly head of the Church, for the simple reason that the Church has no earthly head and was never meant to have one. Christ is the Church’s only foundation, in every sense of that word.
The papacy, they say, is an institution that arose from the politics of the fifth and sixth centuries, both secular and ecclesiastical; it has no connection, except a mythological one, with the New Testament. It was not established by Christ, even if Peter’s supposed “successors” (and their defenders) claim that it was. At best the papacy is a deception; at worst, a work of the devil. In any case, it is an institution designed to give the Catholic Church an authority it simply does not have.
Furthermore, their argument continues, Peter was never in Rome and therefore could not have been the first pope; that makes talk of his “successors” a lie: the unbroken chain snaps at the first link. How can Catholics speak of the divine origin of the papacy when their claim about Peter’s whereabouts is mistaken?
Let us focus on this last charge, reserving for another study a look at Peter’s place among the apostles and in the early Church.
How to understand the argument
At first sight, the question of whether Peter went to Rome and died there might seem irrelevant. And in a certain sense it is. After all, his stay in Rome would not by itself prove the existence of the papacy; it would be a false inference to say that he must have been the first pope because he was in Rome and later popes reigned from Rome. By that logic, Paul would also have been the first pope, since he was an apostle and was in Rome.
On the other hand, if Peter never reached the capital of the Roman Empire, he still could have been the first pope, since one of his successors could have been the first to exercise that ministry in Rome. After all, if the papacy exists, it was established by Christ during his lifetime, long before the time when Peter is said to have arrived in Rome. There must have been a period of some years when the papacy did not yet have a connection with Rome.
Thus, if the apostle arrived there only much later, that might have something to say about who his legitimate successors would be (and it does, unless the man elected bishop of Rome is automatically the new pope on the basis that Peter was the first bishop of Rome and the pope is simply Peter’s successor), but it would tell us nothing about the status of the papal ministry. It would not establish that the papacy was instituted by Christ in the first place.
So the question of Peter’s presence in Rome, although historically interesting, does not seem essential to the real issue, namely whether the papacy was founded by Christ or not. Even so, most anti-Catholic organizations take up the challenge and go to considerable trouble to “prove” that Peter could not have been in Rome. Why? Because they think they can take advantage of it.
“Here is a point on which we can show the falsity of Catholic claims,” they say. “Catholics trace the origin of the papacy back to Peter and say that he was martyred in Rome after heading the Church there. If we can show that he never went to Rome, that would undermine — psychologically, though not logically — their assertion that Peter was the first pope. If people conclude that the Catholic Church is wrong on this historical point, they will conclude that it is wrong on the larger point, the supposed existence of the papacy.” Such is the reasoning — the real reasoning — of the leading anti-Catholics.
The charges summarized
The case is perhaps stated most succinctly, though not quite so openly, by Loraine Boettner in the best known of his books, Roman Catholicism (p. 117): “The remarkable thing, however, about Peter’s alleged bishopric in Rome is that the New Testament does not say a single word about it. The word Rome appears only nine times in the Bible [in fact it appears ten times in the Old Testament and ten times in the New], and Peter is never mentioned in connection with it. There is no allusion to Rome in either of his two epistles. Paul’s journey to the city is narrated in great detail (Acts 27 and 28). The truth is that there is no basis in the New Testament and no historical proof of any kind that Peter was ever in Rome. It is all based on legend.”
Well, what should be said about this? True, the Bible nowhere explicitly says that Peter was in Rome; but on the other hand, it does not say that he was not. Just as the New Testament never says, “Peter then went to Rome,” neither does it say, “Peter did not go to Rome.” In fact, very little is said about where he, or any of the other apostles besides Paul, went in the years after the Ascension. For the most part we have to rely on books other than the New Testament to learn what happened to the apostles, Peter included, in the following years (although Boettner is quite wrong to dismiss them as “legend”: early historical documents cannot be dismissed out of hand as mere carriers of “legends”; they are genuine historical evidence, as any professional historian recognizes).
What the Bible says
Boettner is also wrong when he states: “there is no allusion whatever to Rome in any of [Peter’s] epistles.” There is one, in the greeting at the end of the first epistle: “She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings; and so does my son Mark” (1 Pet 5:13). Babylon is a word used to designate Rome secretly. It is used in this way six times in the last book of the Bible and in extra-biblical sources such as the Sibylline Oracles (5.159f), the Apocalypse of Baruch (2.1), and 4 Ezra (3.1). Eusebius Pamphilius, in his Chronicle, composed around A.D. 303, observed that “the first epistle of Peter, in which he makes mention of Mark, is said to have been composed in Rome itself; and that he himself indicates this, referring figuratively to the city as Babylon.”
Let us now consider the other New Testament passages: “A second angel followed, saying, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her fornication!’” (Rev 14:8). “The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. And Babylon the great was remembered before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the fury of his wrath” (Rev 16:19). “[A]nd on her forehead was written a name, a great mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations’” (Rev 17:5). “He cried out with a mighty voice, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!’” (Rev 18:2). “[T]hey will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, ‘Alas! Alas! The great city, Babylon, the mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come!’” (Rev 18:10). “With such violence Babylon the great city will be thrown down” (Rev 18:21).
These references cannot be to the Babylon that was once the capital of the Babylonian Empire. That Babylon had been reduced to an insignificant town over the years by military defeats and political subjection; it was no longer a “great city.” It played no important role in the recent history of the ancient world. The only real “great city” in New Testament times was Rome.
“But there is no compelling reason to say that ‘Babylon’ means ‘Rome,’” Boettner insists. Ah, but there is: persecution. Peter was known to the authorities as a leader of the Church, and the Church, under Roman law, was considered organized atheism (the worship of any gods other than the Roman gods was considered atheism). Peter would not be doing himself any favors — not to mention those who were with him — by making his presence in the capital public: after all, Rome’s mail service was even worse than today’s, and letters were routinely read by Roman officials. Peter was a wanted man, as were all Christian leaders. Why encourage a manhunt? We also know that the apostles sometimes referred to cities by symbolic names (cf. Rev 11:8).
In any case, let us be generous and admit that it is easy for an opponent of Catholicism to think in good faith that Peter was never in Rome, at least if he bases his conclusion only on the Bible. But restricting his investigation to the Bible is something he should not do: external evidence must also be taken into account.
Early Christian testimony
William A. Jurgens, in his three-volume book The Faith of the Early Fathers, a masterful compendium that quotes extensively from all the works ranging from the Didache [the first known catechism in the history of the Church, Translator’s note] to John Damascene, includes thirty references to this question, divided in the index almost equally between the statements that “Peter came to Rome and died there” and that “Peter established his See in Rome and made the Bishop of Rome his successor in the primacy.” A few examples will suffice, but these and other early references show that there can be no doubt that the universal — and very ancient — position (one hesitates to use the word “tradition,” since some read it as “legend”) was that Peter certainly ended his days in the capital of the Empire.
Dionysius of Corinth, writing his Letter to Soter, the twelfth pope, around A.D. 170, said: “You have also, by your very counsel, reconciled the seed sown by Peter and Paul at Rome.” It was commonly accepted from the earliest times that both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome, probably in the Neronian persecution of the 60s of the first century.
Tertullian, in The Prescription Against Heretics (A.D. 200), noted of Rome “how happy is that Church… where Peter endured a passion like the Lord’s, where Paul was crowned with a death like John’s [he means John the Baptist, beheaded like Paul].” Fundamentalists admit that Paul died in Rome, so Tertullian’s implication is that Peter must also have been there.
Very early references
In the same book Tertullian wrote that “this is the way the apostolic churches hand down their lists: as the church of Smyrna, which records that Polycarp was placed there by John; as the church of Rome, where Clement was ordained by Peter.” This Clement, known as Clement of Rome, would later be the fourth pope (note that Tertullian does not say that Peter consecrated Clement as pope, which would have been impossible, since a pope does not consecrate his own successor; he simply ordained Clement a priest). Clement wrote his Letter to the Corinthians perhaps before A.D. 70, only a few years after Peter and Paul were killed; in it he referred to Peter ending his life where Paul ended his.
In his Letter to the Romans (A.D. 110), Ignatius of Antioch observed that he could not command the Christians of Rome in the way Peter and Paul did, a comment that makes sense only if Peter had been a leader, if not the leader, of the Church of Rome.
Irenaeus, in Against Heresies (A.D. 190), said that Matthew wrote his Gospel “while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundations of the Church.” He then says that the two left Rome, perhaps to attend the Council of Jerusalem (A.D. 49). A few lines later he notes that Linus was appointed Peter’s successor — that is, the second pope — and that the next names on the list were Anacletus (also known as Cletus) and Clement of Rome.
Clement of Alexandria wrote at the beginning of the third century. A fragment of his work Sketches has been preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, the first history of the Church. Clement wrote: “When Peter preached the word publicly in Rome and announced the Gospel by the Spirit, many of those present asked Mark, who had long been his follower and remembered his sayings, to put in writing what had been proclaimed.”
Peter of Alexandria was bishop of that city and died around A.D. 311. Some years before his death he wrote a treatise called Penance. In it he said: “Peter, the first of the apostles, having often been arrested, thrown into prison, and treated with ignominy, was finally crucified in Rome.”
Lactantius, in a treatise called The Death of the Persecutors, written around A.D. 318, observed that “while Nero still reigned, Peter came to Rome, where, by virtue of certain miracles he performed through the power of God that had been conferred on him, he converted many to virtue and established a firm and steadfast temple for God.” Nero reigned from A.D. 54 to 68.
These quotations could be multiplied (see Jurgens’s books for other sources and for fuller quotations of these). It should be enough to note that no ancient writer claimed that Peter ended his life anywhere other than Rome. Many refer to the fact that he was at one point in Antioch, but they go on to say that from there he went to the capital. Let us remember: these are the works that form the basis of historical Christian writings in the centuries immediately after the New Testament. On the question of where Peter went, they agree, and their accumulated testimony carries enormous weight.
In short, Boettner does not know what he is talking about when he says that “there is no historical proof of any kind” and that “it is all based on legend.” The truth is that the historical evidence is on the side of the Catholic position.
What archaeology demonstrated
Even fundamentalists, who invoke the “Bible only” theory, admit that there are many passages in the Bible that must be understood in light of what archaeology tells us, since it provides tangible information about the peoples and places mentioned in the Bible. Thus archaeological discoveries are relevant for determining which city Peter meant when he said he was in Babylon.
There is much archaeological evidence that Peter was in Rome, but Boettner, like other fundamentalist apologists, simply dismisses it, claiming that “archaeologists have carried out exhaustive investigations through the centuries to find some inscription in the catacombs and other ruins of ancient places in Rome that would indicate that Peter at least visited Rome. But all they have found are a few bones of uncertain origin” (p. 118).
Boettner sent his book to press in 1962. His original book and later revisions failed to mention the results of the excavations beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, excavations that had been under way for decades but were pursued vigorously after the Second World War and were concluded roughly a decade earlier. What Boettner casually dismissed as “a few bones of uncertain origin” were in fact the contents of a tomb on the Vatican Hill that was covered with early inscriptions attesting that Peter’s remains were inside. (Using Boettner’s technique, one could casually reject the remains in the tombs of Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, or any other historical figure as if they were only “a few bones of uncertain origin.”)
After the initial publication of Boettner’s book, the evidence continued to increase in number to the point that Pope Paul VI was able officially to announce something that had been discussed in archaeological literature and religious publications for years: that the authentic tomb of the first pope had been conclusively identified, that the remains apparently were there, and that near his tomb there were inscriptions identifying the place as the site where Peter was buried, which meant that the first Christians knew that the Prince of the Apostles was there. The story of how all this was determined with scientific precision is too long to retell here. It is studied in detail in John Evangelist Walsh’s book The Bones of St. Peter. Suffice it to say that the combination of historical and scientific evidence is such that no one willing to look at the facts with an open mind can doubt that Peter was in Rome. To deny that fact is to let prejudice dominate reason.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: For the New Testament passages I have used the translation of ANTONIO FUENTES MENDIOLA, published in Spain by EDICIONES RIALP.
Author: Joaquín Zaragoza Rojas
Source: Apologetica.org
Source: Catholic Answers
