Exegesis of Matthew 16:18
In the New Testament we can find abundant evidence that Peter was first in authority among the apostles. Whenever the apostles are named, Peter heads the list (Matthew 10:1-4, Mark 3:16-19, Luke 6:14-16, Acts 1:13); sometimes only “Peter and those who were with him” appear (Luke 9:32). Peter was the one who generally spoke first on behalf of the apostles (Matthew 18:21, Mark 8:29, Luke 12:41, John 6:69), and he appears in many dramatic scenes (Matthew 14:28-32, Matthew 17:24, Mark 10:28). At Pentecost Peter was the first to preach to the crowd (Acts 2:14-40), and it was Peter who performed the first miraculous healing in the nascent Church (Acts 3:6-7). It was also to Peter that the revelation came that the Gentiles should be baptized and accepted as Christians (Acts 10:46-48).
His preeminent position among the apostles was symbolized at the very beginning of his relationship with Christ. At their first meeting, Christ told Simon that his name would be changed to Peter, which is translated as Rock (John 1:42).
The fact is that—apart from the single time Abraham is called “rock” (Hebrew: sur; Aramaic: Kepha) in Isaiah 51:1-2—in the Old Testament only God was called rock. In antiquity the word rock was not used as a proper name. If you turn to a companion and say, “From now on your name is Asparagus,” people will be surprised. Why Asparagus? What is the intention of this? What does it mean? Of course, why call Simon the fisherman “Rock”? Christ was not doing this without meaning, and neither were the Jews when they gave a name. To give a new name is to change the person’s status, as when Abram’s name was changed to Abraham (Gen. 17:5), Jacob’s to Israel (Gen. 32:28), Eliakim’s to Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:34), or the names of the four Hebrew youths—Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah—to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan. 1:6-8). But no Jew had been called Rock. The Jews gave other names taken from nature, such as Barak, “lightning” (Judges 4:6), Deborah (“bee,” Gen. 35:8), and Rachel (“ewe,” Gen. 29:16), but not Rock. In the New Testament James and John were given by Christ the nickname Boanerges, which means “Sons of Thunder,” but this name was never regularly used in place of their original name and certainly was not taken as a new name. But in the case of Simon bar-Jonah, his new name Cephas (in Greek: Petrus) definitively replaced the old name.
Let us look at the scene
Not only was it significant for Simon to receive a new and unusual name, but the place where Jesus solemnly changed Peter’s name was also important. This happened when “Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi” (Matthew 16:13), a city that Philip the Tetrarch built in honor of Caesar Augustus, who had died in A.D. 14.
The city was located near the waterfalls of the Jordan River and near a gigantic wall of rock about 200 feet high and 500 feet long, which is part of the southern slope of Mount Hermon. The city no longer exists, but its ruins are near Banias, a small Arab town, and at the base of the rock wall one of the tributaries that feed the Jordan can be found to its left. It was here that Jesus addressed Simon and said to him: “You are Peter” (Matthew 16:18).
The significance of this event was very clear to the other apostles. As devout Jews they knew that the place was truly important for what was being done—changing Simon’s name. No one accused Simon because he alone had received this honor, and throughout the rest of the New Testament he is called by his new name, while James and John continued to be called James and John, not Boanerges.
Promises to Peter
When He first met Simon, “Jesus looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas (which means Peter)’” (John 1:42). The word “Cephas” in Greek is merely the literal rendering of the word “Kepha” in Aramaic. Later, after Peter and the other disciples were with Christ, they returned again to Caesarea Philippi, where Peter made his profession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matthew 16:16). Jesus told him that this was a truth specially revealed to him and then solemnly reiterated: “And I say to you, you are Peter” (Matthew 16:18). And to this he added the promise of founding the Church, in some way, upon Peter (Matthew 16:18).
Then two very important things were given to the apostles: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19). Here Peter was distinguished with the authority to forgive sins and to establish disciplinary rules. Later the apostles received similar power, but in this case Peter receives it here in a singular way. It was also only to Peter that it was promised: “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 16:19). In those times the key was a sign of authority. A walled city had a great gate, and that gate had a great lock that worked with a great key. To give the key to the city (an honor that still exists today, even though there are no gates) is also to give free access and authority over the city. The city whose key Peter was receiving was nothing less than the Heavenly City itself. This same symbolism for authority is used elsewhere in the Bible (Isa. 22:22, Revelation 1:18).
Finally, after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples and asked Peter three times: “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-17). In repentance for his three denials, Peter made a threefold affirmation of love. Then Christ, the Good Shepherd (John 10:11, 14), gave Peter the authority he had promised: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). This specifically included the other apostles, since Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15)—the word “these” refers to the other apostles who were present (John 21:2)—. This happened so that the prophecy made before Jesus and his disciples were on the Mount of Olives for the last time might be fulfilled.
Immediately before his denial Jesus said to Peter: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, [after his denial] strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:31-32). It was for Peter that Christ prayed that his faith would not fail and that he would be the guide of the others, and his prayer, being perfectly efficacious, would surely be fulfilled.
Who is the rock?
Let us focus on the key verse: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). The discussion about this verse has always turned on the meaning of the word “stone” or “rock.” To whom is Jesus referring? Since Simon’s new name, Peter, by itself means “rock,” the phrase can be rewritten as “You are Rock and upon this rock I will build my church.” The play on words is obvious, but many commentators, wishing to avoid what follows from this—the establishment of the Papacy—have suggested that the word rock cannot refer to Peter; it must refer to his profession of faith or to Christ himself.
From the grammatical point of view, the phrase “this rock” must refer to the nearest substantive noun. Peter’s profession of faith (“You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”) is two verses earlier, while his name, a proper name, immediately precedes the clause. Consider as an analogy this paraphrase: “I have a car and a truck, and this one is blue.” Which one is blue? The truck, because it is the noun nearest to the pronoun “this one.” All this is even clearer if the reference to the car was two sentences earlier, just as the reference to Peter’s profession of faith is two sentences before the term rock.
Another alternative
The same kind of argument considers that the word rock may refer to Christ himself, since he is mentioned in the profession of faith. The fact that elsewhere in Scripture, in a different metaphor, Christ is called the “cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20, 1 Peter 2:4-8) does not disprove that here the foundation is Peter. Naturally Christ is the principal foundation and, since he is returning to heaven, the invisible foundation of the church he will establish; but Peter is named by him as the secondary foundation and, because he and his successors will remain on earth, the visible foundation. Peter can be the foundation only because Christ is the First.
Consider another analogy: Sometimes we ask our friends to pray for us, and we pray for them. Our prayers ask God for special help for one another. What are we doing when we pray? We are acting as mediators, as intercessors. We are pleading with God on behalf of another. Is this contrary to Paul’s statement that Christ is the one mediator (1 Tim. 2:5)? No, because our mediation is entirely secondary and depends on the mediation of Christ. He is the only God-Man, the only person who is the bridge between God and man, but our intercession for another person does not interfere with Christ’s mediation. In fact, in the four verses before 1 Timothy 2:5, Paul commands Christians to pray for one another. Christ could have established his mediation in any way he wished, but he chose that we also should participate when he himself commands us to pray for one another (Matthew 5:44, 1 Tim. 2:1-4, Rom. 15:30, Acts 12:5). Thus, just as there can be secondary intercessors and one principal intercessor, there can also be a secondary foundation and a principal foundation.
A look at Aramaic
Those who oppose the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16:18 sometimes argue that in the Greek text the apostle’s name is “Petros,” while “rock” is translated as “stone” (petra). They say that the first word (petros) means a small stone and that the second (petra) is a great mass of rock; therefore, if Peter was meant to be a great rock, why is his name not “Petra”? Now, note that Christ did not speak to his disciples in Greek. He spoke in Aramaic, the popular language in the Palestine of that time. In that language the word for “rock” is “Kepha,” which is the word Jesus used in his common speech (notice that in John 1:42 he said: “You shall be called Cephas”). What Jesus said in Matthew 16:18 was this: “You are Kepha, and upon this kepha I will establish my Church.”
When the Gospel of Saint Matthew was translated from the original Aramaic into Greek, a problem arose that the evangelist did not face when he composed this compendium of the life of Christ. In Aramaic the word kepha had the same final sense for referring to a great rock or to a masculine personal name. In Greek, the word used to translate rock, petra, is feminine in gender. The translator could use it the second time the word appears in the sentence, but not the first, because it would be inappropriate to give a man a feminine name. Therefore the translator gave it a masculine ending, and this became Petros.
Moreover, the premise of the argument against Peter as the rock is simply mistaken. In the first century the Greek words “petros” and “petra” were synonyms. Previously they had possessed the meanings of “small stone” and “large rock” in early Greek poetry, but by the first century this distinction had been lost, as some Protestant biblical scholars admit (see D. A. Carson’s comments in “Expositor’s Bible Commentary” [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books]).
Some of the effect of Christ’s play on words was lost when it was translated from Aramaic into Greek, but that was the best that could be done in Greek. In English, as in Aramaic, there is no problem with the endings, because in English translation it could read: “You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.” [The same can be said in English: as in Aramaic, the phrase does not lend itself to any confusion, just as the translation reads today: “You are Peter (a masculine proper name meaning stone), and upon this stone (a common noun referring to the preceding proper noun) I will build my church.” Translator’s note.]
Considering another point of view: if the word rock referred directly to Christ (as some anti-Catholics say, basing themselves on 1 Corinthians 10:4, “and the Rock was Christ”—although the rock was literally a physical rock that traveled with the Israelites in the desert during the exodus; cf. Ex. 17:6, Num. 20:8), why did Matthew leave the passage as it was? In the original Aramaic, and in English, which is more similar to Aramaic than to Greek, the passage is clear. Matthew could realize that his readers would understand the obvious sense of “Peter… rock.”
If Matthew referred to Christ as the rock, why did he not say so clearly? Why did he give the opportunity and leave Paul to write clarifying the text (presuming, of course, that 1 Corinthians was written after the Gospel of Matthew, and if it was first, why did he not write to clarify this matter?
The reason, of course, is that Matthew knew very well that the phrase meant what it actually says. And it was Simon, weak as he was, who was chosen to be the rock, the first link in the chain of the Papacy.
Translator: Fr. Ramón Pons, from the Dominican Republic, currently exercising his apostolate in Fullerton, CA, USA
