by Tom Bissell
Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them did so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.
The young man stood, apparently confused as to how best to take his leave of Philip and James. After a moment of silent consideration, he bowed, awkwardly. I sat there for a few moments by myself before thinking, I want to talk to him. I tracked him down outside, around the corner from the piazza, as he was walking toward the Palazzo Venezia, which was today hosting a Julian Schnabel show. The sky, surrendering the deep, breathing blue of mid-afternoon, was slowly giving way to the jaundice of dusk.
The young man seemed startled, at first, to be approached by me but warmed considerably when I told him why I wanted to talk. He agreed to have a drink on the patio of a small café on the corner of Via del Corso. When the waiter brought two large, astronomically expensive bottles of Peroni and presented the bill, the young man started digging into his pocket. He was relieved when I told him it was my treat.
His name was Glenn. He was from Tennessee and in Rome on an Evangelical Bible tour. He told me he was “sick to death” of being guided around, and while he was uncomfortable with Catholicism, he had read about the Church of the Holy Apostles in his guidebook and decided he wanted to pay his respects to Philip and James. “Why?” I asked him, given the Evangelical antagonism to the cult of the saints.
“Because,” he said, “they were my Savior’s friends and they died for him. They deserve our respect and our love, whatever my position on how Catholics choose to revere them.” And how did he feel about the possibility that James son of Alphaeus might have been the brother of Jesus? Glenn shrugged. “That wouldn’t shock me. I know it’s a possibility. I accept Matthew 1:25—that Mary had normal relations of the body with her husband. There’s nothing in Christian doctrine that forbids normal relations between a man and a wife. Do you know what Paul says? Paul says it’s a ‘doctrine of demons’ to deny a man sexual expression with a woman within the confines of marriage.” He drank from his beer, squinting as though tasting a much harsher spirit. “The apostles were just men. Great men, but men. Yes, they performed miracles, but only through the power of the Holy Spirit, which is available to all of us. To suggest that they had the same power as Jesus is blasphemous. And it’s why we oppose Catholicism.”
Nevertheless, I said, he came to see Philip and James. “I went to Saint Peter’s, too,” he said quickly. “The apostles aren’t important to me. I think about their example—and it’s not always a great example, by the way—but as a Christian I don’t find any spiritual nourishment there. As someone who reads the Bible and studies what it says, I find the fact that I just looked at Philip and James’s tomb interesting. As a person, as someone who finds the history interesting. But not as a Christian.”
Soon more beers were ordered, and our discussion gathered in a number of orbital matters regarding his faith. With a now-reddened face, Glenn leaned forward, his finger thrust out in a combatively friendly way. “If the Bible says Paul and Peter argued, that’s not a shock. They were both men. They were not divine. When they wrote their letters, they were under divine guidance, but in how they behaved, of course they sinned, of course they showed vanity, but the writing of their letters is different. That’s God doing the talking. They were his vessel.”
I met this line of reasoning with an equally out-thrust finger: Okay, but what of the rest of the process? Did the same underwriter of divine veracity oversee every other area of biblical transmission? The writers of the New Testament were working under divine guidance. Fine. But what of those who selected the books of the New Testament? What of the copyists? The translators? The printers? The interpreters? All of these were sinners besides. Or did God step in at every one of the thousand places where the possibility for human error and frailty and misunderstanding intersected with scripture’s earthly manifestation?
Again, Glenn laughed, showing his small, hard Chiclet teeth. “I know what you’re getting at. But I believe the Bible is without the errors of man. I believe that. I have somewhat of an idea that there’s controversies concerning translation, but this is the book Christians turn to, and have turned to, and it has nothing to do with apostles or translators.”
We sat there a while longer, mostly silent, while Glenn finished his beer. No one had ever had this argument before and felt as if he won, just as no one had ever had this argument before and felt as if he lost. Before going, Glenn wished me luck on what he called my “journey.” And so I wished Glenn luck on his.
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*1 “Tetrarch” literally means “ruler of a fourth part,” which is to say, king of one-fourth of Herod the Great’s kingdom, which his sons and grandsons variously ruled, always with Roman approval, in the years after his death in 4 BCE.
*2 Luke characteristically avoids the confusion by noting only “the women who had followed [Jesus] from Galilee”; he neglects to provide their names.
*3 The others are Peter, Andrew, and Thaddaeus. Peter’s given name has both a Greek (Simon) and a Hebrew (Simeon) form.
*4 Among Greek intellectuals, monotheism was a fairly common belief, but this was typically a syncretizing monotheism philosophically at odds with the exclusionist monotheism of the Jews.
*5 Many Greeks admired the Jews, for their antiquity if nothing else. One of Aristotle’s pupils wrote of his master’s being out-wisdomed by a Jew; a later pagan writer asked, “What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?” Not until after the Maccabaean revolt did Greek views of the Jews correspondingly dim.
*6 Thus the crime of simony, whereby one purchases favor or influence within the church. While later commentators would argue that Simon Magus faked his faith in Jesus, Acts specifically notes, “Even Simon himself believed.” Based on the text of Acts, it seems as though Simon is guilty of nothing more than catastrophically poor judgment. Simon would go on to have a colorful career in Christian Apocrypha, and church fathers like Irenaeus would claim that the gospels were written to counter Simon’s false teachings. By the fourth century, Simon was the subject of intense hatred; on him all deviations from orthodoxy were blamed. Eusebius referred to Simon as “a great opponent of great men, our Saviour’s inspired apostles”—Moriarty to the Twelve’s collective Holmes—and noted how “astonishing” it was that Simon’s purportedly feigned acceptance of Jesus “is still the practice of belief in those who to the present day belong to his disgusting sect,” which means Simonian Christianity endured into the fourth century.
*7 Hilariously, Paul and James refer to the same passage from Genesis to make their respective points.
*8 Christians unaware of James’s reported fraternity with the Pharisees will no doubt find it somewhat startling. Surprisingly little is actually known about the Pharisees of Jesus’s lifetime. They were, most basically, a small group of lay Torah interpreters devoted to observance of Jewish purity rules. Some estimates indicate they made up no more than 1 percent of the population. The Pharisees first emerged during the Jewish Maccabaean revolt (166–160 BCE) against the Seleucids. Pharisee influence waxed and waned in the intervening decades, but the gospels inaccurately portray the Pharisees of Jesus’s time enjoying a historically nonexistent consensus of belief and maintaining their organizational power at a moment when Pharisee influence was, in fact, weakest.
PETER
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Saint Peter’s Basilica: Vatican City
THE WORLD’S SMALLEST COUNTRY • THE PIAZZA OF SAINT PET
ER • GAIUS’S MONUMENT • THE FOUNDER OF THE ROMAN CHURCH • GROTTOES • THE CONFESSION • “FEED MY LAMBS” • THE ACTS OF PETER • THE RED WALL • THE MOST EGREGIOUS BLUNDER • HOLY MOUSE
I.
One-third of the world’s smallest country is a garden. Roughly eight hundred citizens call it home. It has its own currency, postal service, army (Stalin famously wondered how many divisions its leader could field; the answer was more than he suspected), and one adult bookstore. From 1870 to 1929, the rulers of the world’s smallest country regarded the nation that surrounds it as an apostate land worthy of divine condemnation. Yet the location of the world’s smallest country, to say nothing of the authority of its principal citizen, is not founded on a site of civic declaration. It is not the victory plain of an ancient battle. It was not placed in recognition of some ethno-tribal border. The only reason the world’s smallest country exists is due to a modest, two-thousand-year-old grave site, the location and contents of which are evidenced by findings best described as interpretive.
During the time of Jesus, not many Romans traveled beyond their city’s walls to the hill-hemmed drainage marsh known, even then, as the Vatican field. Tacitus called it a “notoriously pestilential neighborhood,” and others likened the wine made from Vatican grapes to poison. Fittingly, the Roman emperor Nero showed a malignant fondness for the Vatican field and on its grounds oversaw a series of brutal executions, one of which might have laid the metaphysical cornerstone of the blue-gray marble colossus known as Saint Peter’s Basilica.
The rain, falling from a wet-newspaper-colored sky, struck the marble piazza with aeroballistic force. The sound was like that of a thousand spankings, and the piazza’s two fountains enthusiastically overflowed. Several nuns huddled under the protection of one of the piazza’s two colonnades and stared out at the rain with tamp-mouthed resignation. Vatican police go-carts, also keeping under the colonnade, rolled past the nuns. The piloting officers’ matching white sashes, belts, and pistol holsters brought to mind lightly armed hall monitors.
The piazza of Saint Peter’s Basilica was the last portion of the Vatican complex to be completed. Work on it did not begin until 1656, thirty years after the basilica itself was consecrated. The man responsible for the piazza, Gian Lorenzo Bernini—who in order to finish his commission passed up a chance to design the Louvre—laid the two curved colonnades that hug the ovular piazza like parentheses. One hundred and sixty-four twelve-foot-tall statues were perched atop these colonnades: Bernini called them his “cloud of witnesses.” Every statue required about two months’ work for the master and his workshop students. An entire limestone quarry was leased, and nearly exhausted, to provide Bernini with the requisite stone. Bernini’s last “witness” was not mounted until a century after the pope who commissioned the piazza had died. Seen through curtains of unending rain, Bernini’s witnesses looked as imperturbable as idols.
Whether one was an agnostic or an Evangelical, a bishop or a mullah, a Scientologist or a Jain, the basilica’s gargantuan, overriding reality could not help but psychologically validate the legend on which it had been founded. The basilica built in the name of a Galilean fisherman once known as Simon son of John was commissioned by a hated pope (Julius II), constructed on what was then the holiest site in Europe (Constantine’s Basilica, where nearly two hundred popes were consecrated), initially designed by a then-minor homosexual architect (Donato Bramante), enhanced by several geniuses (Michelangelo among them), despised by Martin Luther (who called it “a very minor thing”), admired by George Eliot (who claimed standing before it was like entering “some millennial Jerusalem”), begun in one era (the Renaissance), and finished in another (the Baroque). The construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica required the passing of thirty papacies. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before. Saint Peter’s Basilica was not a church. It was a self-contained world.
Jesus died knowing no land, apparently, but Palestine. That was his self-contained world. Europe, however, claimed his most prominent early follower, from whose grave spawned the entirety of Western Christianity, first in Catholic adulation, then in Protestant flight.
II.
He has been called the Prince of the Apostles, even though the last thing he needs is another sobriquet. No fewer than six names are used for him in the New Testament: Simon, Simon Peter, Simeon, Simeon Peter, Peter, and Cephas. His given name, Simon, is among the New Testament’s most popular. Seven discernible Simons make an appearance in the gospels: Simon Peter, the apostle Simon the Cananaean (also known as Simon the Zealot), Jesus’s brother Simon, Judas’s father Simon, Simon the leper (who in the Gospel According to Matthew hosts Jesus), Simon the Pharisee (who in the Gospel According to Luke wonders why Jesus lets a sinful woman wash his feet), and Simon the Cyrene (who in the Gospel According to Matthew is “compelled” to carry Jesus’s cross when Jesus, apparently, weakens). If we add to this tally the Acts of the Apostles, we have yet more Simons, including the spell-casting wizard of Samaria.
The uses of his many names are difficult to unravel. The first gospel to be written, Mark, simply tells us that Simon is the one “to whom [Jesus] gave the name Peter.” Early in the Gospel According to Matthew, we meet “Simon, who is called Peter,” but later the gospel’s author chooses to elaborate on this tradition when he has Jesus say, “And I tell you, you are Peter [Petros], and on this rock [petra] I will build my church.” Among Aramaic-speaking Jews, Peter would have been known as Simeon; among Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles, Simon. Following Jesus’s renaming, he would have been known among Aramaic-speaking Jews as Cephas (from kepha, or “rock”); among Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles, Petros (from petra, also “rock”). Neither of Peter’s names is a direct translation from “rock”; they are more akin to neologisms. Greek is a gendered language, and the Greek word for “rock” is feminine. In written Aramaic, which, like Hebrew, does not use vowels, the Latin-alphabet equivalent of Cephas is indicated in this way: kp’. The word is infrequent in ancient Aramaic literature and almost never appears as a proper name. There is even less evidence for Petros being used as a proper name prior to Peter’s rechristening. According to the scholar Pheme Perkins, “The term may well have been created to provide a Greek translation for the Aramaic ‘Cephas.’ ” Because neither name means “rock,” exactly, the most equivalent English name would be something like Rocky. Only Matthew attempts to explain why Jesus called Peter Rocky, and it appears to have something to do with how Jesus would build his church. What Jesus actually intended has been the subject of thermonuclear Christian debate.
With the wildly myriad tradition of his name, actions, and intended position in the faith so contested, it is little wonder that believing Christians have long struggled with Peter’s portrayal in the New Testament. During Jesus’s trial, Peter is singled out by every gospel writer as having denied knowing Jesus; Paul’s letter to the Galatians calls Peter a hypocrite. While Jesus addresses Peter more frequently than any other apostle, Peter is also condemned more harshly than any other apostle. Peter is finally the only apostle within scripture audacious enough to rebuke Jesus to his face. In some sense, the New Testament can be read as an account of the spectacular failings of a not particularly bright man named Simon Peter. But the gospels contain another, equally unmistakable tradition that stresses Peter’s prominence. No other New Testament figure, save for Jesus himself, can be so richly interpreted.
Early Christian history can be divided into three stages of development: (1) the era of the historical Jesus; (2) the era of a Palestinian church centered on Jerusalem; (3) the era of the later, larger Gentile church. The three most important figures in early Christianity, aside from Jesus, are Paul, James the brother of Jesus, and Peter. Paul is absent from the first stage, occupies an ambiguous place in the second, and is prominent in the third. James has an ambiguous place in the first, is prominent in the second, and is absent from the third. Peter, and Peter alone, is the only one of Jesus’s early followers to have a place of
prominence in all three stages of Christian development.
When we speak of the historical Peter, all that can be determined is this: He was probably one of the first called disciples of Jesus. He was considered among a wide swath of Christians around the Mediterranean world to be the most famous disciple of Jesus. He was known by multiple names. He had what other Christians understood as an early encounter with the risen Jesus. He took part in a form of missionary activity. He served as some kind of mediator between Paul and James. Beyond this: only legend. Atop this: a massive basilica named in his honor.
III.
Pietro Zander is a Vatican archaeologist tasked with preserving excavations in the areas beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica known as the grottoes and the necropolis, around which he would serve as my guide. Very few non-Catholics receive the opportunity to see the necropolis, and even Catholics have their difficulties. For many, the wait to descend into the necropolis was months. To be deemed worthy of seeing the necropolis, one often had to be, or at least claim to be, undertaking some sort of religious pilgrimage. This being the case, the vast majority of those selected by the Vatican to visit the necropolis were nuns, priests, or active Catholic laypeople.
Like many archaeologists, Zander appeared to possess a mind in which childlike excitement had been made recombinant with a cooler, more adult desire for precision. I met him in his office in the Fabbrica, one of the Dijon-colored buildings that surround the Vatican complex and which controlled the Vatican’s day-to-day operations. (Through the Fabbrica, we would be entering the grottoes.) Zander’s impressive coif was the color of pencil lead. His fine blue suit had almost certainly never seen a department-store clothes hanger. Virtually every man who worked in the Fabbrica was dressed as exquisitely as an Italian mogul. Standing in the hallway outside Zander’s office, with cologned functionaries striding by, was like being downwind from a cosmetics laboratory.