by Tom Bissell
Just beyond the grottoes’ receiving area, Zander stopped at a small diorama model that he used to explain how the belief came to be that Peter was buried on the Vatican hillside. “Peter was buried in a small ditch,” Zander said, “probably covered by two terra-cotta tables, which were used to make a pitched roof, and which was then covered. Fifty years after his death, other tombs, family tombs, small mausoleums, were built there, not because Peter was there—these weren’t Christians—but because the dead had to be buried outside the city walls, according to Roman law, and this was the closest tomb area outside the city walls.”
The first person known to mention this memorial atop Peter’s burial site was Gaius, a Roman Christian about whom almost nothing is known, though Eusebius called him “a man of the greatest learning.” His Dialogue Against Proclus, a (probably) imagined debate between a Christian and a pagan composed around 200, is no longer extant, but Eusebius cited it as proof that Peter and Paul had been buried in Rome: “I can point out the monuments of the victorious apostles. If you will go as far as the Vatican or the Ostian Way, you will find the monuments of those who founded the church.” While Gaius did not specify where on the Vatican Hill Peter’s monument was, 125 years later Constantine built on the hillside his basilica, then one of the largest in the world, and placed its apse directly over a small roofed structure, known in architectural terms as an aedicule, that earlier Roman Christians had built atop what they believed was Peter’s grave. There is little doubt that Gaius and Constantine were working off the same tradition. The aedicule, quite modest, amounted to a doubly pillared portico built into a red wall, with a trapdoor allowing access to the subjacent grave. The diorama Zander now lingered before was that of this original aedicule.
Constantine built his basilica two decades after the 313 Edict of Milan, in which Constantine (along with his co-signer, and temporary ally, Licinius Augustus) gave “Christians and others full authority to observe that religion which each preferred.” Constantine was not overly involved with his basilica’s construction, as most of his attention was being commanded by various building projects in his new capital of Constantinople. The emperor did, however, break ground with the papal shovel, fill twelve bags with soil—one for each apostle—and carry them to the basilica’s first work site.
In building this basilica, Constantine eradicated the existing cemetery in which Peter had purportedly been buried more than 250 years earlier. By Constantine’s time, this cemetery contained the bodies of many honored Christians; building over it meant leveling an entire hillside. It is estimated that a million cubic feet of soil was removed from the Vatican, all of which was done with tools scarcely more elaborate than buckets.
Zander walked through a spare white room that displayed funereal stones and cinerary urns unearthed from the original Vatican cemetery. He stopped at another small diorama that showed the evolution, still imperfectly understood, of Peter’s burial site. How, I asked Zander, are the Vatican’s archaeologists able to know what Constantine’s original memorial to Peter looked like? Having anticipated this question, Zander opened a book he was carrying. Inside was a picture of a fifth-century ivory chest found in Dalmatia, onto which was carved a depiction of Peter’s Constantinian memorial.
Constantine’s decision to build was widely viewed as a double-barreled sacrilege at the time. Burial matters in Rome were taken very seriously. Violations concerning “sepulture” were sometimes capital offenses. Christianity was not yet Rome’s prevailing faith (paganism was not formally banned until 391), and in violating so many graves, Christian and pagan alike, Constantine risked his entire rule. “Constantine was convinced,” Zander told me, “that this was Peter’s tomb. Otherwise, why do this?” What it all amounted to, he went on, was “two thousand years of documented devotion.”
By the time Saint Peter’s Basilica was complete in 1626, accessing Peter’s grave was no longer possible. In 1939, after the death of Pope Pius XI, the Vatican began to excavate the grottoes, which were found directly beneath and extended slightly beyond the basilica’s four-hundred-foot-long nave. These grottoes were a remnant of Constantine’s Basilica; for centuries, the Vatican had used them as a storage area. In seeking to expand and remake the grottoes into a subterranean chapel, the Vatican decided to lower the grottoes’ floor. The Vatican’s diggers immediately began to uncover bodies, most of them modestly interred. This was no surprise: the tradition that the Vatican was used as a cemetery was well documented. Three months into the dig, however, came quite a surprise: the uncovered top portion of a wall.
A Vatican archaeologist was summoned, and picks and shovels were abandoned for baskets and brushes. After they had removed six thousand cubic feet of earth, the workers were startled to find themselves standing in the middle of a tomb replete with Venus paintings, stucco friezes of birds, and a few intact cinerary urns. These were pagan tombs, clearly, and most likely dated from before the third century, when Roman paganism began to drift away from cremation, possibly due to a growing pagan belief in some form of an afterlife. Another tomb was found, with a Latin epitaph that suggested it had belonged to a Christian. As digging continued, and fill earth was cleared from yet more roofless tomb structures, the diggers realized they were uncovering nothing less than a largely intact portion of the original Vatican Hill cemetery. Again, this was a surprise but not quite a shock. In the seventeenth century, a marble sarcophagus had been discovered during repairs near the basilica’s high altar. Its sensible—but to Christian eyes, scandalous—inscription (“Mix the wine, drink deep, and do not refuse the pretty girls the sweets of love”) so alarmed the Vatican authorities that they destroyed the sarcophagus and threw its pieces into the Tiber.
The most recent excavation, begun in Fascist times, occurred at a difficult moment for Italy. “Before that,” Zander said, “no one dared dig below the altar. It was a matter of respect. You didn’t want to disturb the sleep of the first popes.” A few of these early “popes,” it was believed, had been buried near Peter. Some within the Vatican urged Pius XII to authorize a search for the remains of Peter. Pius was not initially supportive of the idea, because a long-honored tradition held that the grave’s sanctity had to be preserved, but the digging continued. More tombs were uncovered, one of which dated to the middle of the second century and belonged to a family known as Valerius. Here, scrawled in a small niche beneath a charcoal drawing of a face, the excavators found their first mention of Peter. The words (“Peter pray Christ Jesus for the holy…”) were only partially legible and in Latin. As the evidence amassed that the excavation was heading directly toward Peter’s grave, Pius granted his permission to excavate the apostle’s burial area. He asked only that no word of what the Vatican was doing reach the public until an official report was ready for release. The excavators would work quietly for the next decade.
“Pius wanted the dig to happen,” Zander said. “He pushed it. He wanted the area excavated because he wanted to confirm the tradition of Saint Peter’s tomb. He also wanted to give a scientific answer to growing Protestant questions about whether Saint Peter was martyred and buried in Rome. It was political, yes. Papal primacy is founded on this spot, and it is founded here because this is where Peter was buried.”
The methods the initial excavation used were, Zander allowed, deeply regrettable. “Unfortunately, the excavation was carried out in very difficult circumstances, which led to the loss of certain information that would have helped us better understand the situation. They used too much haste.” The Vatican’s diggers were forced to work so quickly, he went on, because their excavation had compromised the basilica’s structural integrity.
With that, Zander waved his large, courteous hand toward the entrance of the grottoes.
IV.
Catholic tradition holds that Peter brought the faith to Rome. Today, the Vatican’s view of this long-battered, almost certainly inaccurate belief is highly qualified. The actual founder of Roman Christianity is not known. The scholar Peter
Lampe, in his groundbreaking work on the origins of Roman Christianity, used multiple sources—ancient pagan history, scripture, archaeological studies—to determine beyond all reasonable doubt that Roman Christianity began as a number of Jewish cells in some of the poorest Roman neighborhoods, particularly the crowded, stinking, and destitute harbor quarter and brick-making neighborhood of Trastevere. Once established, Christian believers gathered in homes across the city and worshipped according to their own understandings, with no centralized authority. There was evident friction between these new Christians and the city’s Jews, one cause of which might have been the Christians’ successful efforts to win non-Jewish God fearers*1 away from the synagogue. The synagogues fought back in some manner dramatic enough to have moved the emperor Claudius to take action. In the late 40s, Claudius banned a large number of “Jews” (early Christians, almost certainly) from Rome. This expulsion marks Roman Christianity’s first historical appearance.
Despite its eventual destruction of Jerusalem, Rome was not a fierce enemy of the Jews. In fact, Diaspora Jews frequently sought out Rome’s protection, and Rome (Claudius’s expulsion edict notwithstanding) usually provided it. Josephus, the great first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, and others suggest that, among Diaspora communities at least, elite Jews could find favor among the Roman authorities. Even during the Jewish War against Rome, Jews did not suffer unusual maltreatment in Rome, provided they did nothing to support the insurrection.
The first Christians in Rome might have anticipated equal benevolence: as immigrant slaves, many of them occupied a position of similar social ambiguity. In fact, Christianity likely infiltrated Rome via slavery, as a number of Jewish (and, thus, Jewish Christian) slaves were sold to Roman aristocrats by members of the Herodian dynasty. Later, many Roman Christians voluntarily sold themselves into slavery, the proceeds of which they apparently used to feed the poor in their communities.
The break between Gentile God fearers and Roman Jews did not happen instantly. In all likelihood, a theologically immature form of Christianity reached Rome by the late 30s or early 40s. A decade would go by before Claudius’s expulsion edict. During this time, early Roman Christians, many of them former God fearers, most likely periodically attended the synagogues of their choice, and most of the Jews of these synagogues, however grumblingly, tolerated them. One result of Claudius’s expulsion was to permanently separate Christians from Rome’s synagogues. Less than twenty years later, during the anti-Christian terror of Nero, Jews and Christians were viewed as distinct groups of people.
Well into the third century, not a single Roman church was anything other than a private home. (The world “basilica” does not occur in the Roman tradition until the fourth century.) This lack of a public place of worship made early Christianity much unlike Judaism or paganism; meetings between pagan groups often occurred in private homes, but to worship there was unusual. Yet Roman Christianity as a whole apparently had access to quite a bit of money. Various scattered references allow us to infer that by the middle of the second century Roman Christianity was the richest of all the world’s Christian communities and had been for some time. Roman support was a good thing for the Christians of the Mediterranean world, but it caused unease among the Christians of Rome, who feared the corruption of the faith as it moved deeper down the corridors of power. The Shepherd of Hermas, a product of early Roman Christianity that dates from the beginning of the second century, contains a devastating portrait of rich, hypocritical Roman Christians.
Just as there were no churches in early Roman Christianity, there were no “popes.” There were, perhaps, presbyters or bishop-like figures but no single recognizable leader of the faith. Paul mentions no leader in his letter to the Romans, and neither does Ignatius in his letter to the city, written roughly fifty years later. The first titles of identifiable ecclesiastic authority do not occur before the middle of the third century.
For Catholics, then, it would seem that the only salvageable part of Peter’s foundation of the Roman church was the idea that Peter came to Rome and ultimately died there. And now, in the grottoes, Zander and I were getting close to his supposed tomb.
He encouraged me to explore, but much of the area was a red-velvet-rope-lined maze used to corral those not fortunate enough to have Zander guiding them. There were two grottoes: the Old Grottoes (the part contiguous to Saint Peter’s nave) and the New Grottoes (a U-shaped gallery beneath the basilica’s central crossing), which are older than the Old Grottoes but were opened to visitors later. Hulkingly squat columns divided the Old Grottoes into three aisles festooned with the doorless crypts of several popes and esteemed Catholics, including John Paul I; Queen Christina of Sweden; and Adrian IV, the lone Englishman in the history of the papacy, who had been entombed beneath a Medusa-headed sarcophagus for reasons unknown even to Zander. Also here was Pius XI, whose death had instigated the grottoes’ refurbishment.
Hundreds of people were moving through the grottoes’ velvet-rope maze in herd-animal silence. Many of them were priests and nuns. No cameras flashed, and no guidebooks were consulted. A good number of the grottoes’ visitors seemed in a state of reverently subdued grief. Zander suggested we abscond to the part of the grottoes found directly beneath the basilica’s confessio and directly above the site of Peter’s purported grave.
Above the archway leading into this space was a carved marble scroll sculpture, on which was written SEPULCRUM SANCTI PETRI APOSTOLI. On either side of the archway, a stone lion lay with its paws forward. Mounted nearby was a pair of angel statues salvaged from Constantine’s Basilica. The archway itself was roped off. Zander seemed genuinely pained he could provide no escort closer than this to the “tomb,” which seemed to glow within a soft ocher light that had no immediately discernible source, other than, possibly, God.
The anti-Christian emperor Julian the Apostate once rather cunningly condemned the Christian practice of revered burial: “You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchers, and yet in your scriptures it is nowhere said that you must grovel among tombs and pay them honor.” There was a time, however, when Christians venerated the dead by drinking half a bottle of wine with a few like-minded friends beside small memorials; when secrecy governed all ritual; when proofs of faith were more personal if no less strongly felt. A few scattered leavings of this abandoned form of Christian devotion could be found in the necropolis, toward which Zander and I now headed.
V.
In all the gospels, Peter is called by Jesus to join him, yet these accounts are so disparate that many writers seeking to harmonize Peter’s call are reduced to circumlocutions such as “It was sometime later….” Simply put, the accounts of Peter’s calling cannot be harmonized without severe temporal corner cutting. In Mark, Peter “immediately” abandons his nets to follow Jesus when called. This is followed by an episode in which Jesus heals Peter’s sick mother-in-law. Mark places Peter’s call after the arrest of John the Baptist, but Matthew locates the call as occurring some time before the arrest. Luke abandons this sequence and depicts Jesus, without the stated presence of Peter, going to Capernaum’s synagogue and driving out “an unclean demon” from one of its worshippers. He then walks into Peter’s house and heals his mother-in-law, even though in Luke’s chronology he has not yet explicitly met Peter.
Another tradition entirely is at work in John’s gospel. Peter’s brother Andrew, a disciple of John the Baptist’s, witnesses his master commend a walking-by Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” Andrew and another, unnamed disciple of John the Baptist’s spend the day with Jesus. On what is apparently the following day, Andrew finds Peter and brings him to Jesus. Jesus looks Peter over and says, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas.” Unlike Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael, all of whom are bid to follow, the Jesus of John’s gospel does not explicitly call Peter. All he does is meet and rename him.
All of this is to say that markedly different early Christian attitudes about Peter can be detected in the g
ospels. The Gospel According to Mark, for instance, was most likely addressed to a predominantly Gentile Christian community uneasy with Judaism and uncomfortable with the Twelve Apostles generally and Peter specifically. Yet the church father Papias provided later Christians with the belief (one that persisted until the nineteenth century) that Mark, in writing his gospel, relied on Peter’s eyewitness. Papias’s testimony on the relationship between Mark and Peter is attributed to an unnamed “presbyter.” The work in which Papias laid out these third-party claims no longer survives, but Eusebius quoted from it: “Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter [in Rome], wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord’s sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of his followers….Mark was quite justified in writing down some things just as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only—to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it.” The gospel was not believed to have been in order? And what does “just as he remembered them” actually mean? The mention of Mark’s being “quite justified” and that his “purpose” was “to make no misstatement” suggests that the legitimacy of Mark’s gospel was, at the time of Papias’s writing, suffering attacks. Today virtually no scholar accepts Papias’s belief that Mark relied on the historical Peter,*2 though the theory did lead to Peter’s tormented portrayal throughout Christian history. One early Christian fabulist had Peter waking up every morning only to burst into tears at the sound of a crowing cock. No wonder, when the gospel he supposedly dictated portrays him as being so inept.