by Tom Bissell
The Gospel According to Matthew was most likely addressed to a predominantly Jewish Christian community struggling with its mandate toward Gentile believers. In Mark, “the disciples” are often said to ask something of Jesus. In Matthew, it is usually Peter who does the asking. Peter’s role as the spokesman of the Twelve, while somewhat apparent in Mark, is owed largely to Matthew’s redactions of Mark. This is only one aspect of Matthew’s many small but telling departures from Mark. In Mark’s gospel, for instance, we are given a scene in which Jesus tells the disciples to sail forth across the Sea of Galilee to Bethsaida, while Jesus “went up on the mountain to pray.” By nightfall, Jesus, “alone on the land,” notices his disciples struggling “against an adverse wind.” In the morning, Jesus walks on the water out to his disciples, which terrifies them. After telling the disciples, “Take heart,” Jesus calms the wind. Yet Mark notes that the disciples, still puzzled by his parable of the loaves from the previous day, saw their hearts “hardened” toward Jesus, which is by any measure an emotionally mystifying turn of events. Matthew, for his part, apparently found this scene interesting enough to include but frustrating enough to reshape. When Matthew’s Jesus approaches the boat on the water, the disciples once again fear him. Peter, however, volunteers to walk out to meet Jesus. Peter does not get far. At the gust of a “strong wind,” he begins to falter and sink. Jesus “reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ ” Matthew provides Peter with no answer, though “those in the boat” proclaim, “Truly you are the Son of God.” Reading through the gospel as a whole, one is left with the clear sense that Matthew’s Peter is somehow closer to Jesus than he is in the other gospels.
The Gospel According to Luke was most likely addressed to a predominantly Gentile Christian community at greater ease with its Jewish Christian forebears. At numerous points, Luke makes more changes to Mark’s portrayal of Peter than Matthew; indeed, his Peter is arguably even more sympathetic. Luke goes out of his way to explain Peter’s behavior. One example is how Mark and Luke portray Peter while Jesus prays at Gethsemane shortly before his arrest. In Mark, Peter and the other disciples cannot stay awake, yet it is Peter whom Mark’s Jesus confronts: “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour?” In Luke’s version of this scene, Peter is not named, and Jesus’s response is much kinder: “Why are you sleeping?” Mark’s Peter falls asleep because he is tired; Luke’s disciples fall asleep “because of grief.” In Mark (and Matthew), Peter swears “an oath” during Jesus’s trial that he does not know Jesus, but in Luke Peter’s denial is far less severe. Luke is also alone in noting that Jesus, having overheard Peter’s denial, “turned and looked” at his friend, which in some strange, subliminal way renders Peter all the more sad and vulnerable. This may be the most humanly heartbreaking moment in the gospels; one historian describes Jesus’s wordless confrontation of Peter as among “the most eloquent quiet stares in human history.” But then Luke needs Peter to be sympathetic, for in the Acts of the Apostles he has him leading the reassembled Twelve.
The Gospel According to John was most likely addressed to a singular community that understood itself as having been founded by an eyewitness to the events of Jesus’s life. Within the gospel proper, this character is called the Beloved Disciple, who is frequently paired with Peter, often in an undercutting way. The Beloved Disciple’s first explicit appearance in the gospel is during the Last Supper, when Jesus announces that one of the disciples is a traitor. The Beloved Disciple is sitting next to Jesus, apparently athwart Peter: “Simon Peter therefore motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.” The point is a pointed one indeed: Peter cannot talk to Jesus about the traitor’s identity without using the Beloved Disciple as an intermediary.*3 John additionally makes Peter the disciple who cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant during Jesus’s capture, when, in the other gospels, this aggressor apostle remains anonymous. While the Beloved Disciple stands bravely at the foot of the cross during Jesus’s crucifixion, Peter is nowhere to be found. Later the Beloved Disciple beats Peter to Jesus’s tomb in a literal race.
VI.
Peter’s confession to Jesus that he, Jesus, is the Messiah is one of the most important moments in the gospel tradition. In Mark, Jesus suddenly asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples respond by saying that there is talk of Jesus’s being many people: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the other prophets. Jesus then asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Mark’s Peter steps forth to answer, “You are the Messiah.” After ordering his disciples to keep this secret, Jesus “quite openly” discusses how the Son of Man “must undergo great suffering…be killed, and on the third day rise again.” Peter, however, “took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Jesus, “turning and looking at his disciples,” unloads on Peter a public counter-rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
In Matthew, Jesus also asks who the people say that he is, but it is Peter who answers: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Matthew’s Jesus is so moved by Peter’s answer that he makes the Petros-petra pun. When Matthew’s Jesus promises he must undergo great suffering, he does not frame it in Mark’s “Son of Man” terms. Peter’s response is also different. While Matthew notes that Peter “began to rebuke him,” his words themselves are pillowy with concern: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus’s response is similar to that of Mark but contains a critical additional phrase: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Mark’s Jesus is angry; Matthew’s Jesus is befuddled. Mark’s Peter is doltishly prone to misunderstanding; Matthew’s Peter is full of misplaced love.
Luke’s rendering of Peter’s confession is the shortest. Here, Jesus is praying alone alongside the disciples, with none of Mark’s “crowd” about, and the roundelay begins. Peter’s eventual confession holds that Jesus is “the Messiah of God,” which, within a first-century context, may be a kind of Christological middle ground between Mark’s “Messiah” and Matthew’s “Son of the Living God.” While Luke’s Jesus expounds on his eventual suffering, Peter does not rebuke him, and he does not liken Peter to Satan. In Luke’s hands, the whole confession sequence has a rushed-through air about it, as if it were something the author recognized as touchy.
In the twenty-first (and last) chapter of John, Peter has returned home to Galilee. He announces to Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and two others, “I am going fishing.” The other disciples come along but, despite fishing through the night, catch nothing. By daybreak, “Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” Jesus asks if they have caught anything, and they tell him no. “Cast the net to the right side of the boat,” Jesus tells them, “and you will find some.” Soon their nets are so full “they were not able to haul it in because there were so many.” With that, the Beloved Disciple recognizes Jesus (“It is the Lord!”), which forces Peter to dress quickly (“for he was naked”), jump into the sea, and swim to Jesus. Once Peter is ashore, Jesus tells him, “Come and have breakfast.” As they finish eating, Jesus says, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” Peter replies, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus responds, “Feed my lambs.” Jesus then asks Peter a second time if he loves him, and Peter responds positively again. “Tend my sheep,” Jesus says. When Jesus asks Peter if he loves him a third time, Peter’s heartbreak and torment are achingly apparent: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus then tells Peter, “Feed my sheep.”
Part of what makes this scene so affecting, and its sensibility so strangely modern, is that one is not sure to whom one’s sympathy is supposed to drift. Is Jesus behaving cruelly by forcing Peter to repeat his love, or is he extracting from Peter a reasonable emotional debit? This is a most rare type of ambiguity for the New Test
ament—that of a seemingly intentional emotional ambiguity. It is also imaginative in a way few other gospel scenes can claim to be. Imaginative writing succeeds primarily by giving readers just enough information to assemble the particulars of the physical world in which a scene takes place. Oftentimes, gospel stories are distinguished by the vital information they withhold, typically during scenes in which pronouns such as “he” and “they” are bandied about with unclear referents. John 21 is imaginative writing of a very high order. Somehow one can sense Peter looking down, perhaps into the dying fire over which he cooks his fish, while he answers Jesus’s questions.
The other dynamic being played out here concerns the tradition of leadership in the early church. Due to the “feed my sheep” sequence’s rough resemblance to the scene in Matthew in which Jesus presents Peter with the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, scholars believe the tradition of Peter’s intended leadership role, at least within the Twelve, was widely familiar to early Christians. Quite possibly, it has some historical basis.
In Acts, after Jesus’s ascension to Heaven, it is Peter who stands “up among the believers” and announces what it is they must do. Their first duty, interestingly, is to restore the Twelve. Peter is the agent of that restoration. The available evidence suggests that Peter played a central role in the years immediately following Jesus’s death.*4 After his visionary experience with Jesus, Paul, by his own admission, traveled to Jerusalem to speak to one person: Cephas. If Peter had not had the foresight to revive and reinvigorate the memories of Jesus among those who first followed him, some have claimed, then Jesus’s legacy might well have suffered the same neglect as any number of ambitious Galilean prophets and agitators.
One way to understand the Acts of the Apostles is as Luke’s attempt to show how Christianity, after a decisively early abandonment of its sectarian Jewish origins, open armedly greeted the larger Mediterranean world, as represented by the Roman centurion Cornelius, “a devout man who feared God with all his household.” Cornelius is visited by an angel, who tells him that he must send for “a certain Simon who is called Peter.” This man, Cornelius learns, is currently lodged in Joppa. Once Cornelius has sent out his messengers, Peter has a vision in which it is revealed to him that what “God has made clean, you must not call profane.” While Peter’s vision is literally about dietary law, it is figuratively about Gentiles. When Peter meets Cornelius the next day, he tells him, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
This appears to present an open-and-shut case that Peter was understood by early Christians as having been interested in expanding the faith to Gentiles. But Acts also notes that Cornelius was not a typical Gentile but a man already observant of a few Jewish rituals or rites. This is of course nothing like Paul’s later missionary efforts among Gentiles, many of whom had little frame of reference for the God of the Jews and his many alarming requirements. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that Acts shows Paul reaching out to Gentiles only after Peter has baptized Cornelius. Raymond E. Brown argues that the Cornelius episode may be “a creation of Lukan theology. According to Luke’s conception such a major step as the mission to the Gentiles had to be the work of the Twelve; and so, one of the Twelve, indeed the most prominent, is described converting a Gentile under divine guidance.” A Roman Gentile, at that. This is also crucial, because by the end of Acts, Jerusalem is all but replaced by Rome as Christianity’s desired epicenter.
VII.
According to Acts, the Christians in Jerusalem began to be hounded by the Jewish authorities around 41 CE. After the execution of James son of Zebedee, Peter is arrested by Herod. With angelic assistance, Peter escapes from prison; following that, Acts tells us only that Peter “went to another place.” Presumably, this means that Peter left Jerusalem. Peter briefly reappears in Acts during what is known as the Jerusalem Council, where, seventeen years after the death of Jesus, it was decided, at Paul’s instigation, that Gentiles did not have to undergo circumcision to enter fully into the faith. Peter argues on behalf of Gentiles, compelling James the brother of Jesus, the evident leader of Jerusalem Christianity, to relent. There is no reliable record of where Peter was during the long period between his disappearance and his reappearance in Acts, though his movements can be cautiously summarized: Antioch (which we know thanks to Paul’s testimony), Corinth,*5 and “Babylon,”*6 which may or may not be code for Rome. Later legends locate Peter in Gaul, Britain (where Peter is supposed to have had a vision at the spot where the Abbey of Saint Peter, Westminster, today stands), and Mesopotamia, among other places. Eusebius connected Peter to the regions of Pontus, Cappadocia, Bithynia, and Galatia, all in Asia Minor, but only because 1 Peter, whose authenticity Eusebius accepted, was addressed to these communities. Nonetheless, Antioch, Corinth, and “Babylon” are the only places to which Peter is linked by the New Testament itself. Of these, only the Antioch linkage is conclusive.
The traditions that place Peter explicitly in Rome emerge no earlier than the late first century. Legends of Peter’s dying in Rome are to be distinguished from those of Peter’s preaching in Rome, however, almost all of which are of far later vintage. An early mention of Peter’s death comes in 1 Clement, which was almost certainly written by the prominent Roman Christian of the same name, a man sometimes referred to as an early pope and who was probably a Jewish Christian: “Peter, who, because of unrighteous jealousy, endured not one or two but many trials, and thus having given his testimony went to his appointed place of glory.” Although Rome is not mentioned, Clement was likely alluding to a Roman death, because he was writing from Rome and furthermore referred to Peter as belonging “to our own generation.” Clement wrote these words around the turn of the first century, allowing for the possibility that Clement knew Peter or someone who did. Ignatius, in his letter to the Romans, noted, “I do not give you orders like Peter and Paul.” Ignatius, who died around 110, also seems to indicate that Peter was in some way active in Rome, though some have argued that Ignatius is referring to a now-lost letter to the Roman church that purported to be from Peter. Yet Ignatius mentions nothing of Peter’s death having transpired in Rome.
But for Ignatius’s enigmatic mention of Peter’s somehow issuing “orders” to the Romans, every notion that Peter preached in Rome dates from the second half of the second century, close to a hundred years after Peter’s supposed death. The church father Irenaeus, for instance, argued that Peter had not only died in Rome but spent considerable time there, often in the company of Paul. Bishop Dionysius of Corinth, writing around 170, noted “the seed which Peter and Paul sowed in Romans and Corinthians alike. For both of them sowed in our Corinth and taught us jointly: in Italy too they taught jointly in the same city, and were martyred at the same time.”
By the fourth century, Peter had become an integral part of the Christian foundation stories of Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Corinth. It is likely that the Roman portion of these foundation stories has its origin in 1 Peter’s mention of “Babylon.” Few scholars, however, regard the letter as having been written by Peter. Its Greek, for one, is too skillfully employed.*7 The letter is addressed to the communities of Asia Minor, whose members might have been only hazily aware of when Peter was martyred. Exhorting the Christians of Asia Minor to behave themselves amid unspecified “trials,” 1 Peter asks that its recipients “set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed,” an event the author assures his audience “is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers.” One Peter also demands that its audience submit to “the authority of every human institution”; commands slaves to obey “your masters with all deference,” even “those who are harsh”; and asks women to “accept the authority of your husbands.” While the style may be Pauline, the rhetoric is less so. Paul asks his audience to emulate him, or try to. One Peter asks for obedience, so that the “chosen” of Asia Minor
can be “sprinkled” with their Messiah’s blood.
If 1 Peter is probably pseudonymous, 2 Peter is absolutely pseudonymous. Even some in the early church cast doubt on its authorship. Two Peter’s composition probably postdates 1 Peter by anywhere from two to five decades. In all likelihood, 2 Peter was the last work of the New Testament to have been written, and it clearly portrays what one scholar describes as “a defensive, institutionalized church.” It is also one of the most colorless epistles, full of warnings of “false prophets,” eager to recount its putative eyewitness of the transfiguration, and weary with its author’s knowledge that “my death will come soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.” Among its few points of interest is what it obliquely reveals about the under-fire position assumed by mid-second-century Christianity. That Jesus had not returned as promised was obviously a source of genuine Christian embarrassment: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.” Obviously, the author of 2 Peter is responding to pagan and Jewish critics of Christianity who were accusing it of being little more than “cleverly devised myths.” The author of 2 Peter, going for broke as “Peter,” puts himself forward as one uniquely able to correct those who do not understand Paul’s letters, which the author acknowledges have “some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.” In all likelihood, this is another giveaway to 2 Peter’s later date of composition, for in the middle of the second century Paul fell out of favor with many Roman Christians due to the heterodox Christian Marcion’s use of his work. Two Peter’s defense of “our beloved brother” Paul likely formed the basis of the later legends of Peter and Paul having preached in Rome together. The letter’s most distinctive accomplishment is to equate Paul’s letters with “the other scriptures,” making it the first and only New Testament text to grant Paul the same authority as the Hebrew Bible.