by Tom Bissell
With 2 Peter, a most peculiar New Testament journey is complete. Peter enters the stories of the first Christians as a man of radiational ambiguity, suffers the public scorn of Paul, eventually grows into Jesus’s promised role of earthly shepherd, key keeper, and rock, and bids his flock farewell with the acknowledgment that scripture can be hard to understand. It is as if the author of 2 Peter is describing not Paul’s letters but the complicated representational predicament faced by the Prince of the Apostles himself.
VIII.
Early Christians were as fascinated as we are by the questions surrounding Peter’s travels and beliefs. In some apocryphal traditions, he is firmly identified with Jewish Christianity. In other traditions, the Gentile Christianity of Rome confidently claims him. In other, more heterodox traditions, Peter is sometimes put forth as representative of a superior, secret understanding of Jesus’s message and other times dismissed as having missed the point of Jesus entirely. Peter is the subject of such frequent apocryphal treatment because he was apparently the only apostle sufficiently well known to warrant the attention of seemingly every Christian understanding.
The Preaching of Peter, or the Kerygma Petrou, dates from the first half of the second century and is known to us only through citation by the church fathers. It appears to have been an entirely distinct piece of Petrine literature and, from what scholars can tell, argues strongly on behalf of Christian monotheism. A later strand of the Peter tradition is contained in what is known as the Pseudo-Clementine works, which were purportedly written by Clement of Rome and addressed to James the brother of Jesus. In actuality, the Pseudo-Clementine literature is pseudonymous, dates to no earlier than the third century, and probably originated in Syria. Notable for their depiction of Peter’s battle with Simon Magus in Caesarea, the Pseudo-Clementine works portray a Jewish Christian Peter opposed to Pauline arguments, even though Paul himself is never directly named. (In the text, Simon Magus is insinuated to be Paul.)
Another prominent “Peter” text, The Gospel of Peter is mentioned by several ancient authorities, none of whom regarded it as anything but unorthodox; Eusebius owlishly noted its “lies.” Despite this, The Gospel of Peter was apparently quite popular and circulated among monks and copyists in private. Serapion of Antioch, in the year 200, permitted a nearby village church to use it during the liturgy but recanted when he actually read the work, even though he allowed that “most of it is indeed in accordance with the true teaching of the savior.” Not until the late nineteenth century was a lengthy fragment of The Gospel of Peter found by a French archaeologist in a monastery in the northern Egyptian city of Akhmim.
The Acts of Peter was one of the earliest documents to gather together various Peter traditions in written form. Composed in either Rome or Asia Minor sometime between 160 and 200, it was popular among many kinds of Christians but in time became the subject of wide condemnation. No complete Greek version of the manuscript exists—scholars estimate that a little over half the total manuscript has survived—and the only wholly extant Greek portion of Acts is its account of Peter’s martyrdom, which was apparently circulated independently. Nonetheless, much of what we know about Peter traditionally comes from this work, including the notion that he was crucified upside down.
Its story begins in Caesarea, where Jesus appears to Peter and demands that he go to Rome to do battle with the hated magician Simon Magus, a figure now widely represented in second- and third-century Christian storytelling as evil’s embodiment on earth. Knowing he must confront Simon, Peter is on the next ship out. When Peter arrives in Italy, an innkeeper named Ariston takes Peter aside to tell him that Simon has made many converts in Rome. In the city itself, Peter stays with a presbyter named Narcissus; Simon Magus, meanwhile, is staying at the home of a Roman senator named Marcellus. Once a holy, giving Christian, Marcellus now refuses to give his money to the poor and beats any beggar he happens upon. Soon Peter is marching, with supporters in tow, to Marcellus’s front door.
Peter finds there a doorman too afraid to act against Simon Magus, whom he calls “the liege of Satan.” Peter grants a nearby dog the ability to speak and sends the beast inside to persuade Simon Magus to come out and fight like a man. Simon Magus, when confronted, begs the talkative hound to tell Peter he is not home. Rather like a child sensing it is losing an adult’s attention, the Acts of Peter’s author has Peter restore life to a smoked fish hanging in a nearby window. The stunned crowd proclaims its belief in Peter. Marcellus commands Simon Magus to leave his house, which, finally, he does, only to have buckets of human waste emptied on his head.
The account of Peter’s martyrdom in The Acts of Peter is quite different from the traditional story of his death. In this version, Peter has made inroads with many wealthy Christians. Among his converts are the concubines of the local ruler, from whom Peter persuades the concubines to withhold sex. Then, alerted to a plot against him, Peter leaves Rome in disguise, but before he can get beyond the city, Jesus appears to him and asks Peter where he is going, because he, Jesus, is on his way to Rome to be crucified again. Peter heads back to Rome to meet his fate.
Tradition most often places Peter’s death around 64 CE; Eusebius names the fateful year as 67. What is known is that on July 19, 64, a fire broke out in Rome that destroyed thirteen of the city’s seventeen regions and incinerated as many as two thousand souls. The Roman historian Tacitus noted that the fire “in its fury ran first through the level portions of the city, then rising to the hills, while it again devastated every place below them.” Even the imperial palace was consumed. One of the only parts of Rome to have been wholly spared the fire was the heavily Christian neighborhood of Trastevere, which was protected by the Tiber River.
Although viciously hostile to the rebellious Jews of Roman Palestine, Nero is thought to have viewed Roman Jews with a modicum of sympathy. His wife, Poppaea Sabina (whom Nero later kicked to death), was, according to Josephus, a God fearer (in his words, “a religious woman”), and Nero’s favorite actor, Aliturus, was a Jew from Judaea.*8 Some scholars have proposed that Rome’s Jews, still smarting from having so many God fearers lured away from their synagogues, might have fed Nero information that the arsonists responsible for the blaze were Christian. Whatever the case, Nero began to look for scapegoats on whom to blame the devastating fire.
Tacitus wrote that “an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.” (Tacitus believed arsonists working at Nero’s order had set the fire.) While he had no use for Christians, Tacitus was appalled by the way they were treated. Christians were covered “with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flame and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.” None of these punishments were out of line in the Roman world. Many were common. The punishment for arson, in fact, was public immolation. The total number of Nero’s Christian victims is not known, but it could easily have stretched into the thousands.
According to tradition, Peter was arrested by Nero and held for close to a year in Mamertine Prison, which is today a small devotional structure next to the ruins of the Forum. Later traditions hold that while ensconced there, Peter converted nearly four dozen of his jailers and shouted to his imprisoned wife, “Remember the Lord!” as she was led away to her death.
As the Christian imagination matured, the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul were claimed to have occurred in Rome at the same instant—which, probably not coincidentally, happened to fall on the very day of Rome’s founding. An influential fifth- or sixth-century Christian mystic who wrote under the name Dionysius later described “the mob of pagans and Jews…spitting in [Peter’s and Paul’s] faces” while they were led to their execution sites. According to other legends, the early Roman Christian bishop Anacletus was, within twenty years of Peter’s death, hosting memorial services next to a
shrine that had been raised atop what he and his co-religionists believed was the historical Peter’s grave.
Again, none of these legends are contemporaneous, and most emerge a hundred years or more after the fact. When one considers the comprehensive silence about where Peter’s death had taken place among early Christians, the unreliable conduits through which such information was eventually passed on, and the superhuman sobriety required of early Roman believers to question the alluring possibility that the most famous apostle was buried in their city, maybe the most astounding thing about Peter’s grave is the fact that it cannot be dismissed out of hand.
IX.
Zander walked down a narrow, winding, altogether unpromising staircase and came to a thick glass door that had no knob or handle. On the opposite side of this space-age portal was the ancient necropolis. Adjacent to the door was an enemy-stronghold numeric keypad, into which Zander quickly tapped his pass code. With a whoosh the glass door opened, releasing a burst of cool, chlorine air. Zander explained that the door was hermetically sealed as a preventative measure: for many years, the necropolis had suffered from seeping microbial moisture. Since 1998, a carefully maintained “microclimate” has been used to facilitate its preservation. Once inside the necropolis, Zander and I stood in the middle of a narrow street, between two largely continuous rows of mausoleums. Around us fell a thin shower of avocado light, the sources of which were covered with greenish filters to combat microorganism growth.
Two tour groups were currently visiting the necropolis. One group was exclusively made up of nuns; the other was 90 percent priest. The necropolis’s coal-colored street, which had the smooth pulverous appearance of a cooled lava flow, was almost two thousand years old. Once a major thoroughfare that led out of the city, this road had probably been laid when the necropolis’s first tombs began to go up in the second century. Zander motioned around at the bordering and largely roofless sepulchral buildings. “This was once a beautiful, panoramic area,” he said. In other words, everything around us had once stood in the open air. That seemed as incredible a thing to ponder as Peter rising from the dead and shaking my hand.
For twelve centuries, nearly every part of the necropolis remained unchanged from when Constantine’s workers finished filling the sepulchral structures with dirt and had their last, unknowable thoughts before sealing the area off from human reach. Walking here, I felt a spidery shiver of the uncanny, much in the way a certain type of dream can be simultaneously bizarre and familiar. The bricks of the necropolis gave off a kind of low subterranean hum. To say this place felt holy, somehow, was, to my shock, not an overstatement.
This was only a small piece of the original necropolis, much of which Constantine’s workers probably destroyed. Nineteen necropolis tombs in total had been excavated. They were arranged in the manner of rooms in two facing railroad apartments. Twelve tombs made up one row, seven the other. Many of their doors and windows had been covered with glass for preservation purposes. Zander walked downhill along the road that divided the mausoleum rows toward one of the smaller tombs. The majority of those buried here, he again emphasized, were not Christian. Additionally, many of the necropolis’s dead appear to have enjoyed a measure of wealth, whether as freedmen—former slaves who had achieved citizenship through the manumission of their owners or by magistrate ruling—or merchants. Some had been buried with their own slaves. In a few of these tombs, however, there was some Christian evidence. This supported the theory that Roman Christianity was, for many years, widely practiced among slaves and that some of these slaves succeeded in partially or wholly converting their masters. (Rich Romans were nothing if not religion faddists.)
Zander told me the necropolis had been in constant use almost to the day that Constantine began building his basilica. Thus, he went on with a sigh, there were likely more nearby tombs and mausoleums waiting to be uncovered, but digging for them could not be essayed without seriously endangering the foundation of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The other hindrance was more prosaic. Any further dig would have to be launched from the grottoes and the necropolis, and given how many tourists came through both areas, and the amount of time needed to survey the surrounding area properly, another large-scale excavation might well be impossible.
Zander stopped at a mausoleum that had belonged to the Aelii family and been dated, he said, to the reign of Antoninus Pius (so-named for his senatorial edict that deified his predecessor Hadrian), which began in 138. This was one of the necropolis’s plainer mausoleums, with none of the elegant travertine lintel work that marked the doorjambs of other tombs. (It is assumed Constantine’s workers stripped this tomb of its lintel.) Zander invited me to look into the mule-gray space and note the small stairway that led to a veranda used for postmortem celebration. Zander explained how families often gathered on such verandas to partake in what he called “banquets with the dead,” which were typically held on the first and last days of the mourning period and on the birthday of the deceased. Roman pagans believed that the dead continued to consume food and drink from the afterlife, and their urns and tombs were outfitted with holes and “libation wells,” into which their relatives poured wine and food.
I asked why many of these tombs had been rather brusquely sheared off at the top. Zander looked up, squinting. “Constantine’s architects did that, to avoid the top of the mausoleums from sticking up through his basilica’s floor.”
A few of the necropolis’s nineteen surviving tombs were still undergoing work. The exterior brickwork of those that had been subject to restoration had a bright, almost festive red-brown glow; the ones that had not been restored looked as though they had survived three winters’ worth of salt blizzards. Zander stopped at one tomb to point out one of the necropolis’s few unambiguously Christian symbols.*9
Zander led me to the tomb’s far wall. It appeared that one of Constantine’s workmen picked up a piece of sharpened coal shortly before sealing off the necropolis and used it to sketch a smeared portrait of Peter. This charcoal Peter portrait was not nearly as strange as a restored third-century ceiling mosaic Zander soon pointed out in another mausoleum, this one belonging to the Iulii family, which was the only entirely Christian mausoleum in the necropolis.
The Iulii mausoleum’s ceiling mosaic has been called the most conclusively important discovery made during the Vatican’s excavation of the necropolis, and it came within an eyelash length of being lost forever. When the Vatican’s excavators broke into this small, eight-foot-long tomb and began clearing away its fill dirt, they noticed on its facing walls apparently Christian images: on the left, the Good Shepherd; on the right, Jonah falling off a boat and being swallowed by a sea-monstery beast while two gawking fishermen stood above him on the boat’s prow. Pressed into the wall mosaic around these images were thousands of tiny tiles made of green-and-gold glass paste, arranged to resemble a complicated network of vines. The Iulii tomb was one of the few in the necropolis to have had a vaulted roof, and it was through this roof that the excavators had gained entrance. When the excavators had at last cleared the tomb’s fill dirt, they looked up to see a stunning mosaic they were horrified to realize they had partially destroyed.
Employing a more elaborate use of the walls’ viny, glass-tile backdrop, the mosaic depicted its beardless Jesus as a white-robed sun god riding two equally white horses across a golden sky within a burst of thick planks of light. It became known as Christ Helios and today stands the only known occurrence of such mongrelized devotional imagery. Almost unimaginably beautiful, the Christ Helios mosaic—the earliest known Christian mosaic—suggests how intertwined pre-Constantine Christian iconography had been with Roman paganism. It illuminated the difficult psychic breakthrough Jesus truly represented. In trying to understand their god, Rome’s first Christians were still subject to familiar pagan ideas.
Zander took me to some of the necropolis’s earliest tombs, many of them found in the vicinity of Peter’s monument sculpture mentioned by the Roman Christian Gaiu
s. A few of these tombs had been briefly looked into in the seventeenth century, when the placement of the high altar’s baldachino—the bronze Bernini sculpture whose weight was estimated at more than 100,000 pounds—necessitated emergency basilica foundation work. The earliest of the necropolis’s mausoleums, Zander said, dated from about six decades after Peter’s traditional date of martyrdom. This was a long time in a society subject to Rome’s socioeconomic expansions and reversals. Those buried closest to Peter were evidently poor, and many of their bodies had been laid in unlined, unprotected shallow ruts. The farther one traveled from Peter’s grave, the richer those buried in the necropolis became. Not until the third century did any major Christian figure see burial in its soil, which was likely due to the Vatican hillside’s unsavory association with the poor immigrant population of Trastevere. Gradually, though, the necropolis became a popular burial site. Christians were following Peter; pagans were following fashion.
Not everyone agreed with Zander’s early dating of some of these tombs. The scholar Peter Lampe writes that the earliest tombs of the necropolis are from no earlier than the middle of the second century, a little shy of a century after Peter’s traditional martyrdom. Nevertheless, Lampe believes that the burial sites closest to Peter’s grave—many of which are angled in such a way as to suggest an ongoing attempt at proximity in increasingly limited space—were probably crypto-Christian, seeing that “it was not desirable, at least in the first two centuries, for the average Christian to advertise his or her Christianity openly, let alone engrave it on stone.” He also believes there were likely earlier Christian burials near Peter but virtually all of them have been lost to time. It was easy to forget, while wandering the necropolis beneath dozens of feet of earth and marble, that all of its burials were carried out in broad daylight and became subject to the intrusions and caprices of the outside world in a way that catacomb-buried Christians were not.