Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  As Zander led the way up a landing flanked by columns once part of the twelfth-century altar of Calixtus, behind which stood the one surviving column of the monument sculpture mentioned by Gaius, I asked him how anyone could be sure that Peter’s grave was here. Zander cited the church’s official position on the matter. “The remains,” he said, “are believed to be those of the blessed apostle Peter.”

  To say the least, the Catholic Church’s position on this matter was an embattled one. On the lower rim of the cupola beneath the glorious dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica is this Latin rendering of Jesus’s words to Peter in the Gospel According to Matthew: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo regna caelorum.”*10 Catholics also point to the last chapter of the Gospel According to John (“Feed my sheep”) as other evidence that Jesus bequeathed administrative power to Peter, who in the Catholic mind serves as the single best diviner of what his earthly ministry meant and what his heavenly rule intends—a kind of subaltern Messiah.

  Unfortunately for Catholicism, Peter’s authority was never a settled matter in early Christianity. The notion that Jesus’s keys to the Kingdom of Heaven gave Peter special duties—and, later, lent the Roman church its authority—was resisted by a number of early Christians. No one appealed to the crucial passage of Matthew until 256, during a debate between a Roman and a Carthaginian bishop. Many church fathers—including Origen, Eusebius, and John Chrysostom—understood the Petros-petra passage in Matthew to mean that Jesus would build on Peter’s confession to Jesus rather than Peter the man. After all, the powers granted to Peter were given to the other apostles as well, at least according to the synoptic gospels and Acts. Not until the fifth century, with the pontificate of Leo the Great, who called himself the “unworthy heir” of Peter, was the doctrine of “Petrine supremacy” put forth to all Western churches with the full wind-tunnel authority of the papacy behind it. (Leo’s naked power play had roots in his outrage that Constantinople had been granted equal stature with Rome.) That doctrine would endure for a thousand years before questions about what Peter’s authority actually meant—and whether it allowed a string of whore-mongering and busily procreative popes—eventually tore Western Christianity in two.

  One Protestant response to the Catholic understanding of Matthew points to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.” Some Protestants also point to 1 Peter, where “Peter” writes that Christians should let themselves “be built into a spiritual house,” which they interpret as Peter’s own warning against ceding inappropriate authority to earthly institutions. The Roman Catholic side of this debate was not helped by the document that putatively entrusted secular authority over Rome and the whole western half of the Roman Empire. Known as the Donation of Constantine, it purports to be a fourth-century agreement between Constantine and Pope Sylvester I and was supposedly drafted shortly after Constantine abandoned Rome for Constantinople in 326 but was in fact an eighth-century forgery.

  In light of this and much, much else, it is tempting to regard Roman Catholicism as an ancient, power-grabbing conspiracy, but that would not be accurate. Papal authority, whatever horrors it eventually proved capable of, evolved gradually and (insofar as the word can be used for a man-made institution) naturally. Lampe cites the “theological pluralism” of Roman Christianity deep into the second century. The city was home to not only proto-orthodox Christians but also Marcionites, Valentinians, Carpocratians, Montanists, Jewish Christians, and Quartodecimans. Almost all of these Christian understandings were imported into the city from other lands, meaning that none could claim the advantage of having originated in Rome. Lampe also notes the basic tolerance that existed between these groups. Because few Christians had much of an idea of what went on in Rome’s other Christian churches, they probably viewed one another as being “in spiritual fellowship” and “united by common bonds.” Only near the end of the second century, during the bishopric of Victor I—the first African-born bishop of Rome, a furious proponent of the use of Latin, and an avid excommunicator—did threats of exclusion from the greater body of Christianity occur.

  Irenaeus, as quoted by Eusebius, noted that during the late second century Christians of different understandings were able to part “company in peace” and remain “in communion.” There were teachings regarded as “false,” certainly, but few denunciations. It became gradually clear, however, that disagreements on smaller issues—such as the preferred date for Easter—were often tips of much larger doctrinal icebergs. After what Lampe describes as “faint-hearted attempts” by the Roman bishops Eleutherius (ca. 175–189), Soter (ca. 166–175), and Anicetus (ca. 155–166) to establish a more centralized Roman authority, Victor I became the first Roman Christian to put himself forward as undisputed leader of the city’s faithful. From this came what Lampe calls “the development of a monarchical episcopacy in the city.” It then became a simple matter of justifying this development by working intellectually backward.

  Prior to Victor’s rule, Irenaeus had cataloged twelve Roman figures, beginning with Linus and ending with Eleutherius, all of whom he imagined serving in clear succession. The apostolic ring of twelve Roman Christian leaders who traced their lineage to Peter was obviously intentional. Lampe argues that this list did not originate with Irenaeus. The twelve names were not invented but rather pulled from the miasma of Roman Christian history. Most crucially, this development came about almost entirely due to what Lampe calls “social-historical factors”: duties such as overseeing aid shipments to other Christian communities around the Mediterranean and coordinating the Roman Christian treasury inadvertently strengthened the hand of the Roman bishop. Men such as Eleutherius were forced to further communication among various Christian cells around Rome, write letters, maintain some basic theological consistencies, and receive visitors from other Christian delegations. Gradually, a larger sense of authority adhered to the bishopric, and the papacy was born.

  To its credit, the modern Catholic Church has proved responsive to the findings of modern science and textual biblical criticism.*11 The church has retreated from many previous bulwarks, and serious Catholic scholars acknowledge the historical weakness of the belief that Peter founded the church, just as they acknowledge the third-century origins of the papacy. But Peter’s grave was one of its last firewalls, a historical area into which doubt could not be allowed to spread.

  The writer John Evangelist Walsh, whose credulous account of the Vatican’s excavation of Peter’s bones is well matched by his middle name, imagines that the first visitors to Peter’s grave “must have been some sons and daughters, certainly some of the grandchildren or other descendants, of those Roman Christians who had actually watched Peter being led to crucifixion, who had stood witness as his wracked and lifeless body was lowered into the earth. These first visitors, possessing a very recent and personal tradition about Peter, could hardly have been misled as to the location of his grave.”

  There is, of course, absolutely no reason why this must be the case. One need only look around the world, ancient and modern, to find any number of fervent beliefs that developed despite any evidence to support them. Consider American tragedies such as the Kennedy assassination or the attacks of September 11. Within only a few years of both events, hundreds were claiming to have been present for events they did not see, and tens of thousands professed knowledge of divergent secret histories—this, in an age of widely available information, photographic records of what had happened, and universal literacy. Remove these empirical mufflers, and what sorts of beliefs might come into being?

  History, in many ways, comes into being as a contrast between interested and disinterested witnesses. Early Christian history is marked by its comprehensive absence of disinterested witnesses.

  I was thinking of this as Zander and I stopped in a small circular chapel found directly beneath the basilica’s high altar, the he
avily illustrated walls and ceiling of which appeared to contain the complete narrative contents of both the Christian and the Jewish testaments in gold relief. Once, Zander explained, this space had served as the crypt of Constantine’s Basilica. Prior to Constantine, Christians had celebrated an early form of Mass here. Zander then walked me through the curved hallway that ringed the chapel and corresponded to the apse of Constantine’s Basilica. Evenly spaced along the ellipsoid wall were paintings of the twelve “popes” who supposedly followed Peter in doctrinally unbroken succession. All held palm fronds, the traditional symbol of the martyr, even though almost nothing is known about most of them, including whether or not they were martyred. After this, Zander returned to the area near the surviving column of the Peter monument mentioned by Gaius and directed my attention to the no-longer-evident breach point through which the Vatican’s excavators had plunged in their search for Peter’s grave.

  Zander pointed out that when Pius finally overcame his personal reservations and approved the attempt to locate Peter, no one had any idea what they might find. In some ways, Pius placed the historical foundation of Roman Catholicism in serious peril. What if they found nothing? The Vatican’s initial discoveries of uniformly pagan inscriptions and graves were not promising. Adjacent to one pagan tomb, however, they found what appeared to be a graveyard that comprised seven plain graves, many of them arranged at angles that seemed to point to a central, honored grave. One of these seven graves, moreover, contained tiny remnants of gold thread. A simple grave, angled toward another, containing precious metal: all suggested that this grave belonged to one of the early “popes” that tradition claimed had been buried near Peter.

  Finding Peter’s grave was not easy. Digging straight down into the suspected gravesite was out of the question. (The lesson of the Christ Helios mosaic’s discovery had been fully absorbed.) Instead, the excavators were forced to crack open distant necropolis sectors and, from there, tunnel sideways toward the area they suspected contained Peter’s grave. Even so, the excavators were serially impeded, first by part of the Constantinian Basilica’s sixth-century altar, which was itself surrounded by Pope Calixtus’s twelfth-century altar. There was no way around either without damaging both. During a resultant archaeological flanking maneuver, they discovered two walls. The first was quickly dubbed “the red wall” due to its faded but distinct painted red plaster. The second was dubbed “the graffiti wall” due to the numerous, often illegible scratchings made on it. The bricks of the red wall were embossed with stamps that conclusively dated the bricks, if not the wall itself, between 146 and 161—long before the construction of Constantine’s Basilica. The red wall was, in any case, substantial: eight feet high, seven feet wide, and two feet thick.

  The graffiti wall was estimated to date from around 250. On it, a number of names and apparently non-Christian inscriptions were identified—as was the so-called chi-rho symbol, wherein the first two Greek alphabet letters of “Christ” are written in overlap and which early Christians used as a secret reference to Jesus. The graffiti wall, the Vatican eventually deduced, had originally been built to shore up the red wall at a place where its foundation had cracked. Its plenitude of Christian scratchings was apparently what had saved this homely stopgap structure from being razed later.

  At the foot of the red wall, the excavators found their first skeletal remains, which dated from the fourth century. From here out, tools were forbidden. Using their hands, the excavators dug a foot deeper and came across another grave they suspected (and which later study verified) dated from the first century. Pope Pius was summoned. While the excavators gathered together the grave’s scattered bones, the thin, beak-nosed pontiff silently observed them from a large chair. Most of the 250 bones and fragments the excavators found were small: toe and finger phalanges, vertebrae bits, rib splinters, but also a few larger, intact femurs and tibias, all of which were sent off for study.

  In the summer of 1968, Pope Paul VI made the “happy announcement” that “the relics of Peter have been identified in a manner which we believe convincing.” The “very patient and accurate” methods used by the Vatican, Paul claimed, all pointed to “a result which we believe positive.” What was not immediately clear in Paul’s proclamation was the fact that the “relics” in question had been found nearly three decades previous. The long pause between their discovery, study, and affirmation was due to what has been described as “perhaps the most regrettable and egregious blunder in archaeological history.”

  “When they found Peter’s grave,” Zander explained, “it was the central grave. It was more like a ditch. And the other graves radiated out from it. It was also an active, much-cared-for, and restored tomb. They found bones down here, many bones, but there were problems. It was a confusing situation.”

  Part of what made it so confusing was the excavators’ ignorance of what it was they had discovered. Believing the red wall was the Gaius monument and expressly built for Peter, they could not understand why it appeared to have been built directly over Peter’s grave. Indeed, its construction succeeded in cutting Peter’s grave in two—and not even handsomely, as it intersected the grave at an awkward hundred-degree angle. Yet the early, modest aedicule that memorialized Peter had clearly been built into this oddly placed red wall.

  No wonder the excavators were confused. Early Roman Christians had apparently opted to honor Peter by ruining the sacred concinnity of his grave. Peter Lampe, in a thrilling piece of historical detection, argues the following: The red wall was built before the aedicule and, initially, had nothing to do with Peter. Another Roman had decided to build his—in all likelihood, quite grand—mausoleum, and these plans happened to cut the venerated, still secretly attended grave of Peter in half. The Christians could not prevent this, because those who built the red wall were not Christian but pagan, and the Christians themselves were poor. At some later point, when the social situation had changed enough to allow for a more public acknowledgment of Peter’s grave, the aedicule was built into the red wall. Evidence for Lampe’s theory can be found in the form of a nearby graffito. The graffito in question, a fish scratching, might not have been the product of spontaneous devotion but was rather a way for Christians to give other Christians a sense of how to reach their now-obstructed place of veneration. As convincing as Lampe makes all this sound, there were still a number of uncertainties and imponderables, and the difficult scholarly work (a sample: “F10 = : γ ≈ θ. When θ was first built, its upper ridge lay either close under or right at the original surface”) continues. It will always continue.

  The study of the bones the excavators found in the soil at the foot of the red wall was led by the pope’s personal physician, which probably ensured something less than impartial inquiry. The Vatican said nothing publicly of its excavation or exhuming work, and for several years World War II interrupted its efforts. Of the exhumed bones themselves, however, it was quickly determined that among them were three fibulas and four tibias. The conclusion, however disappointing, was clear: if these were Peter’s bones, others had been mixed in with them. One of the bones had come, moreover, from a woman. Another blow quickly followed: a fourth of the bones found were of cow, horse, sheep, and goat origin.

  When the excavation resumed, faded markings were found on the red wall in an area that the graffiti wall had previously obscured. These were the first four Greek letters of Peter’s name (the rest was broken off) and, beneath them, three Greek letters: ENI. At long last, the Vatican’s excavators had definitive proof that this burial site was linked with Peter. They judged that the inscription had been made around 250, shortly before the graffiti wall was built. On the graffiti wall itself, meanwhile, many of the individual graffiti had faded since excavation had begun a decade earlier, due to the necropolis’s punishing humidity. An appropriately trained archaeologist, Margherita Guarducci, was finally brought in to look at the graffiti wall. Guarducci was able to translate a few phrases that had hitherto eluded the excavators. “Chr
istian men buried near your body,” read one barely legible scratching, which she estimated as having been written around 300.

  In 1963, five years after Pius XII died deeply disappointed that Peter’s bones had not been definitively identified and shortly after his successor, John XXIII, also passed away, Guarducci asked an innocent question about what else had been found in the tomb. She was told of the first bone harvest and then, to her astonishment, of bones that, in the early 1940s, had been found in a small, camouflaged hole in the graffiti wall and that were then secreted away in the papal apartment by Monsignor Ludwig Kaas. This occurred during a low point in Kaas’s relations with the excavators. Kaas, who was in charge of the excavation, was not an archaeologist, and his suggestions often rankled those beneath him. Kaas had made the chance discovery one night after the excavators had gone home, as was his wont, because he believed that the excavators too often left human bone fragments lying amid other rubble. Inside the graffiti wall, Kaas found two corroded coins, several bone fragments (some quite large), a few bits of cloth, and some threading. Kaas, inexplicably, never informed the other excavators of his discovery. The bones, Guarducci learned, were still sitting in the papal apartment in a mislabeled box. Guarducci came to believe these bones had been hidden away in the graffiti wall, probably at the order of Constantine himself, and were, in fact, Peter’s. When Guarducci presented her argument on behalf of the bones’ provenance before the pope in 1962, they were, at long last, studied.