Peter

I want to give you a quick update on the state of this class because unfortunately we’re
going to have to make some pivots.
So with Pastor Clint out last week,
I was over in confirmation,
sorry for the break,
we have a new members class that has to start for many scheduled reasons you don’t care
about in the end of October.
So we have a pretty time limited set of weeks for this class,
which is unfortunate because
I was going to spend a couple weeks on today.
And so we were going to talk about Peter,
we were going to do part one and we were going
to talk about Peter in the New Testament because there’s really no disciple that the Bible
tells us more about than Peter.
And then I was going to spend part two,
which was going to be next week.
And we were going to talk about Peter outside the Bible,
talking about some of the archaeological
things and some of the church tradition things and we were going to tease that out.
I’m just telling you today,
we’re doing all of Peter.
And so it’s going to be a quick fly by sort of overview.
I’m going to foolishly try to do it all because I’m young and naive.
So we’re going to do as much as we can and I’m going to throw a lot of citations at you.
And if you want to look back over it in fuller detail,
I’m happy to email you the notes where
I have all of it listed out.
And I didn’t physically write it, so it’s legible.
Anyone who knows me knows my handwriting is not legible.
So that said,
no more do.
Let’s just jump right into it.
Like I said,
the apostle Peter,
there’s really no apostle spoken of in scripture at more
length than Peter.
Some of that is because Peter is ultimately going to be the key figure of the handoff
from Jesus and then the disciples and then to the burgeoning church.
We’re going to talk about that in a little bit.
But some of that is just what is recorded in the gospels.
Jesus gave a lot of time and attention in his conversations with Peter.
You might remember Jesus famously says in John 1.42, “You are Simon,
son of John.
You are to be called Cephas,
which is translated Peter.”
And those two words are both significant.
So Cephas is Aramaic.
That would have been in the common language of that region.
And it means rock or pebble.
And then the word what we have translated Peter means in the Greek rock.
Some scholars read into that.
They say that Cephas had the idea of a small rock.
I’m sorry that no,
that’s right.
Cephas in Aramaic had the idea of small rock and then Petros,
which we have translated as Peter,
that it had in mind a big rock.
The idea being I’m taking this small person and I’m going to be building this
large church on top of him.
Some scholars even make the point that Jesus may be talking about himself.
Now, if you know your church history,
you know that this is actually one of the
more controversial statements about any disciple in the New Testament.
Can someone tell me why?
Can you tell me why this would be one of the most controversial
statements that Jesus makes?
Historically, this is the text that is used to define the role of the
Pope in the Roman Catholic church.
You might know that to this day,
every Pope traces their lineage
all the way back to Peter.
Now, if you know your world history,
you might know that there are some very
interesting twists and turns in that lineage,
such as some Popes communicating
the other Pope and political this and that.
But within the Roman Catholic church,
the idea is that every papal leader has a
tie all the way back to Peter.
And this is one of the core texts used to justify that that must be so that if one
is to be the Pope,
one must have a direct link to Peter,
who is the original rock.
And as Presbyterians,
that’s all I have to say about that.
All right.
Let’s talk a little bit about Peter.
So Peter is by all accounts,
impulsive.
Every time that he appears in the New Testament text,
he seems to have his own twist.
You might remember that Peter is the disciple who sees Jesus walking in water says,
just call out to me and I’ll come to you.
And he walks on water until he sees the waves are big.
And then he falls in and then Jesus pulls him out.
But to Peter’s credit,
he got out of the boat.
He’s impulsive.
He moves quickly.
You might remember that Peter is on top of the mountain in the transfiguration.
He sees Jesus transformed and Peter being impulsive thinks this is great.
I like this.
We should make this a thing.
And so he says,
let’s build booths or small temples for all three of you,
Jesus and the two prophets.
And Jesus, as he often does says,
hold it back, Peter.
You’re getting, you’re going a little ahead of yourself here.
And this goes on and on and on.
Peter is the only disciple record in the gospels who rebukes Jesus.
He says to Jesus,
you shouldn’t say this.
And you might remember that this comes from Matthew 1623.
Jesus looks Peter in the eyes and says,
get behind me,
Satan.
So rather harsh rebuke from Jesus.
We don’t see that coming to any other disciple,
really in the New Testament.
Quite frankly,
one scholar that I read in preparation for today made a comment.
I thought very thought provoking.
He said, there’s no difference between the Peter who denies Jesus three times
and the Judas who sells Jesus,
except for Peter confesses his sin and Judas
takes it, his guilt to his grave.
And it’s true.
There are two disciples who betrayed Jesus.
But only one of them confessed that sin.
And if one goes on to read the letters in first and second Peter,
which of course are attributed to Peter,
in those letters, he talks a great deal about guilt.
He talks a great deal about confession.
And when you think about the reality of his history,
that makes a lot of sense.
The reality that Peter is one who had to at many turns confess his sins to Christ.
Moving forward here,
we’re moving a little bit to archaeology to make a point.
If you go to Israel today,
you can actually go to Peter’s house,
more specifically, his mother’s house.
And this is what happened.
There was a church built on top of the house and it was always said that that
was his house.
And so what they did was I’m going to keep moving because that is a
horrible place to put that slide.
This is a current picture.
Those are the original walls of Peter’s house.
And this is underneath this church.
So they destroyed the church that was built in the medieval ages and they then
built this structure, which as you can see,
these pillars is literally built above ground.
So if you are standing in the middle of this church,
you’re standing in the
middle of this ancient structure,
the center of that octagon there being the original house itself.
And what the monks did was they just began digging down layer by layer.
And what they discovered was the church from literally the beginning,
the ancient church had begun living inside that house in the very days of Jesus.
And as you get closer and closer,
go through these walls,
there are more and
more inscriptions in the walls.
And ultimately,
each one of those walls represents tens or twenties,
in some cases hundreds of years later than building the house out so they could store more people.
But as it is today,
you could actually go and visit this home.
And you might think,
why is that significant?
It’s significant because,
and I have a whole section here,
you may be able to see
the entire top of my page are all of the Bible references that references this house.
Jesus was fed in this house by Peter’s mother.
Jesus healed in this house.
He taught in this house.
In fact, an anecdote that I read was that it’s interesting that Peter would live
in this house at all.
Turns out that it’s sort of across the tracks a little bit.
It’s not on the part of the neighborhood that one would expect a good Jewish
person to have a house.
But it turns out you remember that Peter was a fisherman by trade.
It turns out the taxes were higher on the other side of the tracks for fishermen.
So it’s thought that Peter and his family built a house on the other side of the
tracks so that they would have a lower tax rate for their fishing business.
So Peter seems to have had some administrative savvy.
But regardless,
that house still exists.
You can go visit it today.
And it is then preserved by the church from the very beginning believed that
this is one of the most preserved places we know that Jesus himself physically
visited and taught in multiple times.
So all that said,
we’re going to skip through some of those passages,
but there’s a lot of references to that.
Okay, we’re going to move on to talk about the early church.
And I underestimated how far back you were and how small the screen was.
So next week I’ll make a print out of this for you because I think we’ll,
we’ll use something like this again.
But you see here as modern day Spain and all the way over here,
we’re getting closer to Syria, Iraq, this is sort of the range that you’re looking at here
with Great Britain up here.
So what you see in purple is the major concentration of the Jewish population
in the first century AD,
which you see in red is a still Jewish population,
but less than in purple.
Are you all with me?
So what Peter is attributed as doing in his own life is of course,
starting here in Jerusalem.
And the reality is,
as I shared with you last time we were together,
the year 70 AD was this major inflection point when finally the Roman empire destroyed
the temple in Jerusalem and scattered the Jewish faith and those who were worshiping there.
And so what happened with all of the apostles,
but specifically with Peter was
that they were driven north.
And so one of the major stopping points on the way north was Antioch.
Antioch was a major hub of the Christian faith in the first generation of the
church, which makes sense because it’s at the northernmost point here,
bending around the Mediterranean Sea.
So you go west towards Rome or you go east towards Mesopotamia and Mesopotamia
was particularly important because it was the major population of Jewish speaking Jewish faith people.
The reason for that being everything that follows the song of Solomon in your old
Testament up to the first chapter of Matthew,
the intertestamental period is
what it’s called.
Within that period,
the entire nation of Israel was essentially militarily
conquered and the people were deported east.
So where are they still living?
The place they were deported,
right?
So there’s a substantial amount of the Jewish people who are living,
of course, down here by Babylon,
but all throughout this Mediterranean region.
What this means is the first attributed movement of Peter and the early church
was that he went north to Antioch and then he went east into Mesopotamia all
the way here to Babylon.
And of course, if you know your history moving forward,
you know that the eastern church,
the Byzantine church is going to come out of that eastern sector of the
faith.
And this is such a generative region of the faith and the early church.
It is from here,
it’s said that they sent missionaries even within the lifetime of
the disciples to make it all the way to China and to India.
So this is a major sort of Eastern outpost for the Christian faith.
And there are writings of the tribute Peter himself having made it to there.
That said,
Peter actually has quite a interesting sort of lore that goes with him.
So church history tells us that Peter ended his last days and ultimately died in
Nero’s circus in Rome.
We’ll end with that here today.
But it is said that Peter himself made it all the way to Great Britain.
And the reasoning behind that is there is actually a stone tablet that’s been found
that is written and inscribed on it coming from this time frame that says the place of St.
Peter and the British people themselves.
Now,
modern scholarship is going to be a little skeptical of this,
so I’m just owning
this for you.
But there are British churches,
there are British people who claim Peter
as their patron saint because they’re already as of around 150 to 175 A.D.
Christianity was declared the national religion in Great Britain by the rulers of the time.
And they had already built its first cathedral called St.
Peter’s.
So there’s an ancient tradition that the people of Great Britain claim Peter as their own.
If Peter didn’t make it there,
which a modern scholar would probably tell
you that he didn’t,
what he’s certain is that while Peter was the C at the C S E E is
what they call it or essentially was functioning as the leader of the Church of Rome,
it is written.
And as best as I can tell,
verified that he did personally send three missionaries to Great Britain.
So whether he himself was there or not,
it’s clear that Peter cared about the northern
expansion of the church.
So what’s interesting is the Roman Catholic Church’s fascination with Peter being in
Rome.
And that has to be and it makes sense historically.
Of course, you know that the Western Church has always found Rome to be its center.
We know from the New Testament that Rome was an influential church.
You might know from the book of Romans that Paul is writing to the church in Rome and he’s
doing so with a uncharacteristic amount of deference.
If you read Paul’s other letters,
he is very instructive,
in some cases demanding.
It is clear in his tone to the Romans that Paul is writing with some more distance.
It’s clear that though he expects them to take what he says seriously,
he spends a substantial amount of time on the argument itself,
not just his own character reference.
And this goes to point out a few things.
One, Paul is clearly impressed or interested in the ministry happening in Rome.
But there are there is other leadership functioning there that Paul is certainly giving
deference to.
And scholars would point out that they believe that Peter is that individual,
that ultimately Paul is trying to shoot a shot across the bow into another church with
someone who he equally respects,
but is trying to make the case that you need to be careful
to not cross over the bounds, which makes sense.
I’m sorry, I’m not trying to bore you.
But Romans, as the argument goes,
is really about how do we make sense of what God is going
to do with the Jewish people when all of these Gentiles are the ones carrying the bulk of the church.
And that makes sense if you have Peter in Rome,
because Peter, as we know,
has emphasized the Jewish proclamation of the faith.
And you might say,
how do we know that?
If you look to the book of Acts,
Acts can be broken into two basic sections.
The first section, you might call the Acts of Peter.
The second section, you might call the Acts of Paul.
When you think about it,
who’s the person who speaks after Pentecost?
Peter,
who’s the person who sits as judge over the situation with Ananias and Sapphira?
Remember when they sold their land and then they tried to pass it off as if they gave all that property?
It was Peter.
Who was it who was sent to Cornelius?
Peter,
who was the one who healed the man just by walking by him to the temple of his shadow
across the sim and the man stands up healed?
It’s Peter.
All of this is in the first 11 chapters of the book of Acts.
So Peter is very much the center of the Jerusalem conversation.
In fact,
when Paul goes,
by the way,
he goes to the church and I lost it, Antioch.
And then he comes back because Paul says,
hey, the Gentiles are receiving the gifts of the
spirit.
What are we going to do about this?
It is Peter, who is the only disciple who speaks back down in Jerusalem at the Jerusalem Council.
And then ultimately,
Peter has this vision.
You might remember this blanket and all the animals and then he goes and he baptized this Gentiles family.
That is a pivotal transformational moment from Act 1 to Act 2,
because at that moment,
Peter in the book of Acts says that the Gentiles have received the gifts of the spirit.
So therefore, they are equal recipients of God’s grace and action in the world.
At that moment, you won’t be surprised to know the rest of the book of Acts follows not Peter,
but Paul,
who is the apostle to the Gentiles.
So there’s a handing off.
There’s a reality that Peter starts at the center of power,
which we know is broken as the
Roman Empire completely destroys it.
And then as he shifts his direction west,
we see and remember that this is the entire
region.
Paul, in his final journey,
you remember Paul wanted to get to Spain was his ultimate goal,
but he never made it to Spain.
He essentially traveled within this region right here in his missionary journeys.
Ultimately, the only reason he even got to Rome was because he was in Roman captivity.
Right. It’s said that Paul and Peter would have at some point likely crossed paths at their time in Rome.
But regardless, that’s neither for here nor there.
The point is there’s an interesting tension in the scriptures because on one hand,
Peter is clearly not an enemy of the Gentile church.
Right. It’s very clear that Peter,
as it’s told in the book of Acts,
was open to the
conversation about God working in this surprising way.
On the other hand,
there’s no evidence to suggest that Peter ever really went and put his
focus upon that missionary effort.
The way that Acts tells the story,
if we take it at face value,
seems to make the point that
Peter found his people in the Jewish centers.
That is where he did his evangelism and that he trusted Paul and others to do a bulk of the
evangelistic work outside of that circle.
This is a little bit of a closer view of that here.
I just kind of wanted to show you what would be interesting would be to put Texas on top of
this so you could get a sense of scale.
Right. But for the ancient world,
this is a substantial amount of distance for one person to travel.
And it only goes back to the point that I made in our first time together.
That’s only possible because of the Roman peace.
It’s only possible because of roads.
Without that kind of commerce and trade that’s happening,
without that kind of infrastructure,
the growth of the early church would be physically impossible.
OK, so I want to talk to you a little bit about.
Yeah, we’ve pretty much covered all that.
So I want to just sort of finish up here with the idea of what happens in Rome.
So the Roman church has a really interesting history in Peter’s time.
Because, as you know,
there was a substantial Roman population of Jewish individuals.
There was a substantial economic center in which the Jewish people actually did very well.
And it was largely the thing that the Roman government had going for it was though they were very militaristic,
as long as you didn’t pose a threat militarily to Rome,
they sort of said live and let live.
I mean, as long as you pay your taxes and you keep your swords down.
Rome didn’t care what you did.
And so since the Jewish people,
specifically the cosmopolitan Jewish people,
didn’t have much of the revolt in them and because they were wealthy and willing to pay taxes,
they were very well looked over by the Roman Empire for a substantial period of time.
That all changing with Nero.
You know that there’s lots of speculation and I’m sure many of you know your Roman history
better than I was Nero mentally challenged.
Why, you know, whatever he was, he was a very dark and evil individual.
However, he got to that place in his life.
And ultimately,
Nero attributed the burning of Rome to the Christian fellowship.
There’s no scholarly reason I’m aware of to justify the fact that Christians would have
lit Rome on fire.
But regardless,
he essentially,
after this major catastrophic burning in Rome,
attributed that to Jewish Christians.
And that is when he began his systematic persecution of Christians and Rome.
And that is the beginning.
It’s really not the height,
but it’s the beginning of the things that you’re aware of with the Colosseum.
The games is really what it is.
He called it his circus.
It was a way of torturing and killing Christians.
So there is no historically verified record that Peter was crucified at the hands of Nero
because history is told by the winners,
not by the losers.
But Christian history has always held that Peter was crucified at the hands of Nero and
his own request that Peter was crucified upside down so that he would not be crucified in
the same way as the Savior.
I mentioned in the sermon last week,
if you were with us,
an anecdote that grabbed my attention.
And I think it’ll stick with me for a long time.
That image of the early church remembering Peter as being bound and watching his wife
carried into the middle of the circus and saying to her,
remember your Lord.
There’s something deeply compelling about that vision of a couple.
And by the way,
I should have said this.
This is one of the major distinctives between Peter and Paul.
We have no reason to believe that Paul was ever married.
In fact, if you’re going to make a biblical argument,
Paul says some stuff about married
people that would make you think that he was pretty suspect of the whole arrangement.
Peter, on the other hand,
was faithfully married for a very,
very long time.
The sense is that Peter and his wife were partners in the ministry that he did all around the known world.
So when he lost his wife,
Peter was losing someone he’d been with for
his entire adult life, most certainly.
And then he ultimately would come to his end in Rome as well.
Around the 1970s,
the Roman church decided that they wanted to take some of the
archaeological digging a little bit more seriously to identify Peter.
So what they did as they were digging a crypt for the Pope and a Pope,
I’m trying to remember, they were rebearing someone.
I don’t remember who that was.
Sorry.
But they were doing some work and Pope John Paul asked them to do further extensive work underneath St.
Peter’s to see what they might find.
And as they did work as recorded in the 70s,
they found further crypts and further
cemeteries.
They kept digging into those and they found a tomb which was labeled St.
Peter.
So they called in archaeological experts and they did all the things that
archaeologists do.
They wrote lots of papers and they determined to the best that they could define.
It was indeed the original bones of Peter that St.
Peter’s had been built upon.
This is a scholarly article written and paid for by the Roman Catholic Church who finds all of their
leadership structure built upon St.
Peter.
So it’s a little bit of a confirmation bias possibly.
But who am I to say it might be Peter.
Right.
And fundamentally the idea being that there he was buried in Rome following his own
execution which would be if that is accurate the most defended proof that exists that Peter was indeed the leader of the
Roman Church and did in fact die at the hands of Nero in his own crucifixion.
So ultimately I think what strikes me as we look at Peter is I mentioned how acts might be divided into part one and part two.
I wonder if we might be able to do the same with Peter’s life.
Bear with me on this.
So we know Peter from the Bible like I said we know the most about him as any disciple really.
And what we know about him is he is quick to speak.
He’s brash.
He’s impulsive and he kind of does the thing that seems or feels right in the moment.
What you have in the second act of Peter’s life which all seems to change in the moment after he sees Jesus.
Peter suddenly stands up in front of the entire Jewish crowd and has the courage to preach.
He suddenly has the ability to administrate and do so justly in the early church.
He suddenly has the ability to travel and to create church centers in which there’s substantial life such as here in
Antioch then he goes east and we know that he goes west.
There seems to be a pivotal
changing moment in Peter’s life where he goes from the guy who lights fires to the guy who is able to
contain the fire and able to help grow and spread it throughout essentially at that point the known world.
Peter seems to be one of those individuals who lives into his name.
He’s this guy who is in some ways when we meet him small.
I mean he’s a fisherman.
He’s a business owner but not an incredibly
important business or exactly incredibly high.
He’s got the family business right.
And at the end he’s widely considered the entire leader of the Christian faith.
And it’s ultimately
that transition that I think is really interesting how how this guy who’s largely thought of you remember the book of Acts they say how are these Gentiles
speaking.
It’s interesting that it’s not a rags to riches story like we might be accustomed to in America.
It’s it’s more of a an unimportant to an unimportant in a different way kind of story because in the end it was never about Peter.
And that’s the thing that makes I think his story really interesting is in the end he chooses to be crucified upside down.
In church tradition which I think is this beautiful way of pointing to the most important was not the most important.
And even the early churches willingness in the story that it would pass on Peter to say he’s influential like the first eleven chapters of acts right not to deny his importance but is to say that his importance is subject to the one that he sought to serve.
And it strikes me that that’s the story that gets told about Peter in particular.
So that’s a really.
We flew fast I’d be interested in questions or thoughts or comments
or gaps to fill in.
Yes sir.
There’s a book written.
Through them does not contradict anything that you’ve said that I’m glad to hear.
But I thought it was important to be aware of the fact that there is a whole book written down the two most neglected neglected books of the Bible.
Second Peter and June.
Now just to think out loud on that a little bit I do think that this class lands really differently.
At first Presbyterian Church in Spirit Lake and not
first Orthodox Church of Antioch right because for a few reasons number one we can’t escape that were people the Reformation.
And the Reformation is ultimately a group of people who find their fountainhead in the reading of Paul in Romans now they’re doing more than that.
But
theologically there would be no reformed movement if there is not Paul and a new reading of the book to the Romans.
What’s striking about that is we are pretty much exclusively a Gentile church right.
We I have known some people who are Christians who tried to keep kosher for some time or they’ve tried to learn some of those practices and I would in no way decry that or speak against that.
But we do not as a rule and it’s a pretty consistent rule have Jewish ethnic roots.
We don’t have that sense of connection to that history.
But Peter
was doing work to preach the gospel to Jesus’s brothers and sisters cousins and uncles and right.
We we miss because of our own context.
I think the substantial work that needed to be done in that context because as Paul writes to the Romans this scandalous argument quite frankly that God might call the Gentiles to make the Jews jealous.
If you’ve ever read Romans this is this is a pivotal part of the book where Paul says what how do we make sense of the fact all these Gentiles are becoming Christian all the Jews are rejecting it says well God hasn’t rejected his people
because God promised his people that God is faithful.
We know that right.
So what do we make sense of it.
Well maybe God is calling these Gentiles so that the Jews would be convicted and jealous and then they might come to be part of the faith as well.
Someday the idea that maybe God has chosen the Gentiles so that he might also be faithful to his chosen people Israelites not a rejection of either but ultimately the acceptance of both.
That I think is this really interesting turn to that point is that is compelling for people the Reformation to read Paul because he’s speaking to us.
He’s speaking to the outsider who is now quite frankly in our circle the insider right.
But Peter as he writes is doing this is this substantial living out of God’s promise to God’s people when God said you are my chosen people Peter and the other disciples took that serious and they took it so serious by the way.
There is real reason to believe that when they were serving the widows and the orphans in the Book of Acts you remember who administrative that work.
It was the twelve disciples it was Peter at the top and you remember that that work became so onerous that they actually had to call another twelve who became the deacons of the church that they functioned in a way so they could take care of the widows in the orphan.
Well it’s interesting because if you look in Jerusalem it appears that that may have been more universal than just Christians it may have been the Jewish community a form of outreach in the midst of their own place.
And now it’s time to be done.
And the final note on that I just think is we might miss the substantial importance of Peter.
You use the idea of the under read book of Peter because number
one it doesn’t speak to our context and number two it’s not a scandal to us that God has grace for us because if you’re a reform person you know that you need grace.
That’s a thing we’ll club you with over and over again you need grace that you heard again but it is just as scandalous that God would be gracious to the people who the new test makes very clear set out to kill him makes very clear the people who rejected him the very religious leaders who said we want you dead at the hands of our greatest enemy Rome we want them to kill you right.
And there is a beautiful gospel and Peter going to those people and saying Jesus Christ is the Messiah and he loves you and he is the fulfillment of God’s plan and if we can hear that that might be corresponding good news to us because by the way you need grace too.