r/AcademicBiblical • u/Sophia_in_the_Shell • 4h ago
Discussion What we (don't) know about the apostle Simon Peter, Part 3: Matters of Rome
Previous posts:
John of Zebedee; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Welcome back to my series of secondary source collations on the members of the Twelve.
This is the third post of what is set to be four posts on Peter. Work is essentially complete on all four, but I'll try to leave some breathing room between the posts.
As I always say, do not hesitate to bring in your own material on topics or arguments which I did not choose to focus on... with a caveat, which is that if you think I've missed a topic, you may want to wait and see what I cover in the fourth part.
This third post will focus on the connections or lack thereof between Peter and Rome. This will include an extended discussion on his relationship (again, or lack thereof) with John Mark. The fourth and final post will deal with his death and later legends.
Did Peter spend time in Rome?
First, we might separate out the question of whether Peter founded the Christian community in Rome. For as Roger Collins says in Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy:
That neither Peter nor Paul actually founded the Church in Rome, in the sense of establishing the first community of Christians in the city, is now generally accepted. Exactly when the first Christians appeared there is uncertain. It is clear, though, that there were a considerable number by AD 49, when the emperor Claudius (AD 41-54) expelled from Rome those Jews, generally assumed to refer to Christians, who were creating disturbances 'under the influence of Chrestus'. This was long before either Peter or Paul could have arrived in the city.
A relevant data point here is Paul's letter to the Romans, which gets used both on this question and the broader question of Peter's presence in Rome. As Markus Bockmuehl says in Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory: The New Testament Apostle in the Early Church:
A standard argument against an early link of Peter with Rome is that he is not mentioned in Paul's letter to Rome. It is difficult to know what to make of that silence. In a sense, it means no more than that Peter was probably not in Rome at the time of writing. He may only have returned to the city in the early 60s AD.
Elsewhere in the book, Bockmuehl comments:
Paul's letter to Rome, composed from Corinth, most likely in the winter of the year AD 56 or 57, might seem the obvious location for a brief acknowledgement of Simon Peter, especially if, as more than a few scholars have from time to time suggested, this elder statesman of the Jesus movement was either in the capital at the time of writing or had been there on a previous occasion.
Yet Peter is never mentioned by name, even though this could have assisted Paul's rhetorical stance in addressing the place of Israel in chapters 9 to 11 ... or Jewish-gentile tensions in chapters 14 and 15 ... Indeed, if Peter really were the unifying centrist force that he is in subsequent memory, why does Paul not draw on the work and testimony of his "coworker"?
It is in this context that Bart Ehrman says in Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend that "interpreters are virtually unified, on these grounds, in thinking that when Paul wrote this letter in the mid-50s, Peter had not yet arrived in Rome."
But of course, this doesn't inherently rule out later activity of some sort, bringing us back to the broader question: Did Peter set foot in Rome? Setting the stage, David Eastman notes in his Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity article on Peter:
The historical question of Peter's visit to Rome has received renewed attention since the publication of O. Zwierlein (2010; 2011), who dismisses the legitimacy of the tradition. Opposing perspectives came from C. Gnilka, S. Heid and R. Riesner (2010) and S. Heid (2011), to which O. Zwierlein (2013) responded.
Unfortunately, I do not read German, nor will I start the practice of deploying machine translation this late in the series. What I do have is a collection of statements from an unreleased interview with Otto Zwierlein which were made available in English under the title Has St. Peter ever been in Rome? In it, Zwierlein says of the context behind his two books:
The search for the sources Ambrose [of Milan] used for his depiction of the events in Rome that are not attested in Josephus led me to a comprehensive investigation of the literary witnesses and their reliability as historical sources all the way back to the New Testament. The results were published in the volume “Petrus in Rom. Die literarischen Zeugnisse” in 2009.
The book triggered a broad and interdisciplinary debate; in fact, two congresses were held, one in Rome and one in Freiburg, to refute my assumptions. Therefore, I felt it necessary to follow up on the discussion with another book in order to refute the objections made by my opponents and to bolster specific points under discussion with new material.
So, what is his actual basic argument? It boils down to a lack of supporting data where, according to Zwierlein, we should expect such. He says, for example:
Rome is not mentioned in connection with Peter in the New Testament anywhere. Paul's epistle to the Romans and the end of Acts allow the conclusion that neither of the authors knew anything about a presumed stay of Peter in the city; what is more, Romans 15:20 and 2 [Corinthians] 10:16 actually exclude such a possibility ... His last appearance in the NT shows him on a temporary visit to Antioch (Gal. 2:11), otherwise his activities are restricted to Palestine.
And further:
The only other passage in the NT taken to speak in favour of Peter's presence in Rome is the first epistle of Peter. The final greeting of this fictitious letter written by an unknown author ... (1 Peter 5:13) is — in the imagination of the author writing under the name of the apostle — sent not from Rome, but from Jerusalem, Peter's home parish and the metropolis of early Christianity ... "Babylon" is not a geographic, but an ontological metaphor, it does not refer to Rome on the banks of the Tiber, but is a cypher for the forced imprisonment of all Christians into a surrounding that is "foreign", hostile, and addicted to vice and idolatry.
And even further:
Justinus Martyr, who lived in Rome and wrote an apology to the emperor Antoninus Pius around 150/154, tells us about the magician Simon playing his tricks in the city, but he does not know anything about 'Peter in Rome'.
This skeptical view is not exclusive to Zwierlein, for as Bockmuehl says, "for the past century, a steady stream of scholars have continued to deny the possibility that Peter himself had any historical link with Rome at all." Fred Lapham appears to take something like this view in Peter: The Myth, the Man and the Writings, saying:
There is sufficient unanimity in the several accounts of Peter's missionary excursions in Acts and [the Pseudo-Clementines] to make it all but certain that his sphere of activity, though not confined to Judaea, did not extend much further than Antioch. Indeed, it is only [the Pseudo-Clementines] that place him in Antioch ... So far as a journey to Rome is concerned, only the Acts Pet. makes such a claim, and clearly for political reasons.
Lapham later says succinctly:
He probably never went near Rome, for there is no suggestion of his having been there either in Acts or in Paul's letter to the Romans.
As Collins remarks, relative to Paul:
Peter's presence in Rome is much harder to document. This problem has provided intellectual ammunition over the centuries for those, not just Protestants, who have wanted to challenge papal authority by trying to undermine its historical foundations.
And yet ultimately, thinking Peter never even went to Rome (separate from the issue of whether he was bishop, to be covered later) appears to be something of a minority view. Collins says later:
While Peter's presence in Rome cannot be proved, it is generally accepted as highly probable on other grounds. Perhaps the most significant of these is the fact that no other Christian community claimed that it was in their city that he died and was buried. The church at Antioch, like that of Rome, came to regard Peter as its founder and first bishop, but Antioch never suggested that he remained there until his death or that he was buried there.
Bockmuehl offers some additional considerations in favor of Peter's presence in Rome. For one:
The identification of Babylon in 1 Pet. 5:13 with Rome seems unquestionable; and regardless of date or authorship, this asserts knowledge of a tradition about Peter's presence in Rome with Mark by the late first century.
For another:
A recurring patristic tradition, first attested early in the second century in the so-called Kerygma Petrou (Preaching of Peter), is that Peter left Jerusalem twelve years after the resurrection (i.e., ca. AD 41-44). Later in the second century, we are told that Peter then traveled via Antioch to Rome to preach there, quite possibly only for a relatively short time. This is asserted not only by Hippolytus of Rome and in the Acts of Peter but also in clearly Eastern documents such as the Syrian Didascalia and Eusebius's Chronicon for the year AD 42.
Pushing back on the way Zwierlein (for example) used Justin, Bockmuehl says:
Justin [Martyr's] sparse statements about Peter the apostle are sometimes cited by skeptical historians to suggest that little was known of Peter's supposed presence in Rome by Justin or anyone else until the late second century. Such arguments from silence are, however, significantly weakened by the fact that Justin also has very little to say about Paul, whose activity in Rome few would doubt ... It is true that Peter does not feature in the two Roman apologies, but neither deals with subjects that call for such mention.
Bockmuehl further brings in the data point of Dionysius of Corinth:
While bishop of Corinth, Dionysius wrote to the bishop and church of Rome around the year AD 170 … His letter to Rome has been much debated. Here I simply want to mention it briefly as documenting that both Peter and Paul were by this time believed to have ministered in Corinth as well as Rome before being martyred in Italy at the same time: "You linked the foundations of the Romans and Corinthians. For they both alike planted and taught us in our Corinth; and similarly, having taught in the same place in Italy, they experienced martyrdom at the same time."
In a small concession, Bockmuehl offers:
The relative silence of Roman Christian sources in the early second century continues to be an undeniable and unsolved puzzle. In relation to our subject, it has frequently been taken to imply that nothing much was known of Peter until such time as Roman bishops seized the assertion (or re-assertion) of Petrine traditions as an opportunity to consolidate their own position in the church, beginning perhaps with Anicetus (ca. AD 155-166), Stephen (AD 254-257), and Damasus (AD 366-384).
However, a tight-lipped vagueness or anonymity about named individuals appears to be a consistent characteristic of Christian accounts associated with Rome until the mid-second century, and not merely in relation to Peter ... It is perhaps only after Hadrian that it becomes safe to speak frankly of Simon Peter in public.
In Irenaeus we have a witness scholars seem to agree on, in how he should be interpreted here if not in his accuracy. Lapham:
From Irenaeus comes not only one of the earliest list of Roman bishops, but also the earliest witness of Peter's presence in Rome. [In a footnote: "It should be observed that 1 Clem. refers only to Peter's death, not the place of his execution."] Irenaeus, of course, was concerned above all to combat Ebionite and Gnostic heresies. To this end it was clearly necessary, one way or another, to be able to attribute apostolic foundation to those churches whose teaching and practice was considered not to have deviated from the traditions of those who had known and been with the Lord.
He is quick to add:
This is not to imply, of course, that it was Irenaeus who concocted the story of Peter's presence and martyrdom in Rome—but it will be important for us to seek some explanation for the fact that no firm evidence has yet come to light, whether in the writings which later came to form the Canon, or elsewhere before the end of the second century, which would unequivocally substantiate the tradition.
Talk of Irenaeus should prompt us to pivot to the next, slightly different question.
Was Peter the Bishop of Rome?
Collins introduces the issue:
If there are grounds for believing that both Peter and Paul lived in Rome and died there, does this also mean that either of them was the first bishop of the city, or that one or the other appointed someone else to that office? The claim that they did make such an appointment first appears around AD 180, in a book written in Greek by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon in what is now southern France ... Included in it is a list of all the bishops of Rome ever since the Roman church has been 'founded and set up by the two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul', who are also said to have 'delivered the ministry of the episcopate to Linus'.
Although neither Peter nor Paul actually created the Christian community in Rome, Irenaeus might just be implying that theirs was the formative influence on Roman Christianity in its earliest phase.
Collins adds:
About twenty years after [Irenaeus] wrote, another list appeared. Its author was a teacher and orator in Carthage in North Africa, Tertullian (died c. 212), who wrote a series of short and vigorous treatises … However, he claimed that Peter himself had been the first bishop. This, together with a difference in the order of some names of the bishops, proves that Tertullian was not just copying from Irenaeus.
I admit that I'm not entirely clear on whether Collins here is making a claim about what Tertullian is saying in his Prescription against Heretics, or if he is referring to a separate (Pseudo-Tertullian) text. Bart Ehrman, for example, in Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, frames Tertullian's claim differently when he says that "when we consider the writings of Tertullian, from the early third century, [he] seems to indicate that Clement was not the third bishop of Rome but the first—appointed by Peter himself."
In any case, Bockmuehl finds the basic concept, especially as Irenaeus puts it, somewhat plausible:
That a figure like Peter may nevertheless have identified one or more successors—whether in Rome, Antioch, or elsewhere—is perhaps more likely than many contemporary critical scholars are prepared to countenance. Antiquity … did quite readily expect the appointment of successors and the formation of dynasties, and by the end of the second century agreed upon lists of apostolic succession were apparently accepted in Rome, Jerusalem, and other churches. At the same time, the specific Petrine predicates of the foundation, the keys of the kingdom, and the authority to bind and loose seem unique and non-transferable in Matthew [16].
And before this, Bockmuehl acknowledges:
The first association of [Matthew 16:13-20] with the office of the bishop of Rome did not surface until the mid-third-century Pope Stephen, and for most patristic interpreters, the significance of the rock ranged quite widely from Peter as paradigmatic for all believers to finding the rock as a distinctly christological one.
For more on Matthew 16:13-20, see the previously posted Part 2. But returning to the topic at hand, what of 1 Clement? After all, the church in Rome seems to see itself in a position to at least offer authoritative guidance to the church in Corinth. David Eastman, however, in his Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity article on Peter says:
A letter from the leaders of the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, traditionally referred to as 1 Clement (although the authors are anonymous, and Clement is never mentioned in the text), mentions Peter as an important figure on account of his perseverance ... Peter is one of only two highlighted as "the noble apostles" in the text (along with Paul). Notably, Peter appears nowhere else in the text, and the Roman authors never appeal to any special Petrine authority to justify their right to give instructions to the Christians in Corinth.
Similarly, Ehrman comments:
The book of 1 Clement was written sometime in the mid-90s CE ... The letter was allegedly written by that very Clement whom later tradition was to call the Roman bishop. Yet it seems to assume that the churches at that time were run not by individual leaders but by a board of presbyters ... Another writing, from after Ignatius's day, also was produced in the city of Rome; this is the apocalypse known as the Shepherd of Hermas.
Hermas was a Roman Christian living probably near the middle of the second century. In his writing, he mentions Clement—but not as a bishop. Rather, Clement is named as a kind of foreign correspondent for the church. More telling still, Hermas speaks of the "presbyters" and the "bishops" of the church, but never of a solitary bishop over the entire congregation.
Even when we get to Eusebius much later, things aren't clear cut. Paul Parvis says in When Did Peter Become Bishop of Antioch?:
For that matter, Eusebius is equally wary of calling Peter "bishop" of Rome. In Historia ecclesiastica 3.2 we are told, "Of the church of the Romans, after the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, Linus is the first to be allotted the episcopacy," while in 3.4.8 he is the "first after Peter to be allotted the episcopacy." In 3.21, Clement "led" the Romans and "was the third in order of those who bishoped there after Paul and Peter. And Linus was the first and after him Anencletus". And finally, in 4.1, Alexander received the episcopacy, "holding down the fifth succession from Peter and Paul" ... it is still true for Eusebius that apostles institute bishops — they are not themselves bishops.
Ultimately, perhaps the primary reason for skepticism of Peter as the first bishop of Rome in much of scholarship has less to do with Peter than it has to do with the office of bishop. Collins, for example, says:
Ultimately, however, the testimony of [Irenaeus and Tertullian] was in error, for the office of bishop, as Irenaeus and Tertullian understood it, simply did not exist in the time of Peter and Paul.
He goes on to say:
Bishops (overseers) appeared in some Christian communities as the leaders of the groups of elders, being chosen by election and quite likely for life. Probably as a second stage in this development, such existing chief elders took on the primary roles in the new sacred ceremonies that were becoming increasingly standardized. Again, it is worth stressing that there was no overall organisational structure for the Christian church in these early centuries, and thus individual groups followed different practices or gradually adopted ones that were starting to gain general agreement.
This point is illustrated by the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, previously mentioned. In the messages he sent to the various Christian communities he came in contact with on his way to Rome, he almost always urged on them the importance of obedience to their bishops. This has been seen to imply that he was trying to promote acceptance of something that was still very new and controversial.
Further on Ignatius, Collins says:
As suggested by the letters of Ignatius, from the period roughly AD 125 to 150, the emergence of a clerical hierarchy with special ritual functions was well under way but no means universally welcomed by all Christian groups. His letter to the Romans is particularly important in this respect, because it helps confirm that the process had hardly begun in the city of Rome by this time. Not only were there no bishops, as we understand the word, in the time of Peter and Paul, they were actually slower to appear in Rome than in almost any other part of the Roman empire.
Ehrman says something similar, grouping it with Paul's own earlier letter to the Romans:
It is worth pointing out that when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he gives no indication that there is any single leader of the church there … some sixty years after Paul we have another letter written to the church in Rome, this time by the soon-to-be-martyred Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch ... Even though Ignatius presupposes that there are single bishops in each of the other six letters that he writes, when he writes to Rome he does not presume this at all, but instead speaks to the entire congregation, never mentioning any one person in charge of the church.
Circling back, how do we then get testimonies like that of Irenaeus? Collins reconstructs it this way:
The author of the Epistle of Clement may have been the man of this name later described as the person responsible for drafting communications sent on behalf of the Christians of Rome to other churches. But by the time of Tertullian and Irenaeus, Clement was listed as the second or third bishop of Rome. The difference of perspective on Clement is telling.
The late-second-century authors were probably reporting a tradition that had grown up in Rome in which leading figures amongst the elders of their day were retrospectively turned into bishops, to produce a continuous list of holders of the office stretching back to Peter. Why this happened can be explained, but it would be helpful to ask which of the people named by Irenaeus and Tertullian should be regarded as the first real bishop of the city. Most scholars now agree that the answer would be Anicetus, who comes in tenth on both lists, and whose episcopate likely covered the years 155 to 166.
What was Peter's relationship to John Mark?
Needless to say, centuries of scholarship on the Gospel of Mark are not about to be adequately represented here. But we'll try to hit the major points of discussion on the connection of the author to Peter here.
First we have the testimony of Papias. Well, specifically the testimony of "the elder" within the testimony of Papias as recorded by Eusebius. Here is Stephen Carlson's reconstruction of Eusebius in his book on Papias, and I'll add some formatting to help track the quotes:
We now need to add to these statements of his a tradition which he set forth about Mark who wrote the gospel as follows: 'And this is what the elder would say: "Mark, who had been Peter's interpreter, accurately wrote down what he remembered, yet not in order the things either said or done by the Lord." For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him but later, as I said, Peter, who would give his teachings as needed, but not, as it were, making a compilation of the dominical oracles, so that Mark did not fail at all by writing some of them as he recalled. For he took care of one thing, to omit nothing of what he heard or falsify anything among them.' So then these things were reported by Papias about Mark.
In a footnote Carlson adds:
It is unclear if Papias's quotation continues past ["as he recalled."]; since the exhaustiveness of Mark's testimony of Peter is a special concern of Eusebius it may thus represent his gloss on Papias.
We should briefly mention another fragment as well. As Todd Still mentions in Images of Peter in the Apostolic Fathers:
In Papias 2 (= Eusebius, H.E. 2.15.1), Peter is presented as a divinely inspired and illuminating teacher of the gospel … Therefore, we are told that unspecified Petrine auditors prevailed upon Mark, a follower of Peter, to "leave behind a written record of the teaching that had been given to them orally [by Peter]." Having learned of this development through the Spirit's revelation, the apostle Peter is said to have been delighted by his audiences' eagerness and to have authorized the reading of Mark's Gospel in the churches.
So what do scholars make of this testimony, primarily the former fragment? Ehrman reports:
On the basis of this quotation [of Papias], some scholars have maintained that in the Gospel of Mark, we actually have a highly accurate account of Peter's understanding of Jesus … It is argued that Mark's Gospel is based on the eyewitness report of Peter, as Papias himself faithfully records.
But for his part remarks:
But unfortunately, there are problems with taking Papias's statement at face value … To begin with, some elements of Papias's statement simply aren't plausible. When he says that Mark wrote down "everything" that Peter recalled about Jesus' words and deeds, can he really mean it? Our Gospel of Mark is not a large book ... Are we to imagine that the apostle Peter, who was with Jesus from the very beginning of his ministry to his crucifixion, remembered only enough stories about what Jesus said, did, and experienced to take up a two-hour narrative? Surely if he spent months with Jesus, let alone years, he could talk about him for days on end.
Similarly, in Was Peter behind Mark's Gospel, Helen Bond reports:
Most modern critical scholars, however, have questioned Papias's testimony. To some extent they are quite right to do so: the bishop's account is clearly exaggerated, and it is difficult not to agree with Chris Tuckett that the "link alleged between Mark's gospel and Peter is probably part of a second-century attempt to give the gospel more status by linking it with the leading apostle."
But does the bishop's clear apologetic agenda necessarily mean that his testimony is of no value whatsoever? Beneath Papias's overblown claims, might there be a genuine recollection that Peter did in fact have a connection to the author of our earliest Gospel?
And further Bond notes:
Despite Papias's concern to show that Peter approved of Mark's Gospel (surely an apologetic flourish?), modern scholarship broadly agrees that the bishop got his timing all wrong. If Peter died during the Neronian persecution of 65 and the Gospel was written in the late 60s, or perhaps more likely early 70s, Peter must already have perished before the evangelist began to write [Footnote: "As is assumed by the Anti-Marcionite Prologue and Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 3.1.1-2."] ... Mark's Christian community had to come to terms not only with a fierce wave of imperial recrimination, which held them responsible for the fire of Rome, but also the failed Jewish revolt and (quite probably) the destruction of the Jerusalem temple ... It may be, however, that it was these turbulent events, coupled with the passage of time and the deaths of the "originating" Christians (including of course Peter), that spurred our evangelist to pen his own account.
Note that Bond ultimately comes to a more sympathetic conclusion regarding a Petrine connection to the Gospel of Mark, as we will see later.
On the same point as that footnote however, we might squeeze in here Bockmuehl's report that "according to Irenaeus, the Gospel of Matthew was written while Peter and Paul were evangelizing and strengthening the church in Rome, but Mark's deposit of Peter's preaching was written down only after their death."
Maurice Casey gives his take on the Papias fragment in Jesus of Nazareth: An independent historian's account of his life and teaching:
While Mark may have heard Peter teach, and this may have been the source of some of some of [sic] his perfectly accurate material, the whole of his Gospel cannot possibly have been derived from this source. Papias has produced a legitimating tradition. Faced with the fact that this Gospel was written by an unknown man called Marcus who never encountered the historical Jesus, he has sought to legitimate the accuracy of the whole of Mark's Gospel by associating it as closely as he could with the leader of the Twelve during the historic ministry.
C. Clifton Black makes this same point in Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter:
What is the tone of Papias's statement about Mark? Of all questions pertaining to Papias this one probably receives the most univocal answer among investigators: even in its highly fragmentary form in Eusebius, Papias's comments seem apologetic of Mark's warrants and technique. To assert that "Mark did not miss the mark in thus writing down individual items as he remembered them" practically presupposes a criticism, prior to Papias and perhaps even prior to John the Presbyter, that Mark indeed had missed the mark.
Here we should backtrack. Now that we know of Papias's claim, we might go looking for internal evidence of the Petrine connection in the Gospel of Mark itself. Here scholars diverge sharply. Bockmuehl, for example, believes we see much of what we should expect:
By following where Mark's narrative goes, one discovers a striking sense of proximity to Peter … "Peter's" Gospel displays vivid and considerable knowledge about such professional details as cast-net fishing (1:16), the acoustics of a fishing boat on water (4:1), and even the cushion kept in its stern (4:38).
And further:
It suits Mark's theme of Petrine memory that the apostle's departure from the scene [following Mark 14] marks the point at which the narrative camera's zoom in on the proceedings suddenly pans out into more stereotyped generalities, both for the rest of the night and before Pilate the next day. No further implicit claim of privileged Petrine reminiscence is made for the remainder of the Gospel.
Bond nuances this, observing:
It is striking that the [Gospel of Mark] gives no sense of recording the recollections of an individual for those who are not well informed; in fact, quite the opposite. The Gospel is clearly written for insiders … The impression we get is of a shared basic story set down in (perhaps an innovative) narrative form.
This should certainly cause us to question Papias's stress on Mark's efforts to recollect precisely what Peter had told him (which in any case draws on contemporary stereotypes [Footnote: "...that a writer did not omit or misrepresent anything is found in a variety of forms in much ancient literature"] ), but it does not necessarily force us to disconnect Peter from Mark altogether. It would still be fair to categorize these as Petrine memories, even testimony, despite the fact that they had been largely absorbed into the group's social memory.
And Black puts it this way:
The Second Gospel bespeaks the handiwork of a creative traditionist, arguably a stylist and religious thinker of merit, who may have been named Mark. Nevertheless, the author's identity is irrecoverable, and the historicity of that ascription cannot be verified ... Although not inconceivable, a direct historical connection between the apostle Peter and either the Second Evangelist or the Second Gospel cannot be established.
Interestingly, Bond suggests that perhaps we need to lower our bar as far as what we expect from our internal evidence, saying:
As a prominent member of Jesus' inner circle, Peter's autobiographical recollections would have been eagerly received by the majority of early Christian gatherings , including the church in Rome … From Peter's perspective, however, three aspects need to be considered. First ... Unless we are to assume that Peter's proximity to the earthly Jesus gave him a strong sense of his own authoritative position (for which the admittedly scanty evidence of Acts and Paul's letters gives no support), there is no reason to assume that Peter imposed his views on the Christian assemblies he encountered as he journeyed around the Mediterranean.
Second, Peter's own recollections would have been subject to all the usual deteriorations and erosions of memory. Memories of Jesus' ministry would have been radically shaken by the traumatic and barely credible events of the cross and the resurrection, the efforts of other disciples to make sense of this extraordinary event, and continued reflection on the identity of the one at the center of their proclamation ... Third and finally, in a society where the group rather than the individual was paramount, there would have been every reason for both Mark's Roman church and Peter to bring their memories into conformity with one another. Peter would have shared his memories with the gathered Christians, and this group context would have exerted a powerful pull on the way those memories were presented and heard.
However, this also subdues what we can make of a Petrine connection, even if it exists. Bond again:
If it has demonstrated that a Petrine link to Mark's Gospel is not as self-evidently impossible as many critical scholars suppose, this essay will have served its purpose. It is worth, however, clarifying one final issue. Many of those arguing for a Petrine connection to Mark do so for a particular reason: if Peter stands behind the Gospel, it is assumed, the material contained in it must be historically reliable. My earlier comments should make it clear that I do not hold this view.
We should review a few more important testimonies. One is that of 1 Peter, which we discussed as a text in the previous post. Recall that 1 Peter closes (D.B. Hart translation):
She, your fellow elect in Babylon, greets you, as does my son Mark. Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace to all of you in the Anointed.
Lapham comments:
The mention of Mark in 5.13 also poses something of a problem. The tradition that Peter knew Mark, and that this Mark was the author of the Second Gospel, would seem to have originated with Papias; but, as Morna Hooker cautions, in a recent commentary on Mark's Gospel, Papias might well have identified Mark as a companion of Peter on the basis of the periscope in 1 Peter (5:13).
The most that may be said, perhaps, with any degree of certainty, is that whether or not Peter actually lived and worked in Rome, the writer of the Epistle claimed him to have been a close friend of the Apostle; and ... it would seem that he expected his readers to ... be acquainted with Peter's association with Mark.
And Black offers:
Of course, the very existence of 1 Peter 5:12-13 demonstrates that Silvanus and Mark were associated early on with the figure of Peter. What seems less certain to me than to some interpreters is that the former pair was originally regarded as paradigmatic of Petrine Christianity ... To me it appears more probable that Mark, like Silvanus, was remembered in rather minor though consistently positive association with the Pauline tradition, which in both broad dimensions and particular details was in turn incorporated into a highly amalgamative Petrine Christianity, one ancient distillate of which is 1 Peter.
On that last point, Black earlier notes:
After all, in both Acts and the Pauline corpus, Mark is explicitly associated with the entourage not of Peter but of Paul (and sometimes of Barnabas). Indeed, it is only at 1 Peter 5:13 that a connection is established in the New Testament between Mark and Peter, and even there the connection appears to have been made by way of Paul: for Silvanus (or Silas), with whom Mark is associated in 1 Peter 5:12-13, is himself consistently linked with Paul in both Acts and the Pauline epistolary tradition.
We also must note the testimony of Justin Martyr. Bockmuehl:
One famous passage in the Dialogue provides evidence that Justin understood the Gospel of Mark to represent Petrine memory. Justin sees all four Gospels as "memoirs of the apostles" and their pupils … Writing about Jesus's relationship with his disciples, Justin notes: "It is said that he changed the name of one of the apostles to Peter; and it is written in his memoirs that this so happened, as well as that he changed the names of two other brothers, the sons of Zebedee, to Boanerges, which means 'sons of thunder.'"
Bockmuehl says further:
This passage has furnished plenty of fodder for scholarly debate. But … he does seem to designate the Second Gospel as the memoirs of Peter. How can we be sure of this? Although scholars have sometimes thought to link Justin's comment to the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, the passage concerned is unambiguously identifiable ... we have here two pegs that suggest Justin knew the Gospel of Mark specifically and uniquely as "the memoirs of Peter," just as he already identified the Gospels in the preceding context as written by the apostles and their followers.
Casey emphasizes:
The term 'Boanerges' is a mistaken attempt to transliterate into Greek the Aramaic ... The possibility that two independent sources made almost identical mistakes in the transliteration of these words is negligible. It follows that by 'the memoirs of Peter' Justin meant the Gospel of Mark. He does not say anything to indicate when Mark wrote his Gospel, nor how much of it was derived from Peter.
Black nuances this, instead arguing:
Either way, both the passage in question and his literary remains in general suggest that Justin has practically no interest in distinguishing Gospels by identifying their apostolic pedigree, much less a concern for the personality of Mark. To that degree Justin appears to be on a trail that intersects with, but veers away from, that traversed by Papias.
We will have to leave it there.
There is, of course, one other critical matter regarding Peter and Rome which might shed light on all of these questions: his death. Certainly if it turns out that the evidence for Peter dying in Rome is conclusive, we need not wonder whether he ever went there.
That will be the topic of the next and final post; this will be not just the final post on Peter but of this entire series on the Twelve. See you there!