Is Peter Really the Rock of the Church? (part 1)

Pope Kisses the Feet of Christ Crucified

First Response

I am posing this question (again) in response to a most negative email from a Protestant who refused to give me the respectful title "Father" and who contrived all sorts of weak arguments and falsehoods to bolster his objections to the papacy. Let us look at the text in RSV Matthew 16:16-19:

Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

First, we must logically accept that "you are Peter" and "on this rock" refers to the same object, Simon Bar-Jona. Second, various Semitic phrases indicate an obvious Aramaic substratum in the Greek text. Wordplay is being made upon the word "Peter" as an indicator of identity. "You are KEPHA and upon this KEPHA I will build my church." We receive the dialogue after it has passed through a series of translations: Aramaic, Greek, possibly Latin, and finally English. What is most important is the original meaning given by Christ, not any contrived reinterpretation made on the basis of Greek gender-sensitive word endings. The source text, which appears in a few of the Eastern Scriptures, uses the same term. The Greek suffers a little from the fact that the word "petra" for rock is feminine. Obviously, one could not call Simon by a feminine or woman's name. Consequently, it is altered to "petros" which is the masculine version of the word. Unfortunately, the meaning is not strictly identical in that it might refer to a smaller rock or stone. Anti-Catholic critics will misconstrue this usage as signifying that Peter is not the foundation stone or rock of the Church; however, the slight difference between petros/petra in Matthew's Greek is judged insignificant by critical authorities. There are many examples in ancient usage of the two terms as interchangeable and possessing identical meaning.

The email critic claimed that the second use of the word "rock" referred not to Peter, but to Christ. Seeking to support his contention he listed the many numbers of times that Jesus was imaged as the rock or foundation of faith (that the Greek word "petra" was applied to Jesus 16 times in the New Testament). Then he said that it never did refer again to Peter. Well, word-counting games are quite popular with fundamentalist Christians, and yet, when they cross through various Scriptural texts, can become a hermeneutical nightmare. In this particular case, his eagerness to discount Catholic claims precipitated a serious miscalculation in his counting. Such critics rarely count the number of times "rock" is mentioned as a proper name for this privileged apostle under other renditions. Not only will our Lord use it, but it is transliterated into Greek in the Pauline letters as Kephas (1 Cor 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; 15:4; Gal 1:18; 2:9,11,14. John 1:42 translates it as Petros. Considering the text alone, and even many Protestant scholars today admit as much, the "rock" upon which the Church will be built is Peter. The word "ekklesia" or church only occurs in the Gospels here and twice in 18:17. The Catholic will readily admit that elsewhere both Christ and God are compared to a rock or called such; however, this fact does not nullify the clear interpretation of Simon Peter as rock in Matthew 16:16-19.

This same critic then suggested that the demonstrative pronouns used were indicative of the first rock or stone being Peter and the second and most important one being Jesus. But, the pronoun "this" actually demonstrates something quite different-- that it concerns Peter. As for the pronoun "it," in reference to the invulnerability from the powers of death, it is unclear whether it applies to the rock or to the church. The meaning is left unaltered in either case. The devil will never prevail against the Church built upon Peter.

The keys are a general reference to authority. The background may be Isaiah 2:15-25 wherein a sort of prime minister is given the keys to the palace entrance. Coincidentally, there was a successive nature to this role. Peter will be a visible rock for the great ROCK of Christ who will be taken from our sight. He will serve as a foundation rock to the Church, using a building analogy. His function will be to witness to Jesus as Messiah, the Son of the living God. The Church will not be overcome by the power of death. Peter's exercise of his authority in the Church on earth will be confirmed in heaven.

Useful Source: Christian Apologetics by Rev. W. Devivier, S.J. (New York: Joseph F. Wagner, Inc., 1924).