Is St. Peter REALLY the Rock?

Periodically, people have moments in their lives when they make a discovery and suddenly everything changes for them.

Jimmy Akin had one such moment that led him to become Catholic.

In this video, Jimmy tells the story of what happened, what the discovery he made was, and how it PROVES that St. Peter is the rock on which Jesus founded his Church.

TRANSCRIPT E036 Is St. Peter REALLY the Rock?

 

Coming Up

Today, I’m going to tell you the story of why I’m Catholic today.

I’m going to focus on the very moment that forced me to reverse my opinion.

And I’m going to be telling you about the verse that changed everything.

Let’s get into it!

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Howdy, folks!

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My Background

I grew up here in the American South, and I was raised in a Protestant family.

But when I was 6 or 7 years old, my parents had some kind of disagreement with the elders of our church, and they stopped going.

So after that, I was raised nominally Protestant, and we’d only go to church once or twice a year when we visited my grandparents.

When I was a teenager, I was involved in the New Age Movement, but I broke with that when I turned 18.

At age 20, I had a conversion to Christ, and I became a very serious Christian—something I’ve been ever since.

Following this conversion, I wanted to devote my life to teaching God’s word, and I planned to become a seminary professor and maybe a pastor.

But I still needed to figure out what church I should be part of.

Here in my home town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, we have dozens of churches—all different kinds.

But I realized that what church has services at a time I like is not a good test of whether that church’s doctrine is true.

Neither is what church is in convenient driving distance.

Or what church has a pastor I like, music I like, or a social group I like.

So I shouldn’t let my decision of what church to join be influenced by any of those things, because figuring out what is true is the most important thing to me.

I thus worshipped in local Protestant churches—since that is how I’d grown up—but I made a point of studying the theology of all the different branches of Christianity.

I studied the different Protestant groups, like Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, and Pentecostals.

But I also studied the theologies of Eastern Orthodox Christians and even Catholics.

And that was saying something, because the church I had my conversion in was very anti-Catholic, so I heard lots of anti-Catholic preaching and read lots of anti-Catholic material.

But I still studied what they had to say—even if it was just so I could talk Catholics out of the Church better.

And then, one day, it happened.

I was reading a Catholic book. Specifically, it was the book Evangelical Catholics by Deacon Keith Fournier.

And it had a long quotation from Matthew 16 in it—you know, the “You are Peter” passage.

 

Reading the Passage

Specifically, the passage says:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?”

And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

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 gates of Hades 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.”

Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ (Matthew 16:13-20).

 

What I’d Always Said

Now, this was not a new passage for me. I’d read the Bible—or at least as much of it as I knew about—and I’d read the Gospel of Matthew multiple times.

I’d also heard this passage dealt with by numerous Protestant preachers and in basic-level Protestant literature as well.

And I had formed my views about it.

My views weren’t identical with what I’d heard from others, but I definitely did not understand Peter to be the rock.

I argued that Peter was most definitely not the rock, and therefore the Catholic Church was misusing this passage to support the office of the pope.

Here’s how I reasoned. Jesus said to Peter:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.

But in Greek, the word for Peter is petros, and the word for rock is petra. They’re two different words. Petros is masculine, while petra is feminine. Therefore, they must be referring to two different things, so Peter is not the rock.

According to this line of reasoning, petros meant a small stone, while petra meant a large rock. So what Jesus was doing was contrasting Peter with the rock. He was saying, in effect:

You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this other large rock, I will build my Church.

That much was held by many of the people that I’d read on this passage.

But what would the large rock be?

I’d seen many authors claiming that the rock wasn’t Peter but Peter’s faith. However, that never struck me as plausible, because Peter’s faith is not explicitly mentioned in the text. He obviously has faith; but the text doesn’t mention it.

What is mentioned in the text is Jesus’ identity. That’s the main subject of the text that prompts what Jesus says to Peter.

[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

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

First, Jesus says, “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus declares Peter blessed, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to him but Jesus’ father in heaven.

And then Jesus says, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”

So I held that the rock on which Jesus will build his Church is his own identity—the fact that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

What Jesus was saying was, in effect:

You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this great rock of my identity as the Christ I will build my Church.

I thought this worked better as an interpretation, because Jesus’ identity as the Christ is mentioned prominently in the text.

So that made a lot of sense to me. The Church is obviously built on Christ. That’s something even Catholics acknowledge, and it’s taught in other passages in the New Testament.

So I had what I thought was a really good explanation of the passage.

And—as a Protestant—I said to myself, “It’s a good thing that Peter is not the rock, because if he were then he would be the chief apostle, and if he were the chief apostle then he would be in charge once Jesus ascended to heaven.” And that would support the idea of there being a pope.

 

What I Didn’t Know

But there were some things I didn’t yet know.

One of them was that there was another way of taking the passage that had never occurred to me.

It’s obvious that there is parallelism between the two rocks in the passage.

“You are petros” is parallel with “on this petra”—parallelism being a common feature of biblical poetry. It’s a common literary device in the Bible.

But there are two kinds of parallelism. They are referred to as synthetic parallelism and antithetic parallelism.

Antithetic parallelism happens when the two things that are in parallel contrast with each other, like the righteous and the wicked in Proverbs 10:6:

Blessings are on the head of the righteous //

but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence (Proverbs 10:6).

Here the righteous are contrasted with the wicked, so there is antithetic parallelism between them.

Synthetic parallelism is the opposite of this. In synthetic parallelism, the second thing in the parallel builds on the first, like the things the Lord hates in Proverbs 6:16:

There are six things which the Lord hates //

seven which are an abomination to him (Proverbs 6:16).

Here the six things that the Lord hates in the first half of the parallel are amplified into seven things that the Lord hates in the second half, so this is an example of synthetic parallelism, where the second element builds on the first.

You are petros //

and on this petra I will build my Church

Now, I’d spotted the fact that petros and petra are in parallel with each other, but I’d made the mistake of simply assuming that I was looking at antithetic parallelism.

It never occurred to me to consider the idea that the passage might be synthetic parallelism.

If you assume that petros means small stone and petra means large rock—and if the passage is antithetic parallelism—then Jesus would have been saying:

You may be a small stone, Peter, but on this other large rock, I will build my Church.

But what happens if the passage is synthetic parallelism instead? In that case, Jesus would be saying:

You may look like a small stone, Peter, but on the large rock that you really are, I will build my Church.

So the passage can be taken in more than one way. If it’s antithetic parallelism, Jesus is diminishing Peter. But if it’s synthetic parallelism, Jesus is building Peter up.

This possibility just never occurred to me at the time.

 

What the Words Meant

Something else that I wasn’t aware of was what petros and petra meant in first century Greek.

I hadn’t yet studied the language, and so I just assumed the authors I’d been reading were correct when they said that petros meant small stone and petra meant large rock.

But as I started reading commentaries by actual scholars, I discovered that this was not the case in first century Greek.

Language changes over time, and so it’s not enough to look at what a word once meant. You have to look at what it means at the point in time that’s under discussion.

For example, back in the 1500s, the English word awful used to mean awe-inspiring or awesome, something that made you full of awe—something that really impressed you.

But by the 1800s—and still today—awful means something bad or unpleasant. Like if you say, “That new flavor of soda tastes awful,” you mean it’s very unpleasant or even disgusting.

So if you’re listening to Isaac Watts’ hymn Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne, you need to take into account the fact it was written in the early 1700s, so it means “Before Jehovah’s Awe-Inspiring Throne,” not “Before Jehovah’s Disgusting or Unpleasant Throne.”

Well, something similar happened with the Greek words for rocks and stones. As the Protestant scholar D.A. Carson explains in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary:

Although it is true that petros and petra can mean [small] “stone” and [large] “rock” respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry (Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Matthew 16:18).

So there had been a size distinction between petros and petra in some early Greek poetry—prior to the time of Christ. But by the first century, when the Gospel of Matthew was written, they meant the same thing.

I thus came to realize that the foundations of the argument I had made against Peter being the rock were crumbling.

Peter could still be the rock if you take the passage as involving synthetic parallelism between petros and petra, and the two terms didn’t even mean different things when the Gospel of Matthew was written.

Some people point out that Jesus probably was not speaking Greek here but Aramaic, and that in Aramaic the same word was likely used twice. Jesus would have said,

You are kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my Church.

And that’s how the translation known as the Pshitta—which is in the Syriac language related to Aramaic—renders the passage.

The problem is that we don’t have Jesus’ original words in Aramaic, so this argument isn’t decisive. It’s based on scholarly speculation about what they would have said, but we don’t know for 100% that this is what the wording was.

Still, the Greek words petra and petros didn’t mean different things at the time the Gospel of Matthew was written.

That didn’t prove that Peter is the rock. In my mind, it could go either way. But I was now less certain what to think about the passage.

 

The Moment Everything Changed

But then I came to the moment when everything changed. There I was, reading Evangelical Catholics, and I came to the part where Deacon Fournier had a quotation from Matthew 16.

It was then that I noticed something I had never seen before.

[Jesus] said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”

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 gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

Up to now, I’d based my argument on the discussion leading up to what Jesus says to Peter, which was about Jesus’ own identity. But I had not focused carefully on the statements Jesus makes to Peter:

“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 gates of Hades 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.”

In particular, I noticed the last statement that Jesus made to Peter: “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” That’s clearly a blessing on Peter.

I mean, how blessed would you feel if Jesus gave you an honor like that?

And the first statement that Jesus makes to Peter—“Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah!”—that’s explicitly a blessing on Peter.

So what about the middle statement—“And I tell you, you are Peter”?

The way I’d always taken that—based on antithetic parallelism—was that Jesus was diminishing Peter by telling him he’s just a small, insignificant stone.

But if you look at the context, the second statement is sandwiched between the first and the third, and both of those are clearly blessings.

And that wouldn’t make any sense. It would be like Jesus saying, “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah! You’re totally insignificant. Here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven!”

So I realized that—if we read Scripture in context, which is what Protestant scholars just as much as Catholic scholars recognize we need to do—then if the context of that second statement is a blessing on Peter—as is clearly the case here—then that second statement itself must be a blessing on Peter.

Thus Jesus is not diminishing Peter here.

• He builds Peter up in the first statement by declaring him blessed.
• He builds Peter up in the third statement by giving him the keys to the kingdom.
• And so he’s building Peter up when he declares him the rock.

This is so obvious that you don’t even need to go to the original languages to see it. It’s obvious even in translation.

When I realized that, I realized I had the tie-breaker in how to interpret this passage.

Previously, I’d concluded Peter might or might not be the rock, but now I recognized that he definitely is.

 

What Jesus Goes on to Say

But that’s not all I noticed about this passage. I soon noticed that each of the 3 statements Jesus makes to Peter has an expansion, and each expansion has 2 parts.

Statement	Expansion
	Part 1	Part 2
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 gates of Hades 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.

For example, the first statement Jesus makes to Peter—“Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jona!”—that’s expanded by “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

The first part of the expansion is “For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you,” and the second part is “but my Father who is in heaven.”

When we come to the second statement—or “And I tell you, you are Peter”—the first part of the expansion is “and on this rock I will build my Church” and the second part is “and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

Finally, with the third statement—“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven”—the first part of the expansion is “and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,” and the second part is “and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

So Jesus’ address to Peter is essentially a cluster of smaller statements. There are 3 basic statements, each of which has a 2-part expansion, for a total of 9.

And again, you don’t have to go to the original languages for this. It’s so obvious that you can easily spot it even in translation.

Now, after I noticed that the initial statements all need to be blessings on Peter, I noticed something else.

If you look at the first statement—“Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah”—the expansion explains that. Peter is blessed because no man—no flesh—revealed Jesus’ identity to him but God himself revealed this to Peter.

So “for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven” explains the declaration that Peter is blessed.

Similarly, if you look at the third statement—“I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven”—the expansion also explains that.

Part of what it means to have the keys of the kingdom is that what Peter binds on Earth will be bound in heaven, and what Peter looses on Earth will be loosed in heaven.

So again, the expansion explains the initial statement.

Thus, we should assume that the second statement—“And I tell you, you are Peter”—is also explained by its 2-part expansion.

So “You are Peter” is explained by “And on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

This again makes it clear that Peter is the rock.

 

Implications

Once I realized that Peter really is the rock and that this is obvious if you give the text a careful reading, I immediately had to change my views.

I basically pivoted on the spot—in a matter of seconds—and said, “Okay, Catholics are right about Peter being the rock on which the Church is built.”

But that’s when the thought came back to me that, if Peter is the rock, then he’s the chief apostle. I mean, Jesus formally appointed him as the chief apostle in Matthew 16. He said the Church is built on him.

And that means that once Jesus goes back to heaven, Peter is in charge in the earthly Church.

But the person who is in charge of the earthly Church while Jesus is in heaven is a description of the office of the pope.

So I had to conclude that Catholics were right that Peter was the first pope.

That didn’t tell me whether there were meant to be any later popes—that was a separate question.

But this was the moment everything changed for me theologically.

I realized that if Catholics could be right about Peter being the first pope, they could be right about other things, too.

And so I needed to review my beliefs with an open mind toward whether Catholics might be right. I needed to give the issues a serious, open-minded consideration and not just fall back on what was comfortable for me.

At the time, I was in grad school, so I spent basically the next year coasting in my classes. I still got good grades—well, straight A’s—but where I was really putting in my major effort was in going back through all of the categories of systematic theology with an open mind toward the Catholic view.

By the time the year was up, I’d seen the evidence proved the Catholic position correct over and over again, and I realized I needed to become Catholic.

And there’s a story to that, too!

If you’d like to read about it, you can read my conversion story—“A Triumph and a Tragedy”—at my website, JimmyAkin.com.

 

Summary

In any event, it turned out that my initial belief that Jesus’ identity as the Christ is what the Church is built on is not what Jesus was telling Peter.

The Church is built on Jesus in several senses—as indicated in several passages in the New Testament.

But that is not what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 16.

If he were, then he would have to be diminishing Peter—in keeping with antithetic parallelism—but synthetic parallelism is also a possibility.

Further, the terms petros and petra did not mean different things in first century Greek. They were synonyms.

Then there is the fact that each of the 3 basic statements Jesus makes to Peter is a blessing on him:

• “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah” is a blessing on Peter
• “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven” is a blessing on Peter
• And so “And I tell you, you are Peter” is also a blessing on Peter

In addition, each of these blessings is explained by the words that follow it:

• “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah” is explained by the fact that God has revealed Jesus’ identity to him—that’s why Peter is blessed
• “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven” is explained by the fact Peter will be able to bind and loose
• And “You are Peter” is explained by “and on this rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”

So, once again, Peter is the rock.

Now, there’s more to say about all this—and we’ll talk about that in future episodes. But those are stories for other days.

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If you like this content, you can help me out by liking, commenting, writing a review, sharing the podcast, and subscribing

If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and hit the bell notification so that you always get notified when I have a new video

And you can also help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!