Peter Converted Me

One of the most famous passages in the New Testament is in Matthew 16, where Jesus tells Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”

When I was Protestant, I’d always heard that the two words used for rock in this passage—petros and petra—meant “small stone” and “large rock.” I thus interpreted this passage to mean that Jesus was contrasting Peter with the rock. He was saying, in effect, “You may be a small stone, Peter (petros), but on this other large rock (petra), I will build my Church.”

As I discussed last time, I was assuming that Jesus was using what’s called antithetic parallelism in this passage, where two things are contrasted. It never occurred to me that he might have been using what’s known as synthetic parallelism, where one item builds on the other.

If that’s what he was doing, then the passage should be read along these lines: “You may look like a small stone, Peter, but on the large rock that you really are, I will build my Church.”

However, there was another reason to question my original view of the passage, because 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 had just assumed that 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’s 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.”

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.

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.” That’s how the translation known as the Pshitta—which is in the Syriac language, which is 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 sure 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.

Then I came to the moment when everything changed. I was reading a Catholic book that had a quotation from Matthew 16, and it was then that I noticed something I had never seen before.

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.

I now 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.

So the way I’d been taking the second statement 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, the 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 by declaring him to be 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 that Peter might or might not be the rock, but now I recognized that he definitely is.

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

For example, the first statement Jesus makes to Peter—“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah!”—is 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—“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 a cluster of smaller statements. There are three basic statements, each of which has a two-part expansion, for a total of nine. 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.

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 two-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.

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 of 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.

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, 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.