On this Rock: Peter is the First Pope

James Akin

I read a book by a Catholic author who gave a long quote from Matthew 16 in his section on the pope. In this passage Christ says, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church." Up to this time I had always thought the rock on which the Church was built is the revelation that Jesus is the Christ, and I could argue this position well. As my eyes scanned the passage, I noticed for the first time a structural feature in the text which required that Peter be the rock.

In Matthew 16:17-19 Jesus makes three statements to Peter: (a) "Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah," (b) "You are Peter," and (c) "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven." The first statement is clearly a blessing, something which builds Peter up and magnifies him. Christ declares him blessed because he received a special revelation from God.

The third statement is also a blessing: Christ declares that he will give Peter the keys to the kingdom. This is clearly a beatitude, something that magnifies and builds Peter up.

And if Christ's first and third statements to Peter are blessings, the middle statement, in its immediate context, also must be a blessing.

This was a problem, because in order to defend the view that Peter is not the rock on which the Church is built, I had to appeal to a minor difference in the Greek text between the word used for Peter () and the word used for rock ().

According to standard anti-Catholic interpretation, means "a small stone" while means "a large mass of rock," and the statement "You are Peter [] ," should be interpreted as something that stresses Peter's insignificance.

Evangelicals picture Christ as having meant, "You are a small stone, Peter, but I will build my Church on this great mass of rock which is the revelation of my identity."

One problem with this interpretation, a problem that many Protestant Bible scholars will admit,[1] is that while and did have these meanings in some ancient Greek poetry, the distinction was gone by the first century, when Matthew's Gospel was written. At that time the two words meant the same thing: a rock.

Another problem is that when he addressed Peter, Jesus was not speaking Greek, but Aramaic, a cousin language of Hebrew. In Aramaic there is no difference between the two words which in Greek are rendered as and . They are both ; that's why Paul often refers to Peter as [2] (cf. 1 Cor. 15:5, Gal. 2:9).

What Christ actually said was, "You are and on this I will build my Church."

But even if the words and did have different meanings, the Protestant reading of two different "rocks" would not fit the context. The second statement to Peter would be something which minimized or diminished him, pointing out his insignificance, with the result that Jesus would be saying, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar- Jonah! (You are an insignificant little pebble.) Here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven!" Such an incongruous sequence of statements would have been not merely odd, but inexplicable. (Many Protestant commentators recognize this and do their best to deny the obvious sense of this passage, however implausible their explanations may be.)

I also noticed that the Lord's three statements to Peter had two parts, and the second parts explain the first. The reason Peter was "blessed" was because "flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven" (v.17). The meaning of the name change, "You are Rock," is explained by the promise, "On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (v. 18). The purpose of the keys is explained by Jesus' commission, "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (v.19). A careful reading of these three statements, paying attention to their immediate context and interrelatedness, clearly shows that Peter was the rock about which Jesus spoke.

These and other considerations showed me that the standard anti-Catholic interpretations of this text could not stand up to careful biblical scrutiny. They were forced to wrench the middle statement to Peter out of its context.

I reversed my interpretation and concluded that Peter was indeed the rock on which Jesus built his Church. This is what an unbiased reader looking at the grammar and literary structure of the text would conclude.

If Peter in fact was the rock Jesus was talking about, that meant he was the head apostle (the Greek text reveals that Peter alone was singled out for this praise, and he alone was given the special authority symbolized by the keys of the kingdom of heaven, though other disciples shared in a more general sense Peter's authority of binding and loosing [cf. Matt. 18:18]). If he was the head apostle, then once Christ had ascended into heaven, Peter would have been the earthly head of the Church, subordinate to Christ's heavenly headship.

And if Peter was the earthly head of the Church, he fit the most basic definition of the office of the pope. As a result, I had to conclude that Catholics were right in saying that Peter was the first pope.