Was Peter the first pope?

The rock and the keys

At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asks his disciples who they say he is, and Simon answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Only Matthew records the reply.

I also tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give to you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven; and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven.

In Greek it is a pun: Petros, Peter, and petra, rock. In Aramaic the name was Kepha, which is why John’s Gospel and Paul call him Cephas (John 1:42; Galatians 2:9). The keys echo Isaiah, where a royal steward receives “the key of David’s house” to open and to shut (Isaiah 22:22). To bind and to release were rabbinic terms for forbidding and permitting, and in Matthew 18:18 Jesus gives that same power to the disciples together.

Peter in the New Testament

Peter is clearly first among the Twelve. Matthew’s list begins, “The first, Simon, who is called Peter” (Matthew 10:2). After Easter he is told three times to feed Jesus’s sheep (John 21:15–17), and in Acts he leads the Jerusalem believers.

The picture has limits, though. At the Jerusalem meeting about AD 49 it is James, the brother of Jesus, who gives the ruling (Acts 15:19). Paul names “James and Cephas and John” as the pillars (Galatians 2:9), and once opposed Peter to his face at Antioch (Galatians 2:11). No book of the New Testament says he led the church in Rome, or names a successor.

The first bishops of Rome

Rome’s earliest records point to a church led by a group. 1 Clement, a letter from the Roman church around AD 96, is written in the name of the whole church and speaks of overseers and elders in the plural. Writing to Rome about 110, Ignatius of Antioch greets no bishop there, though he names bishops in other cities. The first list of Rome’s bishops comes from Irenaeus, around 180: Peter and Paul founded the church and handed the office to Linus, then came Anacletus, then Clement, down to Eleutherius, the twelfth (Against Heresies 3.3.3). Many historians, the Catholic Eamon Duffy among them, think Rome had no single bishop until the middle of the second century.

Where the word pope comes from

Pope comes from the Greek papas, father. It was long used for many bishops, and the head of the Coptic Church in Alexandria is still called Pope today. In the West the word slowly narrowed to the bishop of Rome, and in 1075 Gregory VII declared it a name unique in the world. When Catholics call Peter the first pope, they mean the first in a line of office, not a man who used the title.

Three readings today

• Catholics. Peter received primacy from Christ, and the bishops of Rome inherit it, as the First Vatican Council defined in 1870. A mosaic portrait of every pope, from Peter on, runs around the walls of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.
• Orthodox. Rome held a primacy of honor, first among sister churches, not rule over them.
• Protestants. Most read this rock as Peter’s confession of faith, or as Christ himself, the one foundation Paul names (1 Corinthians 3:11). Some, like the Lutheran scholar Oscar Cullmann, accept that the rock is Peter but see no succession.

His death in Rome and his shrine under St Peter’s Basilica are told in How did Saint Peter die?