Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory

The New Testament Apostle in the Early Church

Bockmuehl, Markus

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441239600
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

After Jesus, Peter is the most frequently mentioned individual both in the Gospels and in the New Testament as a whole. He was the leading disciple, the "rock" on which Jesus would build his church. How can we know so little about this formative figure of the early church? World-renowned New Testament scholar Markus Bockmuehl introduces the New Testament Peter by asking how first- and second-century sources may be understood through the prism of "living memory" among the disciples of the apostolic generation and the students of those disciples. He argues that early Christian memory of Peter underscores his central role as a bridge-building figure holding together the diversity of first-century Christianity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Bockmuehl applies cutting-edge scholarship to the question of the history and traditions of this important but strangely elusive figure. Bockmuehl provides fresh insight into the biblical witness and early Christian tradition that New Testament students and professors will value.

1

Simon Peter . . . in Living Memory?

It is one of the inscrutable ironies of Christianity’s humble beginnings that we know so little about Jesus of Nazareth’s leading disciple—the one identified in the Gospel of Matthew as the “rock” on whom Jesus would build his church, listed in later Christian tradition as Rome’s first bishop, and one of its two apostolic martyrs at the hands of Emperor Nero. But who was this man, and what happened to him?

Any conventional quest for a “historical Peter” runs into the ground rather swiftly. There are of course a variety of relevant early Christian sources, both from the first century and from the second; a basic inventory is not in principle difficult to compile.[1] Yet they remain remarkably vague or silent about many of the things we would like to know about this apostle’s origin, character, missionary career, and death. Why would these sources show such a lack of interest in the fate of such a prominent apostle? This can only leave the modern reader frustrated and mystified. The historical Peter himself left virtually nothing in writing, and even less of archaeological interest—whether in his native Galilee, in Jerusalem or Caesarea, in Antioch or Corinth. Only Rome may be a partial exception, though here too we soon find reasons aplenty to ask probing questions.

Among the numerous extant writings in his name, there are of course two short and remarkably different letters of uncertain date and origin in the NT. Beyond that, we have a bewildering range of apocryphal sources, styled as written by or about him, dating from the second through (at least) the sixth century.

The authenticity of these documents remains contested among scholars of diverse critical presuppositions. On perusing the scholarly secondary literature, it seems hard to dispel the impression that the vast majority of leading specialists on both sides of the Atlantic now regard neither of the NT’s two Petrine letters as coming from Peter’s own pen. As for the Gospel of Mark, almost universally accepted as the earliest of the canonical Gospels, it too is widely held to have no demonstrable or even plausible link with Simon Peter—despite persistent claims to the contrary in antiquity. For the past century, a steady stream of scholars have continued to deny the possibility that Peter himself had any historical link with Rome at all.[2]

Some consider Peter’s relative obscurity in the early sources as an accurate reflection of a historical figure of only marginal importance for the formation of earliest Christianity. After all, the NT seems to suggest that the apostle Paul had far greater reach as a traveling missionary, let alone as the author of at least a number of authentically transmitted letters.

These are certainly significant and worthwhile cautions. Nevertheless, to underrate Peter’s significance has the effect of rendering key historical quandaries about the origins of Christianity more or less unanswerable. Where were the continuities of either personality or ideological substance that allowed the Jesus movement to survive the death of its founder and early dispersal of its leadership from its heartland in Galilee and Jerusalem? Christianity, of course, did fragment and scatter, but without losing its asserted or perceived cohesion. A century after Pentecost, the widely scattered Christian communities were highly diverse in belief and practice, a fact that is also reflected in the increasing acceptance around this time of not one but four authoritative Gospel accounts. Given the history of radical disruption, opposition, and change, one may marvel that Christianity survived this long at all. But one of the features that most consistently characterizes and grounds that phenomenon is the recourse to Simon Peter, rather more than to Paul, as an anchor figure or key reference point for the literature and traditions of virtually all these diverse groups—including, for example, all four canonical and several noncanonical Gospels.

In this connection, as well, it is surely significant that Peter is, after Jesus, the most frequently mentioned individual both in the Gospels and in the NT as a whole. As even Paul affirms, Peter is the first of the Twelve to witness the resurrection and a paradigmatic “pillar” apostle.[3] Peter appears in the Gospels without fail as the spokesman of the apostles and as the first named in every list of disciples. Acts makes him the first preacher of the gospel to both Jews and gentiles. This is the case even though his image clearly differs in subtle but significant ways between the Gospels: Mark sees and hears Jesus through Peter’s eyes and ears; for Matthew, Peter is the messianic congregation’s bedrock and gatekeeper; for Luke, the pioneering convert, evangelist, and strengthener of believers; for John, the spokesman and shepherd of Jesus’s flock. Though at times brutally candid about Peter’s flaws, the NT authors depict no other individual whose personal or ecclesiological stature approaches that of Simon Peter. If one takes the cumulative effect of these insights seriously, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that in key respects Peter’s role evokes the apostolic leader par excellence.[4] Even where this profile is associated with positions of controversy or dispute, a good many of the great historical and theological puzzles of Christian origins remain unintelligible without an adequate understanding of Simon Peter in his relationships with both the Jewish and the gentile missions. Especially in Protestant NT scholarship, Peter has long been, as Martin Hengel liked to put it, quite simply the underestimated disciple.[5] For anyone seeking to understand why the church continued to develop and grow beyond the lifetime of its founder, it is worth noting the early Christian affirmation that Jesus entrusted his message and memory not to the whim of anonymous tradition but to named apostolic witnesses who went on to encourage his flock—and to take his gospel to the world. For almost all early Christian writers of whatever persuasion, the first and chief among these witnesses is Simon Peter.

Why History Is Always More Than Archaeology

But can we really say anything historically meaningful about Peter if we have no significant written sources extant from his lifetime? All we receive from the first century is a small handful of contested references in Paul’s letters, the four Gospels, a truncated account in Acts that ends on something of a whimper (12:17–18; 15:6–11, 14), and a couple of very different “Petrine” NT letters that strike many as inauthentic. If we limit our quest to history reconstructed from NT evidence alone, we will be rather like the bewildered prison guards of Acts 12:18, left to wonder “what became of Peter”—and unable to account for his unlikely escape from obscurity to prominence.

To think about how we might address this problem, consider for a moment what it is we are looking for when we study any person—especially a dead person. The Greek historian Herodotus famously attributes to the Athenian lawmaker Solon the view that one should call no man happy until he dies (Hist. 1.32). But while that appears in Herodotus as advice for a philosophy of the good life, there is also a sense in which it is true for historiography: the dead are the only people we can have any confidence of knowing in the round, better than through snapshots of a moving target. In the case of someone still alive, our knowledge is only ever partial, and unless we have a long personal history with them, we rarely get more than a freeze-frame. Did contemporaries ever know the “real” historical Caesar or Caligula, Cromwell or Churchill? But there is the rub of our problem: even if you could take a video camera back to the lifetime of a historical figure, you might discover additional facts, but it is far from clear that you would gain the measure of the real person.

For much of its history, modern biblical scholarship conceived of its work in largely archaeological terms, shoveling away the mounds of piety, dogma, and ritual to discover, concealed somewhere underneath, the “real thing,” the pristine first-century facts. To get at the truth we need the earliest sources, and the earliest layers of the earliest sources; the later our material, the more corrupted it is. This was the classic conception of OT and NT study at the beginning of the twentieth century: the real Bible lies buried beneath the strata of centuries of tradition and interpretation, and it is historical criticism’s task to recover it.[6] But for all the well-intentioned concern for dispassionate objectivity, it also began to dawn on thoughtful scholars during the last century that the more we keep deconstructing our sources, the taller our speculations become—and the more we are in danger of finding in them mainly ourselves and our view of the world. Most famously, this discovery was originally the upshot of the nineteenth century’s so-called Quest of the Historical Jesus, which Albert Schweitzer found wanting because the Jesus it uncovered was nothing but a liberal Protestant drawn in its own image[7]—wholly moralizing rather than thoroughly and irretrievably eschatological (Schweitzer 2000).

More recently, scholars have shown a willingness to recognize that the so-called New and Third Quests for the historical Jesus have been in many ways equally elusive, with an ever-broadening range of contradictory Jesuses. Paula Fredriksen (2000, xiii–xiv), among others, has commented on the bewildering fact that

in recent scholarship, Jesus has been imagined and presented as a type of first-century shaman figure; as a Cynic-sort of wandering wise man; as a visionary radical and social reformer preaching egalitarian ethics to the destitute; as a Galilean regionalist alienated from the elitism of Judean religious conventions (like Temple and Torah); as a champion of national liberation and, on the contrary, as its opponent and critic—on and on. All these figures are presented with rigorous academic argument and methodology; all are defended with appeals to the ancient data. Debate continues at a roiling pitch, and consensus—even on issues so basic as what constitutes evidence and how to construe it—seems a distant hope.

Reactions to these insights about the elusiveness of early Christian history have been diffuse, perplexing, and contradictory. In response, some would merrily redouble their efforts to construe NT scholarship as “the task of removing from an original painting the work of later hands”—as one recently deceased, influential Oxford don liked to put it, apparently without a hint of irony or self-doubt.[8] To others, not unreasonably, this seems a desperate case of whistling in the dark. At the other end of the spectrum, some of a more postmodern inclination have advocated giving up any pretense that we can or should prioritize primary over secondary literature, of ancient sources over their past or present interpreters. Some would now say that historiography, and the historians themselves, can be the only proper subject of the study of history. In the end, we are told, history is nothing but texts about texts, and we should desist from misguided and dangerous delusions about “truth.”

These are significant and sobering admonitions. The leading American scholar Dale Allison, for his part, has been prompted by what he calls “the enduring discord of the experts” to articulate the provocative suggestion that since history remains irretrievably outside our grasp, our irreconcilable reconstructions must inevitably exist in an uneasy coincidence of opposites with the affirmations of faith (Allison 2009, 8–14). Yet if this is so for Jesus, how much more must it be the case for far more tenuously attested figures like Simon Peter?

But in the experienced world of love and suffering, we do not have the luxury of disregarding questions of truth and justice, regardless of our political or religious posture. As the historians of twentieth-century totalitarianism have amply shown, the past cannot simply be reduced to a set of conflicting vested opinions about the past. Historians may of course offer diverse accounts, but they cannot collapse these into the past itself. All history that matters—of genocide, for instance, or of liberation from oppression—is necessarily perspectival, offering a point of view, a way of stringing together and only thus of beginning to make sense of the mass of brute facts. On the other hand, such history is never merely “discourse” or “narrative.”[9] Cutting-edge critics of the late twentieth century frequently generated readings of texts understood primarily as the construal of subtexts, suspicions, and subversions—and especially of discourses of power. Too frequently, however, this potentially fine-tuned archaeological tool was wildly misappropriated, and so, ironically, some scholars (sometimes the very same critics) moved from overconfidence in their stratigraphy of the past to the opposite extreme of bulldozing their archaeological tell in the name of ideological advocacy of one kind or another. Needless to say, understanding of the past was, in such exercises, not aided but crushed and brutalized. Workable historical optics require of us both criticism and self-criticism. Without this, we degrade the past achievements and sufferings of real individuals in favor of what our successors will soon enough expose as ideologically ephemeral, unself-critical twitterings.

Understanding What Happened from What Happened Next

But is there any alternative? Is it not painfully obvious now that all historical knowledge is inevitably relative and perspectival, that both sources and interpreters are necessarily shaped by their own cultural and personal agendas, and that therefore an important part of all interpretation must be to deconstruct our sources for their ideological and power interests? We should not deny the force of that question. And yet the Western philosophical and Judeo-Christian theological traditions are at one in affirming the overarching importance of truth and of a world in space and time that is, in important respects, both ordered and intelligible. This in turn supports the conviction that the quest to understand the past, though inescapably difficult and fraught, is neither pointless nor impossible.

One idea that has become enormously influential in recent years is the value of studying the impact and aftermath of historical persons, texts, and events, either for their own sake or, somewhat less commonly, as a potential clue to the original meanings. This is sometimes called “effective history” or, using the German term, Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effects), typically associated with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (e.g., Gadamer 2004, 299–306). It is a way of recognizing the perspectival nature of historical events and our knowledge of them, in part by acknowledging the causes and effects that link events and texts to their aftermath (and ultimately to us).

In NT scholarship, a pioneer in this recently burgeoning field is the Swiss scholar Ulrich Luz, as seen especially in his great commentary on Matthew (Luz 2001–7). He has compiled a marvelous wealth of evidence illustrating the subsequent textual, artistic, and cultural effects of the text; but perhaps the most important achievement is his reflection on the nature of reception history and what it can contribute to biblical interpretation. Many other scholars have followed in recent years.

Luz memorably compares the biblical interpreter and historian to an environmental scientist analyzing the water of a great river while seated in a small boat that is itself carried and driven along by that same river.[10] This analogy, I believe, captures something important about the context of historical scholarship today.[11] More specifically, it also adumbrates the fact that the NT authors and actors themselves were part of a living process of memory and tradition, about which we might fairly expect to gain valuable understanding by sampling the river a little way—a generation or two—downstream of the founding events.

To be sure, that image is not without epistemological and theological weaknesses, on which I have commented more fully elsewhere (Bockmuehl 2006). It is, on the one hand, quite vulnerable to the challenge of a radical relativization: can such analysis really tell us anything worth knowing? Theology, on the other hand, poses the rather different epistemological challenge that this particular river may well scrutinize the scientist much more effectively than could ever be the case vice versa (cf. Heb. 4:12). Edwyn Hoskyns rightly warned that interpreting the Bible is a bit like the scientist staring down a microscope only to find, rather alarmingly, that instead of the lifeless piece of tissue he expected, there is God peering back at him and declaring him to be a sinner (quoted in Barrett 1995, 57)!

That testing of the river is, to be sure, an untidy exercise. We should not expect assured results or unambiguous eyewitness evidence, let alone proof of the historical reliability of the Gospels. The contributory streams of tradition, testimony, or memory, like those of rivers, cannot be dissected or picked apart. Memory’s DNA has no Y chromosome that permits reliable tracking through the generations. And it is certainly right to be cautious about a sort of evidential positivism when dealing with claims o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Peter in Canon and Memory
• Part 2: Peter in the “Living Memory” of East and West
• Part 3: History and Memory—Two Case Studies
• Concluding Observations
• Works Cited
• Scripture and Ancient Writings Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Notes
• Back Cover