in him from the first, and at his first calling even, with reference to his subsequent activity, bestowed upon him the name Cephas, in the later Hebrew dialect, or Peter, as translated into Greek, signifying Rock (John i: 43, Mark iii: 16). This name of honor he confirmed to him a year later, and connected with it the remarkable promise which has become an occasion of strife in church history. Whilst other people took Jesus at best for a forerunner of the Messiah, and so for a mere man only however highly distinguished, Simon apprehended and confessed first with the full energy of living faith the great central mystery, the. fundamental article of Christianity, namely the Messiahship of his Master, the absolute union of the divine and human and the fulness of all life in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; in an hour of crisis and sifting, in which many became apostate, he proclaimed, in the name of all his fellow disciples, from the inmost sanctuary of experience and with the emphasis of the most sure and firm conviction, this good confession: "Thou art the Christ" the Anointed of God, the long promised and earnestly expected Messiah-" the Son of the living God!" (Matth. xvi: 16, comp. Mark viii: 29, Luke ix: 20); or according to the somewhat fuller text of John: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God!”. (John vi: 66-69). On the ground of this primitive christian creed, this triumphant saving confession of faith, which flesh and blood had not revealed to him, that is, neither his own nature nor any other man, as formerly his brother Andrew (John i: 42, 43), but the Father in heaven, the Lord pronounced him blessed and said: "Thou art Peter (Rock, a man of rock,) and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matth. xvi: 18). The rich word-play of the Greek original, σὺ ἐι Πέτρος καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτη τη πέτρα, can be fully rendered again only in French: "tu es Pierre, et sur cette pierre."' 'Our Lord of course employed the Aramaan ', which was translated by érpos instead of the more usual mérpa, and for the reason doubtless that the name of a man was to be expressed, and that the masculine form was otherwise in use for such purpose (Leont. Schol. 18, Fabric. biblioth. gr. xi, 334). With the classics erpos signifies properly a stone, mérpa a large rock. This distinction however is not steadily observed, and in the passage before us it is quite disregarded, since the Greek word must correspond with the Hebrew original which always means rock. In figurative speech érpa is employed by the classics also to denote firmness and stability, for instance by Homer, Odyss. xvii, 463, but more frequently for hardness of heart and want of feeling. In the interpretation of this passage, two false views are to be avoided. On the one side the promise may not be disjoined from the confession, and attached simply to the person of Simon as such. For, in the first place, the name "Peter" v: 18, stands opposed to the original name "Simon Bar-jona" v: 17, and denotes thus the new spiritual man, into which the old Simon was partly transformed already and partly still to be transformed more and more, by the Spirit of Christ. And then again, the Lord himself directly after says to the same apostle, (Matth. xvi: 23), indulging his natural spirit: "Get thee behind me, Satan (evil counsellor, adversary,) thou art an offence unto me; for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men." He had undertaken namely in truth with the most well meaning and good natured intention, but still with shortsighted carnality and presumption, to dissuade his Master from the way of the cross, which was indispensably required for the salvation of the world.-Just as unreasonble is it, on the other side, when many Protestant theologians sunder the petra" from the previous "Peter," and make it to refer wholly to the confession in v 16. For this plainly destroys the beautiful and significant play of the words, as well as the sense of zavry which necessarily refers to the "Peter" going just before. And besides, the Church of Christ is not built upon abstract doctrine and confession, but upon living persons as the bearers of truth. Rather the words " Thou art a Rock, &c.," are by all means to be referred indeed to Peter, but only to him as he comes before us in the immediate connexion of the text, that is to the renovated Peter, so far as the mystery of the Incarnation has come to be revealed to him by God (v: 16 and 17), to Peter the courageous confessor of the Saviour's Divinity, in one word to Peter in Christ; and the sense is accordingly: "I appoint thee as the living witness of this fundamental truth which thou hast now acknowledged, to the first and leading agency in the founding of my Church." Our Lord describes thus the official character of this apostle, and prophesies to him his future_place in church history. The believing and boldly witnessing Peter appears here as the foundation stone, Christ himself as the builder of that glorious spiritual structure, which no hostile power can destroy. In the absolute sense Christ is indeed called the foundation (9μior) of the Church, besides which no other can be Then we should have in Greek rather: inì ci ròv æérpov. laid (1 Cor. iii: 11); but in a secondary or relative sense so are the Apostles also, whom he employed as his instruments. Hence it is said of the saints Eph. ii: 20, that they are built " upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets (ἐπὶ τ. θεμελίῳ τῶν ἀποστό λων κ. xp.), Jesus Christ being himself the chief corner-stone; and hence also the twelve foundations (0εμéo) of the new Jerusalem bear the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Rev. xxi: 14). If now the Apostles in general are the human founders of the Church, under the guidance of course of the Holy Ghost, as Christ's ministers and "laborers together with God" (1 Cor. iii: 9), the true Builder-this holds of Peter, as their representative and leader, in a sense altogether peculiar. This view is supported accordingly also by the Acts of the Apostles, the first twelve chapters of which form a continuous commentary on the prophetical word of Christ Matth. xvi: 18. If even before the Resurrection Peter stands at the head of the apostolic college,' he is still more plainly after it, till Paul comes on the stage, the leading spirit, the acting and speaking organ of the entire christian body. He plays the principal part at the election of Matthias to fill the place of Judas, on the day of Pentecost, at the healing of the lame man, and in the punishment of Ananias; he it was, who more than any one else extended the Church by word and deed in Judea and Samaria, boldly defended the christian cause before the sanhedrim, and refused to be deterred from doing so even by chains and bonds; and as he stood at the head of the Jewish mission, so also did he lay the foundation of the mission among the Gentiles by the baptism of Cornelius without previous circumcision. In short, on to the apostolic council at Jerusalem, a. 50 (Acts xv), Peter is without question the most important personage in the church, and asserts a primacy, which so clearly belongs to him by his natural qualifications as well as by the prophetical word of his Master, and is so fully confirmed by manifold facts in the sacred narrative, that only the most blind party spirit can explain, without in the least justifying however, the headstrong humor which affects to deny it. But we meet with no trace ever of hierar 'As appears from every list given of the Apostles, as well as from many other passages: Matth. x, 2 ff. xiv, 28, xvi, 16–19, xvii, 4, 25, 26, xviii, 21 xix, 27, Mark iii, 16 ff., viii. 29, ix, 2, xiv, 23, Luke vi, 14, ff., xii, 41, xxii, 31 ff., John vi, 68, xxi, 15 ff., &c. * Of course nothing follows still from this concession for the known pretensions of the Papacy, since these rest not simply by any means on the fact here noticed, but on two other suppositions also which are not to be chical pretension on this ground in the later history of Peter, who describes himself rather quite modestly as a "co-presbyter and witness of the sufferings of Christ, and exhorts the elders to feed the flock of Christ, not in the spirit of covetousness and ambition, but with the pattern of a godly life (1 Peter v: 1-3). Then again, the supremacy never came into collision with the independence of the other apostles, in their proper spheres of labor, and did not pretend to keep pace with the universal spread of the church, or at least did not stretch itself with like authority over every part. From the council of Jerusalem on, Peter appears no longer, but James, at the head of the congregation in that city and of the strict Jewish-christian party. the field of the mission to the Gentiles, and of the first literature of christianity, he was completely overshadowed by the later called Paul (comp. 1 Cor. xv, 10); who sustains to him, according to the representation of the same book of Acts that places Peter so high in the beginning, a similar relation, so to speak, with that of the rising sun to the setting moon. At all events his position with regard to him was one of the most perfect independence, as is shown abundantly by the first two chapters even of the Epistle to the Galatians. The last stadium in the pro proved directly from the New Testament. The first is, that the primacy of Peter allowed transmission. This however is not merely without a syllable of mention, but is at once also rendered improbable by the fact that all other surnames given to the apostles express purely personal gifts and personal relations-as the epithet "Sons of Thunder" given to James and John (Mark iii, 17), the "Zealot" to the other Simon (Luke vi, 15, Acts i, 13), and the "Traitor" to Judas Iscariot (Luke vi, 16). That the same held good of the peculiar position of Peter, was a widely prevalent view in the ancient Church. So Firmilianus, bishop of Neo-cæsarea in Cappadocia, a cotemporary of Cyprian, among other things reproaches the Roman bishop Stephen in the name of the Asiatic bishops with wishing to bring in, instead of the one rock on which Christ had built his Church, many rocks, by extending the prerogative of Peter to all his successors (Cyp. Epist. 75. Atque ego in hac parte juste indignor ad hanc tam apertam et manifestam Stephani stultitiam, quod, qui sic de episcopatus sui jure gloriatur et se successionem Petri tenere contendit, super quem fundamenta Ecclesiæ collocata sunt, multas alias petras inducat). The second supposi tion of the Papacy which cannot be proved, is that Peter actually did transmit his primacy, and this not say to the bishop of Antioch, or of Jerusalem where at least he spent many years, but to the bishop of Rome, where at best he could have held the episcopal office only for a very short time, and this not in the later church sense. Finally however, if it even stood better with both these arguments, there would be a huge difference still, between the purely spiritual superiority of Peter, with his exercise of it, and the ecclesiastico-secular primacy of the Pope in the form in which this is now asserted. 06 gress of the Apostolical Church, finally, after the death of Peter and Paul, it devolved on John properly alone to lead and with his genius to complete. But who besides can even for a moment bear the thought, which flows necessarily from the Roman view of the enduring force of the Petrine primacy, that the beloved disciple, who leaned on the breast of the God-man, was subject to the bishop of Rome, a Linus or a Clemens, as the successor and heir of Peter's authority, or that this last exercised a papal supremacy over the first? The special position which was assigned to Peter had regard thus manifestly to the work of laying the foundation of the Apostolical Church, and there is room to speak of it as of perpetual and universal force by succession, only so far as the gifts of all the other apostles perpetuate themselves in the christian world, and as they may be said, by their past deeds as well as by the unbroken action of their word and spirit, to condition the progressive character of the church in every stage of its history. Peter in Rome. It is the unanimous testimony of tradition that Peter suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero. This testimony was indeed in a short time obscured by all sorts of unhistorical and in part directly contradictory embellishments, and has been abused by the Roman hierarchy in support of boundless pretensions, on which account the truth of it has been at times called in question, out of polemical zeal against the papacy and partly from historical skepticism; but by the great body of Protesant historians we find it always acknowledged as in its main substance at least entitled to credit. We will notice first the main voices 'Particularly by the Hollander Frederick Spanheim, who in his celebrated "Dissertatio de ficta profectione Petri Apostoli in urbem Romam, deque non una traditionis origine," first brought the matter from the year 1679 to a thorough inquiry, and endeavored by critical trial of the evidence to estab lish the doubts in regard to Peter's sojourn at Rome, which had been before thrown out by the Waldenses and certain declared enemies of the Papacy, such as Marsilius of Padua, Michael of Cesena, Matthias Flacius and Claudius Salmasius. He derived the story mainly from the ambition of the Roman Church. 2 Namely by the modern hypercritics, Baur, in several articles of the Tübingen Zeitschrift and in his work on Paul p. 212 ff. and Schwegler, Nachap. Zeitalter, I, p. 30: ff. They derive the story from the jealousy of the Roman Jewish Christians towards the Pauline Gentile Christians, an effort to set the Jewish apostle Peter above Paul. So de Wette, Einl. in's N. T. p. 314. 3 Namely by all the older Reformed theologians who have devoted specia |