Ask a Theologian IV

Status
Not open for further replies.
Pretty much I mean moral responsibility, but I mean full moral responsibility. A four year old who steals a cookie is in some sense responsible, but he isn't 100% aware of what he's doing.

Basically I meant at what age people have to either do or believe what is required for Salvation (Worded vaguely due to the differing opinions) or face damnation.

I don't think that most churches specify. To widen the issue, does anyone have any clear idea of how old one has to be to have moral responsibility, quite apart from religious questions? I think that we generally think that there are certain conditions that must be fulfilled for someone to have moral responsibility - e.g. they must understand what they are doing, and in borderline cases the question then is simply whether these conditions are fulfilled for that individual. I would say that a sensible approach to the age of responsibility for matters of salvation would be similar.

So Catholics do believe in differing degrees of punishment in Hell?

Makes sense I suppose, but how can there be any such thing as a MILD eternal torment?

Eternity is matter of duration, not of intensity. An eternity of mild headache would be less severe than an eternity of being boiled alive, for example. In the quotation from Dante, an eternity of being aware that you're missing out on heaven is not as bad as an eternity of having this awareness and also being actively punished.

So not official but acceptable?

That's right.

Are you unaware of the Protestant arguments for some reason? You seem to have gone through all the different Catholic arguments, but you didn't even mention the Protestant arguments, perhaps since I'm already aware of them.

I don't know of any Protestant positions that are interestingly different from the ones I mentioned.

Either way, I've never heard of any Protestant saying all babies who die are damned. I have heard before that it depends on the parents, that all babies are saved, that its God's choice, I've even heard it theoretically stated that babies could potentially choose for or against Christ after death, or that their salvation depends on, if they have lived, whether they would have chosen God or not.

No-one says that all babies are damned. My point was that there must be something reprehensible about a theology that says that any babies, or other non-culpable individuals, are damned.

To be Honest, I've never heard any Protestant say baptism has anything to do with it. Most Protestants don't hold water baptism as a prerequesite for Salvation, and most that do hold to believer's baptism anyways. Infant baptism securing their salvation is a Catholic thing I think, not sure if the Orthodox hold it or not.[/QUOTE]

Your argument is wrong, because contemporaneity does not work like that. Two events can only be said to be happening at the same time, if they are also at the same place. In all other cases there can only exactly one reference frame (arbitrarily chosen from an (close to) infinite amount of reference frames), where the events happen at the same time. Generally the most one can say is that the distance between two events is space-like (i.e. there is a reference frame where they happen at the same time, but no reference frame where they happen at the same place) or time-like (you can find a reference frame where events happen at the same place, but there is no reference frame where they happen at the same time). But to do that you need to know the spatial separation between these events.

So unless you want to pinpoint an exact location of heaven in the universe it makes no sense to refer to "now" with respect to heaven, because the definition of "now" also requires a place, which you cannot define. Therefore the statement "Peter is in heaven now" is not false but indeterminate. If heaven was far enough away, you could find a reference frame where this is true.

What you say is right, but I don't think it makes what I said false - it just gives additional reasons why it's correct. Surely, on the basis of what you've said, "Peter is in heaven now" is indeed false when uttered anywhere other than in heaven, or at least tolerably close to heaven for it to be tolerably close to being true (after all, I can say "Peter is in Rome now" even when I'm in London, which is technically not true but as close to being true as makes no difference). The truth value of "Peter is in heaven now" is indeterminate only if it's a live possibility that heaven is right here, and I take it that this is generally not a live possibility.

For a modern conception of God this is even more important, because omnipresence immediately demands atemporality. Or maybe it would be better to talk about omnitemporality (I am probably making up a word here) - omnipresence in time.

I think that's not an uncommon concept in process theology (if process theology is still around - it was fashionable in the 1970s). I also remember Keith Ward arguing for much this view of God in his lectures that I went to as a student.

To clarify, Palamas would have been considered an Aristotlean theologian as well, correct?

I'm not sure to what extent that's the case. Palamas was not, as far as I know, particularly anti-Aristotelian, although he certain opposed the form of Aristotelianism espoused by Barlaam. But I don't know that he was particularly Aristotelian either.

Question: I am aware of the Catholic viewpoint of Salvation ("Outside the Church there is no Salvation" with limited exceptions being the simplified version) but what is the most common Orthodox view?

The "exclusive" teachings of church fathers such as Cyprian and Augustine are part of the Orthodox heritage as well as the Catholic one; obviously they take these teachings to refer to the Orthodox churches rather than the Roman Catholic Church. As I understand it, there is a variety of interpretations within Orthodoxy. On the question of salvation outside the Orthodox churches, I think the general consensus is to leave it up to God and refrain from commenting. There's an interesting book on the subject here which you might find useful to look through.

Do all non-heretical Catholics reject predestination?

No, predestination is part of Catholic teaching, as you can see here. Catholics differ from orthodox Calvinists in that they believe in both predestination (in some sense) and libertarian free will, which is a bit of a paradox, but not necessarily an insoluble one.

If Jesus were alive today, based on what he said in the gospels, what Christian group do you think he'd endorse the most?

As others have said, I think this is an impossible question. If Jesus were alive today I should think he couldn't possibly comprehend any Christian group, let alone rank them by endorsement.

If you take the same question, but instead of Jesus, you use Paul, what Christian group would Paul most likely endorse (In your opinion)?

I think that Paul would be appalled to find that the world had not ended, and this is what would occupy his attention for the most part. He would have to rethink his whole theology. He could probably find a way to do it - just as he successfully rethought it all when it became apparent that most Jews were not going to accept Jesus - but since he was a religious genius and I am not, I don't know what the outcome of this would be or how he would assess the existing churches. My guess is that he would probably most approve of the less institutional Protestant churches - the free and charismatic churches - since they are probably closer to the churches that he knew; however, that assumes that approval would be based on familiarity. No modern church is, or could be, much like a first-century church anyway.

And same question with the writer of the book of James.

This is even harder to say, because the book of James contains almost nothing distinctively Christian. If it weren't for a couple of mentions of the name of Christ, there would be no reason to think it Christian at all, and it would have been classified as just another piece of Jewish wisdom literature. (How amazing, for example, that in chapter 5 an apparently Christian author, seeking an example of someone who willingly endured suffering, names Job, not Jesus!) I think it would be impossible to say which modern churches this author would most approve of, given that his teaching is almost entirely ethical; I suppose he would approve most of those that live in a most moral way.

What would you recommend for Biblical commentaries? I'm interested in reading analysis regarding genre and historical significance as I go through each book in the Bible.

I couldn't really say - I'm not sufficiently familiar with biblical literature. (The Bible really isn't my thing.) But I'm always pointing people to this site as a good place to begin.

1) Whenever Fr. Sergius Bulgakov is mentioned on Orthodox forums, reactions are... polarized at best. What did he teach that was especially controversial? In general, who's your favorite 20th Century Eastern European theologian?

I really don't know enough about this to say. As I understand it, Bulgakov taught that the Virgin Mary was so suffused with the Holy Spirit that she became hypostatically united to him, and could therefore be considered identical with the Third Person of the Trinity and properly worshipped as him. Which would seem to make Mary the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus was the incarnation of the Son. Which is heterodox, to say the least. However, whether this is an accurate representation of what Bulgakov taught, I don't know.

I'm just not sufficiently familiar with eastern European theologians to designate a favourite!

2) What did you think of Futurama's response to the Problem of Evil?

It only works if you assume that God is not really omniscient and omnipotent.

And to add another question:

Someone posted this in a VM conversation:

Matt 16:18 clearly states that upon this rock (Simon Peter) should the Church of Jesus be built. Simon Peter was also the first Bishop of Rome (and Antioch as well). That means it's pretty clear how papal succession works then from the Bishop of Rome (Antioch as I'm sure you know ceased to exist soon after). And just because half of Christians disagree does not mean they are right. They are just ignoring really obvious Gospel passages.

Is this, in your view, as "Really obvious" as this person says? Or are there good arguments against it? And what do you think the best of those arguments are?

I don't think it's obvious at all. Suppose I were to say that Steve Jobs is the rock upon which Apple is built. We'd all understand what that means: his insight and clever business and design decisions are a key factor behind the company's success. It wouldn't necessarily follow that his successor is to be viewed in the same light, because it's a testament to Jobs' own personal qualities. Similarly, I'd say it's perfectly possible that Jesus meant that Peter was to play a major role in the establishment of the church - indeed I'd think that the most obvious interpretation of the passage. It doesn't at all imply that any particular authority attaches to Peter's successors. And no Christian author seems to have thought that it did until Cyprian at the earliest; and no bishop of Rome tried to appeal to it in defence of his own authority until the fourth century (it was either Liberius or Damasus, I can't remember which).

Of course, I would also say that I don't think that Jesus really meant anything by the saying, because it's highly unlikely that he ever said it. The correct question is what the author of the First Gospel meant by it, so where I say "Jesus" above, I mean in the sense of the character in the text rather than the historical person.

Plotinus, I have a question, but it's more historical than theological -- still worth a shot, I guess. Is there anything you can tell me about the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons? The impression that I've got is that it took place fairly rapidly once it began, was done largely for political reasons, and was probably heavily associated early on with a significant degree of syncretization between Germanic paganism and western Christianity. But that's all terribly generic -- is there anything that can't basically be gleaned by a fairly cursory reading of Bede? How did the Roman Catholic Church handle syncretization/minor "backsliding" in other formerly pagan areas?

I realize that's rather specific and pretty far from your area of specialization, so if you can't really think of anything, that's fine. I just thought it'd be worth a try. :)

This is unfortunately rather hard for me to answer too. As I understand it, Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons and other peoples was something of a two-pronged affair. First you got the famous missionaries turning up and converting the king, so that the kingdom was now officially Christian. But that didn't really mean very much to ordinary people. So second you got the beloved saints turning up and wandering the kingdom itself and actually talking to people and converting them. In the case of the Anglo-Saxons, King Edwin of Northumbria was converted to Christianity by Paulinus of York, in the famous story given by Bede where he compared the life of man to a sparrow flying through the king's hall. But that didn't really make much difference to the kingdom. It took Aidan of Lindisfarne, spending his life travelling the length and breadth of Northumbria and explaining Christianity to people and converting them, to make the kingdom really Christian. So as far as political motives may go, the first kind of conversion may well have been closely connected to politics, but the second wasn't.

As for syncretism, I don't think there was any more blending between Christian and pagan beliefs or practices in England than anywhere else. Of course missionaries re-interpreted traditional festivals in Christian ways, or built churches in established holy places, and so on, but they did that everywhere, following the express advice of Gregory the Great.

It certainly was rapid though - at least as far as we can tell. But then it only takes a generation for an almost complete change in religious attitude. Just look at Britain today - fifty years ago it was a Christian country, and today not only are most people not Christians, but most people don't know anything about Christianity at all. All it takes is a single generation to raise their children not to go to church, and it's largely forgotten. Similarly, all it takes is a single generation to raise them to go to church, and it's established. That's one reason why Julian the Apostate could never really have succeeded in undoing the work of Constantine.

I'm not going to try to answer this for Plotinus, since most of what I can speak to comes from Bede anyway. But most of the problems of syncretism came not from 'paganism', although Bede and other authors make the standard complaints about that. Several Anglo-Saxon kings, and even one notable queen apparently, were Bad, Bad Pagans even after the good missionaries from Canterbury came to spread the Truth and so Suffered Horribly. Surprise. What was more interesting was the clash between 'Roman' and Irish interpretations of Christianity. This manifested itself historically in the synod at Whitby in 664, one of the centerpieces of Bede, where the Northumbrian kings jettisoned Irish advisors and agreed to pay heed to Rome.

It's worth noting that 'paying heed to Rome' didn't mean the same thing in 664 that it did in 1664, obviously. Bede pushed the line of a papacy that rightfully dictates doctrine in the Ecclesiastical History, but back in the Mediterranean, nobody was even close to deciding that this was a good idea. After all, the RCC didn't exist yet in any meaningful sense.

Anyway, in the pages of Bede this Irish problem manifested itself over obviously silly minutiae like the style of tonsuring monks and the calculation of the exact date of Easter. What was more important to the dudes at Whitby was who held the reins in Northumbrian Christianity. When guys like Wilfrid got up to 'persuade' the Northumbrian king Oswiu (who had probably already made his decision, but whatever) of the rightness of the Roman cause, they didn't waste a whole lot of words talking about how important it was that Easter be celebrated on the correct day, that's for damn sure. Irish arguments focused on how they were basically there first, and had the older tradition of Christianity in Britain.

It's hard to guess at exactly why Oswiu sided with the 'Romans', although there are any number of possible reasons, like Roman Christianity being more prestigious, or the immense distance from the central religious authorities. Maybe he realized that the other side was, you know, the friggin' Irish. Who knows. Anyway, the whole "I love the Irish Christians for their piety and conversion efforts but they were WRONG WRONG WRONG" line of discussion runs through Bede more than whining about "backsliding" to paganism, and is arguably second only to the "I love Wilfrid for driving out the Irish but he was WRONG WRONG WRONG" line of discussion in terms of importance to Bede's work. :p

Thanks for this. But one thing I would say is that the date of Easter and the style of the tonsure were more important than you might think. In the case of Easter, how you calculated its date said a lot about your attitude to Judaism. If Easter was to be tied to Passover then the implication was that Christianity was a Jewish sect. In the case of monks' haircuts, the Irish style (shaved at the front, long at the back) was the same hairstyle sported by Celtic druids. Having your monks look the same as Celtic druids was quite a bold statement about the nature of monasticism and, by implication, Christianity. The Roman tonsure (shaved on the crown), by contrast, was an imitation of the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. So one tonsure linked the monks to a pagan past, the other linked them to Jesus' passion. Clearly these are quite important choices to be made. Besides which, irrespective of the merits of one method of dating Easter over another or one tonsure style over another, there was the question of Roman authority. Never mind whether the Roman method of cutting monks' hair was superior or not - it was the Roman method. Were the churches going to be united or not? Were they going to follow different practices or the same ones? These were also very important questions.

Have you read John Boswell's somewhat-controversial work on this topic, and the subsequent responses? (I'm assuming that's what prompted this question.)

No, I haven't.

Well, I'm certainly not a theologian, but Jesus clearly says that Peter is the rock upon which he will build his church, so I'm not sure wherein lies the confusion.

The confusion is obvious: "rock" is not meant literally, so what does it mean? Any time that someone uses a metaphor there's a recipe for confusion, because different people may understand it differently.

Personnally, the only ROCK that was not "prevailed" against by the gates of hell was Jesus the Christ, when He died and descended into hell and led free those who were held captive. He broke the chains of death. Even Peter himself said that Jesus was the chief cornerstone for the foundation of the church.

That does not help us understand the passage, because in it Peter is identified with the rock in question. Whether Jesus himself was also a rock is neither here nor there. Also, the "cornerstone" image comes from the book of 1 Peter, but Peter himself did not really write that. It is actually a deuteropauline work - that is, it is written by someone after the death of Paul, developing his ideas - but unlike the other deuteropauline works we possess, the author of this one chose to attribute his work to Peter rather than to Paul.

History was rewritten so as to make people think that Peter was in Rome.

That is a very provocative statement. Who do you think "rewrote" history in this way, and when? Peter's presence in Rome was a well established tradition by the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian and I know of no reason to reject it.

Plotinus, have you covered the issue of what language the Four Gospels were originally written in? A classical scholar tells me that the consensus is that were originally written in Greek, but is this not somewhat problematic, given that there is no evidence that Jesus and his disciples spoke anything other than Aramaic? Surely it's more likely that the original reporting of Jesus' life and work and words would have been in the language used by Jesus and those who knew and heard him? Would this imply that there is an original document in Aramaic, on which the Gospels are based?

The Gospels were certainly written in Greek. And this can be seen quite clearly when you consider that they exist in a literary relationship to each other. That is, there are passages that are word-for-word the same in different Gospels, in the Greek. That means that one Gospel author must have copied another, or they both copied another, now lost source. And that means that all apart from the first must have been written in Greek - unless they were miraculously somehow all translated in a way that preserved the word-for-word identity between the different passages.

Certainly Jesus very probably taught in Aramaic. I think it's possible that he knew Greek and perhaps even taught in it, but I don't know if there's any consensus among scholars regarding how likely this is. So I'm sure that his words were originally circulated in Aramaic. But there were thirty or forty years between his death and the writing of the first Gospel, by which time the language of the Christian movement, as far as we can tell, was predominantly Greek. Paul wrote in Greek and so did all of the other New Testament authors. Evidently by this time Jesus' words had been translated into Greek and either transmitted orally in that language or written down (Q, a lost source used by both Matthew and Luke, was apparently a document written in Greek).

As for a question: What would you infer from the fact that the Bible is full of God talking directly to people, and miracles being worked, and all sorts of other things which can only be described as divine intervention, yet such things seem almost completely absent from the last two thousand years?

I would infer that people in the times when the Bible was written had a very different understanding from most of us about the nature of the world and its relation to the supernatural. And I think that inference would be borne out by most ancient literature too.

Thanks, Flying Pig, I'm well aware that the Gospels weren't written by the Apostles, and that the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Gospels are written in Greek. However, I also thought that those manuscripts date from several centuries after the Gospels were written, so that is quite weak evidence of what language the Gospels were originally written in, particuarly when an almost-contemporary writer, Eusebius, actually says that Matthew was written in Aramaic.

What I'm trying to get at is how close the Gospels can be to what happened in the first century AD. I've seen some writers claim that Jesus spoke Greek, presumably so as to bring the Gospels nearer to his actual words, but is this plausible? Why would a Galilean Jew, speaking to fellow Jews, have used any language other than Aramaic or Hebrew, even if he also knew some Greek?

Galilean Jews weren't all the same. Jesus grew up practically next door to the highly hellenised city of Tiberias, where presumably Greek would have been widely spoken (and where the most Law-abiding Jews wouldn't live, since it had been built on a graveyard). I don't see it as intrinsically implausible that Jesus might have spoken to people from that city in Greek, assuming he was capable of doing so. Although it's striking that Tiberias is, I think, never even mentioned in the Gospels.

As for the manuscripts, you're right that they're not particularly convincing evidence for the original language of the Gospels. What is convincing is simply the study of the internal evidence for their composition, i.e. the study of the texts themselves. Their relationships to each other, and the different layers of their composition and editing, can be explained on the assumption that we have them in the original languages, but they can't on the assumption that we don't. That's why scholars don't place much weight on ancient claims about earlier versions in other languages, just as they don't place much weight on ancient claims about their authorship either. Such claims may seem early to us but they're still the best part of a century after the fact.
 
On my provocative comment: Even if one took the word babylon which Peter says he is writing from and metaphorically use it as Rome. That is technically re-writing history. In the "last" days Rome would be termed babylon. The statement was not: "The church at Rome that great Babylon." It was: "The church at Babylon." Now you say that Peter did not even write this but Paul did. Paul was never at Babylon, and would not have even "used" that metaphor.

To say that Peter was at Rome instead of Babylon seems to me to be re-writing history the same as saying Paul was at Rome, but calling it Babylon. BTW even if Paul said that Jesus was the Chief Cornerstone, it would not change the fact that the early church did know that Jesus was the Rock/Cornerstone and not Peter. Jesus named Peter a "little rock" when He called him to service and changed his name. It was Jesus who entered hell and held the key to releasing saints from it's "gates" allowing them to enter into paradise. It was Paul who had the greatest influence on the early churches. It was Peter who admitted that Paul was hard to understand. Why would two leaders of the church go to Rome at the same time? Peter was slightly older than Paul and even if he died after Paul, it still makes no sense to me, other than it makes "good" history (yet corrupt) and makes a nice story.

I would like to see the comments of Irenaeus and Tertullian regarding this though. This is what Eusebius had to say:

Spoiler :
For what time is there, or what day, or what godly congregation of the passion of Christ, and glorious day of the memorial of his resurrection,24 when the members of the resurrection of the confessor Christ may not be remembered and honoured by every mouth and by every tongue? So, then, let the new soldiers of his faith, equipped with the glory of his truth, pass in remembrance and in word before our eyes, and before the Lord of victory, and the giver of crowns, the Lord Christ, Peter being second in command after our Lord Jesus, in the heavenly host of the glorious ranks, powerful in heaven and also upon earth, closing and opening without envy, in righteousness, the way of the gate of heaven, and not like the Pharisees, the partakers of his blood and of his race.25 Let us cleave to them, and to every one of the apostles, since it is proclaimed in heaven and by observation that their minister shall receive a crown of righteousness.26

3. Let Stephen be crowned ; and also Paul, no longer persecuting the churches,27 declaring his conversion in the Gospel of truth which is from the Deity, which he received and confessed by his suffering for Christ, and he filled up in his body what was behind of the afflictions of Christ for his body, that is, the Church.

Footnotes:
25. y Although this sentence is not very plain, there is no doubt that Peter has ascribed to him all the honour mentioned above.

26. z We are really uncertain as to the precise idea of this place: possibly the "minister" is one who honours the memory of the saints.

27. a Obscure again. Eusebius appears to mean that Paul, instead of persecuting the churches, narrates his conversion in the exercise of that true hope which God gives, and which he has received and avowed.


I underlined the pertinant part. Either the honor was given to Jesus whose blood was "partaken" by the Pharisees, or Peter was martyred at the hand of the Pharisees. I say that Jesus even by Eusebius was honored with the "keys" of Heaven. He does not even say that Peter or Paul were martyred in this text, other than they should obtain a crown. Unless there is another passage from Eusebius, it seems that someone is re-writing history.
 
What you say is right, but I don't think it makes what I said false - it just gives additional reasons why it's correct. Surely, on the basis of what you've said, "Peter is in heaven now" is indeed false when uttered anywhere other than in heaven, or at least tolerably close to heaven for it to be tolerably close to being true (after all, I can say "Peter is in Rome now" even when I'm in London, which is technically not true but as close to being true as makes no difference). The truth value of "Peter is in heaven now" is indeterminate only if it's a live possibility that heaven is right here, and I take it that this is generally not a live possibility.

I might have been a bit unclear there. My point was, that "Peter is in heaven now" only has a definitive truth value when I am standing at the spot where Peter should be. Either he is there, or he is not.

But when I am standing far away, the classic concept of "now" does not apply any more as it depends on the reference frame. So two people at the same spot a given distance from heaven with a large relative speed could say "Peter is in heaven now" and "Peter is not in heaven now" and both be right as the statement is true in their respective reference frame.

There is a modern scientific definition of "now" that avoids this: The past are all events that can theoretically affect me right now (e.g. a message that reaches me has been sent in the past), and the future are all events that I can theoretically affect right now (e.g. if I send a message, it will reach its recipient in the future). "Now" are all events that cannot affect me and that I cannot affect. It follows from this, that the length of "now" depends on distance (precisely, twice the time it takes for light to get there).

For example, if there was year long war on a planet two light years away, that starts right now (in a certain reference frame). There is no way I can influence that war, as any message that I send, will arrive after the war is over and cannot decide its outcome. But the war cannot affect me right now, as even the news that the war has started (which might crash the stock prices) will arrive in two years at the earliest.

If we push this concept to the limit, in a location infinitely far away everything happens now, as "now" is infinitely long. So if the distance to heaven was far enough, "Peter is in heaven now" is always true under this definition (assuming that Peter is in heaven at one point). But to decide, whether this applies, I need to know the distance. If I do not, there is no way to decide this question. Hence, the truth value of "Peter is in heaven now" is undecidable, unless I can give a location (or at least a distance) for heaven.
 
timtofly, I'm rather baffled by your post. It looks like you've completely misunderstood not only the passage from Eusebius that you quote but also what I wrote here.

On my provocative comment: Even if one took the word babylon which Peter says he is writing from and metaphorically use it as Rome. That is technically re-writing history. In the "last" days Rome would be termed babylon. The statement was not: "The church at Rome that great Babylon." It was: "The church at Babylon."

So are you saying that this should be taken literally - that it means that Peter was actually at Babylon itself, the ancient Middle Eastern city? Is that seriously what you're suggesting? When this letter was written, the city of Babylon had been deserted for two centuries. It was nothing but ruins in the desert, much as it is now. You ask why Peter should have gone to Rome, but it would be utterly baffling for him to have gone to Babylon, let alone to have claimed that there was a Christian church there! There wasn't anything there. Strabo, writing half a century before 1 Peter was written, said of it: "The Great City is a great desert."

This is an example of reading an ancient text without any notion at all of what the terms in it would have meant to its original readers. After AD 70, among Jews (or at least Jews of a certain disposition), "Babylon" was a common term for Rome because the Romans had done what the Babylonians had done, i.e. destroy the Temple in Jerusalem. Any Jew talking about "Babylon" in the late first century who wasn't obviously speaking about the distant past would certainly have meant Rome. It is referred to in this way in, for example, the Sybilline Oracles, 2 Ezra, and the apocalypse of Baruch. The most familiar example is the book of Revelation, which talks about "Babylon" repeatedly, and quite explicitly identifies it with the city of Rome (Rev. 17:9, a reference to the seven hills of Rome). When the author of 1 Peter sends greetings from the church in "Babylon", there is no doubt whatsoever that he means Rome. To say that this is an unwarranted inference because he doesn't explicitly say "Rome" is like saying that if I send you a postcard from "the Big Apple", I must literally be inside a giant apple unless I explicitly state that I mean "New York".

Of course that doesn't mean that 1 Peter actually was written in Rome, since it is pseudonymous - the author is writing in the name of Peter, and he locates Peter in Rome. That is early evidence of a tradition that Peter was in Rome.

Now you say that Peter did not even write this but Paul did.

I never said anything of the kind, and I'm absolutely bemused that you should have read my post carefully enough to make a reply to it, and yet so carelessly that you could have misunderstood it so dramatically. I said that 1 Peter is "written by someone after the death of Paul" - i.e. by someone who took Paul's ideas and developed them. Now how Pauline 1 Peter is is a matter of some debate; some characteristic Pauline ideas are not found in it. But there can be no doubt that it was written by someone who was at least familiar with key ideas from Paul's writings and who developed them in new ways. That person was not Peter. There are other good reasons to suppose that Peter did not write the letter; for example, it is full of Old Testament references, all of which are taken from the Septuagint. In fact, the author uses language taken from the Septuagint even when not quoting the Old Testament. This shows that the author was someone who was extremely well versed in the Septuagint, who had studied it for a long time, and who instinctively knew the Old Testament in that version. That means he was someone with a hellenistic Jewish background. That isn't a Galilean fisherman. Even if he were sufficiently proficient in Greek to write a letter such as 1 Peter, he would have known the Old Testament primarily in Aramaic or Hebrew, not the Septuagint.

Paul was never at Babylon, and would not have even "used" that metaphor.

I agree that Paul was never at Babylon, but I don't know how you know he could never have called Rome "Babylon". Certainly the name conveys considerable disrespect for Rome, and one might think that Paul, who insists in Romans 13:1-10 that the civil authorities are divinely appointed and must always be obeyed, would not adopt such an attitude. It's certainly distinctly at odds with the attitude of Revelation that the Roman authorities are instruments of the devil. However, the author of 1 Peter also tells his readers that the civil authorities are divinely appointed and must be obeyed (2:13-14), and yet he refers to Rome as "Babylon", so evidently it was possible to use this term even when urging obedience to Rome. However, whether or not Paul could have used this language is irrelevant, since no-one thinks that Paul had anything to do with the writing of 1 Peter.

To say that Peter was at Rome instead of Babylon seems to me to be re-writing history the same as saying Paul was at Rome, but calling it Babylon.

It would only be "rewriting history" if we had any good reason to suppose that Peter wasn't at Rome. We have no such reason. Moreover, I don't understand who you think did this rewriting, or when, or why. What would be the purpose of "rewriting history" in order to make it seem that Peter had been in Rome when he wasn't?

BTW even if Paul said that Jesus was the Chief Cornerstone, it would not change the fact that the early church did know that Jesus was the Rock/Cornerstone and not Peter. Jesus named Peter a "little rock" when He called him to service and changed his name. It was Jesus who entered hell and held the key to releasing saints from it's "gates" allowing them to enter into paradise.

No-one's denying that the early church regarded Jesus as a "rock", but that doesn't mean they didn't also regard Peter as a "rock". Are you really trying to argue that the "rock" referred to in Matthew 16:18, on which Jesus says he will build his church, is not Peter but Jesus himself? That seems to me a literally incredible interpretation. It would make a nonsense of the text. Why would Jesus give Peter the nickname "rock" and then talk about himself as a rock? No, there's no doubt that this passage indicates that Peter was regarded as a rock and that he was regarded as the rock on which the church was built. The uncertainty is over precisely who regarded him in this way and what they meant by it.

It was Paul who had the greatest influence on the early churches.

That's debatable. I think that people assume that Paul had more influence in the first century than he actually did, because he had such influence later on. Certainly Paul had a great deal of influence, as is shown by the texts that people wrote pretending to be him. But there's also a lot of the New Testament that isn't Pauline, such as the Synoptic Gospels, the Johannine literature, including Revelation, and the book of Hebrews.

It was Peter who admitted that Paul was hard to understand.

It was not. You are referring to 2 Peter 3:16, but Peter absolutely did not write 2 Peter - that is even more certain than the fact that he did not write 1 Peter. (For one thing, it is based on the book of Jude, and why would Peter do that?) 2 Peter was probably the last book of the New Testament to be written and probably dates from the second century.

Why would two leaders of the church go to Rome at the same time?

Why wouldn't they? Rome was a pretty important place, and the one place outside the eastern half of the Mediterranean where we know there was an important Christian community in the first century. It was, after all, significant enough for Nero to persecute in the 60s. It's evident from the book of Acts that the first generation of Christian leaders were keen to ensure uniformity of practice and doctrine among Christians no matter where they were (a unique concern among ancient religions of this type) - this is shown by the "council of Jerusalem" in Acts 15. So it seems entirely understandable that Peter, one of the major leaders of the movement, might relocate to Rome, the one sizeable Christian community in the west, to look after things there.

As for Paul, the book of Acts tells us why he went to Rome: not through choice, but because he had been arrested in Jerusalem and claimed his right to appeal his case before the emperor. He was therefore taken to Rome in chains and imprisoned there, and was probably executed there.

Peter was slightly older than Paul...

Where on earth do you get this information? No-one knows how old either of them was. The general assumption is that they were both probably born at roughly the same time as Jesus, but that is just a best guess since we know so little of their early lives.

...and even if he died after Paul, it still makes no sense to me, other than it makes "good" history (yet corrupt) and makes a nice story.

It makes perfect sense that one Christian leader should go to Rome to lead the church there, and that another should be taken there after being arrested. Ignatius of Antioch was later taken to Rome in pretty much the same way as Paul (a similarity which was not lost on Ignatius himself).

I would like to see the comments of Irenaeus and Tertullian regarding this though.

Irenaeus mentions Peter and Paul as being at Rome in Against Heresies 3.3:

Irenaeus said:
...that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul...

He also writes in Against Heresies 3.1:

Irenaeus said:
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.

As I said before, there is good reason to doubt that any version of Matthew's Gospel existed in Hebrew (assuming that Irenaeus does here mean the text that we call Matthew's Gospel, and not some other text attributed to the apostle), but I don't know of any good reason to doubt his testimony that Peter and Paul both preached in Rome.

Tertullian writes in Prescription Against Heretics 36:

Tertullian said:
Since, moreover, you are close upon Italy, you have Rome, from which there comes even into our own hands the very authority (of apostles themselves). How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s! where Paul wins his crown in a death like John’s, where the Apostle John was first plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil, and thence remitted to his island-exile!

He also writes in Scorpiace 15:

Tertullian said:
We read the lives of the Cæsars: At Rome Nero was the first who stained with blood the rising faith. Then is Peter girt by another, when he is made fast to the cross. Then does Paul obtain a birth suited to Roman citizenship, when in Rome he springs to life again ennobled by martyrdom.

I might also add the much earlier testimony of 1 Clement 5:4-6:1, which was written in Rome:

Clement said:
There was Peter who by reason of unrighteous jealousy endured not one but many labors, and thus having borne his testimony went to his appointed place of glory. By reason of jealousy and strife Paul by his example pointed out the prize of patient endurance. After that he had been seven times in bonds, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, had preached in the East and in the West, he won the noble renown which was the reward of his faith... Unto these men of holy lives was gathered a vast multitude of the elect, who through many indignities and tortures, being the victims of jealousy, set a brave example among ourselves.

That "among ourselves" indicates that these things happened in Rome (see, for example, 63:3, where the same phrase refers to members of the Roman congregation, and throughout the letter "among you" refers to members of the Corinthian congregation).

This is what Eusebius had to say:

Spoiler :
For what time is there, or what day, or what godly congregation of the passion of Christ, and glorious day of the memorial of his resurrection,24 when the members of the resurrection of the confessor Christ may not be remembered and honoured by every mouth and by every tongue? So, then, let the new soldiers of his faith, equipped with the glory of his truth, pass in remembrance and in word before our eyes, and before the Lord of victory, and the giver of crowns, the Lord Christ, Peter being second in command after our Lord Jesus, in the heavenly host of the glorious ranks, powerful in heaven and also upon earth, closing and opening without envy, in righteousness, the way of the gate of heaven, and not like the Pharisees, the partakers of his blood and of his race.25 Let us cleave to them, and to every one of the apostles, since it is proclaimed in heaven and by observation that their minister shall receive a crown of righteousness.26

3. Let Stephen be crowned ; and also Paul, no longer persecuting the churches,27 declaring his conversion in the Gospel of truth which is from the Deity, which he received and confessed by his suffering for Christ, and he filled up in his body what was behind of the afflictions of Christ for his body, that is, the Church.

Footnotes:
25. y Although this sentence is not very plain, there is no doubt that Peter has ascribed to him all the honour mentioned above.

26. z We are really uncertain as to the precise idea of this place: possibly the "minister" is one who honours the memory of the saints.

27. a Obscure again. Eusebius appears to mean that Paul, instead of persecuting the churches, narrates his conversion in the exercise of that true hope which God gives, and which he has received and avowed.


I underlined the pertinant part. Either the honor was given to Jesus whose blood was "partaken" by the Pharisees, or Peter was martyred at the hand of the Pharisees. I say that Jesus even by Eusebius was honored with the "keys" of Heaven. He does not even say that Peter or Paul were martyred in this text, other than they should obtain a crown. Unless there is another passage from Eusebius, it seems that someone is re-writing history.

This is the most baffling part of your post. First, I don't know what this text from Eusebius is - whether it's his own voice or an earlier document that he quotes - because you haven't specified or given a link. Googling it produces only this very thread. Second, I cannot understand what in this text you think contradicts the claim that Peter was at Rome. There's nothing in there about Peter's location.

Third, I was puzzled by your commentary until I realised that you've misunderstood the translation itself. "Partake" does not mean "take" - it means "share". The phrase "partakers of his blood" does not mean "shedders of his blood" - it means "sharers of his blood". In other words, the Pharisees are here identified as members of the same race as Peter, i.e. Jews. They are not identified as his killers or as Jesus' killers! Eusebius is simply saying that Peter is second in heaven after Jesus and opens and closes the gates of heaven, and in this he is unlike the Pharisees, although he shares their ethnicity, i.e. he and they are Jews.

So there's nothing here to contradict the claim that Peter was in Rome. And in fact, although Eusebius is a late author (he was writing nearly three centuries after Peter was around), he gives plenty more evidence that Peter was in Rome. It seems very odd to me that you should say "unless there is another passage in Eusebius", as if that were a matter of some obscurity. Given that Eusebius is most famous for writing a history of the church from the apostles to his own time, why haven't you just looked up this history, which is freely available online, and seen what he says about Peter? If you had done this, you would have seen that there is an entire chapter of the Church History (2.14) entitled "The preaching of the apostle Peter in Rome", which states that Peter went to Rome because he was chasing Simon Magus, who fled there:

Eusebius said:
...after the evil deeds done by him [Simon Magus] had been first detected by the apostle Peter in Judea, he fled and made a great journey across the sea from the East to the West, thinking that only thus could he live according to his mind.

And coming to the city of Rome, by the mighty co-operation of that power which was lying in wait there, he was in a short time so successful in his undertaking that those who dwelt there honored him as a god by the erection of a statue.

But this did not last long. For immediately, during the reign of Claudius, the all-good and gracious Providence, which watches over all things, led Peter, that strongest and greatest of the apostles, and the one who on account of his virtue was the speaker for all the others, to Rome against this great corrupter of life. He like a noble commander of God, clad in divine armor, carried the costly merchandise of the light of the understanding from the East to those who dwelt in the West, proclaiming the light itself, and the word which brings salvation to souls, and preaching the kingdom of heaven.

In the next chapter, Eusebius describes more of the things that Peter did in Rome, including helping Mark write the Gospel attributed to him:

Eusebius said:
And they say that Peter when he had learned, through a revelation of the Spirit, of that which had been done, was pleased with the zeal of the men, and that the work obtained the sanction of his authority for the purpose of being used in the churches. Clement in the eighth book of his Hypotyposes gives this account, and with him agrees the bishop of Hierapolis named Papias. And Peter makes mention of Mark in his first epistle which they say that he wrote in Rome itself, as is indicated by him, when he calls the city, by a figure, Babylon, as he does in the following words: “The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son.”

You will note here that Eusebius gives the same interpretation of 1 Peter 5:13, as using the name "Babylon" to refer to Rome, as I did above. Moreover, Eusebius here appeals to two much earlier authorities for Peter's presence in Rome: Clement of Alexandria and Papias of Hierapolis. Helpfully, he quotes precisely these sources elsewhere. He quotes the text from Clement at Church History 6.14:

Clement of Alexandria said:
As Peter had preached the Word publicly at Rome, and declared the Gospel by the Spirit, many who were present requested that Mark, who had followed him for a long time and remembered his sayings, should write them out. And having composed the Gospel he gave it to those who had requested it.

(The passage from Papias of Hierapolis gives the same story of Mark writing his Gospel on the basis of Peter's teaching, but doesn't give the location.)

Eusebius describes the deaths of both Peter and Paul in Rome in Church History 2.25. He writes:

Eusebius said:
Thus publicly announcing himself as the first among God’s chief enemies, he [Nero] was led on to the slaughter of the apostles. It is, therefore, recorded that Paul was beheaded in Rome itself, and that Peter likewise was crucified under Nero. This account of Peter and Paul is substantiated by the fact that their names are preserved in the cemeteries of that place even to the present day.

In this same chapter, as you can see, Eusebius cites earlier writers to support this claim. One of the ones he quotes is Dionysius of Corinth, writing in the late 160s or early 170s:

Dionysius of Corinth said:
You have thus by such an admonition bound together the planting of Peter and of Paul at Rome and Corinth. For both of them planted and likewise taught us in our Corinth. And they taught together in like manner in Italy, and suffered martyrdom at the same time.

So in summary, to try to make Eusebius a witness to Peter's non-presence in Rome is impossible; Eusebius is not only absolutely clear that Peter was in Rome, but he gives a narrative to explain it (he went there in pursuit of Simon Magus), he describes what Peter did while he was there (allowed Mark to ghost-write a Gospel for him), and describes his death there. And he even quotes earlier writers to support these claims. Now, as I have said, the tradition that Peter was involved in the writing of Mark's Gospel is problematic and most scholars think it is incorrect. However, there are no such problems with the tradition that Peter was in Rome. I know of no tradition that he was anywhere else such that he couldn't have been in Rome, or that he died anywhere else. Certainly, if he was in Rome, he must have gone there at a relatively late stage, given that Paul's letter to the Romans (written in around AD 58) does not mention him by name, despite greeting an awful lot of people there. So the tradition that he was bishop of Rome for 25 years cannot be true, quite apart from the difficulty of describing anyone at that time as a "bishop". But given that there is no intrinsic implausibility in supposing that Peter went to Rome, and given the universal testimony of ancient authors that he did, and even the references to his grave there, I see no reason to suppose that the tradition is untrue. In all likelihood, both Peter and Paul did indeed suffer martyrdom in Rome in the mid-60s under Nero. Whether Peter was really crucified upside down, and whether Paul was really beheaded, is another matter.

I might have been a bit unclear there. My point was, that "Peter is in heaven now" only has a definitive truth value when I am standing at the spot where Peter should be. Either he is there, or he is not.

But when I am standing far away, the classic concept of "now" does not apply any more as it depends on the reference frame. So two people at the same spot a given distance from heaven with a large relative speed could say "Peter is in heaven now" and "Peter is not in heaven now" and both be right as the statement is true in their respective reference frame.

There is a modern scientific definition of "now" that avoids this: The past are all events that can theoretically affect me right now (e.g. a message that reaches me has been sent in the past), and the future are all events that I can theoretically affect right now (e.g. if I send a message, it will reach its recipient in the future). "Now" are all events that cannot affect me and that I cannot affect. It follows from this, that the length of "now" depends on distance (precisely, twice the time it takes for light to get there).

For example, if there was year long war on a planet two light years away, that starts right now (in a certain reference frame). There is no way I can influence that war, as any message that I send, will arrive after the war is over and cannot decide its outcome. But the war cannot affect me right now, as even the news that the war has started (which might crash the stock prices) will arrive in two years at the earliest.

If we push this concept to the limit, in a location infinitely far away everything happens now, as "now" is infinitely long. So if the distance to heaven was far enough, "Peter is in heaven now" is always true under this definition (assuming that Peter is in heaven at one point). But to decide, whether this applies, I need to know the distance. If I do not, there is no way to decide this question. Hence, the truth value of "Peter is in heaven now" is undecidable, unless I can give a location (or at least a distance) for heaven.

Fair enough. That's very interesting - thanks.
 
As I said before, there is good reason to doubt that any version of Matthew's Gospel existed in Hebrew (assuming that Irenaeus does here mean the text that we call Matthew's Gospel, and not some other text attributed to the apostle), but I don't know of any good reason to doubt his testimony that Peter and Paul both preached in Rome.
Why is that? From what I know, Matthew is the most "Jewish" oriented of the gospels, so it's a little surprising it's wasn't in Hebrew.
 
Why is that? From what I know, Matthew is the most "Jewish" oriented of the gospels, so it's a little surprising it's wasn't in Hebrew.

Because it's based on Mark, which is in Greek. Where Matthew follows Mark, it is word-for-word the same in Greek (well, not exactly, but close enough), which shows that Matthew was originally written in Greek.

I'm not convinced by the traditional claim that Matthew is the most "Jewish" of the Gospels; on the contrary, it's the Gospel that contains the most vehement invective against the Pharisees (chapter 23), who were the ideological precursors to the proto-rabbinic Judaism of the time when the Gospel was written. It also contains the infamous "blood curse" (27:25), not found in any of the others. So one could make a case for saying that it's actually the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels.

However, even if that weren't the case, it's wrong to assume that a highly Jewish text must necessarily be more likely to be written in Hebrew. The book of James is extremely Jewish, but is an original Greek composition. The same is true of the book of Hebrews. Paul was a very zealous Pharisee and yet he wrote in good, educated Greek. There are plenty of Jewish texts written originally in Greek, including deuterocanonical works such as 2 Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon. First-century Judaism was a very varied religion and culture. It was possible to be a zealous Jew and very Greek in culture and outlook, at least to some extent.
 
I am learning.

From St Ireneuas:

Spoiler :
1. We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed perfect knowledge, as some do even venture to say, boasting themselves as improvers of the apostles. For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God. Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.

2. These have all declared to us that there is one God, Creator of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets; and one Christ the Son of God. If any one do not agree to these truths, he despises the companions of the Lord; nay more, he despises Christ Himself the Lord; yea, he despises the Father also, and stands self-condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation, as is the case with all heretics.


I apologize for not citing Eusebius and will get back to you on that issue.

I am at the catholic cite New Advent. In the first chapter of book 3 it seems that Irenius did know who wrote Mathew.

My take again:

I see now that Peter could have, before Paul, started the church at Rome. Mark was his "scribe". Luke was the "scribe" of Paul. From the above it seems that Mark wrote Mark from Peter's perspective. Mark could also have written 1 and 2 Peter from Peter's perspective. Remember that God "breathed", the apostle spoke, and the "scribe" wrote. Now we have to "detect" what departure meant?

I understand that John "saw" Rome as babylon. The early church fathers would have passed this around. My question is what is the diaspora and the "Church at Babylon"? The twelve tribes where scatterd by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Now I think that Peter left Rome and went to this area. Some say he went west. He could have been killed by Nero. I still do not think that Peter and Paul were in Rome at the same time. It does not make sense that two major players be side by side. IMO Peter could have been killed before Paul arrived. In acts at the stoning of Stephen, it seems that Paul was a young "upstart". When Jesus called Peter, 5 years previous or so, Peter was a seasoned fisherman. It could be assumed that Peter was in His late 60's when he arrived at Rome, and Paul would have been in his late 60's ten years later after Peter had departed. I see no contradiction that Peter was 10 years older than Paul. It is also plausible that Peter came back after Paul's "departure".

I am not denying that there was not a Church established at Rome. I am denying that it gets preeminence above any other Church. The church is universal not Roman. To me the "church" failed when Rome happened and the "Babylon" that was so hated came into being.

I am really not trying to debate here. I am looking for what has already been researched and the discrepancies therein. I have not found it yet, but in one of Ireneus's chapter's, it seems that Peter and Paul were linked to starting the churches in Corinth and Rome, but the syntax was odd. Paul would have started the church at Corinth and Peter at Rome, but that is not how it was written. I do appreciate your input and correlation of your studies and research, even if it seems we are at a disagreement at times.
 
The main problem with Babylon being Rome is that Peter, being a Jew would not have been allowed to be in Rome during that time. We have the Book of Acts that the Jews were told to leave Rome. Acts 18:2 And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome:) and came unto them. So it would be very strange for Peter to be allowed in Rome when he was very much Jewish and really had no dealings with the Gentiles, since he would not properly understand them. God uses people that are familiar to their group to send them out to. He used Paul primarily to get to the Gentiles since he was born in Tarsus, thus he was accustomed to Gentile behaviour, so he could be able to relate the Gospel message to them so much better than just some one who is raised up in Jewish culture.

So there is bit of a problem about Babylon, but my best reasoning would be that he was referring to the region around that area. But one thing is for sure is the Rome does not equal Babylon in this instance, since Peter could never have been in Rome at the time of writing it.
 
How about searching non-Biblical records for this anti-Jewish law of which you speak? Surely, such a law would be found in contemporary records.
 
Just briefly, the sources for the law mentioned in Acts 18:2 differ. Suetonius mentions it (Claudius 25:4). But Josephus does not. Cassius Dio (Roman History 60.6) explicitly denies that Claudius expelled the Jews, instead stating that he ordered their meetings to be regulated.

Evidently Claudius ordered something to do with the Jews, but it is uncertain precisely what. Nevertheless, even if he did indeed expel all Jews from Rome, that doesn't prove that Peter wasn't there, for two reasons. The first is that just because an emperor orders something doesn't mean it's obeyed. Case in point: Constantius II banned all pagan sacrifices in the 350s, but they were still being performed all over the place for decades. So it's entirely plausible than in a city of hundreds of thousands of people some Jews might have ignored an order to leave, and others might have turned up. And the second reason is even more decisive: the date of Claudius' order is uncertain and debated, but he died in AD 54 so it must have happened before then. But if Peter was in Rome, he wasn't there until after AD 58 at the latest, because that is when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, and did not mention Peter in the long list of greetings to Christians there. So he wouldn't have been affected by Claudius' edict.
 
Just briefly, the sources for the law mentioned in Acts 18:2 differ. Suetonius mentions it (Claudius 25:4). But Josephus does not. Cassius Dio (Roman History 60.6) explicitly denies that Claudius expelled the Jews, instead stating that he ordered their meetings to be regulated.

Evidently Claudius ordered something to do with the Jews, but it is uncertain precisely what. Nevertheless, even if he did indeed expel all Jews from Rome, that doesn't prove that Peter wasn't there, for two reasons. The first is that just because an emperor orders something doesn't mean it's obeyed. Case in point: Constantius II banned all pagan sacrifices in the 350s, but they were still being performed all over the place for decades. So it's entirely plausible than in a city of hundreds of thousands of people some Jews might have ignored an order to leave, and others might have turned up. And the second reason is even more decisive: the date of Claudius' order is uncertain and debated, but he died in AD 54 so it must have happened before then. But if Peter was in Rome, he wasn't there until after AD 58 at the latest, because that is when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, and did not mention Peter in the long list of greetings to Christians there. So he wouldn't have been affected by Claudius' edict.

Not if Peter was in Rome in the 40's and left. He would have been there when the Jews were "regulated" and had been gone a decade before Paul's letter was written. I would agree that Peter came and left. Then Paul came and "left". They both came and they both departed. If the gospel went into all the known world staying in one place for more than a decade would not have allowed that. He may have traveled back and forth as frequently as Paul did. His last trip may have been right before Nero burned Rome or right after.

With the great Roman transportation system, it does not seem that it would take long to get any where, unless one stopped here and there "strengthening" the churches. We do not know how "direct" each apostle traveled and both seemed to maybe have been in Corinth also?
 
Helpful hint - Nero didn't burn Rome, whether Peter was there or not.
 
I have a professor who argues that with the introduction of clocks in Europe came a popular shift in thinking from a belief in the embedded and physical to the metaphysical and transcendental. He argued this had significant religious implications in that people switched from believing that wine was literally the blood of Christ but instead believed it represented his metaphysical spirit, etc. I was wondering if you would be interesting on expanding on or discussing that.
 
Just briefly, the sources for the law mentioned in Acts 18:2 differ. Suetonius mentions it (Claudius 25:4). But Josephus does not. Cassius Dio (Roman History 60.6) explicitly denies that Claudius expelled the Jews, instead stating that he ordered their meetings to be regulated.

Evidently Claudius ordered something to do with the Jews, but it is uncertain precisely what. Nevertheless, even if he did indeed expel all Jews from Rome, that doesn't prove that Peter wasn't there, for two reasons. The first is that just because an emperor orders something doesn't mean it's obeyed. Case in point: Constantius II banned all pagan sacrifices in the 350s, but they were still being performed all over the place for decades. So it's entirely plausible than in a city of hundreds of thousands of people some Jews might have ignored an order to leave, and others might have turned up. And the second reason is even more decisive: the date of Claudius' order is uncertain and debated, but he died in AD 54 so it must have happened before then. But if Peter was in Rome, he wasn't there until after AD 58 at the latest, because that is when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, and did not mention Peter in the long list of greetings to Christians there. So he wouldn't have been affected by Claudius' edict.

Well there is no valid reason why Peter would even need to be in Rome in the first place. What business would he have there? It is rather odd in Romans that Paul never mentions Peter once and surely Paul would have meant Peter if he had been in Rome at one time or was going to go to Rome, since Paul in his letter often refers to important people that the church will know, whether they are in that church right now, or have been, or will be. Also the 1st Epistle that Peter wrote was "to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," regions far away from Rome. Why would he be writing a letter to people that are not close to him? You can tell when Paul wrote Roman, according to the information in Acts that he wrote that after he had visited Corinth, due to the references of Athens and Corinth in the first chapter of Romans, and he was writing to them so they would have contact with him.
 
I happened to catch a clip of some program on the History channel (yeah yeah, I know) which claimed that the Jews weren't captives in Egypt, but hired hands that eventually decided to skip town and steal a bunch of stuff before they packed up and went on their supposed trek through the desert. Any truth to this?
 
I am learning.

From St Ireneuas:

Spoiler :
1. We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed perfect knowledge, as some do even venture to say, boasting themselves as improvers of the apostles. For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God. Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.

2. These have all declared to us that there is one God, Creator of heaven and earth, announced by the law and the prophets; and one Christ the Son of God. If any one do not agree to these truths, he despises the companions of the Lord; nay more, he despises Christ Himself the Lord; yea, he despises the Father also, and stands self-condemned, resisting and opposing his own salvation, as is the case with all heretics.


I apologize for not citing Eusebius and will get back to you on that issue.

I am at the catholic cite New Advent. In the first chapter of book 3 it seems that Irenius did know who wrote Mathew.

Irenaeus says that the apostle Matthew wrote a Gospel, but just because he says it, doesn't mean he's right or that he actually knows this. As I have said, there are good reasons to think that Irenaeus is wrong about the authorship of the Gospels. We've dealt with the authorship of the Gospels before in these threads so I'm not going to go into it again - you can look at the index on the first page for the links.

Whenever we make a historical judgement, particularly about the accuracy of some claim in some ancient text, we have to take different factors into account, such as the known reliability of the author, the probability of the author knowing the truth about this matter, the intrinsic probability of the claim, whether other evidence supports it, and whether other evidence contradicts it. When it comes to Irenaeus' claims about the authorship of the Gospels, there are problems. What are the chances that Irenaeus, or anyone else at the time, would know who wrote the Gospels? Not very high, I would say, given that the Gospels are anonymous and do not claim authorship by any particular person. Certainly there were traditions about who had written them, as Irenaeus states, but I don't know of any reason to suppose that those traditions must be reliable. If the Gospels were written by unknown people, then it's easy to suppose that traditions would arise later on saying that they were written by significant figures such as apostles. In other words, we would expect to find such traditions whether or not they were actually written by apostles. The fact that we do find such traditions therefore tells us little about who actually wrote them.

Moreover, there is good evidence that the Gospels were not written by apostles, which comes from the careful study of the texts themselves, which I've described elsewhere.

So while Irenaeus' statement should be taken seriously and not dismissed out of hand, nevertheless, it is not very weighty and he is probably wrong.

On his statement about Peter's location and death in Rome, however, things are different. One certainly would expect Christians at the time of Peter's death to know about it and know where he was, because he was one of the major leaders of the church. One would expect that knowledge to be retained by later generations. If the sources tell us he lived and died in Rome, then, it is hard to see how they could get that wrong. Moreover, there is no evidence at all to the effect that he wasn't in Rome. Nowhere else claims to be the location of Peter's death or to house his grave. And the notion that Peter travelled to Rome is perfectly plausible in itself, as is the notion that he died in Nero's persecution. Given these factors, it seems probable to at least some degree that Irenaeus is right to locate Peter in Rome, although probably wrong to say that he collaborated with Mark on a Gospel while he was there.

My take again:

I see now that Peter could have, before Paul, started the church at Rome. Mark was his "scribe". Luke was the "scribe" of Paul. From the above it seems that Mark wrote Mark from Peter's perspective. Mark could also have written 1 and 2 Peter from Peter's perspective. Remember that God "breathed", the apostle spoke, and the "scribe" wrote. Now we have to "detect" what departure meant?

I don't think there's any good reason to think that Mark was Peter's scribe or indeed that Luke was Paul's. Paul certainly used a scribe to take his dictation for at least some of his letters, but he was named Tertius (Romans 16:22), not Luke. There's no good reason to think that the Gospel of Mark was actually written by the John Mark mentioned in 1 Peter and elsewhere in the New Testament and certainly no good reason to think that he wrote 1 Peter itself; but on the other hand, if Mark did write 1 Peter, then Peter did not. And there's no way either Mark or Peter, or anyone else from their period, wrote 2 Peter, which has nothing to do with 1 Peter and is much later. God may have "breathed", but if you're referring to 2 Timothy, I can't think of any reason either (a) to think that the author of 2 Timothy was talking about the Petrine letters or the Gospels, or (b) to think that he was right anyway.

I understand that John "saw" Rome as babylon. The early church fathers would have passed this around. My question is what is the diaspora and the "Church at Babylon"? The twelve tribes where scatterd by the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The "church at Babylon" is the church in Rome, and the "Diaspora" is the churches in Asia Minor. That seems pretty clear from the address of 1 Peter.

Now I think that Peter left Rome and went to this area.

By "this area" you mean Babylon? So you're still insisting that Peter visited Babylon?

Again, you've misunderstood. To a first-century Jew, the term "Diaspora" did not mean the lost tribes of Israel! (And incidentally, there were ten lost tribes, not twelve - two remained.) It meant Jews living outside Palestine. The "Diaspora" was the Jewish population of the Roman and Persian empires, which was actually larger than the Jewish population of Palestine itself. More broadly, it means any population living outside what they perceive as their homeland. When 1 Peter addresses "the exiles of the Dispersion" he is addressing Jews living outside Palestine. This is perfectly clear from the fact that he goes on to specify "in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia" - i.e. churches in Asia Minor, which we know to have been one of the most important Christian regions in the late first century (the book of Revelation is also addressed to them). How could the addressing of a letter to churches in Asia Minor be evidence that its author visited Babylon?

Some say he went west.

No-one says this. As far as I know, every ancient source which talks about what Peter did and where he went says he went to Rome and he died there. You are confusing Peter with Paul. There are some hints in ancient sources that Paul did not die in Rome, but was released and later succeeded in his aim of going to Spain and preaching there. It is generally thought that this is unlikely and that he did die in Rome.

He could have been killed by Nero. I still do not think that Peter and Paul were in Rome at the same time. It does not make sense that two major players be side by side.

Why on earth not? They were both in Jerusalem at the same time, according to Acts 15 - and so was James, and so were the other leaders of the church. I don't understand this insistence of yours that it's impossible that Peter and Paul could both be in the same city at the same time. Paul tells us in Galatians 1:11 that Peter came to Antioch while Paul was there; if that was possible, then why on earth couldn't Paul come to Rome while Peter was there? Or do you think Paul is mistaken when he tells us that he and Peter met in Antioch?

Furthermore, as I already explained, Paul did not voluntarily travel to Rome - he was taken there as a prisoner. In which case, even if he did not wish to be in the same city as Peter, he had little choice about the matter. I honestly don't see what's so implausible about the notion that Peter moved to Rome to look after the church there, and some time later Paul was taken to Rome as a prisoner, with the result that both of them were in Rome at the same time, although for quite different reasons.

IMO Peter could have been killed before Paul arrived. In acts at the stoning of Stephen, it seems that Paul was a young "upstart".

Acts 7:58 says that Paul was "a young man" (I don't know where you get "upstart" from). That could mean anything up to the age of 40, perhaps; it would at least be consistent with the supposition that he was roughly the same age as Jesus himself, given that this event probably happened in the mid-30s AD.

When Jesus called Peter, 5 years previous or so, Peter was a seasoned fisherman.

There's no evidence for that. Mark 1:16 and parallels simply describe Peter as a fisherman, working with his brother Andrew. No details are given, such as how old they were or how experienced. For all we know they could have been teenagers. One might assume that Peter was at least a bit older than that, given that he was married when Jesus knew him (Mark 1:30) (Paul also mentions Peter's wife at 1 Corinthians 9:5). But that doesn't necessarily make him even as old as Jesus, let alone some grizzled ancient sea-dog with a bushy white beard and pipe as you seem to imply.

It could be assumed that Peter was in His late 60's when he arrived at Rome, and Paul would have been in his late 60's ten years later after Peter had departed. I see no contradiction that Peter was 10 years older than Paul. It is also plausible that Peter came back after Paul's "departure".

These things are all possible, but given that there's no evidence for any of them, why suppose them? Why not say that Paul was ten years older than Peter? Why not say that once Peter arrived in Rome he never even left the house, far less the city? Why not say that while they were there they spent their time collaborating on innovative art installations or breeding toads? Any of these things are possible, but unless you can give evidence for them, they're just pointless speculation.

I am not denying that there was not a Church established at Rome. I am denying that it gets preeminence above any other Church. The church is universal not Roman. To me the "church" failed when Rome happened and the "Babylon" that was so hated came into being.

Fine, but you can't use that as a basis for historical claims. Perhaps the Roman church did become dreadfully corrupt. However, whether it did or not is utterly immaterial to the purely historical question of whether or not St Peter lived and died in Rome. The fact that Catholic apologists place great weight upon the person of St Peter, and you disagree with the conclusions they draw from this, is not a good reason to suppose that the historical claims about Peter are false - especially if you just assert this simply because you disagree with Catholics, and ignore what the evidence actually says. That is not an honest discussion technique.

I am really not trying to debate here. I am looking for what has already been researched and the discrepancies therein. I have not found it yet, but in one of Ireneus's chapter's, it seems that Peter and Paul were linked to starting the churches in Corinth and Rome, but the syntax was odd. Paul would have started the church at Corinth and Peter at Rome, but that is not how it was written. I do appreciate your input and correlation of your studies and research, even if it seems we are at a disagreement at times.

It was the letter of Dionysius of Corinth, quoted by Eusebius, and which I quoted in my previous post and gave the link to, that claims that both Peter and Paul were associated with Corinth before being associated with Rome. The idea that Peter was at Corinth is found nowhere else and seems very unlikely. There's no reasonable doubt that Paul was solely responsible for starting the church at Corinth. I suppose that it's possible that Peter visited the place at a later stage.

Well there is no valid reason why Peter would even need to be in Rome in the first place. What business would he have there?

What business did he have in Antioch? Paul tells us in Galatians 1:11 that Peter turned up there and they had a public argument, but he doesn't tell us why he was there. And why would he? As one of the leaders of the Christian movement it seems pretty plain that Peter might have business with one of the largest and most important groups of Christians. If that explains his presence in Antioch it would equally explain his presence in Rome, where the same thing applied.

It is rather odd in Romans that Paul never mentions Peter once and surely Paul would have meant Peter if he had been in Rome at one time or was going to go to Rome, since Paul in his letter often refers to important people that the church will know, whether they are in that church right now, or have been, or will be.

Certainly. That's good evidence that Peter was not in Rome when Paul wrote Romans, as I said above. I don't see how it's good evidence that Peter was never in Rome at all, unless you're saying that Paul would greet even people who were going to be Rome perhaps years in the future. Why would he do that? Is there really anything implausible about saying that Paul would write a letter to Rome in around AD 58 and fail to greet someone who would arrive there in (say) AD 62?

Also the 1st Epistle that Peter wrote was "to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," regions far away from Rome. Why would he be writing a letter to people that are not close to him?

People generally do address letters to people who aren't near them. That's why they're writing a letter rather than meeting up. When Paul wrote Romans, he appears not to have been anywhere near Rome - he was in fact about to travel to Jerusalem (15:25), and he wrote to the Romans because he hoped to enjoy their hospitality in the future (15:24). In fact all of Paul's letters were written for particular reasons, because there was some particular problem in the church that he was worried about - whether it was some kind of circumcising heresy (Galatians) or concerns about the end times (1 Thessalonians) or a whole bunch of issues that the other people had written to him about (1 Corinthians). Other documents from inside and outside the New Testament have similar backgrounds. 1 Clement, for example, is a letter from the Roman church to the Corinthian church, written because there were divisions in the Corinthian church which the Romans were worried about. In the case of 1 Peter the occasion for the letter is clear: there was some kind of persecution going on in Asia Minor, although there is disagreement over whether this was an organised persecution by the civil authorities or less dramatic, social exclusion by the Christians' neighbours. Either way, the Christians there were depressed about it, and the author of 1 Peter writes to them to encourage them. I don't see anything intrinsically implausible about this, whether the author was Peter or someone else, or whether it was written from Rome or from anywhere else. Early Christian communities were in touch with each other, even at long distances, and they wrote to each other. This is one of the most distinctive things about early Christianity compared to other religions of the time.

The fact is that 1 Peter quite plainly claims to be written in Rome and quite plainly is addressed to churches in Asia Minor. You may dispute that either or both of these claims are actually true, and as I said above the fact that the letter is pseudonymous means that any claims it makes about its historical conditions must be taken with a grain of salt, but those are the claims it makes, and they are utterly innocuous ones. Its claim to Petrine authorship is much more dubious, of course. But if you're going to insist that it really was written by Peter then I don't see how you can also insist that Peter wasn't in Rome. You can argue all you like that Peter shouldn't have been in Rome or that he shouldn't have been writing to Asian churches from Rome, but the letter says he was. Irenaeus and the other ancient sources agree. I've noticed that evangelicals tend to take Irenaeus very seriously when he says things they approve of (such as that the Gospels were written by apostles), so it puzzles me that they should ignore him when he says things they don't approve of, even though they are things that, as I said above, he would be far more likely to be right about.

I really don't see why some people seem to have such a problem with the idea that Peter lived and died in Rome - a perfectly innocuous claim found in early Christian texts - especially when they're happy to take at face value other, more tendentious, claims found in the same texts. The evidence for it is by no means overwhelming, but it is a perfectly plausible claim and one for which there is no contrary evidence. Admitting that Peter lived and died in Rome doesn't make you a Roman Catholic, any more than admitting that Jesus was born to Mary does. It's the interpretation of what these events mean that is distinctive about Catholicism, not the belief that the events happened at all. And allowing one's religious views to determine what you think did or didn't happen is not intellectually respectable.

I have a professor who argues that with the introduction of clocks in Europe came a popular shift in thinking from a belief in the embedded and physical to the metaphysical and transcendental. He argued this had significant religious implications in that people switched from believing that wine was literally the blood of Christ but instead believed it represented his metaphysical spirit, etc. I was wondering if you would be interesting on expanding on or discussing that.

This seems implausible to me, at least from what you've said here. First, I don't see why clocks would encourage such a shift in thinking. On the contrary, one might think that a clock represents time (an abstraction) captured, measured, and housed in a mechanical device, and would therefore encourage people to think in terms of concrete physical entities rather than abstracta. Second, a quick online search reveals that mechanical clocks became a common sight in Europe, at least in churches, in roughly the early fourteenth century. But this was a period when intellectual trends were moving away from Platonism and realism about abstracta towards much more radical nominalism, and a belief only in concrete particulars. This was the age of William of Ockham. Third, there has always been a "spiritualising" tendency among some Christians, which can be traced back at least to Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Theologians of this kind had an innate Platonic tendency to interpret texts allegorically and search for "spiritual" meanings rather than understand things in physical terms, and this was well established long before anyone in Europe saw a mechanical clock. And fourth, I'm not convinced that the tendency described was particularly characteristic of the Reformation anyway (since I take it that this is the period meant). The Reformed church interpreted the Eucharist in the way you describe, but the Lutherans did not.

I happened to catch a clip of some program on the History channel (yeah yeah, I know) which claimed that the Jews weren't captives in Egypt, but hired hands that eventually decided to skip town and steal a bunch of stuff before they packed up and went on their supposed trek through the desert. Any truth to this?

I don't think anyone knows one way or the other. There are no sources for either the captivity in Egypt or the Exodus outside the Bible (or later literature depending upon it), and no archaeological evidence for it at all. As far as I know it probably didn't happen in the first place, rather than happening but being different in character from how the Bible portrays it.
 
The bible (except in loose translations) does not claim that the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt, but rather reduced to laborers. At Joseph's advice, the people of Egypt had been subjected to heavy taxation and corvées; Pharaoh bought up their land and reduced the populace to serfdom. The Hebrews were however gifted the most fertile land in the Nile Delta and (like the priests and nobles) were made immune to all the taxes and labors that Egyptians owned their king. Over time the Egyptian people came to deeply resent the privileges that the Hebrews enjoyed, and at the start of the next Dynasty all these privileges were revoked. There is however no reason to believe that the Hebrews were made any worse off than the common laborers elsewhere in the Two Kingdoms. (The idea that they were enslaved and made to build the pyramids hundreds of miles south of the delta is patently ridiculous.)

Also, while many English translations try to make it sound like the Egyptians showered the Israelites with gifts as they left, literal translations make it clear that they did indeed attack and plunder an innocent town between the time that Pharaoh agreed to let them go and the time that he sent his army to destroy them.




Egyptian sources refer to the ha ibiru (we can't know for sure that that is how the hieroglyphs ahould be pronounced, but is is considered a reasonable transliteration) as Canaanite mercenaries that enjoyed privilege in Lower Egypt during the reign of the Hyksos "shepherd kings." After their masters were driven out, these warriors were reduced to being peasants. They resented this and cause trouble until they too were kicked out.

These accounts actually seem quite compatible. Serving in the military is a very common pastime among the privileged land owning class, and it is very possible that the Egypt that the Patriarch's knew was already under Hyksos domination.
 
Irenaeus says that the apostle Matthew wrote a Gospel, but just because he says it, doesn't mean he's right or that he actually knows this. As I have said, there are good reasons to think that Irenaeus is wrong about the authorship of the Gospels.

Interesting. Irenaeus also says Peter and Paul founded the church in Rome, but you consider that testimony - while it should be no more than hearsay, since Irenaeus knew neither Peter nor Paul. And as mentioned above, Paul never mentions Peter even being in Rome (and Paul did know Peter, so his word would be testimony, contrary to Irenaeus´).
 
Interesting. Irenaeus also says Peter and Paul founded the church in Rome, but you consider that testimony - while it should be no more than hearsay, since Irenaeus knew neither Peter nor Paul. And as mentioned above, Paul never mentions Peter even being in Rome (and Paul did know Peter, so his word would be testimony, contrary to Irenaeus´).
I'm getting the sense that you didn't read the post you quoted!

Hearsay is acceptable evidence, because otherwise we would have to throw most historical testimony out. It is not unshakably good evidence, and if something else, evidence of better quality, directly or implicitly contradicts it, then it will probably be judged to be incorrect, but it does constitute evidence all the same. Like Plotinus already said, Paul never mentioning Peter being in Rome does not contradict Irenaeus' claim, and there are no good reasons to believe that Peter was never in Rome outside of Irenaeus' work. On the other hand, there are very good reasons, e.g. textual ones, to not believe that Matthew was not the author of the Gospel of Matthew.
 
I´m getting the sense you´re missing the point! I´m using hearsay in a judicial sense, not a historical sense. ;)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom