I agree with the Protestant position: Namely, that it was just plain STUPID of Jesus to give Simon the name “Rock.” If Jesus had not done that, all the confusion could have been avoided.
Which Protestants said it was stupid to give Peter the name of *rock*? Can you point to the infallible declaration to that position?
Petros is not petra.
A cliff is not a pebble.
Although, I do suppose that Catholicism was built on a pebble.
The true body of Christ is built on the bedrock of Jesus.
I was born in 1970 and came to know Christ outside of the Roman Catholic Church. Since I’m following Him, I would go wherever He would lead me, including the Catholic Church. I even looked into it when I didn’t have much by my simple faith and understanding of the Gospel, and had read the Gospels. I went to masses for awhile, and in my 20’s found some appeal in all the artwork (this was a basilica) and the mysticism that was there in the service, but there was no personal connection there (no one ever spoke to me) and something, looking back, seemed to be missing. I found it to be better than the Lutheran services I grew up in, in which people seemed to see themselves as enduring them, and were only too ecstatic to be released from for another week once they were over. But once I read the whole Bible, and meditated on it over and over, so that my understanding grew, I saw how so much of Roman Catholicism is in clear contradiction to God’s Word and Spirit. And the argument that “it’s the exact same religion” for 2000 years falls flat, too. There might not have been wholesale changes, like Mormonism’s Book of Mormon, but there is over and over again distortion of what was there at the beginning, that result in wholesale changes due to altered meanings of things.
History aside, how do we know from the Scriptures that Christ spoke Aramaic? Simple. In several places He is quoted speaking Aramaic. In St. Matthew’s and St. Mark’s Gospels, some of Christ’s words are rendered in the language the people spoke. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (Mt 27:46, Mk 15:34), “Talitha cuom” (Mk 8:41), and “Ephphatha” (Mk 7:34) are all Aramaic phrases. Even the word “Abba” which Christ uses often to refer to the Father is the Aramaic word roughly translated as “Daddy.” Incidentally, the Arabic word “Abu” has the same meaning… so “Abu Sulieman” means “Father of Solomon.”