Replies

CynicalBear:

Actually, there is a record of him being in Rome. St. Clement of Rome alludes to it in 90-95 AD in his letter to the Church at Corinth. St. Ignatius writings in circa 107 AD clearly indicates that Peter and Paul were both in Rome. St. Irenaeus of Lyon writing circa 170-175 AD also attests that St. Peter and Paul were in Rome. Tertullian, writing while still an orthodox Catholic mentions it

So I am not trying to convince you of anything. I am only providing evidence from writings of the 1st century that attest to St. Peter and Paul being in Rome, writings that are universally accepted among the Catholic, Orthodox Church and the Anglican and Lutheran Traditions. From what I gathered, most of the Reformed CHurch Historians today in Europe alo recognize the 7 letter Ignatian corpus as authentic as well as St. Ireanaeus’s writings.

Two Patristic Scholars, one Lutheran-Reformed J. Pelikan [he became Orthodox before he died] and the Anglican Chadwick clearly review the evidence and totally refute your post and views.

For example, Jaraslov Pelikan the Professor of Church History at Cornell in Volume 1 of his 5- volume work “The CHristian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine” entitled THe Emergence of the Catholic Tradition [100AD-600AD], which was written while he was a Reformed-Lutheran writes “But Rome is where both Peter and Paul had been martyred and were buried and this had given the CHurch of ROme a unique eminence as early as the time of Tertuillian” (p.354).

The great Anglican Patristic Scholar Henry Chadwick, professor at both OxFord and Cambridge and Pastor at the major Anglican “Christ Church” at Oxford writes of St. Peter that the martyrdom of St. Peter is alluded to in the Gospel of John. That it took place at Rome is “Highly Probable” from the epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Ignatius Letter to the Romans and the unamimous tradition of the second century writers and the fact that a monumment was built on Vatican Hill in 160 AD which marked the spot of Peter’s killing [See The Pengiun History of the Church: The Early Church, Revised Edition, 1993 Pengiun Books, p.18]

In summary, the evidence seems to clearly refute your personal opinion on the question of whether ST. Peter was in Rome.

>>In summary, the evidence seems to clearly refute your personal opinion on the question of whether ST. Peter was in Rome.<<

Personal opinion? Oh, come now. Though you would like to relegate it to personal opinion you would be denying some very diligent scholars. Even the RCC had problems trying to prove it as I showed in my previous post.

A 2009 critical study by Otto Zwierlein has concluded that "there is not a single piece of reliable literary evidence (and no archaeological evidence either) that Peter ever was in Rome." (Pieter W. van der Horst, review of Otto Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom: die literarischen Zeugnisse. Mit einer kritischen Edition der Martyrien des Petrus und Paulus auf neuer handschriftlicher Grundlage, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review)

1 Clement, a document that has been dated anywhere from the 90s to the 120s, is one of the earliest sources adduced in support of Peter's stay in Rome, but questions have been raised about the text's authenticity and whether it has any knowledge about Peter's life beyond what is contained in the New Testament Acts.[42] The Letter to the Romans attributed to St. Ignatius of Antioch implies that Peter and Paul had special authority over the Roman church, telling the Roman Christians: "I do not command you, as Peter and Paul did". However, the authenticity of this document and its traditional dating to c. 105–10 have also been questioned, and it may date from the final decades of the 2nd century.