[Campion]

The Greek word for Peter is petros, meaning "a pebble." The Greek word for rock is petra, meaning "a massive rock" such as bedrock. Jesus is the Rock, petra

This argument is totally destroyed, nuked, flattened, and vaporized in Butler, Hess, and Dahlgren's Jesus, Peter, and the Keys.

Briefly:

1. petros was used to mean "little pebble" in classical Greek poetry, not in the Koine of the NT. The whole argument falls to pieces just on that basis, but they don't stop there.
2. Jesus could not have said "you are petra and upon this petra I will build my Church" even if he had wanted to because "petra" has feminine gender and cannot be used as a man's given name. It would be like naming a boy "Roberta" or "Julia". To get a man's name, you have to switch to a masculine declension, hence, "Petros".
3. There's really no point in renaming Simon with anything resembling "rock" unless "rock" has something to do with Simon personally. The rest of the verse clearly grants special authority to Simon personally; it wasn't to Simon Peter's confession that Jesus gave the power to bind and loose, nor does it make any sense whatsoever for Jesus to say, "You, Simon, are but a little pebble (but I'm a big rock), and to you I give the keys of heaven ..."
4. This tortured exegesis totally ignores the Biblical significance of the keys. The passage is a reference to Isaiah 22:22, where the "keys" are viewed as an emblem of the power granted to the royal vizier, the king's right hand man under the Davidic monarchy.
5. Jesus would have been speaking to Peter in Aramaic, not Greek. There is even tradition that Matthew's Gospel was written in "Hebrew". That may mean Hebrew, or may mean Aramaic, but in neither language is the alleged "petros/petra" play on words exist. In Aramaic, it's "kepha/kepha". And we know from the Bible that Peter was referred to as "kepha" in Aramaic, because that's where "Cephas" comes from.

[Cicero]

We don't know for sure whether the Gospels were written first in Aramaic or not, or for that matter whether Jesus and the Apostles spoke to each other or to the Jewish crowds in Aramaic. Greek was the Lingua Franca of the Middle East since the time of Alexander the Great. We have no manuscripts going back prior to the Greek, so it's all speculative as to what might have preceded what we have. And much "scientific biblical criticism" has an axe of one kind or another to grind.

[Isaiah_61]

As the bride of Christ, wouldn't the church have been referred to in the feminine gender in the greek?

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Actually, this argument about Peter and the Greek definition of rock has always appeared to me to be bootless.

The better question to ask is: Does Jesus speak in the first person throughout his sentence to Peter, or does he switch from first person to third person in the middle of it?

If he switches from first to third person, then he is obviously talking about Peter being the foundation of the church.

However, if he is talking to Peter throughout the sentence in the first person (more reasonable considering the context), then it appears Revelation from G-d is the foundation of His church.

[maro]

Technicalities aside, does God really have a taste for puns, and would He have made a pun the foundation on which He built His Church?