But not to dwell upon ancient examples, let us come to the most recent spiritual heroes. Let us take the noble examples furnished in our own generation. Through envy and jealousy, the greatest and most righteous pillars [of the Church] have been persecuted and put to death. Let us set before our eyes the illustrious apostles. Peter, through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two, but numerous labours, and when he had finally suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him. Owing to envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee, and stoned. After preaching both in the east and west, he gained the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world, and come to the extreme limit of the west, and suffered martyrdom under the prefects. Thus was he removed from the world, and went into the holy place, having proved himself a striking example of patience. (Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, 5, [AD 80])
Interesting that Clement of ROME only disccusses the martyrdom of the two Apostles who died in ROME, and not the martyrdom of any others?
Ignatius -- No mention of Peter in Rome at all
Entreat the Lord for me, that by these instruments I may be found a sacrifice to God. I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles of Jesus Christ, but I am the very least [of believers]: they were free, as the servants of God; while I am, even until now, a servant. (Epistle of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Romans, 4, [AD 110])
Note well too that unlike the Churches of Asia, St. Ignatius issues no instructions to the Romans. Rather he recognizes: "Ye have never envied anyone; ye have taught others. Now I desire that those things may be confirmed [by your conduct], which in your instructions ye enjoin [on others]." (ibid., 3) because he is addressing "the Church ... which presides over love" (ibid, Introduction). Thus he exhorts them to: "Remember in your prayers the Church in Syria, which now has God for its shepherd, instead of me. Jesus Christ alone will oversee it, and your love." (ibid., 9) The presidency of Rome in love over the Churches extends explicitly in St. Ignatius' mind over Syria parallel to that of Christ and to his own jurisdiction, which will be ended by his death.
Irenaeus -- Mentions only that Peter visited and preached in Rome (not denied by this article)
Matthew also issued among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. (St. Irenaeus of Lyons, "Against Heresies", 3.1.1, [A.D. 189])"But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the succession of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the succession of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, that church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. With that church, because of its superior origin, all the churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world, and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition.
The blessed apostles, having founded and built up the church, they handed over the office of the episcopate to Linus. Paul makes mention of this Linus in the letter to Timothy [2 Tim. 4:21]. To him succeeded Anacletus, and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was chosen for the episcopate. He had seen the blessed apostles and was acquainted with them. It might be said that he still heard the echoes of the preaching of the apostles and had their traditions before his eyes. And not only he, for there were many still remaining who had been instructed by the apostles. In the time of Clement, no small dissension having arisen among the brethren in Corinth, the church in Rome sent a very strong letter to the Corinthians, exhorting them to peace and renewing their faith, declaring the tradition which it had lately received from the apostles, proclaiming the one God, omnipotent, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Creator of man, who brought on the deluge, and called Abraham, who led the people from the land of Egypt, spake with Moses, set forth the law, sent the prophets, and who has prepared fire for the devil and his angels. From this document, whosoever chooses to do so, may learn that He, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, was preached by the Churches, and may also understand the apostolical tradition of the Church, since this Epistle is of older date than these men who are now propagating falsehood, and who conjure into existence another god beyond the Creator and the Maker of all existing things. To this Clement, Evaristus succeeded Alexander followed Evaristus; then, sixth from the apostles, Sixtus was appointed; after him, Telephorus, who was gloriously martyred; then Hyginus; after him, Pius; then after him, Anicetus. Soter having succeeded Anicetus, and now, in the twelfth place after the apostles, the lot of the episcopate has fallen to Eleutherius. In this order, and by the teaching of the apostles handed down in the Church, the preaching of the truth has come down to us." (ibid., 3.3.2-3)
I'd say St. Irenaeus mentions quite a bit more than Sts. Peter and Paul preachign in Rome.
Tertullian & Eusebius – We now begin to see mentions of Peter’s martyrdom and burial in Rome. However, to accept these references as accurate, we are reduced to accepting the word of a Montanist heretic (Tertullian) who wrote about 140 years after the events in question
Tertullian was a Catholic when he wrote in AD 200.
"But if you are near Italy, you have Rome, where authority is at hand for us too. What a happy church that is, on which the apostles poured out their whole doctrine with their blood; where Peter had a passion like that of the Lord, where Paul was crowned with the death of John [the Baptist, by being beheaded]" (Tertullian, "Demurrer Against the Heretics", 36 [A.D. 200])."[T]his is the way in which the apostolic churches transmit their lists: like the church of the Smyrneans, which records that Polycarp was placed there by John, like the church of the Romans, where Clement was ordained by Peter" (ibid., 32.2)
So we can see that a century-and-a-half or two after the fact a tradition began to develop to support the claim that Peter was martyred in Rome, but the development of a tradition a couple hundred years after the events is not really very sound evidence for the accuracy of the claim.
St. Clement mentions their martyrdom in his letter only a decade and a half after the event!
On the other hand, we have testimony in stone, from the first century AD, that Simon bar Jonah was buried near Jerusalem
No you have an inscription along with an inscription for the grave of a certain "Yehshua". What, no bones? No historical tradition among anybody?
but the fact remains that as evidence for the claim it is much earlier and much more concrete (bad pun, sorry) than the traditions claimed as evidence by Roman Catholicism.
I think the testimony of the Fathers, the bones, and the grave marked "Petros eni" in a Tropaion in a hall with altar and baptistery discovered DIRECTLY under the High Altar of St. Peter's only in this century (what a coincidence!), surrounded by graffiti's such as "Peter, pray Christ Jesus for the holy Christian men buried near your body" are rather more solid. Something made Constantine and the Church to violate Roman law and piety by filling in a graveyard to build a massive Bassilica Church on a certain spot, especially when level ground was available nearby.
A remarkable archaeological detective story begins in the year the Second World War erupted, when work got underway to lower the floor of the crypt beneath St Peter's known as the Sacred Grottoes. In 1939 Pope Pius XI died and preparations were made to inter him in the crypt beside Pius X. The Vatican authorities decided to take this opportunity to convert the subterranean parts of St Peter's into a 'lower church' – a task which required the lowering of the floor to create sufficient height. As they dug downwards, the workmen first came upon the floor of Constantine's basilica – just 20 centimetres below the pavement of the crypt. Beneath that they broke into a street of ancient Roman tombs from the 2nd century AD, sloping eastwards down Vatican Hill. To the west the street, running directly under the nave of the cathedral, headed in the direction of the current high altar. The whole city of the dead had been packed full of earth to form a gigantic horizontal platform upon which Constantine's basilica had been constructed. This was an enormous and costly feat of engineering which suggested to the Vatican archaeologists, appointed to investigate the find, that tremendous effort had been invested in building the basilica precisely at this spot. The four-man excavation team all belonged to the Papal Institute for Christian Archaeology and worked under the personal supervision of the Administrator of St Peter's Basilica, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas.As Kaas and his colleagues worked their way westwards up the street of tombs, they began to find familiar early Christian motifs painted on the walls. Epigraphist Professor Margherita Guarducci was brought in and soon discovered a Latin graffito, painted on the wall of one mausoleum, which read: 'Peter, pray Christ Jesus for the holy Christian men buried near your body.' The inscription was dated to around AD 300.
Further on the excavators discovered an open court measuring 7 metres by 4 metres, bounded on its west (long) side by a thick red-plastered wall. Set into the face of the wall was an aedicula – an altar-like structure supported by thin columns. According to the surrounding archaeological evidence, this dated to around 160 AD – just a century after Peter's death. The team became very excited when they realised that the aedicula stood immediately below the high altar of St Peter's. The early Christian writer, Gaius (c. AD 200), had referred to the 'Tropaion of Peter' located on Vatican Hill. Latin scholars understood this to mean some sort of funerary monument standing over Peter's grave.
Kaas and his colleagues carefully proceeded to investigate the area beneath the red wall behind the aedicula. There they discovered an open space formed by an arch in the foundations of the wall. The brown earth of the tiny chamber's floor was sifted to reveal hundreds of coins from all ages and countries. These had been dropped down a narrow vertical shaft, the iron-grilled opening of which is to be found in the Niche of the Pallia where a new bishop's pallium (robe) is left overnight before his induction. The Niche itself is located in the Confessio (a sunken area in front of the high altar) which lies on top of the courtyard of the aedicula. During the Middle Ages and earlier, the 5-metre shaft, just 13 by 20 cms, became a place of pilgrimage where the devout could 'make contact' with St Peter's mortal remains. Within the chamber at the bottom of the shaft the archaeologists also found human bones. At first they were convinced that they had found the remains of St Peter but, sadly, a later anthropological examination determined that there were in fact three skeletons – those of two young males and a much older female. None could have belonged to Peter who died at a mature age. The disappointment in the failure to find St Peter's bones reached all the way up to Pius XII who had been keeping a close eye on the secret search for the founder of his line ... but then a remarkable thing happened.
The Vatican excavators had previously come across a 47 cm-thick buttress wall to the right of the aedicula, erected in the third century to support the red wall which had been showing signs of movement. The north plastered face of this buttress was covered in Latin names of early Christians who had presumably come to visit the original shrine to St Peter. A further investigation revealed that the wall contained a hidden repository, lined in marble. Unfortunately, the archaeologists found the hiding place empty – again no bones of St Peter. It was only in 1952 that the persistent delving of Margherita Guarducci uncovered an astonishing story which has to go down as one of the greatest archaeological blunders of all time.
A few months after the death of Ludwig Kaas a workman named Giovanni Segoni revealed to Guarducci that he and Kaas had returned to the shrine one evening in 1942, after the excavating team had gone home. Together they had opened the repository, exposed that day but, as yet, unexamined. Inside were several human bones. Kaas instructed Segoni to remove the contents and place them in a wooden box which was then hidden away in a storeroom. Of course, when the rest of the archaeologists came to investigate the repository, they found it empty. No-one was aware of what had transpired the previous night. To this day it is a complete mystery as to why the Vatican Monsignor, assigned the task of supervising the whole excavations by the pope himself, indulged in this clandestine operation. Kaas took his secret with him to the grave but, fortunately, Segoni was still there to take Guarducci to the storeroom in which the box lay forgotten and ignored. The bones were subsequently analysed and proved to be those of an elderly man of stocky build. A close examination showed they had once been buried in the soil beneath the aedicula and red wall. Red staining and fine threads of gold revealed that the relics had been wrapped in a fine woollen cloth, dyed in the emperor's purple and embroidered in gold. Whoever had been reburied in this secret repository must have been regarded with great esteem. Confirmation of the identity soon followed as, once again, fate played its part.
Back in 1950 archaeologist Antonio Ferrua had decided to re-examine the interior of the repository and, to his amazement, found that the previously empty container now held a new surprise. The fact is that the marble casing of the repository only covered the base and sides of the niche in the buttress wall. The upper part had been left open to the exposed bricks of the buttress and, at the short west end, the plaster of the red wall. A piece of that red plaster had been dislodged sometime since 1942, falling into the repository. Ferrua was immediately able to read letters scratched onto the surface of the plaster – letters which had been scribbled onto the inside west wall of the repository at the moment the bones had been sealed in their hiding place so many centuries ago. The Greek inscription read PETR[....] ENI. Two years later epigraphist Guarducci, having discovered that the repository had indeed held the bones of an old man, now realised the importance of this tiny plaster fragment. She translated the Greek graffito as 'Peter is within' or 'Peter is here'.
When was the shrine of St Peter founded? The 6th-century 'Book of the Pontiffs', Liber Pontificalis, claims that Pope Anacletus 'built and set in order a memorial shrine to the Blessed Peter, where the Bishops might be buried'. The problem is that Anacletus lived at the end of the 1st century AD – unfortunately too early for the erection of the 2nd century aedicula or Tropaion which is the visible monument for Peter's grave. However, there is another pope with a similar name – Anacetus – whose pontificate was around AD 155-65. It could well be that the writer of the Liber Pontificalis made a simple error and that the foundation of the shrine should be dated to this later pope's reign. What is interesting is that, behind the courtyard of the aedicula, the archaeologists found a room full of sarcophagi and, next to it, what seems to have been a baptistery. It is clear that the simple courtyard, with the aedicula as its focus, functioned not only as a church where the early Christians worshipped and received baptism, but also, just as the Liber Pontificalis states, as the burial ground where the first popes were laid to rest close to their founder.
The search for the bones of St Peter is surely one of the most fascinating archaeological stories of the 20th century. Not only was the project to dig beneath the massive cathedral of St Peter's a precarious business, but the results were almost beyond belief or expectation. Who would have anticipated the discovery of a street of Roman mausolea leading to the very first church of St Peter's, dating from just a century after the apostle's martyrdom; and finally the recovery of the first pope's bones themselves.
On June 27 1968 a simple ceremony took place in the excavated space beneath St Peter's high altar. Pope Paul VI and a select band of archaeologists carefully placed plexiglass boxes containing Peter's remains back into the repository where they had been found by Ludwig Kaas in December 1950. Those few shattered relics belonging to the 'Prince of Apostles' remain there today – a testimony to the remarkable tenacity of faith and tradition. The simple and romantic truth is that the church of Rome was indeed built upon the very rock (petros) of ages.
http://www.nunki.net/PerDud/TheWorks/Express/StPetersbones.html
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam.