Upon This Rock

In Matthew 16:18, Jesus said to Simon, “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.”

Roman Catholics interpret Matt. 16:18 to mean that Peter is the rock upon which the church is built. That interpretation then becomes the basis for the doctrine of papal succession. If Peter is the rock on which the church is built, and if the bishops of Rome are Peter’s successors, then it follows, they say, that the papacy remains the foundation of the church.

The name “Peter” was a nickname given to Simon by Jesus, all the way back in John 1:42 when Peter first met Jesus. Coming from the Greek word petros (or the Aramaic word “Cephas”), the name Peter means “Rock” or “Stone.” To use an English equivalent, Peter means “Rocky.”

But when Jesus said, “I say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church,” He differentiated between Peter and the “rock” by using two different Greek words. The name Peter is petros, but the word for “rock” is petra.

Those terms may sound similar to us, but ancient Greek literature shows that they actually refer to two different things. Petros was used to signify a small stone; petra, by contrast, referred to bedrock or a large foundation boulder (cf. Matt. 7:24-25).

So, to paraphrase Jesus’ words, the Lord told Peter, “I say to you that you are a small stone, and upon this bedrock I will build My church.” It was a play on words that made a significant spiritual point.

What then was the bedrock to which Jesus was referring? The answer to that question comes a couple verses earlier in Matthew 16.

Peter was just a small stone built atop the bedrock of something much bigger than himself: namely, the truth that Jesus is the Christ the Son of the living God. Put simply, Peter was not the rock; Christ is the Rock. And as Peter and the other apostles testified to the truth about Christ (which Peter did in verse 16), the church was built upon its only sure foundation.

In 1 Corinthians 3:11, Paul wrote that “no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

In Ephesians 2:20, Paul further explained that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone on which the church is founded by the apostles.

Even Peter himself, in 1 Peter 2:1–10 compared all believers to small stones that are part of the superstructure of the church. By contrast, Peter noted in vv. 6, 7, the Lord Jesus is the cornerstone on which the church is built. Peter said the same thing to the Jewish religious leaders in Acts 4:11. Speaking of Jesus, Peter proclaimed, “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone.”

If we were to go beyond Peter’s lifetime, and consider the writings of the church fathers from Origen to Chrysostom to Augustine – we would likewise find that the vast majority of ancient interpreters did not view the rock in Matthew 16:18 as a reference to Peter. The church fathers generally understood the “rock” to refer either to the apostles collectively, or to the specific content of Peter’s confession. In either case, they understood that Matthew 16:18 ultimately centered on Christ – the One to whom the apostles testified, and the One to whom Peter’s confession pointed.

Thus, we see the Roman Catholic understanding of Matthew 16:18 falls short on at least four levels:

1) Grammatically, it does not account for the lexical distinction between petros (Peter) and petra (Rock).

2) Contextually, it makes Peter the focal point of Matthew 16, when the text is clearly featuring truth about Jesus.

3) Theologically, it tries to make Peter the rock when the rest of the New Testament declares Christ to be the Rock.

4) Historically, the Roman Catholic view is not the patristic view of the first few centuries.

(Moreover, even if Peter were the “rock” of Matthew 16:18, such an interpretation would still not necessitate the notion of papal succession. But that is the topic of another post.)

Peter’s nickname might have been Rocky, but Peter himself understood that the Rock was Jesus Christ. The Rock on which Peter’s life was built was none other than the Rock of Salvation; the Rock of Deliverance; the Chief Cornerstone; and the Rock of Ages.

Peter bore witness to that truth in Matthew 16:16. The rest of the Apostles bore witness to that throughout their ministries. And it was the truth of that apostolic witness to Jesus Christ that formed the foundation of the church.

Sorry, ES, but that's as bogus as it gets. From the Septuagint version of Exodus, chapter 17:

9 εἶπεν δὲ Μωυσῆς τῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπίλεξον σεαυτῷ ἄνδρας δυνατοὺς καὶ ἐξελθὼν παράταξαι τῷ Αμαληκ αὔριον καὶ ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἕστηκα ἐπὶ τῆς κορυφῆς τοῦ βουνοῦ καὶ ἡ ῥάβδος τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν τῇ χειρί μου
10 καὶ ἐποίησεν Ἰησοῦς καθάπερ εἶπεν αὐτῷ Μωυσῆς καὶ ἐξελθὼν παρετάξατο τῷ Αμαληκ καὶ Μωυσῆς καὶ Ααρων καὶ Ωρ ἀνέβησαν ἐπὶ τὴν κορυφὴν τοῦ βουνοῦ

Available here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/sep/exo017.htm#009

which translates in the KJV as follows:

9 And Moses said unto Joshua, Choose us out men, and go out, fight with Amalek: to morrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in mine hand.
10 So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek: and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.
(Exodus 17:9-10)

So unless you're willing to say the translators of the LXX were putting this same curse acronym on Joshua the Son of Nun, then you have no case. Because as between Jesus and Joshua, the two forms in Greek are identical.

What about the alleged acronym? Here's the expression "Obliterate his name and memory," from this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yimakh_shemo :

ימח שמו וזכרו

Taking each of the first letters, we get this (remember, Hebrew reads from right to left):

ישו

which is the modern, secular Hebrew spelling of the name of Jesus. However, the original name Yehoshua is quite different.

יְהוֹשֻׁ֗עַ

During the Babylonian period, the name was contracted, dropping the second syllable, so Yehoshua became the shorter Yeshua:

ישוע

The Greek, as noted above, is just a transliteration of this shortened form. The final "s" is added because that's how Greek prefers to see proper names. There is absolutely no basis for the claim that the Greek name originated with the proposed acronym. It would be like saying the GOP was called that originally because it matched the acronym for "Goofballs On Parade." No, the acronym was invented well after the name first appeared, and we know what the name originally meant before the false acronym was applied to it.

Likewise, anyone's good name can be wrongfully tarnished in this way. Defamation is very easy to do if one is willing to do it. Which is why we must insist that such accusers show their work. So, ES, if you have any undiscovered notes from the Septuagint translators, or anyone else contemporary to that period, showing they used that curse in acronym form as a name for Jesus, the world is waiting for your earth-shattering discovery. Bring it forth, if you can. I for one will not be holding my breath.

BTW, as for why the English translators used Jesus and Joshua for the same name, the KJV translators rule seems rather simple. In English, at the time of that translation, both Joshua and Jesus were valid variations of the same name, not unlike "sean" versus "john." Those also are the same name in terms of Hebrew origin. So in the OT, they used Joshua consistently, because the driving text for that was the Hebrew, and in the NT they used Jesus in all places, even when the reference was to Joshua son of Nun, because this represented the greatest consistency with the inspired Greek text. So we have here Joshua being called Jesus:

For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.
(Hebrews 4:8)

Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David;
(Acts 7:45)

So if your translators were invoking a curse, at least it included old Joshua. But the reality is the whole argument is based on the flimsiest possible innuendo, and I have absolutely no doubt in my heart and mind that it has been invented by the prince of darkness himself, to spread darkness rather than light and to insult the wonderful name of our blessed Lord Jesus, because he truly hates the power in that name, which I myself have witnesses in the throwing down of the evil one's power. That's why, try as you might, I believe you will never find a hard factual source for the theory. It originated in someone's imagination, at the prompting of the evil one. But I can tell you from experience that the powers of darkness take flight at that name, Jesus, despite our imperfections of speech. They know, and God knows, who we are talking about. When we call on His name, does He hear it in perfect Hebrew? Or perfect faith? Which would you rather have in the heat of battle?

Peace,

SR

Even PETER says that Jesus is the PETRA on which the church is built.

Matthew 16:18 - http://bible.cc/matthew/16-18.htm

Jesus said that Peter was *petros*(masculine) and that on this *petra*(feminine) He would build His church.

Greek: 4074 Pétros (a masculine noun) – properly, a stone (pebble), such as a small rock found along a pathway. 4074 /Pétros (”small stone”) then stands in contrast to 4073 /pétra (”cliff, boulder,” Abbott-Smith).

“4074 (Pétros) is an isolated rock and 4073 (pétra) is a cliff” (TDNT, 3, 100). “4074 (Pétros) always means a stone . . . such as a man may throw, . . . versus 4073 (pétra), a projecting rock, cliff” (S. Zodhiates, Dict).

4073 pétra (a feminine noun) – “a mass of connected rock,” which is distinct from 4074 (Pétros) which is “a detached stone or boulder” (A-S). 4073 (pétra) is a “solid or native rock, rising up through the earth” (Souter) – a huge mass of rock (a boulder), such as a projecting cliff.

4073 (petra) is “a projecting rock, cliff (feminine noun) . . . 4074 (petros, the masculine form) however is a stone . . . such as a man might throw” (S. Zodhiates, Dict).

It’s also a strange way to word the sentence that He would call Peter a rock and say that on this I will build my church instead of *on you* as would be grammatically correct in talking to a person.

There is no support from the original Greek that Peter was to be the rock on which Jesus said he would build His church. The nouns are not the same, one being masculine and the other being feminine. They denote different objects.

Also, here, Paul identifies who petra is, and that is Christ. This link takes you to the Greek.

http://biblehub.com/text/1_corinthians/10-4.htm

1 Corinthians 10:1-4 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock (petra) that followed them, and the Rock (petra) was Christ.

http://biblehub.com/text/romans/9-33.htm

Romans 9:30-33 What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written,“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock (petra) of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

http://biblehub.com/text/1_peter/2-8.htm

1 Peter 2:1-8 So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe,

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,”

and

“A stone of stumbling, and a rock (petra) of offense.”

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

All occurrences of *petra* in the Greek.

http://biblehub.com/greek/strongs_4073.htm

First, some housekeeping. I made some errors in my previous post to you, as follows:

1. You were wondering which Syriac line preserves the distinction between Petros/Petra. In discovering that it is the Palestinian version which preserves said distinction, I also found that the distinction is preserved on the Petros, not the Petra, side of the equation. Thus, in the Palestinian, it is not tnra in the second slot, as I originally told you, but Petros in the first slot, transliterated directly into the Aramaic character set, so "you are Petros, and upon this kepha ..." This proves the translator sees a distinction in the Greek source from which they are translating, they know the name Petros is derived from Cephas, as we all agree, so to preserve the distinction they see in the Greek between Cephas and "this Rock," they chose to transliterate, rather than translate, Petros. BTW, the tnra theory is still alive and well, as we still do not know what Aramaic word, if any, occupied the second slot in the actual conversation, as all the Syriac lines come well after the Greek.

2. I've been calling "taute" ("this" as in "this rock") a demonstrative pronoun, but it's actually a demonstrative adjective when combined with the following noun "rock." This does not significantly change the analysis, but it is better to be calling things by their right name whenever possible. :)

On to the main argument: You raised some interesting points, but ultimately they fail to positively identify Peter as the Rock.

1. The gender matching argument fails to account for the status of Petros as a proper name, and the possibility that the word behind Petra is NOT Kepha. There is no dispute that Cephas is Petros rendered in Aramaic. But what you still do not have is the Aramaic underlying the passage as a whole, meaning you, like the rest of us, can only guess at what lies under Petra. And the Aramaic tnra is as good a candidate as kepha, because 1) the linguistic evidence from the targums shows it can stand for "rock," and 2) the Syriac texts are not final proof of either position, because they are not the original words behind the Greek. Furthermore, the Palestinian Syriac is older than the Peshitta, and highly regarded among linguists for the quality of its data, and it is that version in which the distinction survives as a true lexical difference (a proper name versus a type of object), and NOT a mere gender adjustment.

2. Whether Jesus spoke Aramaic with his disciples is till open to conjecture, so again there is no way to build a conscience-binding doctrine on the basis of unconfirmed conjecture.. You may have assessed the probability as high that Jesus spoke Aramaic on this occasion, and you would have many scholars with you. But the Aramaic primacy theory is more doubtful than you may realize. Please check out the following article, which describes a more fluid, transitional language environment in First Century Galilee, in which a colloquial exchange among friends may well have taken place in Hebrew, with some Aramaic terms coming along for the ride:

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.596687

The bottom line is this: Without discovery of some long lost Matthean text that predates the Greek we now have, we do not know what words were used in Matthew 18, other than what the Holy Spirit chose to reveal to us through the Greek manuscripts we do have. Everything beyond that is pure speculation, and it is an extraordinarily foolish thing to build a critical doctrine on the shifting sands of pure speculation. Rather, one should build the edifice of faith upon a proven Rock.

Matthew 7:24-25 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: (25) And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

Notice there is NO mention of Peter here. Just the rock of believing in Jesus, which, by the rule of first mention, becomes the governing definition of "foundation rock" for the remainder of the book.

3. As to what is the proper grammatical referent of the "this," it is not true that it must refer to the grammatically closest (antecedent) mention of "rock," for the following reasons:

a) Petros is a proper name in it's own right. It is therefore NOT semantically the same as simply saying "rock." Augustine is right on this. It has much more the effect of saying "Rocky," not "The Rock." The presence of that difference is sufficient to suggest the likelihood of a word play. If there is no word play, the use of the same word twice is just a meaningless redundancy. If there is a word play, the difference between the two is being intentionally used to express some higher level thought, and that drives one to look to the context for the most suitable, not necessarily the closest, antecedent.

b) A demonstrative adjective can come to rest on a more remote antecedent if that object is more in line with the framework of reference. We see this in law all the time. It's handled under what is called the canon of last antecedent, which reads like this:

A pronoun, relative pronoun, or demonstrative adjective generally refers to the nearest reasonable antecedent

Note that the rule is framed as a general principle, not an absolute, and that it allows passing over unreasonable antecedents to get to reasonable ones. For example, consider the antecedent in this statement (borrowed from this article):

"Victims depend on jurors to understand their motives."

Who is represented by the "their" there? Now, we can see what the speaker is saying, but not by strict appeal to the rule of last antecedent. Instead, we have to invoke knowledge about each of the respective objects and figure it out from their relationships. We know what a victim is, what a juror is, and what a motive is. We can infer that jurors' motives are not what a victim wants the juror to understand, so we deduce the victim's own motives are the thing desired to be understood, and therefore the victims are the proper antecedent. But that antecedent is remote. There are intermediate nouns to which it could possibly apply. Yet by the power of context we are able to discern the best of those choices.

In Matthew 16, the best antecedent, the best foundation for the Ecclesia, isn't Rocky. It's the Rock he has been named after, who has just been identified as the Messiah, and whose divine teaching has already in this same text been presented as the solid rock that will endure the tests of the storm, and whom both Peter and Paul will later identify, multiple times, as the foundation stone for all believers.

c) Furthermore, Jesus' switch from direct to indirect address gives us warrant to look past Peter for an antecedent more compatible with a third person indirect address. The demonstrative pronoun "this rock" is not a proper form for addressing Peter, and it is clear from the preceding clause that is what Jesus is doing, addressing Peter. The normal pattern is that whenever a speaker starts out in second person address, they don't switch to indirect address midstream, unless they are speaking of something different. There must have been a good reason for Jesus to shift from talking to Peter to talking about The Rock, and it would be consistent with the aforementioned word play, that Jesus is here deliberately signaling He wants us to look past the man Peter, to see the Rock on which Peter is standing, because it is that Rock, not fallible man, Who will be the foundation of the Ecclesia, which foundation, and the living temple built upon it, will remain secure, no matter what storms assault it, nor what powers of Hell fight against it.

4. The Occam's Razor problem. Why go the long way around? Up to about 1870, there were, within Catholicism itself, five significant strands of belief about the identity of the Rock in Matthew 16:18. That could have all been avoided, very cleanly, if Jesus had simply said "You are Peter, and upon you I will build my Ecclesia." If Jesus' intent was to continue to address Peter as the Rock upon which the Ecclesia will be built, then there would be no need for the second mention of Rock, nor any reason to shift to talking in the third person to someone standing right in front of Him. It's all excess baggage.

5. The mystery of the Markan omission. Mark is believed by many to be the product of Peter relating the Gospel through Mark. If Peter understood himself to be the rock of which Jesus spoke, why did he fail to mention it to Mark, at least as an important part of the story? Wouldn't that be one of the most memorable moments of Jesus' teaching ministry for Peter? But instead, what do we find?

Mark 8:27-30 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? (28) And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets. (29) And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. (30) And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

6. As a close corollary to the Markan omission, we see that when Peter does get the chance to speak of a founding rock, he directs the reader to Jesus, and not himself:

1 Peter 2:6-8 Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. (7) Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, (8) And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed.

Conclusion:

The case for Peter being the Rock is much weaker than the case for Jesus being the Rock. The context pushes us to look past Petros and look for the Petra after whom he is named. Our respect for Jesus as an effective communicator requires us to make sense of why He set up a word play instead of just telling Peter directly he would be the foundation of the Ecclesia. And we are amazed that a doctrine of such high importance to ecclesiastical structure would go entirely without mention or receive any sort of elaboration anywhere in the NT record, other than in Roman speculation over this one passage.

In any event, I will follow Peter on this, and agree with him to honor Jesus as the "chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded."

Peace,

SR

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