Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And one of the biggest roadblocks that almost any Protestant dialoguing with a Catholic faces is the Pope.

What makes him so special?

Why should I follow that man when I've got the Word of God?

Well, Catholics believe part of the answer is this.

Jesus Christ created the papacy.

He changes Simon's name to Peter, Rock, and then says, Upon this rock I will build my church.

You might ask, what does that have to do with the Bishop of Rome today?

Well, the Catholic claim here is that St. Peter went to Rome where he built up the church, and was ultimately martyred.

And that his special leadership role carries on in the bishops who follow after him.

Now, Protestants reject this, and many claim that not only was St. Peter not the first pope, but he never even went to Rome in the first place.

This whole connection between St. Peter then and the Bishops of Rome that allegedly follow him is all just a big Catholic myth with no evidence.

Well, the truth is from the scriptures and true history and archeological evidence, we know Peter never went to Rome.

There is no biblical evidence.

There is no historical evidence.

In fact, much to the contrary, it was the Apostle Paul who said he wanted to go to Rome.

We have biblical evidence and we have historical evidence that the Apostle Paul made it to Rome, but not whom we know as Simon Peter.

Okay, so that is the claim, that there's no biblical, historical or archeological evidence that St. Peter ever went to Rome, and therefore he couldn't be the first pope.

Now, as we're gonna see, each of those three claims is false.

There is biblical, there is historical, there is archeological evidence, and I want to look at each of those three areas in turn.

But before we do that, I want to give a huge thank you to my supporters over on Patreon.

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Okay, back to the argument.

Number one, let's look at the biblical evidence, and we'll look at St. Peter's own testimony first.

At the end of First Peter, St. Peter signs off with these words.

She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings, and so does my son Mark.

Okay, so Peter is writing from Babylon.

Now, if you remember the Old Testament, Babylon is the capital city of the empire that had conquered ancient Israel, so it's not surprising that we find Jewish writers living under Roman occupation referring to Rome as Babylon.

For instance, Oracle 5, of what are called the Sibylline Oracles, this is a Jewish prophetic writing from the first or second century AD, and it foretells the destruction of Rome by saying that then a great star shall come from heaven into the dreadful sea and burn the vastly deep and Babylon itself and the land of Italy, because of which there perished many holy, faithful men among the Hebrews and a people true.

Okay, so it's quite clear from the context there that the Babylon in question isn't the ancient city, it's a major city in Italy that's by the sea.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that that is Rome.

Similarly, in the New Testament itself, Revelation chapter 17 describes the so-called Whore of Babylon.

Now, the references in Revelation 17 and 18, and in First Peter 5, are actually the only times in the New Testament that Babylon is referenced in the present tense.

And here in Revelation at least, Babylon is obviously not referring to the ancient city.

Now, many Protestants are going to claim it's actually warning against the Catholic Church, but that is at best a bad misreading of the biblical evidence.

There are several clues in the biblical context that this is referring to the city of Rome, and more broadly to the Roman Empire.

As in the Sibylline Oracles, this Babylon is seated upon many waters.

But she's also described as being upon a seven-headed beast, which John tells us explicitly are the seven hills of the city.

And she's described as being drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

So what major city was built on seven hills, conquered Israel, and was martyring Christians in the first century?

Was not the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, it's the city of Rome.

And I've never heard anyone so bold as to claim that the Catholic Church in Rome was the one martyring Christians in the first century, which is what you would seemingly have to believe if you think Revelation 17 and 18 is referring to Catholicism.

Okay, so given all of this, it should be painfully obvious that when St. Peter says that he's writing from Babylon in First Peter 5:13, he's making admittedly a veiled but an obvious reference to the fact that he's in the city of Rome.

Now, that case is buttressed by the fact that he mentions he's there with St. Mark.

Now, we know from other early sources, like St. Irenaeus, who we're gonna talk about soon, that Mark was with Peter in Rome and that it was there that he wrote the Gospel of Mark.

We also have clues from within the Gospel of Mark itself.

The Lutheran biblical scholar Martin Hengel points out that the Gospel of Mark has numerous what are called Latinisms, which point to it most likely having been written in Rome.

That is, Mark will mention some detail and then he'll explain it in ways that a Latin-speaking Roman audience would understand.

Just to take two clear instances, in Mark 15:16, St. Mark uses the Greek word alea, and then he adds that is praetorium.

He's assuming that his audience is gonna be more familiar with the Roman term than the Greek one.

Similarly, in Mark 12:42, when the widow puts in 2 lepta, Mark says that these are equivalent to one Roman quadrans.

Now, those kind of conversions make total sense if Mark is writing from Rome, but would be bizarre if Mark is writing from the ancient city of Babylon, far outside the Roman Empire.

If you understand the cultural, linguistic, geographic, and historical background to the New Testament, you can see why First Peter 5 proves that St. Peter was in Rome.

But if you don't have any of that context, and you just take a surface reading of scripture alone, then you're likely to distort the biblical message pretty badly.

The 20th century Presbyterian theologian Lorin Boettner, famous for his anti-Catholic book Roman Catholicism, looks at this very same passage .

and takes just a surface literal reading.

He concludes that while there is no scriptural evidence at all that Peter went west to Rome, here's a plain statement of scripture that he did go east to Babylon.

Well, he's obviously wrong, but he's hardly the first to misunderstand First Peter five this badly.

The Protestant reformer John Calvin acknowledged that the early Christians had read Babylon as an obvious reference to Rome, but he seems confused by this.

He insists that they're wrong, that their reading has no color of truth in its favor, and he doesn't understand why so many of them thought this unless they were somehow all led astray.

But the idea that Babylon has to be taken literally is an odd position.

The usual argument made by people who take it literally is that, well, First Peter isn't apocalyptic writing or poetic writing, so we wouldn't expect to see terms like Babylon being used in a spiritual and non-literal sense.

That argument is really weak.

In his own writings, which are not poetry and are not apocalyptic writings, John Calvin himself compares his fight against the Catholic Church to distinguishing Jerusalem from Babylon.

He doesn't have to explain that he means this metaphorically 'cause it's perfectly obvious.

People use imagery and metaphors in their language even when they're not writing prophecy.

There's a good reason that none of the early Christians seemed to think that St. Peter had literally gone east to the city of Babylon because they knew the city was basically destroyed by this point.

In his book, A History of Babylon: 2200 BC to AD 75, Paul-Alain Boulloud points out that ancient writers described the city of Babylon becoming deserted by the second century AD. For instance, the Greek geographer Strabo, who lived during the time of Jesus, he described the city of Babylon as so deserted that you wouldn't hesitate to call it a desert.

Dio Cassius, writing about the Emperor Trajan's visit to Babylon in the year 116, describes how the emperor had gone to see the same city and found that it was nothing but mounds and stones and ruins.

So if you want a modern example, think about the use of the term Timbuktu in English.

Technically, the city of Timbuktu still really exists.

It's a small city of about 32,000 people in Mali, Africa.

But most of the time, if somebody says they're going to Timbuktu, they just mean they're going somewhere far away.

Someone who didn't speak English, reading this 1,500 years later, might misunderstand that, and that seemingly what happens here.

Protestants looking at scripture alone without any of the necessary cultural references just take a proof text and read it badly in the wrong direction.

After all, does it really strike you as plausible that St. Peter decides that the best way he's gonna spread the good news of Jesus Christ is by traveling all the way to Mesopotamia to go preach to a bunch of mounds and stones and ruins?

Or might he have instead gone, I don't know, to the heart of the Roman Empire, the very place that the early Christians tell us that they're aware that he went?

Let's turn now from the biblical evidence to the historical evidence of the early Christian witnesses.

Because in addition to the biblical evidence, we also have numerous early Christian sources who tell us that they know that St. Peter went to Rome, that he preached there, that he built up a church there, and that he was martyred there.

I'm gonna give you just a few examples.

So in about the year 107, St. Ignatius of Antioch, a student of the Apostle Johns, writes to the Christians in Rome.

In his letter, he asks them not to interfere with his martyrdom, but then he adds, I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you.

They were apostles; I am but a condemned man.

They were free, while I am, even unto now, a servant.

So remember that many of Ignatius' readers would have been old enough to have lived during the lifetime of the apostles, and Ignatius is taking for granted that as Christians of Rome, they were once instructed and commanded by Peter and Paul directly.

Later in the second century, now about the year 170, we've got fragments of a letter that Dionysius, the Bishop of Corinth, wrote to Pope Soter I. In it, he talks about how Peter and Paul planted and taught in Corinth before the two of them planted and taught the church in Rome and were martyred there.

About ten years later, we find the oldest existing evidence that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four Gospels.

We hear this from St. Irenaeus, the bishop of what is now Lyon, France, and he tells us that Matthew was written while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, laying the foundations of the church, and that Mark was a disciple and interpreter of Peter.

Two chapters later, when he's talking about how it's necessary that all Christians hold to the faith of the Roman Church, he describes it as, The very ancient and universally known Church, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul.

He then traces every Bishop of Rome from the time of Peter and Paul down to his own age.

A few decades later, Tertullian does the same thing.

In responding to heretics who claim that their teachings were what the apostles really taught, he lays out this simple test that we can still use today.

Quote, Let them exhibit the origins of their churches, let them unroll the list of their bishops coming down from the beginning by succession, in such a way that their first bishop had for his originator and predecessors one of the apostles or apostolic men.

One, I mean, who continued with the apostles.

For this is how the apostolic churches record their origins.

End quote.

So the principle that he's laying down there is what we call apostolic succession.

It's not a question of your interpretation of the Bible versus mine.

It's a question of whether we can trust that the churches which knew the apostles directly, had heard their preaching in person, were built up by those apostles, whether those can be trusted or not.

Notice in the very next sentence, Tertullian says explicitly that the Church of Rome can trace its origin to the Apostle Peter in this way.

And notice the stakes here.

It's not just historical trivia.

The authority of the Church of Rome is being tied, even back then, to the fact that it is an apostolic see instituted by these saints, Peter and Paul, by these apostles.

Now, there's actually much more in the way of early Christian evidence, even as early as the first century.

We see St. Clement of Rome referring to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul as recent events, even though he doesn't explicitly tell us in what city the two were killed.

But my point here is just that when people tell you that there's no early evidence for Peter having been to Rome, they're either ignorant or lying.So besides the Biblical data, we have these seemingly independent accounts corroborating this, from the Christians of Antioch, from the Christians of Corinth, from the Christians of Rome itself.

As Martin Bruchmühl points out, during the period of what he calls living memory, that's gonna be the lifetime of the disciples of the apostles and the generation right after, we find this wide range of sources all testifying to Peter having been martyred in Rome, and nobody disputing this, and nobody claiming he died somewhere else or offering any other kind of competing narrative.

There's nobody in Mesopotamia who says, Oh no, actually St. Peter came out here instead to the ancient city of Babylon.

Let's turn finally to the archeological evidence, Peter's own body.

Suppose for a moment that the historical and Biblical evidence isn't enough for you.

We have something even more astounding, the bones of St. Peter himself.

2013 was a year of faith, and as part of an extra kind of reward for pilgrims who had come, uh, Pope Francis displayed these nine bones, and he's essentially making the claim that he's holding right there the bones of the person who founded the Church in Rome.

This is something that has never happened before.

The Vatican, this morning, publicly displayed what's believed to be bone fragments from St. Peter and Apostle of Jesus Christ and the world's first pope.

Now obviously, there are limits to what we can prove, but the scientific and archeological evidence really does point to the fact that beneath St. Peter's Basilica is an ancient tomb containing the bones of St. Peter.

Dr. Paul Anderson of George Fox University, he sums up the evidence for the bones being Peter's like this.

Quote, Several types of evidence support the likelihood that these might indeed be the bones of Peter.

First, the site is an ancient burial complex going back to the first century and earlier.

Second, an ancient engraving can be read to say Peter is here, but not conclusively.

Third, carbon-14 dating of these bones show them to be those of a robust male, 60 to 70 years of age, dating from the appropriate time period.

A fourth element of evidence not mentioned by the CNN episode is that an ancient worship shrine predated the building of a church is found on that spot going back to the pre-Constantinian era so the traditional connections with Peter are strong.

And Dr. Anderson, by the way, as far as I know, is a Quaker.

He's not a Catholic trying to build up the Catholic case.

So there you have it.

Not only does scripture point to Peter and St. Mark being in Rome, this is also the clear and unanimous witness of the earliest Christians.

This is a claim supported by the best available archeological and scientific evidence.

So if you've heard a Protestant make this claim before, please share this video with them.

See what they have to say.

Now if you liked this video and wanna see more, please drop a like and consider directly supporting our channel on Patreon by going to shamelessjoe.com.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmair.

God bless you.