Apostle Peter

Simon, later called Peter, was a Galilean Jewish fisherman of the early first century, identified in the New Testament as the son of Jonah (or John) and the brother of Andrew. The Gospel of John states that he and Andrew came from Bethsaida, a town on the northern side of the Sea of Galilee; the Synoptic Gospels associate his household with Capernaum, where Jesus healed his mother-in-law, a notice that establishes that Peter was married. He and his brother were called from their nets to follow Jesus, and he received the Aramaic name Kepha (Cephas), translated into Greek as Petros, meaning 'rock.' In the lists of the Twelve Apostles his name is invariably placed first, and the evangelists repeatedly present him as the disciples' spokesman. According to Matthew 16, Jesus declared that Peter was the rock on which he would build his church and that he would be given the keys of the kingdom of heaven, a passage that later became central to Roman claims of Petrine primacy. First Corinthians 9:5, written by Paul in the mid-first century, refers to Peter's being accompanied by a believing wife, confirming the Gospel indication of marriage.

In the Gospel narratives of Jesus' ministry Peter is present at the Transfiguration, at the raising of Jairus's daughter, and in Gethsemane. He confesses Jesus as the Messiah, attempts to walk on the water, and, on the night of Jesus' arrest, denies him three times, an episode attested by all four canonical Gospels. The Gospel of John recounts a post-resurrection encounter by the lake in which the risen Jesus three times asks whether Peter loves him and charges him to feed and tend his sheep, a scene traditionally read as restoration after the denials and as a pastoral commission. In the Acts of the Apostles Peter dominates the account of the earliest Jerusalem community: he interprets the events of Pentecost, heals in the name of Jesus, speaks before the Sanhedrin, and is instrumental in the baptism of the Gentile centurion Cornelius, a turning point in the church's mission beyond Israel. The same book records his imprisonment and miraculous release, and his departure 'to another place.' Paul's letter to the Galatians describes a subsequent clash at Antioch, in which Paul rebuked Peter for withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentiles under pressure from men associated with James, evidence both of Peter's stature and of conflict over the terms of Gentile inclusion.

Writers of the late first and second centuries already link Peter with Rome and with martyrdom. The First Letter of Clement, commonly dated to the end of the first century, speaks of Peter's endurance of many labors and of his witness among the Romans. Ignatius of Antioch, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus of Lyons, and the Roman presbyter Gaius likewise associate Peter (often together with Paul) with the Roman church and with a death that sealed his testimony. Later tradition, reported by Origen as cited in Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, held that Peter was crucified; the second-century apocryphal Acts of Peter add the well-known detail that he requested to be crucified upside down, deeming himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus. These traditions place the martyrdom in Rome during Nero's reign, in the period of the persecution connected with the fire of the mid-60s, although no contemporary source records an exact year. Eusebius and subsequent church historians also present Peter as having preached at Antioch and as the founder of that church's episcopal line, which is why the patriarchs of Antioch have counted him as their first predecessor. Of the two New Testament epistles that bear his name, 1 Peter is often connected by scholars with a Roman Petrine circle in the later first century, while 2 Peter is widely regarded as a second-century work written in his name. Clement of Alexandria, writing around the turn of the third century, states that Peter had children and recounts a tradition that Peter's wife was herself led to martyrdom.

From the second century onward Peter was venerated as the chief of the apostles and as the first bishop of Rome, a conviction that underpinned the developing idea of Roman primacy in the West and that is shared, with different ecclesiological emphases, in the East. A tropaion or memorial on the Vatican hill was already pointed out as his burial place by Gaius around the year 200; Constantine built a basilica over the cemetery there in the fourth century, and the present St. Peter's Basilica stands on the same site. Excavations in the mid-twentieth century uncovered a first- and second-century necropolis and a shrine consistent with early cult, though identification of specific remains remains a matter of faith and debate rather than of uncontested demonstration. Because Peter belongs to the apostolic age, he was never formally canonized under the later papal procedures of beatification and canonization; his cult is immemorial in both East and West. His principal feast, celebrated jointly with the apostle Paul, falls on 29 June; the Chair of Saint Peter is kept on 22 February. He is invoked as patron of the papacy and of the city of Rome, of fishermen, net makers, shipwrights and boat builders, bridge builders, locksmiths, cobblers, and a range of other trades and needs.