Apostle Peter

Simon, later called Peter (Greek Petros, corresponding to Aramaic Kepha or Cephas, meaning rock), was a Galilean Jewish fisherman, the son of Jonah or John, from Bethsaida. He worked the Sea of Galilee with his brother Andrew and, according to the Synoptic Gospels, kept a household in Capernaum, where Jesus healed his mother-in-law. The Gospel of John presents Andrew, then a disciple of John the Baptist, as bringing Simon to Jesus, who named him Cephas. The Synoptics describe a calling by the lake in which Simon and Andrew left their nets to follow Jesus. Peter stands first in every New Testament list of the Twelve Apostles. He is portrayed as their spokesman, present at the Transfiguration and in Gethsemane, and, in Matthew 16, as the one to whom Jesus declared that he was the rock on which the church would be built and to whom he gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The same Gospels record his threefold denial of Jesus during the Passion and a subsequent restoration, including the threefold charge in John 21 to feed Christ's sheep.

In the Acts of the Apostles Peter is the leading figure of the earliest Jerusalem community: he preaches at Pentecost, heals in the name of Jesus, and, in the account of the centurion Cornelius at Caesarea, takes a decisive part in admitting uncircumcised Gentiles. Paul's letter to the Galatians names Cephas among the pillars of the Jerusalem church and recounts a confrontation with him at Antioch over table fellowship with Gentiles. The New Testament does not narrate Peter's later career in detail. Second-century and later writers, including Origen as reported by Eusebius, and the episcopal lists of Antioch, associate him with the foundation of the church in that city, which later counted him as its first bishop or patriarch. Independent Roman tradition, already reflected in First Clement near the end of the first century and in second-century authors such as Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, holds that Peter came to Rome and died there as a martyr.

No contemporary document gives the date or manner of his death. Christian writers of the second and third centuries place the martyrdom in Rome during the reign of Nero. From the later second century the tradition of crucifixion, and subsequently of crucifixion head downward at Peter's own request, became attached to his memory. The year is not fixed in the earliest sources and is variously assigned by later chronographers to the mid- or later 60s, in connection with Nero's persecution after the fire of Rome. Around the year 200 the Roman priest Gaius pointed to memorial trophies of the apostles on the Vatican hill and on the Ostian Way. Constantine built a basilica over the Vatican site in the fourth century; the present St. Peter's Basilica occupies the same location. Twentieth-century excavations beneath the high altar uncovered a second-century tropaion and a grave that had been the object of early veneration, consistent with the ancient claim that Peter was buried there.

The Gospels' reference to Peter's mother-in-law and Paul's remark in 1 Corinthians that Cephas was accompanied by a believing wife establish that he was married; the wife's name is not recorded in the New Testament. Clement of Alexandria states that Peter had children and preserves a tradition of his wife's martyrdom. Peter has been commemorated together with Paul on 29 June since at least the fourth century in Rome; other observances include the Chair of Saint Peter. Catholic tradition counts him as the first Bishop of Rome and therefore the first pope. Eastern churches honor him as chief of the apostles and as first bishop of Antioch. He is widely invoked as patron of fishermen and of crafts connected with nets, ships, locks, and clocks, of the papacy and the city of Rome, and of many other places and causes. His cult is among the oldest in Christianity and does not rest on a later formal process of canonization.