PART I: Peter THE ROCK: All you need to know on the Papacy

For 20 years, I would have said to all Catholics, “If you're so smart and you know your Bible so well, why don't you show me the Pope in the Bible! Come on right here chapter and verse.” I would have said the word Pope is not there. There's no vatican and Cardinals and infallibility doctrines in the Bible. So why do you believe that when we have the Bible? Why do you let some dictator in Italy tell you what to do and believe? 

I wasn't saying that to be facetious. I believe that I thought it was ridiculous.

First of all there's a big problem with that because I assumed everything had to be found in the Bible. You're smarter than that. You know that that's not true at least explicitly stated. The first thing I ask people now is “where do you find in the Bible that I have to find everything in the Bible?” If everything has to be in the Bible then why don't you show me in the Bible where it says everything has to be found in the Bible because that's not in the Bible. There was no such thing as a Bible in New Testament times. 

I was a Bible alone girl for 20 years. I'm going to ask you to suspend your reality here and go back two thousand years to the other side of the world where you don't speak English anymore; you speak Aramaic. You no longer live in a democracy, you live in a kingdom. I want you to see this through the eyes of the first century Christians who were confronted with this idea of a new Church, new kingdom and a Messiah. 

If you come to this topic as an American not understanding the history, the culture, the language and whole history of the church, you may not see it. You may just see splatters of words on a page but if you have eyes to see and if you understand the Bible in its context both historical and text, you will see the pope jump out. 

The papacy comes from a word, meaning papa. It just refers to the Pope as being the head of the church in the sense of a father. The Pope is like the Vice President to the President. 

You have to have eyes to see. Many listen or read to respond or refute immediately without any research, without prayer and without the guiding of the Holy Spirit. So I will ask you right now to stop. Say a prayer. Tell God to open your heart to what comes from Him and close your heart to what is not. Let the Holy Spirit guide you and most importantly BE TEACHABLE!

To understand Mary and Jesus and the beginnings of what we are as a church we need to go back.  Today we are sitting in America 2000 years removed from the beginning with a different language, different culture, different ideas, different governmental form and it does us a tremendous disservice. When we look at things as Americans in modern-day times, we can’t grasp what it was like living 2000+ years ago. So let’s step back in time and dig deep into history, it's culture and ideas. 

I want to start by going back on a journey to the land of Jesus. To the very beginning of the time. Let's see what we can find about the pope and whether it was intended to be what we believe as Catholics. 

I want to start with The Rock and then we'll go to the Keys and then to the chair.

First we have, THE ROCK.

Matthew chapter 16 says that Jesus took his disciples into the District of Caesarea of Philippi. Israel is a long skinny country the size of New Jersey, only eight thousand square miles. It's a little country. That's where the doctors of the law were.  That's where the throbbing pulsing life of Judaism was. Down there is where it was clean (so to speak) and holy. However, they are way up 60 to 80 miles by the Sea of Galilee. Up here is the land of the Gentiles. Jesus and his disciples walked 3 days from Galilee all the way to the very tip of Israel (today it's right on the Lebanese border) and up there you are as far away from Jerusalem as you can get and still be in the Holy Land in Israel. You were in Pagan territory and at the time of Jesus, this place was the capital of Caesar who was the tetrarch of the area and he named it after himself. This was a place of pagan worship. They came there to worship Pan, the God Pan, and they also had before the time of Christ, Herod the King. King Herod had built a huge white temple there, made out of white marble imported from Greece. And he made it to the divine Caesar Augustus because Caesar was considered divine.

Why would Jesus go to such a place? Jesus was very smart and he was a very good teacher. As a good teacher,  you know that you need to use props and visuals to show things to people. During all his parables, Jesus is using visuals because he knows how our brains work. Look at the coin, look at the rocks and the fields, etc. There’s a huge rock in this place. This rock is massive. It’s 500 feet long at least and approximately 100 feet high and on the left hand side there’s a big cave. This huge rock was a place where Pagans came to worship their god Pan and to worship the divine Caesar Augustus. And right behind the temple, was a huge cave and Pagans would come there and they would throw their living sacrifices into the cave because it was full of water and they believed that the gods were down there. 

So let’s insert ourselves into this scene. Here we have a big rock, a false temple that represents almost like a church and you have the gates of hell and they’re coming to worship the wrong Lord with the wrong sacrifices. This is why it is so important to understand the geography when reading this within context. 

When they get there Jesus says to his disciples,

“who do men say that I am?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” and Jesus says “But what about you? Who do you say I am?”

Peter, who always blurts things out, got it right. Peter receives a revelation. It wasn’t Thomas or James or John that got the revelation. It was Peter. And I think this is significant because it’s after he gets the revelation. It’s almost as though the father has chosen Peter and by him speaking these words, Jesus recognized that he was the one, he was the one that was going to be given this royal authority. He said,

“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.”

Now, in this chapter Jesus still calls him Simon. This is Jesus identifying him as a man and made of flesh. However, the revelation did not come from man, it came directly from God. For this reason, Jesus immediately returns the favor to Simon in the very next verse when he names him Peter. Because Simon had defined him I can imagine Jesus smiling and saying 'Thank you for defining me. Now I am going to return the favor and define you. You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.'

Before we move deeper into this, let's keep in mind that name changes have had a deep meaning in scripture since the beginning of Bible times. Jesus changed Simon’s name to Kepha, (Greek, Petros) which was a way of signifying the special role he would play in the Church (Matthew 16:18, John 1:41-42).  

Many have come to me and point out the fact that in Greek, the word for rock is petra, which means a large, massive stone. The word used for Simon’s new name is different; it’s Petros, which means a little stone, a pebble.

Here is where many get it wrong.

Greek scholars, even non-Catholic ones, admit that the words petros and petra were synonyms in first century Greek. They meant “small stone” and “large rock” in some Greek poetry, centuries before the time of Christ. However, that distinction had disappeared from the language by the time Matthew’s Gospel. The difference in meaning can only be found in Attic Greek.  The New Testament was written in Koine Greek which is an entirely different dialect. In Koine Greek, both petros and petra simply meant “rock.” If Jesus wanted to call Simon a small stone, the Greek word lithos would have been used instead. 

Now, let’s get behind the Greek to the Aramaic. This is a must as Aramaic was the language Jesus and the apostles and all the Jews in Palestine spoke at the time. Aramaic was the common language of the place. Many, if not most Jews, knew Greek because it was the language of culture and commerce. Most of the books of the New Testament were written not just for Christians in Palestine but also for Christians in places such as Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, places where Aramaic wasn’t the spoken language.

We know that Jesus spoke Aramaic not only because we know he was Jewish but also because some of his words, which he recites from the first sentence in Psalm 22, are still preserved for us in the Gospels in Matthew 27:46. Jesus says from the cross,

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

This isn’t Greek; it’s Aramaic, and it means,

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In Paul’s epistles, four times in Galatians as well as in First Corinthians, we have the Aramaic form of Simon’s new name preserved for us. In our English Bibles it comes out as Cephas. That isn’t Greek. That’s a transliteration of the Aramaic word Kepha which means a rock, the same as petra. It doesn’t mean a little stone or a pebble. What Jesus said to Simon in Matthew 16:18 was this:

“You are Kepha, and on this kepha I will build my Church.”

There is no change in the words, it’s exactly the same word. And if you go back to John chapter 1:42 where Jesus first meets Simon, he says, Jesus looked at him and said,

“You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).

And John knowing we didn’t know what that means explains in parentheses that Cephas means rock. When Jesus first meets Simon, the first thing he says to him is, I’m going to rename you someday and your name is going to be rock.

When you understand what the Aramaic says, you see that Jesus was equating Simon and the rock; he wasn’t contrasting them. We see this vividly in some modern English translations, which render the verse this way:

‘You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.’

In French one word, pierre, has always been used both for Simon’s new name and for the rock. Here is a direct quote from a French translation of Matthew 16:18,

"Et moi, je te déclare : Tu es Pierre, et sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Eglise, contre laquelle la mort elle-même ne pourra rien."

Now, you must be asking yourself, if kepha means the same as petra, why don’t we read in the Greek, “You are Petra, and on this petra I will build my Church”? Why, for Simon’s new name, does Matthew use a Greek word, Petros, which means something quite different from petra? 

Here is why. In Greek you encounter a problem arising from the fact that nouns take differing gender endings. The Greek word petra is feminine. You can use it in the second half of Matthew 16:18 without any trouble. But you can’t use it as Simon’s new name, because you can’t give a man a feminine name—at least back then you couldn’t because it was disrespectful and impudent. You have to change the ending of the noun to make it masculine. So Jesus created a new word. He takes the word Petra which is feminine and puts a masculine ending on it, which then makes it a masculine word. This masculine word has never ever been used before. He then designates that as the new name for Simon; and that is Petros. That is rock with a masculine ending. So now when you read this in the Greek, it says, “You are Petros and on this Petra, I will build my church.” When you do that, you get Petros, which was an already-existing word meaning rock. 

Look at the way Matthew 16:15-19 is designed. After Peter gives a confession about the identity of Jesus, the Lord does the same in return for Peter. Jesus does not say, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are an insignificant pebble and on this rock I will build my Church. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ Jesus is giving Peter a threefold blessing, including the gift of the keys to the kingdom, not undermining his authority.

We don’t do this today as it was done in the scriptures. Our names do not represent so much today as they did in the old days. In the Old Testament, your name represented you. It was something of your character, may be your dignity and even office. When his name is Simon, that’s just his name, but Jesus changes his name. Just as we knew of a man from Genesis who was named Abraham, which means father. But when God called him to be the father of all those who believe by faith in the people of Israel, he changed his name from Abram to Abraham, which means father of nations. 

It’s a new dignity, a new calling and a new position. When somebody gets a name change in the Bible, it’s very significant because it says something about either their character, their dignity, their office, or some new calling that they have. So what is happening by giving him a new name, he’s giving him a new dignity and a new office. And that is very significant in biblical terms.

Protestant logic says: In the Old Testament, God is called the rock. In First Corinthians 10:4 Paul says the rock was Christ and another passage says that the church will be built on Christ, the cornerstone and using all these different verses will try to say the rock in this passage is God or Christ and not Peter or even his confession.

That is not the case in John 1:42. The first time Jesus meets Simon, his  words are, “You’re going to be named rock.” This is going to be the rock. It’s not what you say. It’s not your confession, it’s YOU. And when Paul addresses Peter or refers to him later in his epistles, he doesn’t refer to him as Simon, he refers to him as Cephas, which as mentioned earlier is the Aramaic word for rock. So it is Peter who is the rock. And if you take all of the scripture in context, you cannot just say that it says confession or something other than Peter because in this passage, Peter has the name rock and he is that rock.

So as a Protestant I would’ve said, “Well, see! In 1 Corinthians 3 Paul says that there is no other foundation other than Jesus Christ. He’s the rock foundation.” But those are different stories. Here we’re seeing Jesus as the builder. Peter is the rock, but in the other story in 1 Corinthians 3 Paul is the builder. Jesus is the foundation and we are the rocks. We can’t mix the metaphors.

Jesus of course, is the only foundation. What does Jesus do? He’s delegated Peter to work with him. So he’s sharing his rockness, his foundation. And Peter then becomes a rock. He shares his rockness with Peter, he’s the King and Peter becomes the foundation along with Jesus.