The answer is almost certainly no. Across the seven undisputed letters, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon, Paul refers to the Jerusalem figure he met, argued with, and named as one of the pillars of the church by a single consistent name: Cephas. The Greek form Peter, Πέτρος, appears in his letters only twice, both in the same narrow passage, Galatians 2:7-8. When those two verses are set against everything Paul writes before and after them, the pattern does not look like an author who used both names interchangeably. It looks like a text that has been touched.

What Paul Actually Wrote

The inventory is not ambiguous. In 1 Corinthians, Paul names Cephas four times: as the leader of a faction in Corinth (1:12), as one of the pillars invoked by his rivals (3:22), as someone whose right to travel with a believing wife Paul asserts alongside his own (9:5), and as the first named witness of the resurrection (15:5). In each case the name is Cephas, Κηφᾶς, the Aramaic word for rock. Paul never once calls him Peter in 1 Corinthians.

Galatians tells the same story — until it doesn’t. Paul uses Cephas at 1:18, where he recounts going up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion and staying with him for fifteen days. He uses Cephas again at 2:9, where he identifies the three men recognized as pillars: James, Cephas, and John, in that order. He uses Cephas at 2:11, where he says he opposed him to his face at Antioch. He uses Cephas at 2:14, where he confronts him publicly for withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentiles when the circumcision party arrived from James.

That is six occurrences of Cephas in Galatians and 1 Corinthians combined. The name Paul uses for this man is Cephas. Every occurrence frames this person as a familiar figure: a pillar, a traveling missionary, someone Paul met in person, a man whose behavior at Antioch was consequential enough to warrant a public confrontation.

Then there are two verses that call him Peter.

Galatians 2:7-8 and the Problem

The passage reads: “On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised — for he who worked through Peter for his apostleship to the circumcised worked through me also for the Gentiles.”

Two things happen in these verses that happen nowhere else in Paul’s letters. The man Paul has been calling Cephas is now called Peter. And this Peter is introduced in a formal institutional capacity, as the one entrusted with an apostolic mission to the circumcised, as someone whose commission is defined and named and set in parallel with Paul’s own. The language has shifted from personal narrative to something resembling an official agreement, a recognized division of missionary territory.

Then, one verse later, the name reverts. Galatians 2:9 calls him Cephas again and places him second, behind James.

This reversal is not a minor stylistic peculiarity. Paul is writing a continuous argument under considerable emotional pressure. He has spent the first two chapters of Galatians establishing that his gospel and his apostolic authority came from no human source. He is not narrating a story in which formal titles matter; he is making a case. Within that case, the sudden appearance of a different name, a Greek name that translates Cephas but is not the name Paul uses, in the precise verses that assign this figure a defined jurisdiction over the circumcision mission, is a textual event that requires explanation.

The Manuscript Evidence

The manuscript tradition at Galatians 2:7-8 is uniformly Πέτρος. There are no extant witnesses that read Κηφᾶς in these two verses. This unanimity is itself a piece of evidence, but it needs to be read alongside what the manuscript tradition does at the surrounding verses.

At Galatians 2:9, where Paul writes “James, Cephas, and John,” the manuscript tradition diverges at exactly this name. Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the two most important early Greek witnesses, preserve Κηφᾶς. The Byzantine majority follows them. Papyrus 46, one of the earliest extant Pauline manuscripts dated to roughly 200 CE, reads Πέτρος instead of Κηφᾶς, joined by Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, Italic manuscripts, Marcion, and Origen. Some of these witnesses also reorganize the name order to read “Peter and James and John,” placing Peter first. At Galatians 2:11 and 2:14, the same fault line reappears: Cephas in the early Alexandrian witnesses, Peter in Codex Bezae and the Harclean Syriac. At Galatians 1:18, the pattern holds again along roughly the same lines.[1]

The pattern reveals something. Wherever Paul names this figure, a portion of the scribal tradition wanted to read Peter rather than Cephas. That impulse is visible as a recurring pressure applied to multiple verses across multiple manuscript families. But at 2:7-8, that pressure is nowhere. There is no minority tradition preserving Κηφᾶς at 2:7-8, no wavering, no Western outlier that kept an earlier Aramaic form. The text entered the manuscript tradition at those two verses already reading Πέτρος, before any of the scribal debates that produced Cephas/Peter variants elsewhere in the letter had a chance to operate.

The most economical explanation for that pattern is that Galatians 2:7-8 entered the manuscript tradition later than the surrounding text, at a point when the Cephas/Peter debate was already settled for those verses because they were composed from the beginning with the Greek name. Not transcribed from an original that said Cephas, but inserted into the letter already reading Peter.

What the Interpolation Does

The argument for interpolation becomes clearer when the passage is read for what it accomplishes theologically and institutionally.

Paul’s account of the Jerusalem meeting in Galatians 2 is built around a specific claim about authority and independence. He went up by revelation, not by summons. The pillars added nothing to him. The recognition he received was acknowledgment, not authorization. When he names the pillars at 2:9, they are “James, Cephas, and “John”—James first. This is not incidental. Paul is writing to communities threatened by teachers who claim Jerusalemite backing. The name order matters because it reflects the actual hierarchy as Paul encountered it: James at the head of the Jerusalem church, Cephas second, John third.

Galatians 2:7-8, set into that context, does something different. It reframes the meeting not as Paul receiving acknowledgment from James-led pillars but as a bilateral compact between two coordinate apostles: Peter entrusted with the circumcision mission, Paul with the uncircumcised. The language of entrusting and working through, the symmetry of the parallel construction, and the institutional tone—all of it reshapes the Jerusalem encounter into an apostolic summit between equals, with Peter as the recognized head of one mission and Paul the head of another.

James disappears from this framing entirely. He does not appear in 2:7-8. The circumcision mission belongs to Peter. Yet one verse later, in text that shows every sign of being Paul’s own, James comes first.

The redactional logic is not difficult to see. By the second century, the tradition developing around Roman Christian leadership needed Peter to have held primacy among the Jerusalem apostles. The Gospel of Matthew’s rock-and-keys passage (16:18-19) had already named Peter as the foundation of the church and the holder of the keys to the kingdom. The developing Petrine succession narrative required this primacy to extend backward into the earliest apostolic period. A letter by Paul in which Peter appears nowhere, in which James leads the Jerusalem pillars and Cephas is merely second, was an awkward document for that project.

Inserting two verses that assign Peter explicit apostolic jurisdiction over the circumcision mission, in Paul’s own letter, in Paul’s own account of the Jerusalem meeting, did the work that no other source could do as effectively. It put the Petrine claim inside the earliest Christian archive.

What Remains When the Interpolation Is Removed

Strip Galatians 2:7-8 from the letter and the argument becomes more coherent, not less. Paul goes from his account of the private meeting (2:2-6, where the pillars add nothing to him) directly to the recognition extended by the three pillars (2:9), where James leads, Cephas follows, and Paul and Barnabas receive the right hand of fellowship with a single attached condition: remember the poor. That is the agreement Paul is interested in. The rest, who holds which jurisdiction, the formal parallelism of two apostolic commissions, belongs to someone else’s agenda.

Paul’s seven letters call the Jerusalem figure Cephas. They do it nine times with complete consistency, across two different letters, across different argumentative contexts. The two occurrences of Peter in Galatians 2:7-8 stand alone in the entire Pauline corpus. They appear in verses that have no manuscript variation, surrounded by verses that do. They accomplish a theological purpose Paul has no interest in accomplishing: the elevation of Peter to coordinating equal, the erasure of James from the circumcision mandate, the retroactive installation of a Petrine primacy the letter’s own surrounding material contradicts.

The name Peter in the undisputed Pauline letters is not Paul’s word. It is the correction of someone who needed it to be.

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[1] Barbara Aland et al., eds., Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), critical apparatus to Gal. 1:18; 2:9, 11, 14; Barbara Aland et al., eds., The Greek New Testament, 5th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2014), textual notes to the same passages; Stephen C. Carlson, The Text of Galatians and Its History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015).