In the summer of 62, with the Roman procurator Festus recently dead and his successor still on the road from Rome, the high priest Ananus saw his opening. He assembled the Sanhedrin, brought James before it on a charge of breaking the law, and had him stoned. Josephus records the episode in the twentieth book of the Antiquities and names the victim with care: James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. That detail carries weight for everything that follows, so it earns a pause before the argument moves anywhere else. A minority of scholars, Richard Carrier the most prominent among them, has argued that the phrase “who was called Christ” never stood in Josephus’s original text, that it entered the manuscript tradition later as a scribal note lifted from Origen’s discussion of the passage, and that the James executed in 62 was someone else, the brother of a different man named Jesus. The majority position among historians of the period still treats the passage as authentic, and I follow that majority here, though a reader who wants this essay’s argument at its strongest should know that the identification of James, and with it the whole premise that a hostile non-Christian source confirms his standing, carries a dissenting reading attached to it. If Carrier turns out to be right, the argument that follows loses one leg and has to stand on the others.

The majority of historians take the passage at face value, and what it tells us, stripped of any Christian framing, is that a man named James, identified through his relationship to a crucified Jesus, held real standing in Jerusalem by 62, the kind of standing that made executing him a matter requiring a formal charge before the Sanhedrin, and that the manner of his death was controversial, since Ananus lost his office over it not long after. Josephus had no reason to inflate the importance of a Christian leader. He was not writing for Christians, and elsewhere in his work he treats the messianic movement James belonged to with something closer to contempt than sympathy. That Josephus recorded James’s death at all is not a claim the movement invented about itself. It comes from outside it.

The order Paul remembered

Paul’s letters give the same picture from a source closer still to the events, and here there is no comparable dispute about authenticity. In a letter to the Galatians, discussing a visit to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, Paul says he saw only James, the Lord’s brother, along with Cephas. Fourteen years later, describing a second visit, he names James first among those he calls pillars, then Cephas, then John. Order in a list like this is not decoration. Paul writes carefully about precedence throughout this letter, prickly about his own standing relative to the Jerusalem leadership, and if he names James before Cephas twice in the same document, the ordering reflects something he understood about how authority in Jerusalem actually worked. Acts, for all its later composition and its own interest in smoothing over the movement’s internal disputes, shows James presiding over the council in chapter fifteen and issuing the ruling that settles the debate over Gentile observance. Cephas speaks in that scene, but James decides.

None of this proves that Peter held no standing at all. Paul plainly treats Cephas as someone he was willing to confront to his face, which he does at Antioch, and confronting a man who carried no weight, over a dispute that carried none either, would have made a strange centerpiece for the second chapter of Galatians. The claim I want to make is narrower and better supported by what survives: whatever standing Peter had, it operated inside a Jerusalem hierarchy where James held the senior position, a position Paul’s own letters confirm without needing to argue for it, since he is not making a case about who leads whom, he simply writes the names in the order his readers would have found unremarkable.

A saying with no home

Against that background, Matthew 16:16–19 is a strange passage to explain. Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God, and Jesus answers with a commissioning that Mark does not contain, that Luke does not contain even though Luke works from Mark and adds material of his own throughout his gospel, and that John, working independently of the other three, never approaches in anything like this form. Paul, who discusses Cephas by name, who describes a serious dispute with him, who had every incentive to invoke a commissioning from Jesus himself had one been in general circulation and had it worked against his own position, never mentions it. An argument from silence is always vulnerable on its own, and this one deserves a narrow reading. It cannot prove that Jesus never said anything resembling this. It can support a narrower and more defensible claim: that a commissioning this significant, had it belonged to the tradition Paul inherited or the tradition circulating in the churches he corresponded with, would be a strange thing for every other source to leave out, particularly the two witnesses, James’s own faction in Jerusalem and Paul’s own letters, with the least reason to protect Peter’s reputation and every reason to correct him had he overstepped.

What we have instead, in a document usually dated to the 80s, a full two generations after the events it narrates, is a scene appearing nowhere else, granting foundational authority to a man whose actual position in the historical record, on the evidence closest to the events, ran second to Jesus’s own brother.

James in a different book

The strangeness sharpens once a second, independent source enters the picture. The Gospel of Thomas, in its twelfth saying, has the disciples ask Jesus who will lead them after he departs, and Jesus answers:

Wherever you have come from, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.

Whatever one makes of Thomas as a whole, a text stitched together over generations and preserved only in a fourth-century Coptic manuscript from Nag Hammadi, this particular saying has drawn attention from scholars working on very different sides of other debates. April DeConick’s work on Thomas as a layered, rolling composition places sayings like this one in an early stratum tied to the memory of the Jerusalem community, and the reasoning is not hard to follow: a document compiled generations after James’s death, in communities that had moved past Jerusalem’s authority entirely, had nothing to gain by inventing a saying that elevates a figure largely absent from its own theological interests elsewhere. Thomas shows almost no interest in James anywhere else across its hundred and fourteen sayings. A late invention usually serves the people inventing it. This one does not obviously serve Thomas’s own interests.

I want to resist making this saying carry more weight than it can hold. The very next logion in the same document has Jesus ask the disciples to compare him to something, and when Peter answers “a righteous angel” and Matthew answers “a wise philosopher,” Thomas himself says his mouth cannot say what Jesus is like, and receives three secret words in private as a reward. That sequence stakes a claim for Thomas rather than James, positioning him above both Peter and the Matthew of the text’s title as the disciple who actually understood. A document that elevates James in one breath and Thomas in the next is not a clean witness for anybody’s primacy. It shows instead that the question of who came after Jesus was contested along more than one line at once, with Peter positioned, in this telling, no higher than a man who gave a serviceable but incomplete answer. That is not nothing. A gospel with its own reasons to promote its own name-figure had no reason to hand Peter even the compliment of second place unless there was already, sitting there, a floor beneath which he could not credibly be placed.

A family still watched

The Jerusalem leadership under James did not vanish with his death in 62. Eusebius, drawing on the second-century writer Hegesippus, preserves an account of what happened a generation later, when informants brought two grandsons of Jude, Jesus’s brother, before the emperor Domitian on the charge that they descended from David and so posed a political threat. Hegesippus names their holdings: about thirty-nine acres of land, worked with their own hands, nine thousand denarii between them. Asked about the kingdom of Christ, they told Domitian it was heavenly, not earthly, due to appear at the end of the age. Domitian, satisfied that men with calloused hands and no money posed no threat to him, let them go and, according to Hegesippus, ended a persecution of the church that had been underway. The two men, Eusebius reports, went on to lead congregations themselves, as witnesses to the family and relatives of the Lord both, and lived into Trajan’s reign.

Historians reasonably treat the details in this story with caution. The interview with an emperor, the exact figures for the land and the money, the tidy ending in which imperial suspicion turns to imperial indifference, all carry the shape of an edifying story more than a transcript. The caution belongs to the details, though, not to the underlying claim that a family line descended from Jesus’s own brothers remained visible, identifiable, and taken seriously as a threat during the very decades in which the bulk of historical-critical scholarship, following Raymond Brown, places the composition of Matthew’s gospel. By the time Matthew’s redactor sat down to work, this family had not faded into legend at all; a Roman emperor had personally interrogated them within living memory of the gospel’s likely composition.

Where the book was written

Brown’s case for locating Matthew’s community in Antioch or somewhere in Syria rests on a cluster of indicators inside the text itself: its concern with Jewish law and its continuing relevance, its awareness of a Gentile mission already underway, its use of a Greek suggesting a bilingual environment, and its citation by Ignatius of Antioch early in the second century, which sets an outer limit on how late it could have been written and where it was already known. If that location holds, and it commands broad though not universal assent, a detail from Paul’s own letters becomes far more useful than it might otherwise be. Peter’s presence in Antioch is not a later legend attached retroactively to a city wanting an apostolic pedigree. Paul describes standing up to Cephas to his face there, over the question of eating with Gentiles, in a conflict Paul recalls in real detail, down to exactly what Cephas did and with whom he stopped eating once certain men arrived from James. Whatever else that confrontation tells us, it fixes Peter in Antioch as a documented, dated fact, decades before Matthew’s probable composition.

A community writing in or near that city in the 80s did not need to borrow Peter’s memory from Rome and did not need to imagine his presence among them. He had actually stood in their streets, eaten at their tables, and been correctly remembered as having reversed himself under pressure from men James sent. Access to Peter’s memory was never the problem for such a community. The problem was warrant: a reason to place him, rather than the family that still controlled Jerusalem’s memory and that an emperor had bothered to summon, at the foundation of the whole structure.

A second circle, the same move

Antioch was not alone in reaching for Peter’s name once he could no longer object to how it was used. The letter known as 1 Peter addresses churches scattered across five provinces of Asia Minor under Peter’s name, and closes with greetings from “she who is in Babylon.” The reading of Babylon as a cipher for Rome goes back to the earliest interpreters we have access to. Eusebius reports that Papias understood it this way, and Clement of Alexandria is cited for the same tradition, both writing within a couple of generations of the letter itself. The reasoning behind the code is not hard to follow: after Rome destroyed the temple in 70, precisely as Babylon had destroyed the first temple over six centuries earlier, writers reaching for a name for the imperial power that would resonate with a Jewish and Jewish-Christian audience had a ready-made one sitting in their own scriptures. Revelation uses the same code in a way no ancient reader mistook, describing Babylon as the city seated on seven hills that rules the kings of the earth, a description that fits nowhere on the Euphrates. A minority reading takes 1 Peter’s Babylon literally, either the old Mesopotamian city, which by this period the geographer Strabo already describes as largely abandoned, or a Roman garrison town of the same name in Egypt, remembered mainly through later Coptic tradition. Neither has drawn much support against the patristic and modern critical consensus, and the letter’s address to five provinces clustered around Asia Minor fits a Roman point of origin far better than either alternative.

What matters for this argument has less to do with settling exactly where Peter died than with noticing what the letter does regardless of where it was actually written. The bulk of critical scholarship reads 1 Peter as pseudonymous, composed after Peter’s death by someone writing under his authority to reach communities he likely never visited in person. That is a second, geographically distinct circle, independent of whatever was happening in Antioch, performing a similar kind of operation: taking a dead apostle whose actual ministry had been narrower than the claim now being made in his name, and using his memory to authorize a broader reach than he exercised while alive. Two circles doing the same thing to the same man’s memory in the same general period, with no evident coordination between them, make a stronger pattern than either instance would alone. It points to something about Peter himself, not about any single community’s motives. He was dead, his actual career was documented but geographically limited, and that combination made him unusually available for exactly this kind of use in a way that a living, land-holding, emperor-interviewed family in Jerusalem never could be.

Borrowed stone

The remaining question is why a foundational commissioning would take the particular form it does in Matthew, built on the image of a rock. One direction deserves mention only so it can be closed off: claims that the name Peter descends from an ancient priestly title for an interpreter or hierophant, with links proposed to place names like Patara and Patras and even, by some nineteenth-century comparative mythologists, to Buddha. This kind of argument, familiar above all from Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, belongs to a method of comparative philology that gathers words which sound alike across unrelated language families and infers a shared origin without any regular sound correspondence to justify the connection. It does not survive contact with the linguistics that superseded it within a decade or two of its own publication.

The very apostolic designation Peter is from the Mysteries. The hierophant or supreme pontiff bore the Chaldean title Peter, or interpreter. The names Phtah, Peth’r, the residence of Balaam, Patara, and Patras, the names of oracle-cities, pateres or pateras and, perhaps, Buddha,* all come from the same root. Jesus says: “Upon this petra I will build my Church, and the gates, or rulers of Hades, shall not prevail against it”; meaning by petra the rock-temple, and by metaphor, the Christian Mysteries; the adversaries to which were the old mystery-gods of the underworld, who were worshipped in the rites of Isis, Adonis, Atys, Sabazius, Dionysus, and the Eleusinia. No apostle Peter was ever at Rome; but the Pope, seizing the sceptre of the Pontifex Maximus, the keys of Janus and Kubele, and adorning his Christian head with the cap of the Magna Mater, copied from that of the tiara of Brahmatma, the Supreme Pontiff of the Initiates of old India, became the successor of the Pagan high priest, the real Peter-Roma, or Petroma.†

The Roman Catholic Church has two far mightier enemies than the “heretics” and the “infidels”; and these are — Comparative Mythology and Philology. When such eminent divines as the Rev. James Freeman Clarke go so much out of their way to prove to their readers that “Critical Theology from the time of Origen and Jerome . . . and the Controversial Theology during fifteen centuries, has not consisted in accepting on authority the opinions of other people,” but has shown, on the contrary, much “acute and comprehensive reasoning,” we can but regret that so much scholarship should have been wasted in attempting to prove that which a fair survey of the history of theology upsets at every step. In these “controversies” and critical treatment of the doctrines of the Church one can certainly find any amount of “acute reasoning,” but far more of a still acuter sophistry.

Recently the mass of cumulative evidence has been re-inforced to an extent which leaves little, if any, room for further controversy. A conclusive opinion is furnished by too many scholars to doubt the fact that India was the Alma-Mater, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity; Judaism, and hence Christianity, included. Herder places the cradle of humanity in India, and shows Moses as a clever and relatively modern compiler of the ancient Brahmanical traditions: “The river which encircles the country (India) is the sacred Ganges, which all Asia considers as the paradisaical river. There, also, is the biblical Gihon, which is none else but the Indus. The Arabs call it so unto this day, and the names of the countries watered by it are yet existing among the Hindus.” Jacolliot claims to have translated every ancient palm-leaf manuscript which he had the fortune of being allowed by the Brahmans of the pagodas to see. In one of his translations, we found passages which reveal to us the undoubted origin of the keys of St. Peter, and account for the subsequent adoption of the symbol by their Holinesses, the Popes of Rome. (Isis Unveiled, PART TWO. — RELIGION. CHAPTER I)

* E. Pococke gives the variations of the name Buddha as: Bud’ha, Buddha, Booddha, Butta, Pout, Pote, Pto, Pte, Phte, Phtha, Phut, etc., etc. See “India in Greece,” Note, Appendix, 397.

† The tiara of the Pope is also a perfect copy of that of the Dalai-Lama of Thibet.

The actual, well-established derivation runs the opposite direction from what such an argument would need: Petros is a Greek rendering of the Aramaic Kepha, meaning simply rock or stone, used as Simon’s byname among people who spoke Aramaic as a first language. There is no path from that word to a Chaldean priestly title, and building an essay’s central claim on one would hand a careful reader an easy way to dismiss everything built on top of it.

The etymology aside, a better-supported line of evidence remains, one resting less on what the word Peter means than on what a rock could mean to an audience already immersed in the religious world of the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule. Mithraism, spreading through the same century in which Matthew’s gospel was likely composed, depicted its central god as born directly from a rock, an image so central to the cult that dedicated altars survive with the inscription Petrae Genetrici, to the rock that gives birth, set up by priests of the cult in garrisons from the Danube frontier to Rome itself. The cult of Cybele, formally welcomed into Rome in 204 BCE according to Livy’s own account, centered on a black stone, understood by ancient observers to have fallen from the sky, that was carried from Asia Minor and installed as the physical presence of the goddess herself, an object still receiving public devotion under the empire well into the period Matthew’s community occupied. Even the god enthroned at the center of Delphi’s own sanctuary, the omphalos Apollo’s oracle sat beside, was itself a baetyl, a stone understood to house divine presence rather than merely represent it. None of this requires that Matthew’s redactor attended a Mithraeum or made a pilgrimage to Pessinus. It requires only that the redactor and the redactor’s audience lived inside a religious culture where a stone functioning as the seat, source, or birthplace of divine authority was already doing serious work elsewhere, recognizable well beyond whatever Jewish scriptural resonance the word petra also carried through its association with the temple mount and with God as rock in the psalms.

This is where the evidence runs out and the reconstruction becomes mine. No ancient source tells us that the author of Matthew 16 was thinking of Mithraic inscriptions or Cybele’s Palatine temple. I read the passage as drawing on an image that had accumulated this kind of authority across the wider religious environment of its probable time and place, an image available to a writer who needed to hand Peter something a bloodline claim could never supply and that an actual, geographically limited ministry in Antioch could not by itself establish either. A living dynasty, interrogated by an emperor and still governing congregations from land it worked with its own hands, could not be argued out of existence. It could be answered, though, by a rival foundation built from different material entirely, one owing nothing to descent and everything to a claim about what Jesus himself was reported to have said, dressed in an image that would have struck a Diaspora audience as recognizably sacred before they worked out what it meant for Peter. Whoever wrote this scene was answering a family that was still, at the time of writing, very much alive, rather than recovering a memory of something Jesus said at Caesarea Philippi decades earlier.

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Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 2.15; 3.19–20.

Josephus. Jewish Antiquities 20.200.

Livy. Ab Urbe Condita 29.10–11.

Origen. Commentary on Matthew 10.17; Contra Celsum 1.47.

Pausanias. Description of Greece 10.24.

Strabo. Geography 16.1.5.

Gospel of Thomas, Logia 12–13.

The New Testament. Galatians 1:19; 2:9, 11–14; 1 Peter 5:13; Matthew 16:16–19.

Inscriptions

CIL III 4424, Petrae Genetrici, Carnuntum.

AE 1980, no. 48, Petram Genetricem, Rome.

Modern Scholarship

Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Carrier, Richard. “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, no. 4 (2012): 489–514.