Peter in Rome - The BAS Library
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Peter in Rome

Every year millions of Christian pilgrims converge on the Vatican, the heart of Catholic Christendom, and its vast basilica bearing the apostle Peter’s name. The church, visitors are told, marks the site of Peter’s tomb. According to long-standing tradition, Peter was martyred in Rome during Emperor Nero’s persecutions of the Christians in the mid-60s C.E. But while Peter, the “rock” on which Jesus founded his church, will forever be linked with Rome, and Rome with Peter, we have no clues as to how or when he came there, and the evidence, both archaeological and textual, of his time in […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Julie Skurdenis, “City of the Dead,” Archaeology Odyssey, March/April 2001.

2.

Jack Finegan, “The Death and Burial of St. Peter,” Biblical Archaeology Review, December 1976.

Endnotes

1.

1 Clement 5.4.

2.

Ignatius’s theological emphasis on unity with a monarchic bishop as key to defending churches against heresty in Asia Minor (see Ignatius, Ephesians 4.1-6.1) would lead one to expect such a move.

3.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3,2.

4.

Quoted in Eusebius, History of the Church 2.25.

5.

See Hans Georg Thümmel, Die Memorien für Petrus und Paulus im Rom, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 76 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 6–7.

6.

Tertullian, Scorpiace 15.3.

7.

Origen, Commentary on Genesis, reported in Eusebius’s History of the Church 3.1.2.

8.

Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 1.

9.

Most of the account that follows comes from John Evangelist Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter (New York: Doubleday, 1982).