Were Peter and Cephas the Same Person?

[00:00:01] Were Peter and Cephas the Same Person? [00:00:04] By Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth In Galatians 2, Paul describes a serious blow up that he had with Cephas over the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the church. [00:00:19] Major conflict possibly never resolved throughout history, this event has usually been cited to show that Paul and Peter had very different views of things. [00:00:28] But what if the Cephas Paul attacked was not Peter, but someone else? [00:00:33] A couple of weeks ago I gave a webinar on Kephas and Peter for members of the Biblical Studies Academy, my for profit business that produces online courses, etc. Not connected with the blog I had written an academic article with that title many years ago, sometime back in the Pleistocene age, arguing that contrary to what everyone thinks and says, they may not have been the same person, that there were two people with that name, not just one. Despite what John 1:42 explicitly states, it was a rather controversial issue and I had to look up the details of a number of arguments I used. [00:01:10] In doing so, I remembered I had posted on the topic on the blog years ago, looked up the four posts, and decided that it might be fun and interesting to post on the issue again. [00:01:20] The article itself can be found in Cephas and Peter in the Journal of Biblical Literature 109 from 1990, pages 463 to 74. [00:01:31] There's a link on the online blog. [00:01:33] As you will see, it is written at a more academic level than usual blog posts, but I don't think there's much that's difficult to understand. [00:01:40] Just some stilted language and a few references to ancient Christian writings that most people would have had zero reason to have ever heard of. [00:01:48] But on an interesting issue, if you don't want to plow through the historical data, you can probably get the gist from the opening and closing paragraphs. The only necessary background is that in the New Testament, Jesus gives his closest follower Simon the name Peter, which in Aramaic is Cephas. And so it is almost always assumed that if an author mentions Cephas, he is referring to Simon Peter. But is that right? [00:02:14] Most ancient authors who discuss the relationship of Cephas and Peter explicitly identify the two, or at least speak of Peter when referring to NT passages that name only Cephas. [00:02:24] This is not at all surprising given the unequivocal statement of John 1:42 you are CEPHAs, which translated means Peter. [00:02:34] What is surprising is that other early Christian authors, all of whom also knew and used the Fourth Gospel, refused to make this identification and asserted, either explicitly or by implication, that there were in fact two different persons, one called Cephas, the other Peter. This dissenting opinion is striking both for its antiquity and its persistence. How ancient is it evidence from the early Church? [00:03:00] It first occurs in the first half of the second century in the Epistula Apostolorum. The author of this pseudepigraph opposes a docetic kind of Christology by penning a letter ostensibly written after Jesus resurrection by the eleven remaining disciples, in which he repeatedly affirms the both the fleshliness of Jesus and the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. [00:03:23] Since this author otherwise makes repeated use of the fourth Gospel, he must have known that Cephas and Peter refer to the same person. [00:03:31] This makes it all the more striking that in his own delineation of the 11 disciples, he names Cephas and Peter as two distinct individuals. [00:03:42] Somewhat later in the second century, Clement of Alexandria expresses a similar opinion in book five of his Hypoteposes, a work now lost but cited for us by eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 1:12, 2 Clement maintained that Peter was one of the twelve who later became one of the three styloi, that is, pillars of the Church in Jerusalem, while Cephas was one of the 70 disciples whom Jesus sent out in Luke chapter 10. [00:04:10] In constructing the relationship of Cephas and Peter in this way, Clement may well have initiated the tradition that is still preserved in a number of ancient documents that list the names and sometimes the salient activities of the early apostles. Many of these apostolic lists situate Peter among the disciples but cephas among the 70. [00:04:30] Most of them allege that it was Cephas whom Paul opposed in Antioch. [00:04:34] The documents in question span some eight centuries, and in some cases, but not all, they evidence clear literary interdependence. [00:04:43] Thus, in a third century list wrongly ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome, Cephas is named as the 51st of the 70 apostles. This is clearly not the same person as Peter, one of the 12. [00:04:55] Similarly, about a century later, Pseudo Dorotheus makes Cephas the 51st apostle and indicates that he became the bishop of Iconium after being rebuked by the apostle Paul in Antioch. [00:05:08] Essentially the same information is provided at a later date, perhaps as late as the 9th century, in the apostolic list of Pseudoepiphanius, who, in addition to naming Simon Peter as one of the 12, cites as the 45th of the 70 apostles Caiphas, Peter's namesake, who was rebuked by Paul prior to assuming the bishopric Iconium. [00:05:30] It's also worth noting that an appendix to this work cites the opinion of Clement of Alexandria, previously reported in Eusebius that Cephas quote, the namesake of Peter, was one of the 70. [00:05:44] Later apostolic lists that perpetuate this tradition are found in the following a. The Chronicon Paschale, a seventh century sketch of history from creation to the 20th year of Emperor Heraclius, 629 CE here Caiaphas is called Peter's namesake and is said to have been confronted by Paul over the matter of Judaizing. [00:06:06] B. The 9th Century Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus 10 the list of the 70 apostles in this manuscript claims to derive from none other than Irenaeus. [00:06:16] Here it is stated that Cephas, the fourth of the Seventy, was stoned to death in Antioch C. The 10th century list wrongly ascribed to the Byzantine hagiographer Simeon Logothetes. Cephas is named as the 49th of the 70 apostles and said to have later become the bishop of Colonaeus. [00:06:36] D. An anonymous medieval Greek Syriac index of the apostles. This index makes Cephas the 14th of the 70 apostles and specifies that Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius had previously shown that this is not the great Peter. [00:06:53] It should be noted that certain features of these apostolic lists suggest that the distinction between Cephas and Peter was being perpetuated on more than the literary level, that is that the tradition existed outside of the lists themselves. [00:07:07] The lists all differ in numerous ways. Rarely is Cephas assigned the same number within a list, and in virtually every case something different, great or small, is said about him. [00:07:18] These admittedly slight pieces of evidence are in any case corroborated by the statements of several Church fathers, including Jerome, Augustine, and Chrysostom, who note the tradition of two persons, Peter the Disciple and Cephas one of the 70. Only in order to discount it. Jerome's comment can be cited as representative, which in a rough translation says there are some people who say that this Cephas, whom Paul opposed face to face, was not the apostle Peter, but was one of the seventy apostles. [00:07:49] From Jerome's Commentary on Galatians 1, Part 2. [00:07:54] Probably to be included among these others who make such a claim is none other than Eusebius of Caesarea. [00:08:00] Here the Greek Syriac apostolic list mentioned previously serves to alert us to what has otherwise been generally overlooked. [00:08:08] Eusebius not only claims that Clement of Alexandria differentiated between Cephas and Peter, he does so in such a way as to indicate that he himself agrees. And that is not all. In addition to our earliest available witness, the Epistula Apostolorum. There are several other sources that distinguish Cephas from Peter without, however, making him one of the seventy. [00:08:30] Thus the Egyptian Apostolic Church order, in a way that is reminiscent of the Epistula Apostolorum but independently of it, names Cephas as one of the 12 along with Peter. [00:08:42] These two, together with the other disciples, present moral and ecclesiastical advice to the church in a series of speeches delivered in turn. [00:08:51] All told, Peter delivers four short speeches and CAIPHAS 3. [00:08:56] While this document itself dates to the late 3rd or early 4th century, Harnak has demonstrated its reliance on earlier sources, including its list of the 12, which may well date to the second century. [00:09:08] A different kind of attestation altogether occurs in the Armenian ecclesiastical calendar, which mentions CEPHAs on March 25 and asserts that this apostle was in fact a disciple of the apostle Paul. [00:09:21] Somewhat more difficult to construe is the interesting reference in the Pseudo Syrian tractate De Rebaptism to the early work known as the Predicatio Pauli, found in part 17 of the tractate. In an effort to discredit this apparently gnostic work, the author cites several of its aberrant traditions, including its report that Paul and Peter came to be acquainted with one another in Rome only after the apostolic conference in Jerusalem in which Paul and the other evangelists met and decided how to proceed with the Christian mission. [00:09:54] Since the passage clearly refers to either Acts 15 or Galatians 2, and since both chapters mention the role of Peter and or Cephas in this conference, the conclusion seems to be unavoidable that in the view of the Predicatio Pauli, it was only Caipas who attended the conference, while Peter was unknown to Paul until near the end of his life in Rome. [00:10:17] To sum up the evidence from the early Church from the early second century onwards, a number of sources maintain that Cephas and Peter were two different persons. [00:10:27] Some of these sources claim that both belong to the 12 others place Peter among the 12 and Cephas among the 70, while others leave the matter unresolved. [00:10:37] A natural question that now arises is how or why this tradition came into being.