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The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew (Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308)
NOTE: This series is a work in progress. See Part 1 updates including bibliography in progress. As I add sources and update past posts I will continue to expand the bibliography.
“So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Kephas (which means Petros)” (John 1:42).
All four Gospels tell us that Simon bar-Jona was renamed Petros (i.e., Peter) or Kephas by Jesus himself (Matthew 16:18, Mark 3:16, Luke 6:14, John 1:42). As John 1:42 indicates, Petros and Kephas are synonymous; both mean more or less “rock” or “a stone” (questions of nuance will be explored below).
Petros (Πέτρος) is cognate to petra (πέτρα), the usual Greek word for rock. Kephas (Κηφας) is a Grecized transliteration of kepha, an Aramaic word with the same basic meaning. (Kephas is often rendered in English as Cephas, following the Latin transliteration. This spelling works better in Latin than in English, though, since in Latin Cephas is pronounced “Keyfas,” while in English it is usually pronounced “Seefas.” For English speakers, Kephas is a better transliteration.)
Both Kephas and Petros are used by Paul in Galatians, apparently interchangeably (Kephas in Gal 1:18 and 2:9-14, Petros in Gal 2:7-8). Earlier, in 1 Corinthians, Paul uses Kephas consistently (1:12, 3:22, 9:5, 15:5), including the very early credal formula of 15:5.
The indications in Paul suggest that the Grecized form Kephas was used very early among Greek-speaking Christians, possibly before Petros. This reinforces the likelihood that Aramaic Kepha, to which Kephas in John 1:42 points, is the original form of Peter’s new name as given by Jesus, who would most likely have customarily spoken Aramaic among his Galilean disciples.
Thus, Simon Peter was probably first called Kepha (in Aramaic speech), then Kephas (in Greek speech), and finally Petros (again in Greek). Adding the final “s” or sigma for the Grecized form Kephas conforms the word in Greek to masculine nouns of the second declension, making it masculine rather than feminine, as befitting a man’s name. (For Greek speakers, the name Kepha without the final sigma would be taken for a woman’s name.)
In the same way, Greek petra is feminine (first declension), Petros masculine (second declension), so Petros rather than Petra is the natural equivalent of the masculine-form Grecized Kephas, and, again, appropriate for a man’s name.
Even after Peter receives his new name, the old name, Simon, doesn’t entirely disappear. In the Gospels Jesus himself continues to use Simon most of the time (Matt 17:25, Mark 14:37, Luke 22:31, John 21:15), though not always (Luke 22:34), and others use Simon at least occasionally (Luke 24:34). But the Evangelists almost never refer to Peter simply as Simon, except very early on. He is either “Simon called Petros” or “Simon Petros” (particularly in John), or else simply Petros, probably indicating the prevalence of Petros as the familiar version of the name at the time when the Gospels were written.
In Acts, Luke only uses Petros, except when relating how the men from Cornelius, sent by the angel, come seeking “Simon called Petros.” The angel in Peter’s vision addresses him as Petros (Acts 10:1-18). The only other echo of Simon in Acts comes from James, at the Jerusalem Council, who uses the form Simeon, a more Semitic form of the name. This form is also attested in the opening of 2 Peter, where it is conjoined with Peter: “Simeon Petros, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ”; 1 Peter begins simply, “Petros, an apostle of Jesus Christ.”
Paul never uses Simon, only Kephas or Petros. From this, and from the prevalence of Petros in the Gospels and Acts, it seems clear that Peter’s new name was well established and widely used in the first-century church.
The surnaming of Peter by Jesus is unique in a number of respects. Mark’s Gospel mentions that the other two disciples of Jesus’ inner circle, James and John, received the collective nickname Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder.” But that lone mention is the only time this sobriquet is ever heard from; we never read, for example, that “Jesus took with him Peter and the Sons of Thunder” or any such thing. They are sometimes referred to collectively as the sons of Zebedee, but never the Sons of Thunder. Nor is there any mention of “James Son of Thunder” or “John Son of Thunder.” James is never called anything but James, nor John anything but John.
Likewise, the popular notion that Jesus changed Saul’s name to Paul is a misconception. Like many of his peers, Paul, a Jew and a Roman citizen in a Hellenized world, had simply acquired more than one name. The shift in Acts from Saul to Paul is merely the narrator’s way of transitioning literarily from the story of Saul’s Pharisaical Jewish origins to his better-known identity as the great apostle to the Gentiles. Symbolic, certainly, but there is no indication of a name change. The story of Paul’s conversion is related three times in Acts (once by Luke, twice by Paul), with no indication that Jesus ever called Saul anything but “Saul, Saul” (cf. Acts 9, 22 and 26). Then, at a certain point, Luke simply tells us that Saul was “also called Paul” (Acts 13:9), and goes from there. There is no parallel to the significance of Peter’s new name, especially as we find it expounded in Matthew 16, where it is part of a solemn commission speech.
In fact, the closest parallels in scripture to Peter’s new name are found in the Old Testament, particularly in the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Israel, who all receive new names from God in passages with notable parallels to Matthew 16, as we will see.
Among other things, Jesus’ choice of Peter’s new name is in a way as paradoxical as the choice of Abraham (“father of a multitude”) for a childless old man. This is very different, probably, from the nickname “Sons of Thunder,” which likely reflects an assessment of the personalities or dispositions of the sons of Zebedee (possibly as seen in Luke 9:54). In the same way, the surname Barnabas (Son of Encouragement), given to Joseph of Cyprus by the apostles (Acts 4:36), was probably indicative of his personality. It is easy to feel that Kepha/Kephas/Petros is hardly illustrative of Peter’s personality in the same way.
On the contrary, Peter is well known as a man of shifting extremes — impetuous, unsteady, at turns fervent and foolish, faithful and fearful, promising the greatest fidelity, then failing most spectacularly — anything but rock-like, however nuanced or glossed the notion of rockness might be. This is not to say that Peter’s personality was not a factor at all, only that in itself it does not seem to be a sufficient explanation. As we will see, “Rock” seems to be primarily indicative of Jesus’ intention for the role he would give to Peter, rather than any attributes Peter possessed in himself.
Further heightening the drama of Peter’s name change is the apparent novelty in contemporary usage of Aramaic Kepha and Greek Petros as a given name. In subsequent Christian usage Peter became a popular name thanks to its apostolic namesake, but when Simon bar-Jona was first called that, it was apparently unheard of. (This point isn’t definitive; there is one apparent instance of Aramaic Kepha as a name in a legal document from the 5th century BC, and others might be discovered.)
(This is as good a point as any for a disclaimer to the effect that I am neither a student of language nor learned in ancient texts. In this post I’m reliant on a number of works that need to be sourced. I’ll try to come back in the near future and re-edit to credit sources. In the meantime, comments, queries and corrections are all welcome. As always, when a non-expert is synthesizing technical material, mistakes are possible. Further updates may be forthcoming on the basis of such feedback.)
Aramaic kepha is cognate to Hebrew keph, a rare word found only in Jeremiah 4:29 and Job 30:6, where it has the sense of mountain crags or rocky terrain. In both texts keph is translated petra (cognate to petros) in the Greek Old Testament translation, the Septuagint.
Aramaic kepha is more widely used than its Hebrew cognate. In fact, it can be used to translate any of the common Hebrew words for rock: sela‘ and tsûr (both usually rendered in the Greek Septuagint as petra) as well as ’eben, a stone (usually rendered lithos in Greek).
A word of explanation may be helpful here. As the above suggests, there is a broad distinction in both Hebrew and Greek between words that often mean something like solid rock, bedrock, rocky terrain, cliff wall, etc., and words that usually indicate a stone or detached rock on some movable scale: a boulder, a precious gem, a thrown rock, a shaped stone, etc. Hebrew sela‘ and tsûr (often used in parallel), and Greek petra, are typically “rock solid” language, while Hebrew ’eben and Greek lithos usually indicate rocks of the smaller and more mobile type.
The above I take to be fairly noncontroversial; but two other words, one Greek and one Aramaic, are sometimes controverted particularly in discussions about Peter. Greek petros and Aramaic kepha are asserted, usually by non-Catholics, to mean more or less the same as lithos or ’eben, i.e., a movable stone, in contradistinction to petra or tsûr, solid rock. (One sometimes encounters the claim that Aramaic shua‘, cognate to Hebrew tsûr, is the rock-solid equivalent of petra.)
Kepha first. It is true that kepha can mean a stone, boulder or small rock, and is accordingly used in Aramaic texts to translate Hebrew ’eben in the same passages where the Greek has lithos. Aramaic also has another word, ’evna, cognate to Hebrew ’eben, that may often have a similar meaning. But ’evna is apparently uncommon, leaving kepha, maybe, to pick up some of the slack.
However, kepha is also used in Aramaic texts to translate Hebrew sela‘ and tsûr where the latter indicate solid rock. The usual Greek translation in these cases is petra, indicating that kepha and petra can function more or less synonymously.
For example, the water-giving rock (sela‘) struck by Moses in the wilderness (Num 20:8-11), the rock (sela‘) on which the psalmist stands securely (Psalm 40:2), and the prophet’s “shadow of a great rock (sela‘) in a weary land” (Isaiah 32:2) are all rendered kepha in Aramaic targums (Targum Onkelos, Targum Jerusalem). Other targums attest kepha for tsûr in such texts as Deuteronomy 32:4 and Isaiah 17:10, where rock is used metaphorically for God himself (i.e., solid rock).
Significantly, discoveries in Qumran targums have found pre-Christian evidence for kepha referring to rocky mountain summits or crags (sela‘) in Job 39:1,28 and 1 Enoch 89:29. I am not aware of any corresponding evidence of Aramaic shua‘ (cognate of Hebrew tsûr) attested prior to medieval Aramaic texts; for all I know, that the word may not have been available in Jesus’ day.
For each of the above passages, wherever the Aramaic uses kepha for sela‘ or tsûr, the Greek Septuagint translation is petra (except where rock metaphors are lost in translation, e.g., Isa 32:2). Petra is the usual word for rock in the Septuagint, and also appears a number of times in the New Testament. The masculine form, petros, is virtually unknown in either, except as Peter’s name in the New Testament.
In the Attic Greek of classical poetry, petros is sometimes used in the sense of a stone or movable rock, perhaps more or less synonymously with lithos, in contradistinction to petra. In the common Koine Greek of biblical literature, this distinction is virtually unknown. As a rule, when the Greek biblical texts want to reference a movable stone, they use lithos, not petros. This rule is not, however, quite without exception: A single Greek Old Testament book, 2 Maccabees, offers two instances of petros referring to thrown stones (2 Macc 1:16 and 4:41).
On the other hand, petra need not always mean massive rock over against lithos (or petros) in biblical Greek. In Isaiah 8:14 in the Septuagint, and again in Romans 9:33 and 1 Peter 2:8, both apparently drawing on the Septuagint, we read of “a stone (lithos) that will make men stumble and a rock (petra) that will make them fall.” Lithos and petra are thus used in parallel, not opposition, referring to a stone capable of being tripped over.
Kepha is even more flexible. It can be used equivalently to lithos (a stone) or to petra in the sense of rock mass. Like the English word rock, kepha seems to run the gamut of meaning, and no specific sense can be insisted on in advance.
As with Aramaic kepha and Greek petra/petros, the Hebrew words sela‘ and tsûr are not used in the Old Testament as Hebrew personal names (though there seems to have been a Canaanite or two named Sur; see Num 25:15 and 1 Chron 8:30). Both tsûr and sela‘ are, however, metaphorically applied to God himself so frequently, particularly in Psalms and Isaiah, that “Rock” almost becomes a sort of divine title: “the Rock,” “our Rock,” “my Rock,” “the Rock of Israel,” “the Rock of your refuge,” etc. (e.g., Deut 32:4,15-18,31; 2 Sam 22:2,32,47; Psa 18:2,31,46; Isa 17:10).
Such rock language seems to have been exclusive to God; we never read that David or Moses was a rock, etc. It may be the link between rock language and God was generally considered too close to comfortably apply such language to men, whether as a name or as a metaphor.
But this rule, too, is not without exception. There is a rabbinic tradition that may well have gone back to Jesus’ day, describing one man as a rock: Abraham. Based on Isaiah 51:1-2 (“look to the rock (tsûr) from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged; Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you”), a number of Talmudic and midrashic texts, the earliest of which go back to the mid-second century, interpreted Abraham as the “rock” from which God’s people were hewn.
What is the significance of Jesus renaming Simon Kepha or Kephas? In what sense is Peter a rock? It is time at last to turn to Matthew 16.
More to come.
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