Who was Peter?

His name was Simon. He fished on the Sea of Galilee alongside his brother Andrew, and he had business partners — James and John. He had a boat and a house in Capernaum, where his mother-in-law also lived. He was not a beggar; he was a small businessman in the fishing trade.

On the call, the Gospels report two ways. Mark and Matthew show Jesus passing along the shore and calling the two brothers at the same time; John says Andrew heard about Jesus first and went to fetch his brother. In both accounts the new name comes early: Cephas, in Aramaic, which the Gospels translate as rock.

Much later, when he and John are questioned by the authorities in Jerusalem, Acts records the impression they made: men without formal schooling, and confident all the same. Both things sit in the same verse.

At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asks the group who they say he is. Peter answers, and his answer is the confession around which Matthew’s Gospel is organised. What follows is the passage most quoted about Peter in the whole Bible: the statement about the rock, the church and the keys.

This is where Catholics and Protestants read differently, and the difference is not small — distinct understandings of authority in the Church rest on it. Both readings are set out further down this page, with equal weight and without our arbitrating between them.

Worth noticing what comes immediately after, because it is almost never quoted alongside: a few verses later, in the same chapter, Peter tries to talk Jesus out of speaking about suffering and receives the harshest rebuke any disciple receives in the Gospels. The commendation and the dressing-down are on the same page.

The episode where he steps out of the boat sums the character up better than any analysis. He is the only one who asks to come; the only one who goes; and the only one who sinks. The three are inseparable.

Notice that the text records why he sinks — he saw the wind — and that the hand that catches him arrives before the rebuke. The order of those gestures belongs to the narrator, and it matters.

On the night of the arrest, Peter follows Jesus at a distance into the high priest’s courtyard. There, by the fire, he is recognised three times and denies three times — to a servant girl, to a man, and to someone else who insists because he can hear the Galilean accent. No authority interrogates him: these are ordinary people around a fire.

Luke adds a detail the others do not have: at the moment the rooster crows, Jesus turns and looks at him. Peter goes out and weeps.

The restoration, at the end of John’s Gospel, happens beside another fire, and the repetition is clearly deliberate: three questions, three answers, three commissions. There is no rebuke, no penance required, not even an explicit mention of the denial. What there is, is the same question asked three times, until it hurts.

In Acts, Peter is the central figure of the first half. He is the one who speaks on the day of Pentecost, standing before the crowd, and his address is the first Christian sermon on record.

The most consequential episode, though, is a different one. After a vision about clean and unclean food, Peter walks into the house of a Roman officer — something an observant Jew did not do — and opens by saying he has come to understand that God shows no partiality. That unlocks the entry of non-Jews into the community, and it is a change of position rather than a confirmation of what he already held.

And there is Antioch. Paul reports, in the letter to the Galatians, that he confronted Peter publicly because he had been eating with Gentiles and stopped once people arrived from Jerusalem. The text hides nothing: it names the conflict, names the motive and names who, in the writer’s judgement, was in the wrong. That this letter was preserved in the canon is itself a data point about how the first generation handled his authority.

Acts sets Peter aside in its second half, and no book of the New Testament recounts his death. What exists is a sentence, in the last chapter of John, about hands stretched out and about being led where one does not wish to go — and the evangelist’s own comment that it pointed to how he would die.

The tradition that he died in Rome is early: already at the end of the first century and through the second, Christian writers tie his death to the city. The first letter of Peter signs off by sending greetings from the church in Babylon, an expression read since antiquity as a reference to Rome.

What tradition added afterwards — the manner of execution, the chronology, the staging — is dealt with in the section below.