Peter’s Confession and the Transfiguration (6 of 12)

This short stretch is the hinge the whole story turns on.

Before it, the ministry moves outward through Galilee. After it, everything points at Jerusalem and the cross.

Why Did Jesus Withdraw From Galilee?

Because the crowds had become the problem rather than the point.

After the bread of life discourse the numbers collapse, and Jesus moves out of Galilee entirely, into Gentile territory around Tyre and Sidon and then the Decapolis.

The purpose of this period is training. The crowds are gone and the Twelve get concentrated attention, which is exactly what they need before what is coming.

What Happened with the Syrophoenician Woman?

The most uncomfortable exchange in the Gospels, and it ends with her winning the argument.

Mark 7:24-30. A Gentile woman comes about her demonised daughter. Jesus answers that it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.

That is harsh on any reading, and attempts to soften it by pointing to the diminutive form of the word do not remove the sting.

Her reply is the sharpest line anyone gives him: even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. She accepts the frame and turns it, and he tells her that for such a reply she may go, the demon has left her daughter.

Whatever is happening in that exchange, and it has been read many ways, the outcome is that a Gentile woman gets what she asks for by out-arguing him, and the Gospels kept it. The full treatment is in the post on the Syrophoenician woman.

What Did Peter Confess at Caesarea Philippi?

That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

Matt 16:13-20. He asks who people say the Son of Man is, gets the range of answers, and then asks the direct question. Peter answers.

The location deserves attention on two counts. N. T. Wright notes the practical one first: Caesarea Philippi is in the far north, outside Herod Antipas’s territory, a good two days’ walk from the lake. Being named as a would-be Messiah drew official attention and usually hostility, and there had been several such claimants in living memory whose followers scattered as soon as the authorities took them. Jesus asked the question in the one place where the answer could be said out loud safely, and even then he asked it obliquely, about the Son of Man rather than about himself.

The second is the setting, and it is doing more work than the security question.

Caesarea Philippi sat at the foot of Mount Hermon, in the northern part of the old territory of Bashan, which the Old Testament associates with the serpent and with the giant clans. The town was also called Panias, after the cave sacred to Pan, and it held a temple to Zeus, regarded in that period as incarnate in Augustus Caesar.

The concentration of cult sites in that district is remarkable. More than twenty temples have been surveyed on Hermon and its surroundings, an unprecedented number for the region, and they appear to be open-air centres dedicated to the celestial gods.

Celestial gods is the phrase to sit with. That is the host of heaven, the powers placed over the nations at Babel in the Deut 32 arrangement and repeatedly forbidden to Israel. Jesus walks his disciples two days north, out of Antipas’s reach, and asks the question standing in the most densely occupied piece of rival spiritual real estate in the country.

Jesus asks who he is while standing in front of a rock face dedicated to other gods, and the reply about building his church on this rock, with the gates of Hades not prevailing against it, is spoken in that setting.

Heiser argues the rock carries a double sense. There is the wordplay on Peter’s name, which nobody disputes. There is also the mountain they are standing at the foot of, which in Old Testament times was regarded as the gateway to the realm of the dead. Peter makes the confession at that rock.

Why Does the Gates of Hades Line Mean the Opposite of What People Think?

Because gates are defensive.

The phrase is almost always read as though the church is under siege, hunkered down, bravely holding out while hell batters the walls. That picture requires hell to be attacking, and gates do not attack. Nobody has ever assaulted a city with a gate. A gate is what you install because something is coming for you.

So the direction of the sentence reverses. It is the gates of Hades that are under assault, and they will not hold. The church is not the fortress in that image. The church is the army in the field, and the kingdom of God is the aggressor.

Read it that way and the setting stops being scenery. Jesus picks the place his culture regarded as the doorway to the dead, at the foot of a mountain crowded with shrines to the powers set over the nations, and announces that he is building something that will come through those doors.

Wright reads the renaming as a deliberate echo. God renamed Abram to Abraham to signal that he would father many nations. Jesus renames Simon to Rock and immediately says he will build on it, which is the image from the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the wise man who built on rock. And in some Jewish tradition the temple mount was where heaven and earth met and where the gates of the underworld were located.

On that reading he is not founding an institution. He is saying the meeting place of heaven and earth is being rebuilt somewhere else, out of people.

Why Did Jesus Order Them Not to Tell Anyone?

Because the title came with a job description he had no intention of taking.

Matt 16:20 has him warning the disciples not to tell anyone he was the Messiah, and the command runs right through the Gospels. He silences demons who name him. He tells the healed not to publicise it. After the transfiguration he tells the three to say nothing until the resurrection.

The reason is what the word meant to the people who would hear it. First-century messianic expectation ran heavily toward a son of David who would raise an army, drive the Romans out, and purge Jerusalem of foreigners. That hope is written down and it is not subtle. The Psalms of Solomon, from roughly the century before, ask God to raise up a king to smash the arrogance of the nations like a potter’s vessel and destroy the unlawful peoples.

So the title was not an abstract claim about identity. It was a promise about Rome.

Announce it publicly and every hearer fills in the rest, and what follows is exactly what the crowd tried in Galilee after the loaves. They intended to seize him and make him king, and he went up the mountain alone to avoid it.

Notice what he uses instead. His habitual self-description is Son of Man, which sounds modest and is not. It comes from Dan 7, where one like a son of man approaches the Ancient of Days and receives authority, glory, and an everlasting kingdom. The phrase claims more than Messiah does and carries none of the military freight, which is precisely why he can say it in public.

The silence has an expiry date. In Mark 9:9 the instruction is to tell no one until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. And at the trial, when a confession can no longer start an uprising and can only get him killed, the high priest asks directly whether he is the Messiah, and he answers plainly that he is.

He claims the title at the one moment claiming it costs him everything and gains him nothing.

Why Did Jesus Rebuke Peter Immediately After?

Because Peter was right about the title and wrong about what it meant.

Matt 16:21-23. Jesus begins explaining that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed, and be raised. Peter takes him aside and rebukes him: never, Lord, this shall never happen to you.

The answer is the harshest sentence Jesus addresses to any of the Twelve. Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, because you do not have in mind the concerns of God but merely human concerns.

Six verses separate the highest commendation Peter receives from the lowest. He had the identity correct and the job description entirely wrong, and the correction is delivered in the vocabulary of the wilderness temptation, because it is the same offer: the crown without the cross.

What Was the Transfiguration?

A visible change on a mountain about a week later, witnessed by three.

Matt 17:1-8 and parallels. Peter, James, and John are taken up a high mountain. His appearance changes and his clothes become dazzling. Moses and Elijah appear and speak with him. Luke adds that they spoke about his departure, using the word exodus.

Which mountain is not stated. Early tradition settled on Tabor, but that tradition first appears in the fourth century and has no basis in the text, and Tabor is under two thousand feet where Hermon is over eight thousand, which fits the description of a high mountain considerably better. Many scholars now favour Hermon on grounds of proximity to Caesarea Philippi and everything that location carries. Some still hold Tabor.

If it is Hermon, the placement is pointed. In 1 Enoch, Hermon is where the sons of God of Gen 6 descended to begin their rebellion, and that tradition demonstrably shaped how Peter and Jude wrote. Jesus reveals who he is on the slope where the rebellion started.

Peter proposes building three shelters, and Mark notes that he did not know what to say because they were terrified.

Three shelters. One each.

That is worth sitting with, because of who is saying it and when. This is the man who six days earlier had been told that flesh and blood did not reveal his confession to him, and who had been renamed for it. He has the identity right and he still reaches for an arrangement that puts Jesus on a level with two other men.

Equal structures for equal guests. Moses is the law and Elijah is the prophets and Jesus is the third of them, which is a very high estimate and still the wrong category.

The correction comes from the cloud and it is precise. The voice does not endorse the plan or reject it in words. It singles one out. This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him.

Then Matthew records what they saw when they looked up. Jesus only. Moses and Elijah are gone and the question of three shelters has answered itself.

Understanding is not a switch. Peter gets the confession right at Caesarea Philippi, gets the job description wrong six verses later, and gets the ranking wrong six days after that, and he is still the one they build on.

Then a bright cloud covers them and a voice says: this is my Son, whom I love; listen to him.

That voice repeats the baptism declaration with one addition. Listen to him. It comes immediately after Peter had contradicted him about the cross.

Why Moses and Elijah?

The law and the prophets, and both had their own mountain encounters with God.

Moses received the law on Sinai. Elijah met God at Horeb, the same mountain, in the sound of low silence after wind and earthquake and fire.

Both of them also had unusual endings. Moses was buried by God with no one knowing the place. Elijah was taken up without dying.

And Luke’s word for the conversation topic is exodus. They are discussing the departure he is about to accomplish at Jerusalem, which is the second exodus the prophets had been pointing at.

What Happened at the Bottom of the Mountain?

Failure, immediately, and a father’s honest prayer.

Mark 9:14-29. The other disciples have been unable to help a boy with a violent condition, and an argument is underway when Jesus returns.

The father’s request carries a hedge: if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us. Jesus repeats the phrase back: if you can.

And then the line that has probably comforted more people than any other in Mark: I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.

Glory on the mountain, failure at the foot of it, and a man admitting his faith is partial and being helped anyway.

What Was the Coin in the Fish?

The temple tax, paid by an unusual method, with a point attached.

Matt 17:24-27. Collectors ask whether Jesus pays the two-drachma tax. Jesus asks Peter whether kings collect duty from their own sons or from others, and Peter answers, from others. Then the conclusion: so the sons are exempt.

But rather than press the point, he tells Peter to go fishing and take the first fish, where he will find a four-drachma coin, enough for both of them.

The argument establishes an exemption and then declines to use it, so as not to give offence. That combination is worth noticing.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Footnotes2

1. Luke's choice of the word exodus for the subject of the mountaintop conversation is not incidental. It places the coming death inside the pattern the whole Old Testament runs on, and it is the same pattern the wilderness temptation was working with.
2. The father's prayer in Mark 9:24 is theologically awkward and pastorally decisive. He does not resolve his doubt before asking. He states the doubt as part of the request, and the request is granted.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Matt 16:13-17:27, Mark 7:24-30, 8:27-9:29, Luke 9:18-45, and 1 Kgs 19 for Elijah at Horeb.

N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two: Chapters 16-28 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the reading of Caesarea Philippi as chosen for safety outside Antipas's territory, the oblique form of the question, and the renaming of Simon as an echo of Abram and of the wise builder. Supplied in full.

Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015). Supports the cosmic geography of Caesarea Philippi in northern Bashan, the concentration of temples on Hermon and their dedication to the celestial gods, the double sense of the rock as both Peter and the mountain, the reading of the gates of Hades as defensive works under assault rather than attacking, and the case for Hermon over Tabor as the mount of transfiguration. Supplied in full.

Psalms of Solomon 17, first century BC. The clearest surviving statement of the militant Davidic expectation attached to the title Messiah in this period. Widely available in translation.

Where the sourcing stops: the significance of the Caesarea Philippi setting is background about the site rather than something the text comments on, and the weight placed on it varies among interpreters. The Syrophoenician exchange has been read many ways and this post describes the scene rather than resolving it.