Who Was the Apostle Peter? Life and Death (2 of 13)

Peter is the one apostle we can actually watch change.

Most of the Twelve are names in a list. Peter gets scenes. He gets dialogue, and a lot of it is dialogue he probably wished had not been written down. He is the first to say the right thing and the first to say the catastrophically wrong thing, sometimes within a few verses of each other. The Gospels do not tidy him up, which is itself worth noticing, because the men who preserved these stories were not in the habit of making their own leader look foolish for no reason.

This is what Scripture records about him, followed by the honest state of the evidence for how he died.

Who Was Simon Peter Before He Followed Jesus?

A commercial fisherman working the Sea of Galilee, originally from Bethsaida and later based in Capernaum. He worked with his brother Andrew, and the family had enough of an operation to be in partnership with Zebedee’s sons, which puts him closer to small business owner than to day laborer.

His name was Simon. Jesus renamed him, and the rename is the argument. In Matt 16:18 the wordplay runs through the Greek: you are Petros, and on this petra I will build my church. John records the same renaming earlier and gives the Aramaic behind it, Cephas, which also means rock. Paul uses that Aramaic form throughout his letters, which is a small sign of how early it was in circulation.

The call itself is in Luke 5:1-11, and it does not go the way a recruitment scene usually goes.

Jesus opens by asking for help rather than offering it. He needs a boat to speak from and Peter’s skill to hold it steady against the drift, and the request is genuine rather than a pretext. Kenneth Bailey notes what that does: it approaches a man at the point of his competence and puts the teacher in his debt before anything is asked of him.

Then the order that should have ended the conversation. Fish congregate near the shore where fresh water enters, and they feed at night, which is why Peter’s crew had worked all night close in. An inland carpenter telling a professional to launch into deep water in daylight is not a hard instruction; it is an absurd one. Peter says so, in the tone of a man who knows his trade, and complies anyway.

After the catch that nearly sinks two boats, Simon does not volunteer. He tells Jesus to go away from him, because he is a sinful man. The response is a commission anyway.

His two titles frame the scene. He begins by calling Jesus epistates, which is closer to boss or chief than to teacher. He ends by calling him kyrios, Lord. Bailey also notices that Peter beckons to the other boat rather than shouting, because sound carries across water and a new fishing ground was worth money. The man is thinking about his business right up to the moment he leaves it.

He was also married. Mark 1:30 has Jesus healing his mother-in-law at Capernaum, and decades later Paul is still assuming it, asking in 1 Cor 9:5 whether he and Barnabas alone lack the right to take along a believing wife, as the other apostles and Cephas do. She is never named. That is the whole record, and it is worth keeping in view when later centuries build a picture of Peter with no room in it for a household.

Why Was Peter Renamed at Caesarea Philippi?

That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Matt 16:16.

The location matters more than most readers are told. Caesarea Philippi sat at the foot of Mount Hermon beside a cave sacred to Pan, in a district thick with pagan worship and, in Old Testament terms, regarded as a gateway to the realm of the dead. Jesus asks who people say he is while standing in front of a rock face dedicated to another god, and Peter answers there.

The promise attached to the answer is usually read backwards. The gates of Hades will not prevail sounds like a church under siege holding out against attack, but gates are defensive works. Nothing has ever been besieged by a gate. The church in that sentence is not the fortress, it is the force in the field, and the gates are what will not hold.

What happens next is the part people forget. Jesus starts explaining that he will suffer and be killed, and Peter, still glowing from the confession, takes him aside to correct him. The rebuke he gets back in Matt 16:23 is the harshest sentence Jesus addresses to any of the Twelve. Right about the identity, catastrophically wrong about what the identity meant. Both in the same conversation.

Why Did Peter Deny Jesus Three Times?

Because he was the only one close enough to be asked.

That is not a defense of him, but it is a fact the story keeps. The rest scattered. Peter followed into the high priest’s courtyard, which is the reason a servant girl was in a position to recognize him at all. He failed in a place none of the others were standing.

The denial is in Luke 22:54-62, and Luke adds a detail the others do not: the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then the weeping.

Underneath sits Luke 22:31-32, spoken hours earlier. Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you, and when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. The failure was foreseen, so was the return, and so was the job waiting on the far side of it. Being told in advance did not stop him, which is its own kind of realism about how people work.

How Was Peter Restored After the Denial?

Over breakfast, on a beach, in John 21:15-19.

Three denials at a charcoal fire in the courtyard. Three questions at a charcoal fire on the shore. John uses the same unusual word for the fire in both scenes, and the repetition is not accidental. Peter is walked back through the shape of his own failure and given a commission at each step. Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Feed my sheep.

By the third round Peter is grieved, and his answer stops being a claim about his own devotion and becomes an appeal to what Jesus already knows. Lord, you know all things. That is a different man from the one who swore he would die before denying anything.

What Did Peter Do in the Book of Acts?

He led, for roughly the first half of it.

Peter preaches at Pentecost in Acts 2:14-41, and about three thousand respond. He heals at the temple gate in Acts 3:6 with a line about having no silver or gold. He stands before the Sanhedrin, gets flogged, and keeps teaching. Then in Acts 10:34-35 he says out loud, in a Gentile centurion’s house, that God shows no favoritism and accepts people from every nation. That is the hinge the whole book turns on, and it turns under Peter rather than Paul.

Acts 12:6-11 has him chained between two soldiers the night before Herod planned to execute him, walking out past the guards behind an angel and assuming he is seeing a vision until he is standing alone in the street.

And then there is Antioch. In Gal 2:11-14 Paul says he opposed Peter to his face, because Peter had been eating with Gentile believers and then pulled back when men from James arrived. The man who opened the door was the man caught closing it again. Whoever preserved that story had no interest in making the leadership look untouchable, and the fact that it survived into the New Testament at all says something about how these documents were handled.

Did Peter Write 1 and 2 Peter?

Both letters claim him. The two claims are not held with equal confidence.

1 Peter is written to believers scattered across northern Asia Minor and under real pressure, and it closes in 1 Pet 5:13 with greetings from she who is in Babylon, along with Mark. Babylon is almost certainly code for Rome. That single line puts Peter and Mark in the same city near the end.

That greeting also supports the oldest tradition about Mark’s Gospel. Papias, quoted by Eusebius, says Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately what he remembered of Peter’s preaching, though not in order.^[1] Nobody in the ancient world contested it, and it matches the letter, which puts the two men in the same city late in Peter’s life. Tradition and text arriving at the same arrangement from opposite directions is the kind of convergence that makes a claim worth trusting. [1]

2 Peter has always carried more questions. It was among the disputed books in the early canon lists, its Greek differs noticeably from the first letter, and it overlaps heavily with Jude. The authorship discussion is real rather than a modern invention, and worth naming rather than smoothing over.

What 2 Peter does give is a man writing with his own death in view. 2 Pet 1:14 says he knows the putting off of his tent will come soon, as the Lord made clear to him, which reads as a direct backward glance at the prediction in John 21.

How Did the Apostle Peter Die?

Scripture predicts it and never narrates it.

John 21:18-19 has Jesus telling Peter that when he is old he will stretch out his hands, and someone else will dress him and carry him where he does not want to go. John then tells the reader plainly that this indicated the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. The Gospel was written after the fact. The author knew how it ended and chose to leave the scene off the page.

The earliest witness outside the New Testament is Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth from Rome around AD 95 or 96. He lists Peter and Paul in a catalogue of men brought down by jealousy, and his language is careful and short. ^[2] No method, no place. What makes it evidence is the company it keeps: the surrounding chapters are a sequence of examples of envy producing violent death, and Peter would not be in that list if he had died at home.

The specifics arrive later. Tertullian and Origen both place the death in Rome under Nero by crucifixion. Around AD 200 a Roman writer named Gaius points visitors to the memorial of Peter on the Vatican hill, which means that within roughly a century and a half the location was a fixed point in Roman Christian memory.

So the tier here is genuinely strong. Peter died in Rome, under Nero, by execution. That is about as well attested as anything can be that the Bible does not narrate.

Was Peter Crucified Upside Down?

Maybe. This one is older than skeptics usually allow and shakier than believers usually allow, which is an awkward place to land and also where the evidence actually sits.

The detail is not a medieval embellishment. Origen states it in the third century, and Eusebius quotes him word for word. ^[3] That is early enough to take seriously.

The difficulty is where Origen most likely got it. The inverted crucifixion appears in the Acts of Peter, a late second-century work that is unmistakably devotional fiction, complete with a talking dog and a resurrected fish. A respectable scholar repeating a detail does not launder its source.

The familiar reason attached to it, that Peter asked for it because he was unworthy to die as his Lord did, is the part most clearly shaped by the storyteller. It is a beautiful line and it is doing obvious literary work.

Hold it loosely. Nothing about Peter depends on it. The prediction in John 21 says stretched-out hands and being carried where he did not want to go, and the picture that gives is already complete without a single detail from a novel.

Part of a series working through the Twelve one at a time. See the overview of the Twelve as a group and the Twelve Apostles timeline.

Sources

Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 5, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Supports the earliest external notice of Peter’s death and the jealousy framing around it. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.39, quoting Papias of Hierapolis. Supports the Mark-as-Peter’s-interpreter tradition. Standard English translations in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers second series, free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, quoting Origen. Supports the head-downward detail and its third-century date. Same access as above.

Acts of Peter, late second century. The literary origin of the inverted crucifixion. Cited here as the source of a claim, not as a reliable witness to events.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 11. Supports the reading of the call of Peter: the request for help as the approach, the absurdity of the daytime deep-water order given Galilean fishing practice, the beckoning rather than calling, and the shift from epistates to kyrios. In my Logos library.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of the charcoal fire as a deliberate echo between the denial and the restoration is a widely noted observation about John’s wording rather than a claim I am attributing to a particular scholar. The judgment that Origen’s likely source for the inverted crucifixion is the Acts of Peter is an inference from the dates and the content, and it is a common one, but it is an inference.

Footnotes

1. Papias, preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39. Papias is writing early in the second century and is himself reporting what an elder told him, so the chain is short but it is a chain. The qualification about order is part of the original claim rather than a later concession, and it has shaped discussion of Mark’s structure ever since.
2. 1 Clement 5. Written from Rome, roughly AD 95 to 96, within living memory of the events. The word rendered witness was only in the process of becoming a technical term for martyrdom, so the passage carries less lexical weight than it is often given. Its force comes from context: chapters 4 through 6 are a catalogue of jealousy ending in death.
3. Origen, quoted verbatim in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, states that Peter came at the end to Rome and was crucified head downwards. The date is third century, which is earlier than most people assume for this detail. The problem is not the date but the underlying source.