Was Peter in Rome?

Why the question matters less than it seems

Protestants say the Church has no earthly head and that the papacy arose from fifth- or sixth-century politics. A key premise is that Peter was never in Rome, so he could not have been its first bishop or had successors there.

The question is not decisive. Peter's being in Rome would not by itself prove the papacy; by that logic Paul, who also went to Rome, would have been pope. And if Peter never reached Rome, he could still have been the first pope, with a later successor settling there. If Christ established the papacy, he did so in his lifetime, before Peter is said to have reached Rome. Anti-Catholic writers press the point anyway, hoping that if the Church is wrong on this, people will conclude it is wrong on the papacy.

The biblical evidence

Loraine Boettner claims the New Testament never connects Peter with Rome and his epistles contain no allusion to it. The Bible indeed does not explicitly say Peter was in Rome, but neither does it say he was not; it says little about where any apostle but Paul went. For that we rely on other early documents, which historians recognize as genuine evidence, not "legend."

And 1 Peter does allude to Rome: it closes with greetings from the church "in Babylon" and from Mark (1 Peter 5:13). "Babylon" is a code word for Rome in the Sibylline Oracles, the Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Esdras. Eusebius's Chronicle records that Peter's first epistle was composed in Rome, which he called Babylon figuratively. Revelation's "Babylon the great" (Revelation 14:8; 16:19; 17:5; 18:2, 10, 21) cannot be the old Babylon, by then an insignificant village; the only candidates for the "great city" are Rome and Jerusalem. Peter had reason for code: the Church was illegal, and advertising his presence in the capital would invite a manhunt. The apostles also used symbolic names for cities (Revelation 11:8).

The early Christian testimony

William Jurgens's The Faith of the Early Fathers lists thirty references, about evenly divided between "Peter came to Rome and died there" and "Peter established his see at Rome." Examples:

• Tertullian (200) calls Rome the church where Peter suffered a passion like the Lord's and Paul died like John the Baptist, and says Clement was ordained there by Peter.
• Clement of Rome, writing perhaps before 70, refers to Peter ending his life where Paul ended his.
• Ignatius of Antioch (110) tells the Romans he cannot command them as Peter and Paul did.
• Irenaeus (190) says Matthew wrote while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome, and names Linus, Anacletus and Clement as Peter's successors.
• Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) says Mark wrote down what Peter preached publicly in Rome.
• Lactantius (c. 318) says Peter came to Rome under Nero and converted many.

No ancient writer claimed Peter died anywhere but Rome.

The archaeological evidence

Boettner dismissed the finds as "bones of uncertain origin," but his book, first published in 1962, never mentions the excavations under the high altar of St. Peter's. A tomb on Vatican Hill bore early inscriptions attesting that Peter's remains were inside, and Pope Paul VI announced that the tomb of the first pope had been identified conclusively (see John Evangelist Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter). No one who looks at the evidence objectively can doubt that Peter was in Rome.