The Primacy Of Peter

I had originally posted this at Scripture Scribes, but I have a feeling more people will see it here. Does anyone even read the Scripture Scribes blog?


Matthew 16.

This is the Chapter that Protestants have such a hard time with.

I am convinced, though, that if they took the time to really figure out what is going on here they would clearly see that Peter is the first among the Apostles and that the papacy is bestowed upon him by Christ!

In this chapter, Peter professes Christ to be "the Son of the living God." Then Christ gives him the name Peter or Petros in Greek. Then Christ says that "upon this rock" (Petra in Greek) he will build his Church.

Some Protestants (although recently there have been some well known Protestant scholars who side with the Catholic view) will try to say here that Christ calls Peter Petros-meaning "rock" or "little stone" in Greek (stressing the "little stone)-and that Christ is referring to himself when he says Petra-meaning "big rock" in Greek. This however is absurd for two reasons.

1) In the Greek, Petra is feminine and Petros is the masculine version. Christ would not have called Peter by the feminine version of the word, but rather the masculine since Peter is a male. Christ didn't speak Greek though, he spoke Aramaic, so Matthew in translating Aramaic to Greek is merely displaying proper Greek translation. Which brings us to the second point...

2) In the original Aramaic (which Jesus spoke), Jesus would have called Peter Cephas which is the Aramaic word for rock whether masculine or feminine.

So it is plain to see that Peter is Cephas. The rock upon which the Church is built!

Another dead give away for Peter's primacy is that Jesus gives Peter the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and tells him that whatever he binds on earth shall be bound in Heaven and whatever he looses on earth shall be loosed in Heaven.

Keys denote authority. Whoever has the keys to a kingdom is the Prime-Minister, which is an office that has succession. Jesus here is re-establishing the Davidic Kingdom that God promised would last forever.

In the Davidic Kingdom there were twelve ministers with one of the ministers being the Prime-Minister who held the keys and had the authority to rule over the kingdom when the king was not present. The Prime-Minister was the greatest in all the kingdom with only the king himself being above him.

When Jesus tells Peter, "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" He is quoting from Isaiah 22:13-23:

"13: and behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." 14: The LORD of hosts has revealed himself in my ears: "Surely this iniquity will not be forgiven you till you die," says the Lord GOD of hosts. 15: Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts, "Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: 16: What have you to do here and whom have you here, that you have hewn here a tomb for yourself, you who hew a tomb on the height, and carve a habitation for yourself in the rock? 17: Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O you strong man. He will seize firm hold on you, 18: and whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land; there you shall die, and there shall be your splendid chariots, you shame of your master's house. 19: I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station. 20: In that day I will call my servant Eli'akim the son of Hilki'ah, 21: and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your girdle on him, and will commit your authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. 22: And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. 23: And I will fasten him like a peg in a sure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father's house. "

In this passage Eliakim is taking the place of the the old Prime-Minister, Shebna. Notice that he is given the "key to the house of David" (which is the keys to the kingdom), granted authority, and told "he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open."

Sound familiar? Of course it does!

And Protestants said that the establishment of the pope is not in the Bible!