3
But who was this Paul? He had not been one of the original Twelve. How had he come to be so important, and why, among most Jews, did he arouse such violent antipathies? Notes Chapter 2 5
According to St. Jerome (de Viris Illustribus, 1 & 11), St. Peter came to Rome ‘in the second year of Claudius’ i.e. in 42. The Liberian Liber Pontificalis gives St. Peter’s pontificate in Rome as having lasted ‘25 years, 1 month and 9 days’. This means, counting back from the date of his martyrdom on 29 June 67, that St. Peter arrived in Rome on 21 May 42. It has been suggested that St. Luke’s ‘to another place’ is a coded reference to Ezekiel 12:11. This refers to exile ‘to another place’ which verse 12:13 then identifies as Babylon. St. Peter and St. John both used ‘Babylon’ as a code for Rome. The tradition that St. Barnabas came to Rome in the year before St. Peter is found in the Datiana Historia (an 11th century chronicle of the diocese of Milan commissioned by Datius, the then Archbishop of Milan). After accurately relating the choice of him and St. Paul as apostles to the Gentiles ‘in the fourteenth year after Christ’s Passion’ (i.e. 44 AD), this account proceeds to state that ‘in the first year of Claudius’ St. Barnabas ‘took ship with some of his disciples to Rome, as one desiring to gaze upon the mistress of the whole world’. 6
We read of St. Peter’s worsting of Simon Magus in St. Justin Martyr’s I Apol. 16: 1 – 3. That Simon Magus encountered St. Peter in Rome is also attested to by St. Hippolytus of Rome in his Refutationes, 6:15. The account of Simon’s demise is found in the Philosophumena (of c. 225) Indeed the power of exorcising demons was claimed by many early Church apologists and Fathers as an infallible proof of the divine truth of the Christian religion. (e.g. Tertullian, Apologeticus 23; Justin Martyr, I Apol. 2,6; Minucius Felix, Octavius 27; Theophilus 2,8; Origen, Contra Celsum 7,67.) 7
In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey had captured Jerusalem and had led some of the Jewish royal family and their followers captive to Rome. Rome thenceforth had a most considerable Jewish community. Following the example of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar had regarded them highly, and Augustus granted them a special exemption from the normal obligations of the Empire’s subjects to partake in the Empire’s official state pagan cults. The wide variety of Roman districts where the Jews lived – the Porta Capena, the Campus Martius, the Trans Tiberim and the Suburra – shows that they were not in a ‘ghetto’ but were free to reside where they wished. 9
Upper class Christians normally kept their former names in public life and used their new baptismal names only in the Church. Because he could no longer, in conscience, perform the innumerable acts of pagan worship inevitable in Roman public life or attend at the cruel spectacles in the amphitheatre, the Christian aristocrat was forced to withdraw from public life. This and his persistence in a life of retirement were later to be recognised by the pagans as the surest signs that an aristocrat had become a Christian. 10
This portable ‘Chair of Peter’ is now venerated in the Vatican.
12
Acts 11:19 refers to Jewish Christian foundations in Phoenicia, Cyprus & Antioch.
13
The record (Eusebius Hist. Eccl. 6, 14) that St. Mark wrote at the request of the equites Caesareani (‘Caesarean knights’) after the ‘departure’ (exodos) of St. Peter has