Is the Pope the Successor of Peter?

The interior of a great pillared church

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”

Luke 22:31–32

Of everything that divides Catholics from other Christians, nothing divides more visibly than one man in white. The papacy is the Reformation’s oldest grievance and its most durable one: churches that no longer agree with each other about baptism, the Supper, or the canon still agree that Rome’s claim for the successor of Peter goes too far. The Westminster divines went further than disagreement — their confession named the pope the antichrist — and even where the language has softened, the conviction beneath it has not: that Christ’s Church has no earthly head, and that the office claiming to be one is a human growth on a divine institution.

The Catholic claim is exactly as strong, and it is a claim about this page’s verse. On the night He was betrayed, knowing Satan had demanded all the apostles — the “you” is plural — Jesus prayed for one of them — that “you” is singular — and gave that one a charge toward the rest: strengthen your brethren. Catholics hold that this was not a passing kindness but the shape of an office: that Peter held a unique place among the Twelve by his Lord’s design, and that the place, like the apostolic office itself, did not die with the man.

This page asks the question at its narrowest and strongest: what does Scripture actually show about Peter? What did the First Vatican Council actually define — and what does the definition expressly not claim? And can the objections — Antioch, the bad popes, the late date of 1870 — carry the weight laid on them?

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Protestant View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The Protestant position is that Christ’s Church has one Head, and he is not in Rome. The Westminster Confession of 1647 stated it at full strength: “There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ.” Most modern Protestants would not use that sentence — the American church deleted it in 1789 — but the conviction under it remains: the papal office is a human development, not a divine institution.1

The Rock Is the Confession — or Christ

The case begins at the proof-text itself. In Matthew 16 Jesus says “you are Petros, and on this petra I will build my church” — two different Greek words, a stone and a bedrock. Many readers, ancient and modern, have taken the bedrock to be not the man but what the man had just said: the confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Augustine himself, reviewing his life’s work, records that he had often taken the rock to be Christ, whom Peter confessed, and left the reader to choose between the readings.2 Scripture elsewhere is emphatic that the foundation is Christ: “no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11), and where the apostles are called foundational, they are so together — the Church is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). One apostle elevated above the rest is read into the text, not out of it.

The Peter of the Record Is No Pope

Watch Peter in the New Testament and the papal portrait fades. At Antioch, Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal. 2:11) — a junior apostle publicly correcting the alleged head of the Church. At the council of Jerusalem, Peter speaks, but it is James who renders the decision: “my judgment is…” (Acts 15:19). The apostles at Jerusalem send Peter to Samaria (Acts 8:14) — one does not dispatch the monarch. And Peter’s own letters claim nothing: he styles himself “a fellow elder” (1 Pet. 5:1), forbids lording it over the flock, and never once asserts a primacy, names a successor, or mentions a see.3

A Succession Scripture Never Commands

Even granting Peter a personal prominence, the papal claim needs more: that his role passed to the bishops of one particular city, in perpetuity. Scripture nowhere says so. No verse commands a successor to Peter; no apostle appeals to Rome; Paul’s letter to Rome greets twenty-six people and no bishop; and Peter’s presence in the city rests on a cryptic “she who is at Babylon sends you greetings” (1 Pet. 5:13). A doctrine on which the identity of Christ’s Church is said to depend hangs, on the Catholic telling, from an inference about real estate.4

Infallibility, Anno Domini 1870

The strongest evidence against the dogma is its date. Papal infallibility was defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870 — eighteen centuries into the Church’s life — over the objection of a substantial minority of the council’s own bishops, most of whom left Rome rather than vote; the church historian Ignaz von Döllinger was excommunicated for refusing it. A truth necessary to the faith, Protestants observe, does not wait eighteen hundred years to be discovered, and is not carried by a vote its own experts could not conscientiously attend.5

The Fruit of the Office

Finally, the tree is known by its fruit. The office claimed for the humble fisherman produced princes: the pornocracy of the tenth century, three rival popes at once in the fourteenth, Alexander VI’s children, the sale of indulgences that ignited the Reformation itself. An institution protected by God, the Protestant concludes, should not need that much protecting from its occupants — and a Christian conscience should not be asked to submit to it.6

Endnotes
  1. Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), XXV.6. The American revision of 1789 removed the antichrist clause; the chapter’s claim that Christ alone is Head of the Church stands in both forms. ↩
  2. Augustine, Retractations 1.20 (1.21 in some editions), reviewing his earlier statement that the Church was built on Peter: he records his later preference for the rock as Christ whom Peter confessed, and concludes that the reader may choose. ↩
  3. Galatians 2:11–14; Acts 15:13–19; Acts 8:14; 1 Peter 5:1–3. ↩
  4. Romans 16; 1 Peter 5:13. ↩
  5. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus (18 July 1870). On the minority’s departure before the vote and the Döllinger case, see the standard histories of the council. ↩
  6. Matthew 7:16–20. The historical episodes are not disputed by Catholic historians; see the site’s own examination of the Church’s record. ↩

Catholic View

Three concessions first, because the Catholic case is stronger with them than without them. Peter denied his Lord three times and wavered at Antioch. Some popes have disgraced the office as thoroughly as the left panel says. And the solemn definition of infallibility does indeed date from 1870. None of this is denied; the question is what follows from it — and what Scripture, read whole, actually shows about the fisherman and his place.

The Portrait Scripture Paints

Set aside Matthew 16 entirely for a moment and simply watch Peter. He is named in the New Testament roughly one hundred ninety times; John, the nearest rival among the Twelve, appears about thirty. Every list of the Twelve puts him first, and Matthew makes the ranking explicit: “first, Simon, who is called Peter” (Matt. 10:2) — protos, though Andrew his brother was called before him. He speaks for the Twelve at every hinge: at Caesarea Philippi, at Capernaum (“Lord, to whom shall we go?”), in the courtyard, at the tomb, at Pentecost. On the night of the betrayal, Jesus tells the apostles that Satan has demanded to sift you — plural, all of them — and then turns to one: “but I have prayed for you” — singular — “that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:31–32). And after the resurrection, the risen Christ asks Peter three times — once for each denial — “do you love me?”, and three times commissions him: “feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). The sheep are Christ’s — my sheep — and the shepherd under Him is Peter. This is not a proof-text; it is a pattern, drawn across four Gospels and Acts, and patterns are harder to explain away than verses.1

Acts: The Pattern Continues

In Acts the pattern walks. Peter presides over the replacement of Judas (Acts 1), preaches the Church’s first sermon (Acts 2), works its first healing, answers for it before the Sanhedrin, pronounces its first discipline (Acts 5), and — by a revelation given to him and no one else — opens the door to the Gentiles (Acts 10). At the Jerusalem council, “after there had been much debate, Peter rose” — and the debate ends; the assembly falls silent (Acts 15:7, 12). James then applies the decision Peter’s testimony has settled, as a local president applies it, which answers the objection rather than raising it: speaking last and framing the decree is what a moderator does; ending the argument is what Peter did.2 As for Antioch — Paul rebuked Peter’s conduct, his eating arrangements, not his teaching; and the sting of the episode depends entirely on Peter’s example carrying unique weight. Nobody drafts half of Galatians about the inconsistency of a nobody.

The Rock, the Keys, and the Office

Matthew 16 should be read with all this around it. The wordplay objection dissolves in Aramaic, where Jesus spoke one word — Kepha — and John preserves it (John 1:42); and a man is not given a new name to commemorate somebody else’s foundation. As for the fear that a rock-Peter competes with the foundation that is Christ: Scripture happily calls Christ the one foundation, the apostles together a foundation, and Peter rock — the metaphors serve different truths, as they do when Christ is the Good Shepherd and Peter is told to shepherd. The keys of Matthew 16:19 are the decisive detail, because they come from Isaiah 22, where the key of the house of David marks the office of the king’s chief steward — an office that is not the king’s rival but his deputy’s, and an office the Isaiah passage shows passing from one holder to the next. That argument — the steward, and the succession built into the image — is made in full on the apostolic succession page, and this page leans on it rather than repeating it.3 Augustine’s two readings, honestly cited by the left panel, are no difficulty: the confession and the confessor are not rivals either — Peter is rock precisely as confessing — and Augustine, who let both readings stand, lived and died in communion with the Roman see and appealed to its judgment.

What Vatican I Actually Defined

Now put the 1870 definition on the table, in its own words, because almost no one who objects to it has read it. The council taught “that when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses… that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.”4 Count the conditions: the pope must be exercising his office as shepherd of the whole Church, not musing at dinner; he must be defining, not opining; the matter must be faith or morals; the definition must bind the whole Church. It is a negative protection inside narrow walls — not sinlessness, not inspiration, not new revelation, not a promise that popes will be wise, holy, or even adequate. In that solemn form it has been exercised twice in two centuries. The bad popes are therefore beside the definition’s point — a claim about protected teaching is not touched by unprotected behavior — and the strongest historical counter-example, Honorius, defined nothing at all, as is shown where his case is treated on the Orthodoxy page.5

1870, and What Was New in It

Was the dogma invented in 1870? What 1870 did was define — under challenge, as definitions always come — what the Church had long practiced. Within the first century, with the apostle John likely still alive, the church of Rome was already intervening authoritatively in the affairs of Corinth — a Greek church with closer apostolic neighbors — and the early record of Rome’s acting, and being appealed to, is set out with its sources on the Great Schism page. Definition following long practice is the normal grammar of doctrine — the Trinity waited until 325, the canon of Scripture until later still — and a Protestant who accepts Nicaea’s late definition of Christ’s deity cannot disqualify a doctrine merely for the date of its defining. As for the minority bishops of 1870: they doubted the opportuneness of defining, most of them, not the truth of the doctrine — and after the council, they accepted it.6

The Antichrist Clause

One last word about Westminster’s hardest sentence, answered without heat. The exegesis behind it — that the “man of sin” of 2 Thessalonians 2 is the papal office — requires the Church of God to be the seat of Satan through the very centuries in which that Church, by Protestant reckoning too, preserved the Scriptures, defined the Trinity, and carried the gospel to the nations. The Westminster tradition itself retreated from the sentence in 1789. What remains, once the polemic is set aside, is the real question this page began with: whether Christ gave His flock a visible shepherd under Himself. The reader has now seen the evidence on both panels — the verses, the pattern, the definition, and the objections at full strength — and can weigh whether the office Jesus described at the Sea of Tiberias sounds like a human invention: feed my sheep.7

The full essay walks the whole case: Peter’s place in the Gospels and Acts text by text, the keys and the steward’s office, what Pastor Aeternus defines and expressly declines to claim, Honorius and the bad popes, and the development question answered on its own terms. Download it from the summary below — and the comments are open, anonymously if you prefer.

Endnotes
  1. Matthew 10:2; Luke 22:31–32 (RSV; the Greek second-person plural and singular are explicit); John 21:15–17. On the counts of names in the New Testament, tallies vary slightly by method; Peter’s dominance does not. ↩
  2. Acts 1:15–26; 2:14–41; 3:1–10; 4:8–12; 5:1–11; 10:9–48; 15:7–12 (RSV). ↩
  3. John 1:42; Isaiah 22:20–22 (RSV: “I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut”); Matthew 16:19. ↩
  4. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus (18 July 1870), ch. 4, in the translation at papalencyclicals.net; the definition concludes that such definitions are irreformable “of themselves, and not by the consent of the church.” ↩
  5. The two exercises generally counted are the definitions of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption (1950). On what infallibility is not, see also the treatment on the apostolic succession page. ↩
  6. 1 Clement (c. 96), the letter of the Roman church to Corinth. On the council’s minority and its subsequent adherence, see the standard histories of Vatican I; Döllinger’s was the conspicuous exception, not the rule. ↩
  7. 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4; Westminster Confession XXV.6 (1647) and the American revision of 1789. ↩

Summary

Watch Peter before arguing about him. Named about one hundred ninety times where the next apostle gets thirty; first in every list, and “first” by Matthew’s own word; spokesman at every hinge of the Gospels. On the night of the betrayal Satan demands all the apostles — the “you” is plural — and Jesus prays for one, singular, charging him to strengthen his brethren. The risen Christ asks him “do you love me?” three times, once for each denial, and three times says: feed my sheep. In Acts he fills the vacant apostolic office, preaches Pentecost, opens the door to the Gentiles, and rises at Jerusalem after much debate — and the debate ends. That is a pattern, not a proof-text, and patterns are harder to explain away.

The rock-versus-confession quarrel dissolves in Aramaic. Jesus spoke one word — Kepha — and John preserves it. Nobody receives a new name to commemorate someone else’s foundation. And the keys come from Isaiah 22, where they mark the office of the king’s chief steward — a deputy, not a rival king, holding an office the passage itself shows passing from one man to the next.

Read the 1870 definition before objecting to it. Infallibility operates only when a pope, exercising his office as shepherd of the whole Church, defines a doctrine of faith or morals to bind the whole Church. Not sinlessness, not inspiration, not new revelation — a negative protection in narrow walls, exercised solemnly twice in two centuries. The bad popes are beside its point: unprotected behavior does not touch a claim about protected teaching. And Honorius, the best counter-example in nineteen centuries, defined nothing at all.

A late definition is not a late doctrine. Rome was intervening authoritatively at Corinth within the first century, with John likely still alive. Definition follows challenge: the Trinity waited until 325, the canon longer. A Protestant who accepts Nicaea cannot disqualify a doctrine merely for the date of its defining — and Westminster itself retreated from its antichrist clause in 1789.

The question is finally pastoral, and it was asked by the Sea of Tiberias. Did Christ leave His flock a visible shepherd under Himself, or only a book and a memory? The Catholic answer is the one the pattern suggests: He prayed for Peter, renamed Peter, and told Peter — feed my sheep.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Is the Pope the Successor of Peter? (.docx) or (.pdf)

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