Friday, October 03, 2003

Peter's bones

I am prompted by seeing this in RogueClassicism blog; it appeared last week and I forgot to mention it:

Tom Mueller, "Inside Job", Atlantic Monthly Volume 292, No. 3 (October 2003), 138-142

Subtitle: "Below the high altar of St. Peter's, investigators have found sheep bones, ox bones, pig bones, and the complete skeleton of a mouse. Was Peter himself ever there?" The author's answer, as usual when journalists ask apparently open questions, is negative, though he never says that unequivocally. It's a very interesting read. I particularly enjoyed the quotation from Antonio Ferrua's review of Margherita Guarducci. The latter claimed, against the former, that Peter's bones had been found:

"Thus one can either commiserate with or admire the illustrious Authoress for her immense exertions, carried out with commendable passion and ingenuousness, and indeed with a faith that ought to move mountains . . . . But all this cannot suffice to make us accept a work that is fundamentally wrong."

There's a small error in the article -- the author states that Peter appears in Acts for the last time "around A.D. 44, in a Jerusalem jail". He appears for the last time in Acts 15, at the Jerusalem council. And if the Antioch incident reported in Galatians 2 postdates the Jerusalem council, then Peter's last mention in the NT is later still. I think it's only Lüdemann who puts the Jerusalem council after the Antioch incident.

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