I have received a number of emails asking me about the Cephas and Peter article I started giving a couple of posts ago, and most of the questions, as it turns out, are answered in the *second* half of the article, which I had originally planned not to provide here on the blog.  So now I’ve decided, well—why not? And so here is the rest of the article for anyone who is interested.  For those not interested in all the convoluted ins and outs of the argument, you may want to see the end, the summary and conclusions, as the pay-off of the argument is rather significant.  As with the rest of the article, I have not included any of the footnotes, where I give some of the logic and evidence for my sundry points. As it turns out, I’m not sure I buy the argument anymore.  I’ll explain why in simple terms in a later post.   *******************************************************   The evidence of Paul has not been exhausted by this consideration of Gal 2:7-9.  There [...]

In my previous post I gave the evidence that in the early church there were writers who maintained that Cephas and Peter were *not* the same person, despite what is explicitly said in John 1:42.  As some readers have noted to me, that differentiation *may* have been driven by a very clear and certain reason: in Galatians 2 Paul confronts “Cephas” and blasts him for not understanding the Gospel.  Could there have been a major rift between the two most important apostles of early Christianity?  Surely they were more unified than *that*!  Well, if Cephas was not the same person as Peter, it is a much, much smaller problem.  So maybe that is what was driving early Christians to claim there were in fact two figures, the apostle Peter and the other person Cephas. That post came from a scholarly article I wrote on the topic many years ago.  I’ve decided not to give the entire article here – it gets increasingly technical and rather, uh, boring to general readers.  But I will give here, [...]