In Galatians 2 Paul describes a serious blow up that he had with “Cephas” over the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the church.  Major conflict.  Possibly never resolved.  Throughout history this event has usually been cited to show that Paul and Peter had very different views of things.

But what if the Cephas Paul attacked was not Peter but someone else?

A couple of weeks ago I gave a webinar on “Cephas and Peter” for members of the Biblical Studies Academy (my for-profit business that produces on-line courses, etc., not connected with the blog).  I had written an academic article with that title many years ago, some time back in the Pleistocene age, arguing that contrary to what everyone thinks and says, they may not have been the same person.  That there were two people with that name, not just one (despite what John 1:42 explicitly states).

It was a rather, uh, controversial issue and I had to look up the details of a number of the arguments I used; in doing so I remembered I had posted on the topic on the blog years ago, looked up the (four) posts, and decided that it might be fun and interesting to post on the issue again.

The article itself can be found in “Cephas and Peter,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 109 (1990) pp. 463-74.  As you will see, it is written at a more academic level than usual blog posts.  But I don’t think there’s much that’s difficult to understand, just some stilted language and a few references to ancient Christian writings that most people would have had zero reason to have ever heard of.   But on an interesting issue!

(The only necessary background is that in the New Testament, Jesus gives his closest follower Simon the nickname “Peter” which in Aramaic is “Cephas,” and so it is almost always assumed that if an author mentions Cephas he is referring to Simon Peter.  But is that right?)

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Most ancient authors who discuss the relationship of Cephas and Peter explicitly identify the two, or at least speak of Peter when referring to NT passages that name only Cephas.  This is not at all surprising given the unequivocal statement of John 1:42: “You are Cephas (which translated means ‘Peter’).”   What is surprising is that other early Christian authors, all of whom also knew and used the Fourth Gospel, refused to make this identification, and asserted either explicitly or by implication that there were in fact two different persons, one called Cephas, the other Peter.  This dissenting opinion is striking for both its antiquity and its persistence.  How ancient is it?

 

Evidence from the Early Church

It first occurs in the first half of the second century in the Epistula Apostolorum.  The author of this pseudepigraph opposes a docetic kind of Christology by penning a letter, ostensibly written after Jesus’ resurrection by the eleven remaining disciples, in which he repeatedly affirms both the fleshliness of Jesus and the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh.  Since this author otherwise makes repeated use of the Fourth Gospel, he must have known that “Cephas” and “Peter” refer to the same person.  This makes it all the more striking that in his own delineation of the eleven disciples he names Cephas and Peter as two distinct individuals (Epistula Apostolorum, 2).

Somewhat later in the second century, Clement of Alexandria expresses a similar opinion.  In Book 5 of his Hypotyposes, a work now lost but cited for us by Eusebius (Hist. eccl. I, 12. 2), Clement maintained that Peter was one of the Twelve, who later became one of the three “styloi” [= pillars] of the church in Jerusalem, while Cephas was one of the seventy disciples whom Jesus had sent out in Luke chapter 10.

In construing the relationship of Cephas and Peter in this way, Clement may well have initiated the tradition that is still preserved in a number of ancient documents that list the names, and sometimes the salient activities, of the early apostles.  Many of these apostolic lists situate Peter among the disciples but Cephas among the seventy; most of them allege that it was Cephas whom Paul opposed in Antioch.

The documents in question span some eight centuries, and in some cases, but not all, they evidence clear literary interdependence.  Thus in a third-century list wrongly ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome, Cephas is named as the fifty-first of the seventy apostles.  This is clearly not the same person as Peter, one of the Twelve.  Similarly, about a century later, Pseudo-Dorotheus makes Cephas the fifty-first apostle, and indicates that he became the bishop of Iconium after being rebuked by the Apostle Paul in Antioch.

Essentially the same information is provided at a later date, perhaps as late as the ninth century, in the apostolic list of Pseudo-Epiphanius, who in addition to naming Simon Peter as one of the Twelve, cites as the forty-fifth of the seventy apostles Cephas, “Peter’s namesake,” who was rebuked by Paul prior to assuming the bishopric of Iconium.  It is also worth noting that an appendix to this work cites the opinion of Clement of Alexandria, previously reported in Eusebius, that Cephas, “the namesake of Peter,” was one of the seventy.

Later apostolic lists that perpetuate this tradition are found in the following sources:  (a) The Chronicon Pascale, a seventh-century sketch of history from Creation to the twentieth year of the Emperor Heraclius (629 C.E.)  Here Cephas is called Peter’s namesake and is said to have been confronted by Paul over the matter of Judaizing.  (b) The ninth-century Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus 10. The list of the seventy apostles in this MS claims to derive from none other than Irenaeus.  Here it is stated that Cephas, the fourth of the seventy, was stoned to death in Antioch. (c) The tenth-century list wrongly ascribed to the Byzantine hagiographer Symeon Logothetes.  Cephas is named as the forty-ninth of the seventy apostles, and said to have later become the bishop of “Koloneias.”  (d) An anonymous Medieval Greek-Syriac index of the apostles. This index makes Cephas the fourteenth of the seventy apostles and specifies that Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius had previously shown that this is not “the Great Peter” (“ho megas petros”).

It should be noted that certain features of these apostolic lists suggest that the distinction between Cephas and Peter was being perpetuated on more than the literary level, that is that the tradition existed outside of the lists themselves: the lists all differ in numerous ways, rarely is Cephas assigned the same number within a list, and in virtually every case something different, great or small, is said about him.

These admittedly slight pieces of evidence are in any case corroborated by the statements of several church Fathers, including Jerome, Augustine, and Chrysostom, who note the tradition of two persons, Peter the disciple and Cephas one of the seventy, only in order to discount it.  Jerome’s comment can be cited as representative:  “Sunt qui Cephan, cui hic in faciem Paulus restitisse se scribit, non putant apostolum Petrum, sed alium de septuaginta discipulis isto vocabulo nuncupatum”  (Comm. Gal. I, 2; ROUGHLY SAYS: “There are some people who say that this Cephas, whom Paul opposed face to face, was not the apostle Peter but was one of the Seventy apostles”).

Probably to be included among these “others” who make such a claim, is none other than Eusebius of Caesarea.  Here the Greek-Syriac apostolic list mentioned previously serves to alert us to what has otherwise been generally overlooked.   Eusebius not only claims that Clement of Alexandria differentiated between Cephas and Peter, he does so in such a way as to indicate that he himself agrees.

And that is not all.  In addition to our earliest available witness, the Epistula Apostolorum, there are other sources that distinguish Cephas from Peter without, however, making him one of the seventy.  Thus the Egyptian Apostolic Church Order, in a way that is reminiscent of the Epistula Apostolorum, but independently of it, names Cephas as one of the Twelve along with Peter. These two, together with the other disciples, present moral and ecclesiastical advice to the church in a series of speeches delivered in turn.  All told, Peter delivers four short speeches and Cephas three.  While this document itself dates to the late third or early fourth century, Harnack has demonstrated its reliance on earlier sources, including its list of the Twelve which may well date to the second century

A different kind of attestation altogether occurs in the Armenian Ecclesiastical Calendar, which mentions Cephas on March 25, and asserts that this apostle was in fact a disciple of the apostle Paul (!).  Somewhat more difficult to construe is the interesting reference in the Pseudo-Cyprian tractate  de rebaptismate (late third century), to the earlier work known as the Praedicatio Pauli (de rebaptismate, 17).  In an effort to discredit this apparently Gnostic work, the author cites several of its aberrant traditions, including its report that Paul and Peter came to be acquainted with one another in Rome, only after the Apostolic Conference in Jerusalem, in which Paul and the other evangelists met and decided how to proceed with the Christian mission.  Since the passage clearly refers to either Acts 15 or Galatians 2, and since both chapters mention the role of Peter and/or Cephas in this conference, the conclusion seems to be unavoidable that in the view of the Praedicatio Pauli it was only Cephas who attended the conference, while Peter was unknown to Paul until nearer the end of his life in Rome.

To sum up the evidence from the early church:  from the early second century onwards, a number of sources maintain that Cephas and Peter were two different persons.  Some of these sources claim that both belonged to the Twelve, others place Peter among the Twelve and Cephas among the seventy, while others leave the matter unresolved.  A natural question that now arises is how or why this tradition came into being.