Continuing…
Step 2:
Once I did that, I thought it might be good to explore the citations from William Webster that Ronnie has provided (
christiantruth.com/fathersmt16.html) and see how they matched up with those in Butler et al’s ‘Jesus, Peter & the Keys’ (which Matthew has already referred to and which again I am fortunate enough to have a copy of).
Webster’s page is very long so I didn’t read every citation. I quickly skimmed it to get an idea of the structure (it really helped that the sources are in alphabetical order) and then I mainly worked off the header at the top, which lists all the sources.
From that header I could identify 49 Church Fathers or theologians that he was citing. Again, I didn’t read his whole page, I just made a list of each Father and then looked in JPK to see if there was a citation there where the same Father identified Peter as the rock. What I found was that of Webster’s 49 sources, I found 28 in JPK where they also identify Peter as the rock (details are below). Again, this represents a majority for the “Peter is the rock” position, and is a lot better than Ronnie’s post makes out, especially the bit about how Catholics “squeeeeeeeeze a few doubtful quotes here and there from a couple of the fathers” (sorry to talk about you in the third person Ronnie, no offense intended here).
Further, JPK has citations from 57 sources in its section on St. Peter as the Rock and Key Holder of Matthew 16-19. Not all of these are about the rock, as some are just about the keys, but the ones that identify Peter as the rock which are not mentioned by Webster are Hippolytus, Juvencus, Zeno of Africa, Siricius, Council of Ephesus, Leo, Council of Chalcedon, Felix, and Agatho. There’s also Proclus (only implicitly) and Sechnall (indirectly). That’s 9 not counting the last 2. There’s also the Pseudo-Clementine quote that I found.
So when you add it up you’ve got
21 of Webster’s Fathers who say that the rock is something besides Peter (which of course is not necessarily the same as saying the rock is NOT Peter, although not having read the paper in detail I don’t know how many definitively exclude the Peter = rock interpretation), and
28 who say the rock IS Peter or words to that effect, plus another
10 sources which Webster didn’t include.
Obviously that’s again a majority for the “Peter is the rock” camp, plus of course there’s the significant overlap which shows that interpretations of Matthew 16:18 are not necessarily exclusive (and I think this is a
really important point). This is epitomised by St Augustine, and also, fittingly enough, by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (see #424, #552, #586 for example).
