This is why Peter isnt the rock.Its christREAD

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seetiger33

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If we take scripture put it together and say yes scripture is consistant. Yes there are no double meanings or falsehoods of the word of god. So look at all these scriptures were the rock is obviously God himself. So who is god? Jesus. Trinity. Of course you agree now look at all these scriptures. God is obviously the rock.

The Lord is my ROCK, and my fortress, and my deliverer. My God, is the ROCK of refuge. Psalm 18:2, 94:22.

God was their ROCK, and the high God their redeemer. Psalm 78:35.

Unto Thee will I cry, O LORD, MY ROCK; Psalm 28:1.

Bow down Thy thine ear to me; deliver me speedily: be Thou my strong ROCK, FOR A HOUSE of defense to SAVE me. for Thou art my ROCK and my FORTRESS; therefore for Thy name’s sake lead me, and guide me. Psalm 31:2,3).

I will say unto God my ROCK, why hast Thou forgotten me? Psalm 41:l0.

Lead me to the ROCK that is higher than I Psalms 61:2

He Only is my ROCK and my salvation; He is my defense; I shall not be moved. In GOD is my salvation and my glory: THE ROCK of my strength, and my refuge, is in God. Trust in him at all times, ye people, Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. Selah Psalm 62:6-8

To shew that the Lord is upright: He is my ROCK, and there is no unrighteousness in Him. Psalm92:15.

but the Lord is my defense; and MY GOD IS THE ROCK of my refuge. Psalm 94:22.

O Come, let us sing unto THE LORD; let us make a joyful noise to THE ROCK of our salvation. Psalm 95:1.

The stone which the builders refused is become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes. Psalm 118:22, 23.

Therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. Isaiah 28:16.

Because I will publish the name of the LORD: ascribe ye greatness unto OUR GOD! He is THE ROCK, His work is perfect: for all his ways are judgement: Deuteronomy 32:3,4.

Then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed THE ROCK of his salvation. Deuteronomy 32:15, 18).

And he said: THE LORD IS MY ROCK, and my fortress, and my deliverer II Samuel 22:2.
 
seetiger33,

We don’t say Christ is not the Rock nor the Catholic Church says that Simon once named by Christ as Peter replaces the Lord who is the Rock. Instead, once the name of Simon was changed to Petros-Peter-Rock, he was grafted into the Lord who is the Rock.

The Lord Jesus will not just change the name of the person if it means for nothing.

Why didn’t you include the very sentnce that the Lord Jesus said to Simon after he confesses that Jesus is the Christos? Of all the 12 apostles, ONLY SIMON was able to say the correct identity of the Lord. And so, by this confession, Christ said unto Simon ALONE:

“And so you are Peter (Rock) and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. To you (Peter alone) I give the keys of the kingdom…”(emphasis added)

Pio
 
Judges 13:19 - So Manoah took a kid with a meat offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the LORD: and the angel did wonderously; and Manoah and his wife looked on.

1 Samuel 14:4 - And between the passages, by which Jonathan sought to go over unto the Philistines’ garrison, there was a sharp rock on the one side, and a sharp rock on the other side: and the name of the one was Bozez, and the name of the other Seneh.

Proverbs 30:19 - The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.

Jeremiah 5:3 - O LORD, are not thine eyes upon the truth? thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction: they have made their faces harder than a rock; they have refused to return.

Jeremiah 23:29 - Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?

Luke 8:6 - And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture.

Acts 27:29 - Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.

Is God a place for the serpent? A thing which must be avoided lest it destroy ships? Something which can be smashed with a hammer? Is God named Bozez and Seneh? Obviously not, so obviously not every reference to rock means God. Context, my friend, context!
 
SeeTiger before you waste more of your energy on exegetical argumentation and presentations of your human logic please realize one little bitty thing. The Catholic Church is 2000 + years old, we have been taught our deposit of faith from the first days. We have historical recordings from the first years of the Church showing that what we practice today is the same as then. Meaning that what the apostles were taught with Jesus before the crucifixion and during the forty days following his resurrection is exactly what we practice today. So, unless you want to go back and rewrite history, the arguments you present as a personal sophist exercise from a person who clearly embraces the theological relativism of the Protestants is pretty much a waste of your time. If you are really interested in truth rather than arguments born over 1500 years AFTER Jesus founded HIS Church then you should shelve anti-Catholic bias you may have been exposed to and go read up on early history then, come home to Rome.
 
Here’s the way I look at it. In both testaments, a name change signifies an extremely important event in someone’s life, a commissioning, so to speak (e.g. Abraham, Paul). Now we know our Lord changed Simon’s name, which is significant in itself. Now, how much more significant is it that He changed Simon’s name to one that was exclusively (well virtually so) reserved for God?
 
Here ya go seetiger :yawn: :sleep:
From Karl Keatings own tract on this very topic:

“You Catholics,” the missionary continued, “because you don’t know Greek, imagine that Jesus was equating Simon and the rock. Actually, of course, it was just the opposite. He was contrasting them. On the one side, the rock on which the Church would be built, Jesus himself; on the other, this mere pebble. Jesus was really saying that he himself would be the foundation, and he was emphasizing that Simon wasn’t remotely qualified to be it.”

“Case closed,” he thought.

It was the missionary’s turn to pause and smile broadly. He had followed the training he had been given. He had been told that a rare Catholic might have heard of Matthew 16:18 and might argue that it proved the establishment of the papacy. He knew what he was supposed to say to prove otherwise, and he had said it.

“Well,” I replied, beginning to use that nugget of information I had come across, “I agree with you that we must get behind the English to the Greek.” He smiled some more and nodded. “But I’m sure you’ll agree with me that we must get behind the Greek to the Aramaic.”

“The what?” he asked.

“The Aramaic,” I said. “As you know, Aramaic was the language Jesus and the apostles and all the Jews in Palestine spoke. It was the common language of the place.”

“I thought Greek was.”

“No,” I answered. "Many, if not most of them, knew Greek, of course, because Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world. It was the language of culture and commerce; and most of the books of the New Testament were written in it, because they were written not just for Christians in Palestine but also for Christians in places such as Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, places where Aramaic wasn’t the spoken language.

“I say most of the New Testament was written in Greek, but not all. Many hold that Matthew was written in Aramaic—we know this from records kept by Eusebius of Caesarea—but it was translated into Greek early on, perhaps by Matthew himself. In any case the Aramaic original is lost (as are all the originals of the New Testament books), so all we have today is the Greek.”

I stopped for a moment and looked at the missionary. He seemed a bit uncomfortable, perhaps doubting that I was a Catholic because I seemed to know what I was talking about. I continued.

Cont’d
 
Aramaic in the New Testament

"We know that Jesus spoke Aramaic because some of his words are preserved for us in the Gospels. Look at Matthew 27:46, where he says from the cross, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ That isn’t Greek; it’s Aramaic, and it means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

“What’s more,” I said, "in Paul’s epistles—four times in Galatians and four times in 1 Corinthians—we have the Aramaic form of Simon’s new name preserved for us. In our English Bibles it comes out as Cephas. That isn’t Greek. That’s a transliteration of the Aramaic word Kepha (rendered as Kephas in its Hellenistic form).

"And what does Kepha mean? It means a rock, the same as petra. (It doesn’t mean a little stone or a pebble. What Jesus said to Simon in Matthew 16:18 was this: ‘You are Kepha, and on this kepha I will build my Church.’

“When you understand what the Aramaic says, you see that Jesus was equating Simon and the rock; he wasn’t contrasting them. We see this vividly in some modern English translations, which render the verse this way: ‘You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ In French one word, pierre, has always been used both for Simon’s new name and for the rock.”

For a few moments the missionary seemed stumped. It was obvious he had never heard such a rejoinder. His brow was knit in thought as he tried to come up with a counter. Then it occurred to him.

“Wait a second,” he said. “If kepha means the same as petra, why don’t we read in the Greek, ‘You are Petra, and on this petra I will build my Church’? Why, for Simon’s new name, does Matthew use a Greek word, Petros, which means something quite different from petra?”

“Because he had no choice,” I said. "Greek and Aramaic have different grammatical structures. In Aramaic you can use kepha in both places in Matthew 16:18. In Greek you encounter a problem arising from the fact that nouns take differing gender endings.

"You have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The Greek word petra is feminine. You can use it in the second half of Matthew 16:18 without any trouble. But you can’t use it as Simon’s new name, because you can’t give a man a feminine name—at least back then you couldn’t. You have to change the ending of the noun to make it masculine. When you do that, you get Petros, which was an already-existing word meaning rock.

“I admit that’s an imperfect rendering of the Aramaic; you lose part of the play on words. In English, where we have ‘Peter’ and ‘rock,’ you lose all of it. But that’s the best you can do in Greek.”

Beyond the grammatical evidence, the structure of the narrative does not allow for a downplaying of Peter’s role in the Church. Look at the way Matthew 16:15-19 is structured. After Peter gives a confession about the identity of Jesus, the Lord does the same in return for Peter. Jesus does not say, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are an insignificant pebble and on this rock I will build my Church. . . . I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus is giving Peter a three-fold blessing, including the gift of the keys to the kingdom, not undermining his authority. To say that Jesus is downplaying Peter flies in the face of the context. Jesus is installing Peter as a form of chief steward or prime minister under the King of Kings by giving him the keys to the kingdom. As can be seen in Isaiah 22:22, kings in the Old Testament appointed a chief steward to serve under them in a position of great authority to rule over the inhabitants of the kingdom. Jesus quotes almost verbatum from this passage in Isaiah, and so it is clear what he has in mind. He is raising Peter up as a father figure to the household of faith (Is. 22:21), to lead them and guide the flock (John 21:15-17). This authority of the prime minister under the king was passed on from one man to another down through the ages by the giving of the keys, which were worn on the shoulder as a sign of authority. Likewise, the authority of Peter has been passed down for 2000 years by means of the papacy.

There’s more…but you can find it yourself on the CA main page library.
Pax vobiscum,
 
Does it bug anybody else that seetiger doesn’t capatalize “God” but, will “Jesus”?
 
OH NO! There’s more!
But how can this be …? From the ma(name removed by moderator)age library here at CA

This is why you can’t get Catholics to believe that Peter isn’t the rock…
You can say it all day long…but that doesn’t change the simple truth:

Peter and the Papacy

There is ample evidence in the New Testament that Peter was first in authority among the apostles. Whenever they were named, Peter headed the list (Matt. 10:1-4, Mark 3:16-19, Luke 6:14-16, Acts 1:13); sometimes the apostles were referred to as “Peter and those who were with him” (Luke 9:32). Peter was the one who generally spoke for the apostles (Matt. 18:21, Mark 8:29, Luke 12:41, John 6:68-69), and he figured in many of the most dramatic scenes (Matt. 14:28-32, Matt. 17:24-27, Mark 10:23-28). On Pentecost it was Peter who first preached to the crowds (Acts 2:14-40), and he worked the first healing in the Church age (Acts 3:6-7). It is Peter’s faith that will strengthen his brethren (Luke 22:32) and Peter is given Christ’s flock to shepherd (John 21:17). An angel was sent to announce the resurrection to Peter (Mark 16:7), and the risen Christ first appeared to Peter (Luke 24:34). He headed the meeting that elected Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1:13-26), and he received the first converts (Acts 2:41). He inflicted the first punishment (Acts 5:1-11), and excommunicated the first heretic (Acts 8:18-23). He led the first council in Jerusalem (Acts 15), and announced the first dogmatic decision (Acts 15:7-11). It was to Peter that the revelation came that Gentiles were to be baptized and accepted as Christians (Acts 10:46-48).

Peter the Rock

Peter’s preeminent position among the apostles was symbolized at the very beginning of his relationship with Christ. At their first meeting, Christ told Simon that his name would thereafter be Peter, which translates as “Rock” (John 1:42). The startling thing was that—aside from the single time that Abraham is called a “rock” (Hebrew: Tsur; Aramaic: Kepha) in Isaiah 51:1-2—in the Old Testament only God was called a rock. The word rock was not used as a proper name in the ancient world. If you were to turn to a companion and say, “From now on your name is Asparagus,” people would wonder: Why Asparagus? What is the meaning of it? What does it signify? Indeed, why call Simon the fisherman “Rock”? Christ was not given to meaningless gestures, and neither were the Jews as a whole when it came to names. Giving a new name meant that the status of the person was changed, as when Abram’s name was changed to Abraham (Gen.17:5), Jacob’s to Israel (Gen. 32:28), Eliakim’s to Joakim (2 Kgs. 23:34), or the names of the four Hebrew youths—Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan. 1:6-7). But no Jew had ever been called “Rock.” The Jews would give other names taken from nature, such as Deborah (“bee,” Gen. 35:8), and Rachel (“ewe,” Gen. 29:16), but never “Rock.” In the New Testament James and John were nicknamed Boanerges, meaning “Sons of Thunder,” by Christ, but that was never regularly used in place of their original names, and it certainly was not given as a new name. But in the case of Simon-bar-Jonah, his new name Kephas (Greek: Petros) definitely replaced the old.

Look at the scene

Not only was there significance in Simon being given a new and unusual name, but the place where Jesus solemnly conferred it upon Peter was also important. It happened when “Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi” (Matt. 16:13), a city that Philip the Tetrarch built and named in honor of Caesar Augustus, who had died in A.D. 14. The city lay near cascades in the Jordan River and near a gigantic wall of rock, a wall about 200 feet high and 500 feet long, which is part of the southern foothills of Mount Hermon. The city no longer exists, but its ruins are near the small Arab town of Banias; and at the base of the rock wall may be found what is left of one of the springs that fed the Jordan. It was here that Jesus pointed to Simon and said, “You are Peter” (Matt. 16:18).

The significance of the event must have been clear to the other apostles. As devout Jews they knew at once that the location was meant to emphasize the importance of what was being done. None complained of Simon being singled out for this honor; and in the rest of the New Testament he is called by his new name, while James and John remain just James and John, not Boanerges.

cont’d
 
Promises to Peter

When he first saw Simon, “Jesus looked at him, and said, ‘So you are Simon the son of John? You shall be called Cephas (which means Peter)’” (John 1:42). The word Cephas is merely the transliteration of the Aramaic Kepha into Greek. Later, after Peter and the other disciples had been with Christ for some time, they went to Caesarea Philippi, where Peter made his profession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). Jesus told him that this truth was specially revealed to him, and then he solemnly reiterated: “And I tell you, you are Peter” (Matt. 16:18). To this was added the promise that the Church would be founded, in some way, on Peter (Matt. 16:18).

Then two important things were told the apostle. “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19). Here Peter was singled out for the authority that provides for the forgiveness of sins and the making of disciplinary rules. Later the apostles as a whole would be given similar power [Matt.18:18], but here Peter received it in a special sense.

Peter alone was promised something else also: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:19). In ancient times, keys were the hallmark of authority. A walled city might have one great gate; and that gate had one great lock, worked by one great key. To be given the key to the city—an honor that exists even today, though its import is lost—meant to be given free access to and authority over the city. The city to which Peter was given the keys was the heavenly city itself. This symbolism for authority is used elsewhere in the Bible (Is. 22:22, Rev. 1:18).

Finally, after the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples and asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-17). In repentance for his threefold denial, Peter gave a threefold affirmation of love. Then Christ, the Good Shepherd (John 10:11, 14), gave Peter the authority he earlier had promised: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). This specifically included the other apostles, since Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15), the word “these” referring to the other apostles who were present (John 21:2). Thus was completed the prediction made just before Jesus and his followers went for the last time to the Mount of Olives.

Immediately before his denials were predicted, Peter was told, “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 [after the denials], strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:31-32). It was Peter who Christ prayed would have faith that would not fail and that would be a guide for the others; and his prayer, being perfectly efficacious, was sure to be fulfilled.

Who is the rock?

Now take a closer look at the key verse: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church” (Matt. 16:18). Disputes about this passage have always been related to the meaning of the term “rock.” To whom, or to what, does it refer? Since Simon’s new name of Peter itself means rock, the sentence could be rewritten as: “You are Rock and upon this rock I will build my Church.” The play on words seems obvious, but commentators wishing to avoid what follows from this—namely the establishment of the papacy—have suggested that the word rock could not refer to Peter but must refer to his profession of faith or to Christ.

From the grammatical point of view, the phrase “this rock” must relate back to the closest noun. Peter’s profession of faith (“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”) is two verses earlier, while his name, a proper noun, is in the immediately preceding clause.

As an analogy, consider this artificial sentence: “I have a car and a truck, and it is blue.” Which is blue? The truck, because that is the noun closest to the pronoun “it.” This is all the more clear if the reference to the car is two sentences earlier, as the reference to Peter’s profession is two sentences earlier than the term rock.

Another alternative

The previous argument also settles the question of whether the word refers to Christ himself, since he is mentioned within the profession of faith. The fact that he is elsewhere, by a different metaphor, called the cornerstone (Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:4-8) does not disprove that here Peter is the foundation. Christ is naturally the principal and, since he will be returning to heaven, the invisible foundation of the Church that he will establish; but Peter is named by him as the secondary and, because he and his successors will remain on earth, the visible foundation. Peter can be a foundation only because Christ is the cornerstone.

cont’d
 
In fact, the New Testament contains five different metaphors for the foundation of the Church (Matt. 16:18, 1 Cor. 3:11, Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:5-6, Rev. 21:14). One cannot take a single metaphor from a single passage and use it to twist the plain meaning of other passages. Rather, one must respect and harmonize the different passages, for the Church can be described as having different foundations since the word foundation can be used in different senses.

Look at the Aramaic

Opponents of the Catholic interpretation of Matthew 16:18 sometimes argue that in the Greek text the name of the apostle is Petros, while “rock” is rendered as petra. They claim that the former refers to a small stone, while the latter refers to a massive rock; so, if Peter was meant to be the massive rock, why isn’t his name Petra?

Note that Christ did not speak to the disciples in Greek. He spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine at that time. In that language the word for rock is kepha, which is what Jesus called him in everyday speech (note that in John 1:42 he was told, “You will be called Cephas”). What Jesus said in Matthew 16:18 was: “You are Kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my Church.”

When Matthew’s Gospel was translated from the original Aramaic to Greek, there arose a problem which did not confront the evangelist when he first composed his account of Christ’s life. In Aramaic the word kepha has the same ending whether it refers to a rock or is used as a man’s name. In Greek, though, the word for rock, petra, is feminine in gender. The translator could use it for the second appearance of kepha in the sentence, but not for the first because it would be inappropriate to give a man a feminine name. So he put a masculine ending on it, and hence Peter became Petros.

Furthermore, the premise of the argument against Peter being the rock is simply false. In first century Greek the words petros and petra were synonyms. They had previously possessed the meanings of “small stone” and “large rock” in some early Greek poetry, but by the first century this distinction was gone, as Protestant Bible scholars admit (see D. A. Carson’s remarks on this passage in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books]).

Some of the effect of Christ’s play on words was lost when his statement was translated from the Aramaic into Greek, but that was the best that could be done in Greek. In English, like Aramaic, there is no problem with endings; so an English rendition could read: “You are Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.”

Consider another point: If the rock really did refer to Christ (as some claim, based on 1 Cor. 10:4, “and the Rock was Christ” though the rock there was a literal, physical rock), why did Matthew leave the passage as it was? In the original Aramaic, and in the English which is a closer parallel to it than is the Greek, the passage is clear enough. Matthew must have realized that his readers would conclude the obvious from “Rock . . . rock.”

If he meant Christ to be understood as the rock, why didn’t he say so? Why did he take a chance and leave it up to Paul to write a clarifying text? This presumes, of course, that 1 Corinthians was written after Matthew’s Gospel; if it came first, it could not have been written to clarify it.

The reason, of course, is that Matthew knew full well that what the sentence seemed to say was just what it really was saying. It was Simon, weak as he was, who was chosen to become the rock and thus the first link in the chain of the papacy.

Pax vobiscum,
 
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adstrinity:
Does it bug anybody else that seetiger doesn’t capatalize “God” but, will “Jesus”?
Click to expand...
Weird isn’t it…he says he’s Baptist, but that’s kinda odd… Yeah it seems disrespectful to me too :irish1:
 
I just want to say, to Church Militant, your posts rock!

😃 couldn’t help it.
 
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adstrinity:
Does it bug anybody else that seetiger doesn’t capatalize “God” but, will “Jesus”?
Click to expand...
I don’t read to much into that…some people are so passionate about their arguments, I would suspect that accidents happen…besides, maybe his focus was on disproving Catholicism and not on God…
 
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hlgomez:
seetiger33,

We don’t say Christ is not the Rock nor the Catholic Church says that Simon once named by Christ as Peter replaces the Lord who is the Rock. Instead, once the name of Simon was changed to Petros-Peter-Rock, he was grafted into the Lord who is the Rock.
Click to expand...
All responses to seetiger’s post are superb. But this paragraph by hlgomez says it all in a nice easy to read short statement. This why all uses of “Rock” are complimentary. There are no contradictions! Jesus changed Simon’s name to “Rock”, and hence Peter was grafted into the Lord. Only Peter knew that Jesus was the Messiah! And that was revealed to him by the Father!
 
Hi Church Militant,

Thank you for such a wonderful post! I agree with Celia, your posts do ‘rock’…They are always thought provoking, and well researched. Thank you for your constant vigil to inform those of us who are treading the path to knowledge; especially when we appear to veer off course! You are a true blessing to all of us!

adstrinity;

Yes, it does bug me, as it seems very disrespectful; however it may have been an accident, as seetiger33 uses the Capital ‘G’ more often than not…at least I would hope it was an accident.

seetiger33,

CM has given you enough info to mull over, so there is nothing more I can really add, except to say; if this doesn’t open your eyes, nothing will. May God bless you with the ability to see the truth in it.

May peace be with you all, and those whom you love 🙂
 
I just wanted to say that given all the verses the seetiger posted calling the Lord the “Rock,” it seems like it would be pretty significant when Jesus Himself names someone “Rock.”
 
Don’t expect seetiger to respond to any of this. He looks like a
post -and -runner. :mad:
 
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