What’s amazing is that the site preserves around 600 graffiti scrawled by Christian pilgrims in the early Middle Ages, most of them prayers to Peter and Paul, the joint patron saints of Rome. It’s off the Via Appia at the modern site of the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, and you can still go and visit it today, although the memorial itself is largely built over. But it turns out that there’s a second site in Rome where pilgrims went for hundreds of years, which was known as the Memoria Apostolorum (the Memorial to the Apostles). Most people know about Peter’s traditional burial site at St. This is another fascinating thing we explore in Finding Jesus. Why are there two places in Rome where the apostle Peter was supposedly buried? The official Vatican position, first stated in 1968, is that they might be. Are these Peter’s bones? That appears to be a matter of faith. Only later were some bones produced from that excavation, and it’s a fascinating story we talk about in Finding Jesus. When it was excavated in the 1950s, archaeologists were shocked to find that there was no grave and no bones under the tropaion. Yet this spot-which was originally in the middle of an ancient cemetery-was quickly understood as the place where Peter was buried. It’s not the word used in the Roman Empire for a burial place.
The word itself is very unusual sometimes translated as “trophy,” it means something like a war memorial or a cenotaph (i.e., an empty grave). Starting around the end of the second century, Christian pilgrims went to see Peter’s tropaion. There is no solid evidence-textual or even archaeological-that Peter died in Rome. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the traditional burial site of the apostle Peter. The absence of connection between Peter and Rome in the New Testament, the lack of references to him in our earliest Roman Christian literature, and what we know of Peter’s background and character all combine to make it unlikely, to my mind, that he ever went to Rome. Not only is it a very long way, according to the New Testament, Peter was a fisherman who was not very educated and who spoke only Aramaic he was not the type of person that might travel widely across the Roman Empire to a large city where Latin and Greek were the dominant languages. In short, there is no early textual evidence for Peter in Rome, so for some people, it’s very hard to believe that he ever traveled there. After Jesus’ death, Paul says that Jesus’ brother, James, and Peter are the co-leaders of the “church,” or assembly, of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem.
The apostle Paul, in his letters, also talks about meeting Peter in the eastern Mediterranean. When the gospels end, Peter is in Jerusalem. Interestingly, the Bible says nothing about Peter ever traveling to Rome. Is it likely that the apostle Peter went to Rome and founded the church there? To prove that his vision was real, you can still see there a bit of marble pavement which the faithful say miraculously preserve Jesus’ footprints. “Where are you going?” in Latin is “Quo Vadis?” and there’s a medieval church in Rome called the Church of Quo Vadis at the spot where Peter met Jesus. He asks Jesus, “Where are you going?” Jesus tells Peter that he is going to Rome “to be crucified again.” Peter realizes, from this, that he cannot flee from his fate. Rather unexpectedly, Peter meets Jesus, who is traveling in the opposite direction. At the end of this text, Peter, not wishing to be martyred for his faith, flees from Roman authorities on the Via Appia leading out of the city. Simon challenges Peter to a flying contest around the Roman Forum, but Peter’s prayers make Simon crash to the ground, proving that Simon’s powers are not as great as his own. At one point in Acts of Peter, Peter is taunted by a flamboyant heretic, Simon Magus. One early Christian text, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, recounts many things that Peter did in the city. But there are other traditions besides Peter’s tropaion. Writing probably toward the end of the second century C.E.-so, around 170 or 180 C.E.-Gaius tells about the wondrous things in Rome, including something called a tropaion (see below for more) where Peter established a church-in fact, the Church, the Roman Catholic church at the site where St. The earliest testimony to the apostle Peter’s presence in Rome is a letter from a Christian deacon named Gaius. Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter (also called Simon Peter or Cephas), has been associated with Rome for nearly 2,000 years.
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