Stunned by Scripture. Dr. John S. Bergsma, Ph.D.

conventions where we talked, sang, and prayed for Christian unity. However, I never felt like anyone was serious about it. It was well and good to have ecumenical prayer meetings, but I knew when push came to shove, you would have to pry everyone’s denominational distinctions out of their cold, dead fingers. If we had been really serious about unity, we would have had to submit our doctrinal differences to a common person or group of persons (a synod or council), and then abide by whatever decision resulted. I knew no one was ever going to do that: not the Calvinists, not the Baptists, not the Lutherans, not the Pentecostals, and so on. We were all convinced of the truth of our own positions. We were all paying lip service to unity, but for real unity to come about, there would have to be (among other things) a universal pastor with whom “the buck stopped.”

      So, years later, it didn’t take long for my Catholic friend Michael to convince me of the practical need for a Pope. Since I was already favorably disposed, I was also pretty receptive to the biblical data when he laid it out.

      The key biblical passage for the papacy is found in Matthew 16, the famous dialogue between Jesus and Peter:

      Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “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 Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. (Matt 16:13–20)

      In verse 18, Jesus gives Simon a new name, “Rock,” which in the original language of the Gospel (Greek) is petros, from which we get the English name Peter. Reading in the original language, the point of verse 18 is clearer:

      “And I tell you, you are ‘Rock,’ and on this rock I will build my church.”

      Jesus was making Simon into a kind of human foundation stone for the community (the “Church,” Greek ekklesia, Hebrew qahal) that he was establishing on earth.

      Now, I knew from my seminary studies that John Calvin and many other Protestant theologians had bent over backwards to avoid the clear statement of the verse that Simon Peter was the human “foundation stone” on which Jesus would build his Church. It was popular to argue that the “rock” on which Jesus would build the Church was Peter’s confession of faith in the previous verse, not Simon Peter himself. Sometimes, the difference in gender endings on the name “Peter” and the word “rock” were pointed out in order to prove that Simon Peter could not be the “rock” on which Jesus built his Church. The Greek reads:

      “And I tell you, you are petros, and on this petra I will build my Church.”

      There is a difference in ending between the two words. But this means nothing. It only marks the grammatical gender of the word. If you know a European language besides English, you know that nouns in most languages have an assigned gender that is marked by various endings or by the article used with the word. Often the assigned gender of a word makes no sense. For example, in German the word for “young woman” (das Mädchen) is in the neuter gender!

      In Greek, the word for rock, petra, is grammatically feminine and takes the ending a, which is feminine. However, you can’t make a feminine noun into a man’s name. So, when petra is given as Simon’s name, the ending is changed to the masculine-os, thus his name is petros. This is a little like adding the ending “-y” on the word “rock” to make the man’s name “Rocky.”

      This is all simply a meaningless exercise of Greek grammar, and none of it would be relevant in Jesus’ spoken language. The Gospels are written in Greek, which was the international language of the day, everyone’s second language (like English in modern culture), in order to reach a large audience.

      But Jesus usually spoke a different language, called Aramaic, with his disciples. We see a hint of untranslated Aramaic peeking through in Matthew 16, because the phrase “Bar-Jonah” in verse 17 is Aramaic for “son of John.” So, Jesus was originally speaking in Aramaic when he made Peter the Rock of the Church, and in Aramaic the word for rock is kepha, and kepha cannot take any endings in Aramaic. The original spoken words of Jesus would have been:

      “And I tell you, you are kepha and on this kepha I will build my Church.”

      The word kepha was given a Greek masculine ending (-s) and appears nine times in our Bibles as “Cephas”: John 1:42; 1 Corinthians 1:12, 3:22, 9:5, 15:5; Galations 1:18, 2:9, 11, 14.

      The difference in gender of petros and petra is a grammatical issue that arose only when Jesus’ original words were translated into Greek. Nonetheless, I had read convoluted apologetics that tried to make a big deal over it in order to separate Peter as a person from the “rock” on which Jesus would build the Church.

      Yet even when I was a Protestant pastor and seminarian, I never bought Calvin’s interpretation that the “rock” of the Church was Peter’s confession of faith rather than Peter himself. That seemed so strained to me. It was so obvious that Jesus was changing Simon’s name in order to signify the fact that he had become the rock of the Church. In my own mind, Calvin had just gone overboard trying to reject the position of the Catholic Church. Now that relations with the Catholic Church under John Paul II weren’t so strained, I thought, we could all agree that Peter was the rock of the Church.

      But to me, this meant no more than that Peter was the first Christian, and maybe had an important role in founding the Christian movement. It never occurred to me that this role of “rock” was a kind of office or position that would continue after Peter’s death, with someone else taking on the role.

      Here’s where we need to turn to the next verse, verse 19:

      “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

      I was told in the Protestant seminary that the “keys of the kingdom” were the preaching of the Gospel. When Peter preached the Gospel, those who accepted it would be “loosed in heaven” (saved) and those who rejected it would be “bound in heaven” (damned).

      I accepted that view because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the Old Testament background for this verse. What I am about to show you was never shown to me in the seminary, and it rocked my world when I first saw it. Matthew 16:18–19 is actually drawing on a famous passage from the prophet Isaiah.

      Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts, “Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is over the household, and say to him: What have you to do here and whom have you here, that you have hewn here a tomb for yourself, you who hew a tomb on the height, and carve a habitation for yourself in the rock?… I will thrust you from your office, and you will be cast down from your station. In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your girdle on him, and will commit your authority to his hand; and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.” (Is 22:15–22)

      Again, it amazes me that, even though we discussed Matthew 16:18–19 in several different classes in my seminary, no one ever pointed out the connection with the Isaiah passage, even though the connection is well-known among Bible scholars and mentioned in several commentaries. After all, there are only two places in the Old Testament where the word “key” is used (Judg 3:25; Isa 22:22), so when we look for the Old Testament background of Jesus’ teaching (which we should always do), it doesn’t take long to find the connection between Matthew