Jesus, Peter, and the Keys :
James White's Objections Answered
by David Palm and Robert Sungenis
James White vs. Jesus, Peter, and the Keys
by David Palm, Copyright (c) 13 June, 1997
James White has provided on his Web site a lengthy critique of the latest book-length work on the papacy, Jesus, Peter, and the Keys by Scott Butler, Norman Dahlgren, and David Hess (Santa Barbara: Queenship, 1996; henceforth JP&K). Although I find the book very helpful and I heartily recommend it, this essay is not intended to be a vindication of JP&K per se. Rather, it is a response to some more general arguments thrown out by White in his critique (see White's Reply to Butler, Dahlgren, and Hess) and in other of his writings and debates. In the background the reader should keep in mind many of the general criticisms that White levels against Catholic apologists, including selective and unbalanced citation of the evidence, ignoring evidence that runs against one's position, spotty treatments of centrally important topics, and anachronistic argumentation.
[It is not easy to label concisely the different interpretations of Matt 16:18 without prejudice. For this paper, I will speak of the interpretation in which "this rock" is taken as Peter's confession as the "confessional interpretation" and that in which "this rock" refers to the person of Peter as the "personal interpretation."]
Dollinger, Matthew 16:18f and the Bishops of
In his critique of JP&K, White questions the authors' labelling as "traditional" the personal interpretation of Matt 16:18.
"Unless our authors are wanting to redefine 'traditional' to merely 'Roman,' they need to deal with the conclusions of Dollinger, in his work The Pope and the Council."
Now as a side note, The Pope and the Council was originally written under the pseudonym "Janus". Although it has been widely attributed to Dollinger, Scott Butler has pointed out to me that there is reason to question this, most notably because Dollinger's own works are cited and refuted in The Pope and the Council (see pp. 74, 78, and 86 in the 1870 English translation published by Roberts Brothers). Although it is possible that Dollinger would attempt to deflect suspicion from himself by criticizing his own previous work, it seems clumsy and improbable. All this aside, White approvingly cites "Janus":
"Of all the Fathers who interpret these passages in the Gospels (Matt 16:18, John 21:17), not a single one applies them to the Roman bishops as Peter's successors. How many Fathers have busied themselves with these texts, yet not one of them whose commentaries we possess -- Origen, Chrysostom, Hilary, Augustine, Cyril, Theodoret, and those whose interpretations are collected in catenas -- has dropped the faintest hint that the primacy of
For ease of refutation, "Janus" (and by extension, Mr. White) has packaged his argument in the form of a universal negative. One need bring just one counter-example and his assertion is proved false. But the authors of JP&K have supplied far more than just one example. Following is a list of the Fathers cited in JP&K, saying what "Janus" and White claim they never said (page number in parentheses): St. Jerome (247), St. Augustine (249, 250, 296), St. Ambrose (292-3; possibly), St. Peter Chrysologus (259), Stephen of Dora (271-2), St. Maximus the Confessor (273), Theodore the Studite (278-9), Sergius of Cyprus (352-3), and Alcuin (357).
If silence gives consent then we may point to the Fathers of the Council of Ephesus (258), who offered no protest when the papal legates read out this statement at the council:
"There is no doubt, and in fact has been known in all ages, that the holy and most blessed Peter, prince and head of the Apostles, pillar of the faith, and the foundation of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Redeemer of the human race, and that to him was given the power of loosing and binding sins: who down even to today and forever both lives and judges in his successors. The holy and most blessed Pope Coelestine, according to due order, is his successor and holds his place." (JP&K, 258)
Of course, we should not forget to mention the Eastern bishops who wrote to Pope Symmachus (342) or the 250 Eastern bishops who signed the Formula of Pope Hormisdas (268; the authors of JP&K cite Dollinger to the effect that this number eventually climbed to 2500 Eastern signatories). And all of this ignores the early Popes themselves who are, by anyone's standards, considered Fathers of the Church and who add their witness to this choir: Damasus (238), St. Siricius (239), St. Zosimus (253-4), St. Celestine (255), St. Leo (261-4), St. Felix (266), St. Gelasius (267), St. Hormisdas (268), Pelagius II (269, 348), St. Gregory the Great (270-1), St. Simplicius (301), and St. Agatho (276).
So unless Mr. White wants to redefine "Church Father" to mean only those who cannot be cited in support of the papacy -- a question-begging position to be sure -- then some major modifications to his thesis are in order. And of course this bald assertion does not account for the fact that even those Fathers for whom explicit evidence is lacking for this particular application of the Petrine Scripture texts very often spoke of and deferred to the authority of the Roman bishops in ways that defy Protestant categories (see, e.g. Theodoret's testimony in JP&K, 332-3 and Luke Rivington on Cyril of Alexandria in The Primitive Church and the See of Peter, London: Longmans, Green, and Co [1894], 305-28).
Finally, in addition to being wrong on this point, "Janus" and White also argue from silence, an intrinsically weak position, whereas the authors of JP&K have brought considerable explicit and implicit evidence to the table. The fact that Mr. White still cites The Pope and the Council in the face of all of this counter-evidence which runs directly against their position leaves us with the disturbing question: Did James White actually read all of Jesus, Peter, and the Keys before responding to it?
History of Exegesis on Matthew 16:18f
But beyond all this, our authors are not alone in speaking of this as the "traditional" interpretation. Even Protestant scholars recognize that the personal interpretation of Matt 16:18 adopted and defended byJP&K is indeed the obvious and traditional one:
"Though in the past some authorities have considered that the term 'rock' refers to Jesus himself or to Peter's faith, the consensus of the great majority of scholars today is that the most obvious and traditional understanding should be construed, namely, that 'rock' refers to the person of Peter." (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1985 ed, s.v. "Papacy" by D. W. O'Connor)
And while chiding our authors for speaking of the Petrine equation as the "traditional" interpretation, Mr. White flatly labels the personal interpretation as "Roman Catholic exegesis" or the product of "Roman theology." Perhaps Catholic apologists should take him at his word and without further argument simply claim for our own all of the Church Fathers who support this exegesis. For JP&K cites no less than three dozen Fathers of the Church and other early Christian writers who agree with the interpretation that Peter is the Rock on which the Church is built. If they are all guilty of "Roman Catholic exegesis" and their conclusions flow from "Roman theology" then it seems only logical that they were all Roman Catholics. I am certainly happy with that conclusion and thank Mr. White for helping us reach it.
But what Mr. White is really trying to emphasize is that there were different interpretations adopted by various Church Fathers. Many Fathers do say that "this rock" of Matt 16:18 is Peter's confession. For White and others (such as William Webster, in his lop-sided book Peter and the Rock) this is a telling point against the personal interpretation. Indeed, Martin Luther used this tactic in his dispute with Eck. But
"when Luther insisted upon this interpretation, Eck, the papal champion replied . . . that no one denied it" (J. T. Shotwell and L. Ropes Loomis, eds. The See of Peter,
Eck's answer to Luther is the correct one for any Catholic apologist. There is no need to deny that the Fathers spoke of this passage in several ways (indeed, the new Catechism of the Catholic Churchalso does so), for a careful analysis of that phenomenon ends up supporting the Catholic claim that the personal interpretation is primary:
"The orthodox Catholic view has been the simple and literal one -- that the rock was Peter (Kepha in both cases). But it was also held by some of the Fathers that it was the confession which Peter made --"thou art Christ, the son of the living God" -- which was the cornerstone of the Church, since upon that belief the new religion was in reality based. This view was especially seized upon by the Fathers who were disputing with the bishop of
Thus the interpretation which understands "this rock" to refer to Peter's confession is, in the history of exegesis, a polemical device and not a straightforward, unbiased reading of the text. This establishes it as a secondary interpretation, which ultimately must derive its validity (or lack thereof) from an underlying literal or primary exegesis of the text. Most modern biblical scholarship is concerned only with the literal meaning of the text (in technical terms the "grammatico- historical" meaning) whereas the Fathers were prone to find additional, "spiritual" meanings in the text of Scripture. [It is important to note, however, that even for the Fathers the literal meaning was always primary and any secondary meanings must flow from it.]
Suffice it to say that White, along with most evangelical Protestants, frequently scoffs at the secondary interpretations of the Fathers, indicating that for him the grammatico-historical approach is the only valid one. And yet in this instance he adopts what is, in the history of exegesis and the opinion of the vast majority even of Protestant scholars, a spiritual and secondary interpretation of Matt 16:18.
Then too, apologists such as White and Webster present evidence almost exclusively from a subset of Fathers who support the confessional interpretation. But in doing so they do their readers two disservices. They ignore the massive (indeed, one is tempted to call it unanimous) testimony in support of the personal interpretation of the text which equates Peter and the rock. And they don't normally tell their readers that the very same Fathers who are cited in support of the confessional exegesis explictly support the personal interpretation as well.
Modern Protestants on Matthew 16:18f
Now to modern Protestants -- who reject the notion that a text may have other spiritual meanings besides the grammatico-historical one -- finding certain Fathers supporting the confessional interpretation of Matt 16:18 seems to exclude other interpretations. But unless these apologists are content not only to set the Fathers in opposition to each other, but even to pit a given Father against himself, they must offer some additional explanation for the ubiquitous occurrence of the personal interpretation alongside the occasional use of the confessional interpretation. To ignore this is to read modern standards of exegesis back into the patristic period. Here, it seems to me, James White is doing precisely what he castigates Catholics for, namely, applying modern categories to ancient texts (see Answers to Catholic Claims, 112ff.).
The Catholic apologist, on the other hand, readily agrees that certain Fathers hold to the confessional interpretation. But he notes that this is almost always in harmony with (not set against) the personal interpretation, as evidenced by the fact that the same Fathers can personally support both views without contradiction. Interestingly, the Protestant New Bible Commentary upholds the personal interpretation of Matt 16:18 while capturing exactly the relationship between the two views in the minds of the Fathers and subsequent Catholics:
"Some interpreters have . . . referred to Jesus as the rock here, but the context is against this. Nor is it likely that Peter's faith or Peter's confession is meant. It is undoubtedly Peter himself who is to be the rock, but Peter confessing, faithful and obedient." (D. Guthrie, et al. eds. The New Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), 837; emphasis mine).
[It is probably a weakness of JP&K that it does not interact much with the Fathers' propensity to find several meanings in this text. Its presentation of the patristic evidence -- while certainly providing a much needed balance to badly skewed and misleading works such as Webster's Peter and the Rock -- could itself be charged with a certain unbalance.]
So the Catholic can certainly say that in some secondary sense the "rock" of Matt 16:18 is Peter's confession, but, as a literal exegesis of the text and the history of interpretation shows, this is never divorced from specific promises made to Peter himself.
The Peter Syndrome?
One of White's major objections to JP&K and indeed to Catholic apologetics in general is what he calls the "Peter Syndrome." White claims that the entire gamut of the most prominent Catholic apologists has fallen prey to this malady:
"[JP&K] falls into the 'Peter Syndrome' over and over again: that being the tendency on the part of Roman Catholics to interpret all of the Bible (including the Old Testament) as well as all of Church History in the light of modern Petrine claims on the part of
Now JP&K is, by its authors' own admission, a source-book: detailed analysis and scholarly synthesis is largely left to others. I do think that in some sense the presentation of JP&K is lop-sided; on the other hand, when taken together with such unbalanced works as William Webster's Peter and the Rock or White's Answers to Catholic Claims it presents much-needed balancing information. Overall it is best (as I hope I've done here) to acknowledge evidence that appears to run contrary to one's position, explain it, and thus nullify the claim that one is ignoring it.
That having been said, however, I reject the claim that the panoply of Catholic apologists have been struck down by the dreaded "Peter Syndrome."
Any complex theological edifice (including distinctively Protestant ones, such as Sola Scriptura) must be built up a brick at a time. And it is a very legitimate technique to call upon "hostile witnesses" in support of some points of one's case; this happens in courtrooms throughout the world every single day. Now White grouses, for example, when Catholics use citations from Protestant scholars to support their case.
"Citations are multiplied (often out of context, or lacking very necessary caveats) from well-known Protestant scholars so that it looks like the authors have done their homework, and that anyone who disagrees is really out of step with even the majority of Protestant scholarship."
It is a fact that White's own understanding of Matt 16:18 is out of step with the majority of modern Protestant scholarship; it would be helpful if he would simply admit this, even if it does not effect his position. But the authors of JP&K have simply tried to establish that the majority of Protestant scholars now agree with Catholics on the placement of the first few bricks in the case for the papacy. Of course these Protestants don't follow us all the way down the path; if they did, they would be Catholics. That should be so obvious to the reader as to obviate explicit mention.
The same principle of building a case a piece at a time lies behind the use of citations from the Fathers to illustrate the role of Peter in the New Testament. White claims that,
"The Roman apologist must demonstrate that [sic] for such statements to be meaningful that the Father under discussion believed that the bishop of Rome alone is the sole, unique successor of Peter, so that any such exalted language about Peter is to be applied in that Father's thinking to the bishop of Rome alone. If such a basis is not provided, references to Peter are irrelevant."
Perhaps Catholic apologists need to be more explicit about the way in which they are building their case, but White's criticism that they use every individual nugget of evidence as stand-alone proof of the full-blown system is simply false. Patristic citations concerning St. Peter are far from irrelevant. It may be that certain Fathers did not apply their particular interpretation of Petrine Scripture texts to support ongoing papal prerogatives, although this is at best an argument from silence and often their other words or actions indicate that they admitted papal authority to an extent that would be anathema to the Protestant. But that aside, their testimony on the meaning of Gospel texts such as Matt 16:18-19 and John 21:15-17, even as they relate strictly to Peter, forms a legitimate plank in a full-orbed apology.
Succession to Office: The Key/Keys of Isaiah 22 and Matthew 16:19
My own progression of thought is perhaps not atypical of those who come ultimately to embrace the Catholic doctrine of the papacy. Long before I had any inkling of becoming Catholic I came to embrace the current majority report among Protestant scholars, namely, that "this rock" of Matt 16:18 refers to the person of Peter and that he is the foundation on which Christ would build His Church. I was challenged later, by those same scholars and by Catholic apologists, to see from the use of Isaiah 22:22 in Matt 16:19, that our Lord, as the son of David and new King of Israel, reestablished the office of "steward" or "one who is over the house" (in modern parlance, the prime minister). He gives that office to Peter, as symbolized by the "keys of the kingdom." This establishes that in principle there is nothing antithetical between the supreme Lordship of Jesus Christ and a mortal man serving as His "vicar" on earth.
Succession of this office eventually became altogether reasonable to me given
(1) that the office was a successive one in the Old Testament economy,
(2) that the promise of the Lord to "build my Church" did not pertain only to the New Testament Church, so there is a future thrust right in the text -- this text, then, appears more as a prophecy than as an exclusive promise to Peter,
(3) that if the Kingdom would last till the end of time, and the King would certainly be enthroned until the end of time, then there is no good reason to suppose that the newly established office of prime minister would cease after the death of Peter,
(4) that the Lord in parables speaks of stewards who are placed "over the house" until His Parousia (see e.g. Matt 24:45ff),
(5) that the papacy represents the logical "historical embodiment of Christ's promise" to Peter,
(6) that the covenant people of God have always had this kind of earthly, patriachal headship and there is no good reason to suppose that will end in the New Covenant,
(7) that if the leadership of the New Testament Church was constituted this way then there is no good reason to suppose that the Church's fundamental structure would change radically when the Apostles died,
(8) that the early Church had a lively understanding of the direct succession of its leadership from the Apostles in general,
(9) that in the aggregate the Church, in its belief and practice, early and continuously, ascribed to the bishops of Rome as the successors of Peter the same sort of overseeing authority that was indeed promised in the New Testament itself,
(10) that the need for such an office certainly did not cease in the first century with the death of Peter. So it is illegitimate to say that Catholics don't give arguments, both biblical and patristic, for both the existence of the office or its continuity throughout the Church age.
Certainly there is considerable evidence presented in JP&K in support of all these theses.
James White: Concede Nothing
But for James White it is all or nothing; he gives no quarter when it comes to arguments on the papacy. And frankly, from the purely pragmatic view of preserving his tradition in the face of Catholic challenges, there is a certain necessity to his position. One thing the authors of JP&K establish, definitively in my opinion, is that Peter was constituted by Christ as the prime minister of His Kingdom and the chief pastor of the universal Church.
And they also show that the work of a significant number of conservative Protestant scholars (e.g. D. A. Carson, W. F. Albright, R. T. France, F. F. Bruce, et al.) supports this conclusion. The issue of succession aside, it is a significant breach in the historic Protestant position to find, in both Scripture and the testimony of the Fathers, that a mere mortal can hold such a position in Christ's Church at all! In centuries past the only possible label for a man in such a position would be Antichrist; now they find this office in the pages of the Sacred Text, in the very source on which they claim to model their own communions.
For Protestants who go along with the majority report on the exegesis of Matt 16:18, there can be no more appeal to the "independent local congregation" or some other provincial model of Church government as "apostolic," since the apostolic Church itself had this mortal man at its head, appointed by our Lord as the prime minister of the Kingdom. There can be no more claim that having a universal pastor, an earthly head of the Church, violates the exclusive prerogatives of Christ, since it was our Lord Himself who established just such a position in the
In principle, then, there can be no objection to the office of the papacy and at best the Protestant is left arguing that this was a merely temporary arrangement in the Church. He argues a negative position of discontinuity in the face of much positive evidence for continuity and this rear-guard position becomes increasingly weak in light of a mass of evidence. That is the slippery slope down which many of us have slid and which White, rightly from his vantage point, seeks to block entirely by denying even those first few planks which the preponderance of Christian scholarship now affirms.
This is why bibilical and patristic evidence concerning St. Peter is important, even if in some sources there is no explicit connection made to the ongoing prerogatives of the bishops of
Why Succession is Logical and Necessary
Now of course, succession of this office is another matter and Catholics have never said otherwise. It is often asserted even by those Protestants who agree that Jesus conferred this lofty office on Peter that there is no basis in the Scriptural text at all for the idea of this being an ongoing office. As I have shown above, Catholics do indeed point to indications in Scripture and the early Church that the office is ongoing. But this is not enough for our Protestant brethren. Only an explicit command in Scripture will do. But frankly, there has not been nearly enough self-reflection on the part of Protestants on just how they determine the ongoing applicability of other texts of Scripture.
For example, the vast majority of Protestant denominations continue to practice the Lord's Supper. But where is the explicit Scripture text telling them that they should do this? There is none. When one turns, for example, to the Evangelical theologian Millard Erickson for his view of why the Lord's Supper has application throughout the Church age, he argues in a fashion remarkably similar to my own arguments above for papal succession.
First, Erickson notes the Lord's command to the Apostles to "do this in remembrance of me" (Christian Theology, [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985], 1110). But according to the way Protestant apologists counter various Catholic arguments this doesn't prove anything, since this was said only to the Apostles. Next he says:
"We must add to these considerations the practice of the church. Evidently, believers celebrated the Lord's Supper from a very early time. Certainly it was already being observed by the church at the time of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (c. A.D. 55). This was easily within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, who would have been a check upon the authenticity of Paul's report of Jesus' words. It would seem, then, that the command to repeat the sacrament goes back to Jesus." (Ibid)
Now just because one local congregation with direct ties to apostolic instruction celebrated the Lord's Supper, this does not prove that any other congregation should or that it would extend beyond the time of the Apostles. And I could argue, in a similar fashion, that the idea of the supremacy of Peter and his successors goes back to the Apostles and hence to Jesus, since the same church at Corinth, when disturbed by a local schism, appealed to Clement, the bishop of Rome, who himself is widely acknowledged to be a direct witness of the Apostolic teaching.
Here, if I anticipate Mr. White's reply, he will insist that there was no monarchical episcopate at Rome at this time, so Clement could not have been the bishop of Rome. A full-blown look at this newfangled theory is forthcoming. Suffice it to say for now that it is an argument exclusively from silence, in the face of considerable positive historical testimony to the contrary. One wonders how Evangelicals will shore up their own ramparts with respect to traditional authorship and dating of the New Testament books after they have worked so hard to impeach all of the pertinent historical witnesses on other grounds.
( See Mark Bonocore's Answer to James White on the Early Papacy )
Finally, Erickson asks, "We also need to ask what the point of the Last Supper would have been had there been no command to repeat it" (Ibid).
And similarly, Catholics ask what point there would be to reestablish the office of "steward" or prime minister if it would only last for a single generation. Certainly the need for such an office did not disappear. So we see that the arguments that evangelical Protestants use to establish the Lord's Supper as a normative feature of the Church age are the very same kinds of arguments used by Catholics to establish the ongoing nature of the papacy. I suggest that it is a double standard to accept their general validity in one context and deny them completely in another.
The same criteria can be applied to a host of other issues in Scripture: the sacrament of baptism, the notion that public revelation ceased with the death of the last Apostle, the washing of feet, speaking in tongues, head coverings for women (which St. Paul says were used in all the New Testament churches, 1 Cor 11:16), women speaking in Church, the greeting "with a holy kiss." Take 1 Tim 2:8-9 as an example:
"I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; also that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire."
On what basis do most Protestants ignore or spiritualize this? How is it, in the face of a Scripture passage so direct and straightforward, that most Presbyterians or Lutherans will look at you like you're a nut if you raise your hands in prayer in their congregation, or that all Protestant women don't immediately throw away their wedding rings and pearl necklaces?
In fact, using the same hermeneutical principles used by Protestants to deny the papacy, one could just as easily deny the ongoing validity of the Great Commission. It was, after all, delivered exclusively to the Apostles, with no hint in the context of Matt 28:18-20 or Acts 1:8 that Jesus' words applied to anybody else. And one could argue that the testimony of the New Testament itself, if taken at face value, shows that this commission was fulfilled by the Apostles (see e.g. Rom 1:8; 10:18; Col 1:6, 23) and thus no longer applies to succeeding generations of Christians.
There are no explicit texts of Scripture saying whether these doctrines or practices are or are not ongoing and normative for the Church age. And of course there is no Scripture support at all for the boundaries of the canon or the authorship of the anonymous books of the Bible; here the testimony and practice of the post-apostolic Church is by itself sufficient for Protestants (even, strangely enough, after having been attacked as being corrupted by numerous Catholic leanings).
The Catholic, on the other hand, readily acknowledges his reliance on Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Church to decide these things and so argues consistently across the board.
So, circling back around to our central topic, on what basis is the idea of succession of the papal office denied by Protestants?
Certainly not simply because there is no explicit Scripture text to that effect. For there are plenty of implicit pointers and on other matters implicit texts -- or even no text at all -- are sufficient for Protestants. Certainly not because there is no evidence for the supremacy of the successors of St. Peter in the belief and practice of the early Church, for Catholics have shown again and again--most recently in JP&K--that such belief and practice existed from the very beginning.
For the Protestant there is no objective basis on which to deny this; it is maintained only by clinging to artificial distinctions, created to maintain a man-made tradition in opposition to Catholic claims.
Miscellanies:
Aramaic/Semitisms of Matthew 16:18f
(1) It is troubling to see White again and again reject as impossible arguments which even conservative Protestant scholars see as plausible and even convincing. For example, he summarily dismisses as ridiculous the argument which points to an Aramaic substratum behind our present Greek text, which in turn nullifies completely any appeal to the distinction between petros and petra in the Greek, since the word would be kepha in both places. The authors of JP&K present significant patristic evidence to support the existence of just such a written source, from which our present Greek text was in some way derived (363-373). This evidence White simply dismisses out of hand, dubbing the existence of a Semitic original "mythical."
[Now that he has trashed the credibility of the only historical sources on which belief in the traditional authorship is based, one wonders how White would counter a modernist scholar seeking to deny Matthean authorship of our present Greek text.]
But White misses the fact that an Aramaic or Hebrew text is not an essential facet of the argument. As even prominent Protestant scholars acknowledge, there are Semitisms in the Greek text of Matthew which indicate that these words of Jesus were first delivered in Aramaic.
"[T]he great antiquity and the Palestinian origin of the section may today be considered beyond question. This is shown by the quite Semitic linguistic character of this section. On this point, in fact, almost all scholars are united, whether they accept or reject genuineness." (O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple-Apostle-Martyr trans. F. V. Filson [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953], 185)
Elsewhere, Cullmann points not only to the pun -- "You are Rock, and on this rock. . ." indicating that both words were the same when originally uttered, thus, "You are Kepha, and on this kepha. . ." -- but also to such Semitisms as the designation of Peter as bar-yinh, the expression "flesh and blood" to mean "men," and the characteristically Semitic phrase "bind and loose" as evidence that this section was originally uttered in Aramaic (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 6:106).
So, while White is certainly free to argue against the idea of a Semitic original, he cannot claim that this view is a product of Catholic bias, nor that this observation is so shaky that only the ignorant would accept its validity. The appeal to a Semitic original behind Matt 16:18 is only one piece of a full-orbed exegesis and apology but it is certainly a legitimate one, based on evidence in the Greek text of the New Testament as well as significant patristic evidence.
Origen and 600 Books?
(2) White has complained much of evidence misleadingly presented in Catholic works. But then we encounter some strange argumentation from him, such as this reponse to JP&K's citations from Origen concerning the primacy of Peter:
"In the 600 books written by [Origen] in his lifetime, [the authors of JP&K] can only come up with a few phrases about the subject, and even then, they can't provide any meaningful bridge between a high view of Peter and the bishop of Rome as the Pope?"
But, speaking of a misleading presentation of evidence, we might ask first just how many of these 600 books to which the authors of JP&K were supposed to refer have survived to the present day? The answer is, a relative handful! And how many of the few surviving works have as their subject matter anything that would remotely call for a mention of the prerogatives of St. Peter or the papacy? A still smaller subset of those. It seems as if Mr. White would know all this; but for whatever reason he builds an argument on the alleged silence of works long since lost and then points to this manufactured silence as evidence that our authors have a weak case. But in fact, the evidence they do cite from Origen clearly enlists him as a proponent of the personal interpretation of Matt 16:18 and that is all the authors claim.
The Arabic Canons of Nicaea
(3) Often White focuses on peripheral issues rather than going to the heart of the matter. An example would be his treatment of the Arabic "Canons of Nicaea." In the course of an approximately 18 page critique of JP&K, White spends approximately six of them discussing this tangential point. He will claim, I think, that he was using this example to make a larger point about the proper use of evidence. But in fact, the authors of JP&K are quite measured in their presentation of this evidence, careful to point out that the canons are not original but noting that they give, "a mind's eye view of the thinking of Eastern Christianity" at the time of their composition.
White tries to make much of the existence of forged or glossed documents like these Arabic canons, claiming that the only reason anybody would create such documents is that they are desperate for evidence to support an intrinsically worthless case. But this assertion flies in the face of the evidence even of the transmission of the Bible, in which glosses to or modifications of the text were made for very pious, albeit misguided, reasons. Indeed, these glosses, modifications, and commentaries often do precisely what the authors of JP&K say they do, namely, give us some insight into the personal theology of those making the changes.
And, if White is correct, then what does that say about the Protestant forgery of an alleged discourse by Bishop John Strossmayer at the First Vatican Council? Should we conclude that the Protestant case against papal infallibility is so bad that it requires that a bogus speech be placed in the mouth of a Catholic bishop?
The simple fact is that the papal prerogatives can be established by numerous authentic patristic sources, Eastern and Western, long before any false decretals or canons appeared on the scene; these questionable documents have never formed any central part of the Catholic response to Protestants. JP&K put no significant weight on the Arabic canons, nor does any other book written in support of the papacy. Why, then, does White spend so much time trying to refute them, even reproducing several pages from Schaff's Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers to prove that the Arabic canons are not original, something already admitted in the text of JP&K! His discourse on such a peripheral point leaves the central thesis of JP&K untouched.
[Scott Butler informs me that the material he presented from the Arabic "Canons of Nicaea" is also found, almost verbatim, in the ancient Armenian and Chaldean Nomocanons, the official collections of canon law for those ancient churches. These represent two more independent and Eastern witnesses to the pervasiveness of the perspective that the bishop of Rome, as Peter's successor, holds the primacy in the early Church. He intends to present this evidence formally in the follow-up volume to JP&K.]
The 28th Canon of Chalcedon
(4) But in reply to the assertion of our authors that these Arabic canons give us a glimpse of certain Eastern attitudes towards the papacy, White carts out the 28th canon of the Council of Chalcedon, as if this canon alone puts the lie to the Catholic position. [William Webster also makes much of the 28th canon of Chalcedon in his Peter and the Rock, and presents his information in the same unbalanced manner as White.]
But there are a significant number of oversights in the presentation of this canon by these Protestant apologists. For example, White fails to tell his readers that the 28th canon was passed by a rump session of a mere 150 bishops after the main body (totalling 520 bishops) had dispersed. All of the Western bishops had already quit the council and the diminuative group that remained purposely misled the papal legates concerning the nature of its deliberations. When the legates found out what this band had done, they immediately denounced the proceeding as hopelessly irregular and the canon itself as contrary to the canons of the Council of Nicaea. The motivation for this action on the part of the Easterns was exclusively political, seeking to solidify the melding of Church and State, and exhibited the kind of political ambition -- to the denigration of spiritual truths -- that Protestants ordinarily loathe.
White also fails to tell his readers about the letter written by the council fathers of Chalcedon entreating Pope St. Leo the Great to ratify and approve what they had done:
"And we further inform you that we have decided on other things also for the good management and stability of church matters, being persuaded that your holiness will accept and ratify them, when you are told. . . . Accordingly vouchsafe most holy and blessed father to accept as your own wish, and as conducing to good government the things which we have resolved on for the removal of all confusion and the confirmation of church order. . . . Accordingly, we entreat you, honour our decision by your assent, and as we have yielded to the head our agreement on things honourable, so may the head also fulfil for the children what is fitting. . . . But that you may know that we have done nothing for favour or in hatred, but as being guided by the Divine Will, we have made known to you the whole scope of our proceedings to strengthen our position and to ratify and establish what we have done." (Ep. xcviii; cited from NPNF 2:12:72-3)
They speak of Pope Leo's relationship to themselves, "of whom you were, chief, as the head to the members, showing your goodwill in the person of those who represented you" (Ibid). They portray the Pope as "the head," compared to their own status as "children" and speak of him as their "most holy and blessed father." They also speak of him as their "guide in all that is good" and as one who specially embodies the ongoing ministry of St. Peter:
"And this golden chain leading down from the Author of the command to us, you yourself have stedfastly preserved, being set as the mouthpiece unto all of the blessed Peter, and imparting the blessedness of his Faith unto all. Whence we too, wisely taking you as our guide in all that is good, have shown to the sons of the Church their inheritance of Truth . . . ." (Ibid)
Gone is any notion that the Roman bishop's position in the Church is strictly honorary or political. As Philip Hughes points out,
"The bishops, in this letter, have dropped the language about the imperial importance of the new city, and about recognition of the pope's primacy as related to the like importance of Rome. It is to him as primate because Peter's successor that they address their plea-- the one sure concrete reality beneath their wealth of insinuating compliment." (The Church in Crisis: A History of the General Councils, 325-1870, Garden City: Doubleday, 1961, 90)
After a masterful survey of the evidence, Luke Rivington summarizes well this testimony of the council fathers of Chalcedon concerning the position of the Bishop of Rome:
"If insincerely used, they testify to the necessity under which these bishops found themselves, of crouching at the feet of a master in order to gain the object of their desires. If used in sincerity, they are the testimony of witnesses, naturally the most unwilling, to the position of headship which the East recognised in the occupant of the See of Peter. We cannot claim for [the authors of the 28th canon] the authority of the council, for these men were not the council; but we are compelled to see in these terms the strongest possible evidence that the idea of the connection between Rome and St. Peter, and of such a consequent 'headship' of Rome over Constantinople that the latter could not arrange its own relations with other sees in the East without the acquiescence of Rome -- we are compelled, I say, to acknowledge that this was so deeply rooted in the mind of the Eastern Church that it was simply useless to ignore it, and that the only thing to be done was to admit it plainly and to win the adhesion of Rome to their projected canon." (The Primitive Church and the See of Peter, 455) [See Rivington's complete treatment "The Byzantine Plot" and that of Philip Hughes in The Church in Crisis, 85-92]
White also does not tell his readers that it was precisely on the authority of papal prerogatives that the 28th canon was nullified by Pope St. Leo the Great, who says of the canon, "we dismiss as without legal effect. . . . By the authority of the blessed apostle Peter we quash it utterly by a general sentence" (cited by Hughes, Crisis, 91). Nor does he tell them that no less a witness than the Patriarch of Constantinople, Anatolius, submitted to St. Leo's censure of the canon and affirmed the Pope's authority to approve (or disapprove) not just the 28th canon but the entire council proceedings:
"All the force and confirmation of what was thus done was reserved for the authority of your Blessedness [Cum et sic gestorum vis omnis et confirmatio auctoritati vestrm beatitudinis fuerit reservata]" (Ep. cxxxii.c.4; cited in Rivington).
Or, as Hughes so well paraphrases, "All this is so much hot air until you choose to ratify it!" (Crisis, 92). This affair concerning the 28th canon of Chalcedon might be compared, roughly, to 150 U.S. congressmen meeting in secret session after hours and hammering out a bill directly contradicting the current laws of the U.S., which they then send off to the President who absolutely refuses his signature; yet centuries down the road, some fractious groups continue to trumpet the validity of the action and point to it as representative of the official law of the United States. It is simply bizarre for White (and Webster) to insist that the highly irregular and abherent 28th canon of Chalcedon somehow represents the authentic mind of the ancient Church.
Conclusion
Never in his critique or other writings does White address the significant evidence brought by the authors of JP&K from Eastern sources in support of the papacy; he simply asserts over and over that there was opposition from other Eastern leaders, something never denied by Catholic apologists.
Never does he address the massive testimony from the Fathers supporting the personal interpretation of Matt 16:18 or the exegesis of John 21:15f that sees Peter as the earthly chief shepherd of the universal Church; he only quotes counter-examples in which they held different views, something not only acknowledged by Catholic apologists but neatly harmonized within an understanding of patristic methods of exegesis.
In all I believe that he leaves the central thesis of JP&K, and indeed of the Catholic position in general, untouched.
In one final note, I have to disagree with my fellow Catholic apologist, Patrick Madrid, who, as cited by White, says that JP&K is a "complete iteration of the biblical and patristic evidence." As helpful as it is, I don't think the book is complete by a long shot; there's an enormous amount of additional material that can be brought to bear to illuminate this topic and much more that can be brought to refute the most common Protestant or Eastern Orthodox objections. This is no slight to the authors of the book; one can only put so much between two covers. JP&K is a very useful compendium of source material, but the Protestant apologist should be aware that there is a lot more where that came from.
David Palm
A Response to James White's Comments on Jesus, Peter and the Keys
by Robert Sungenis
Well, we've got to hand it to Mr. White. I really don't know where he finds the time to sit down and write all his rebuttals to Catholic apologists, but it is apparent that he somehow manages. We can safely conclude from observing his Web page that Mr. White is on a crusade. Clearly out-numbered by Catholic apologists who have taken the pen-sword in hand to challenge their Protestant brethren, White feels it his personal responsibility to slay the giant behemoth of the Catholic Church, especially those nasty new converts who are just popping up everywhere. But take heart, dear Catholic friend, God allows the Mr. White's of the world to continue in their crusades because they actually do us more good than harm. For every clever argument that is raised by the Mr. White's, God is giving us a chance to sharpen our swords. Yes, we will answer every minutia of argumentation they bring forth and thereby vindicate the Catholic Church for all the world to see. With that said, let me briefly respond to some of Mr. White's arguments.
Let's Get Personal
As he almost never fails to do, Mr. White opens his rebuttal by planting the seed of doubt in the reader's mind regarding the knowledge and credibility of his opponent. Mr. White writes:
"In particular, this book often cites Robert Sungenis, a Westminster Seminary graduate, as their primary source of Greek scholar [sic]. While we are unaware of any advanced study in the field on the part of Mr. Sungenis beyond a Master's degree, and have never been informed that he has professional teaching experience, published scholarly works, etc, his opinions on the grammar of the Greek text are presented as the 'final word' by Jesus, Peter & the Keys."
Wrong, Mr. White. The book makes no mention of Robert Sungenis being its primary source of Greek scholar[ship]. The book merely thanks him for being a substantial contributor to the work in the words:
"Robert Sungenis who also inspires us with his commanding knowledge of the Bible and biblical Greek."
I'm sure there are many authors in the book who know as much or more than me about biblical Greek. I wanted to concentrate on Greek for the book precisely because of people like Mr. White who consistently attempt to counter arguments from Catholic apologists with his supposed knowledge of the language. His recent debacle on the Internet with the heous hou phrase ("until") in Matthew 1:25 is a case in point. Be that as it may, if Mr. White has any objections to my being cited in the book for Greek analysis then he should show where he thinks my knowledge of Greek grammar has fallen short, instead of taking pot shots at me or my academic career. So far, all we have seen from Mr. White is innuendo.
Though I am reluctant to "toot my own horn," as they say, if Mr. White would stop trying to "muddy the waters" by unnecessarily casting doubt upon his opponents credibility then we wouldn't have to make pit stops to defend ourselves in the midst of our rebuttals against Mr. White. [Note Mr. White's appeal to his lack of information rather than factual information in his statement "We are unaware of any advanced study..."] For the record, I am presently pursuing doctoral studies at the Maryvale Institute in England. As for professional teaching experience, I had an accredited teaching position with Family Stations, Inc., (1980-1982) probably before Mr. White graduated college. And though I have been encouraged to take an academic position, rather than be confined to the rigors of the academic institutions, I made a decision to head up a Catholic apologetics organization, which has now been in operation since 1993 and gives me much latitude in my efforts to defend the Church. Yes, something very similar to Mr. White's organization. By the same token, has anyone seen those three little letters (Ph.D.) after Mr. White's name? I don't remember seeing them, but then again, Mr. White says I ignore a lot about him.
As for published works, I have published Shockwave 2000 (New Leaf Press, 1994) which is a scholarly rebuttal to the varied predictions of Protestant evangelicals concerning the end of the world. The former president of Dallas Theological Seminary John Walvoord, said it was one of the best books written on the subject, which prompted him to write the Foreword. As for other works, Queenship Publishing will be releasing the book Not By Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence of the Catholic Doctrine of Justification in July 1997 (800 pages), and publishing the book: Is the Bible Our Only Authority: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura [retitled: Not By Scripture Alone] in the fall of 1997, of which I am the general editor. Is that enough for you, Mr. White? I suggest that the next time you want to plant doubt in your reader's mind about your opponent, check first with the person about whom you are writing and stop trying to make someone look bad by the things you don't know about them.
Let me mention one more thing: Mr. White is famous for accusing Catholic apologists of employing ad hominem arguments, of being accusatory and vitriolic. I want to point out, however, that it is precisely because of his subtle yet sharp attacks on the character and credibility of Catholic apologists, some of which I have noted above, that make Mr. White so irritating and repulsive to Catholic apologists. For example, Mr. White keeps complaining that Scott Hahn won't debate him and makes quite an issue of it on his Web page, attempting to make Scott look very bad. Anyone who has talked to Scott knows that the very reason he will not debate Mr. White, nor even be in the same room with him, is precisely for the subtle yet malicious attacks Mr. White has made against him and the Catholic Church. Listen closely to Mr. White's argumentation and you will invariably hear innuendos, insinuations and downright contempt for his opponents. Here is another case in point: Regarding our debate on the papacy in April 1995, Mr. White writes:
"None of the real issues are touched upon at all by Sungenis, and this despite the fact that I pointed these things out to him in the Boston College debate earlier the same year! (I should note that it is possible Mr. Sungenis did not hear my rebuttal of his comments: both he and Mr. Butler frequently left the stage for long periods during the debate, and he may well have missed my rebuttal due to such an absence. It is not, however, my recollection that he was gone at this particular juncture)."
This is vintage James White -- insinuating something bad without really saying it explicitly. What makes it worse is that Mr. White continues to use this subtle character assassination even though I have told him explicitly in personal correspondence, several times, that I left the stage for none other than a simple bladder problem. I did this once, and it was for no more than five minutes. Instead of accepting this, Mr. White insinuates that I was either scared or disinterested in the debate, or who knows what his twisted thinking is trying to conjure up in the mind of his web-page reader. I assure you I was fully engaged in the debate, as attested by many in the audience. Anyone who wants the tapes, I have them available and you can judge for yourself.
As for Mr. White's demeanor during the debate: Fr. Tacelli who attended the debate, though he congratulated White on a good job, told me that he felt White was so obnoxious he wanted "to go up there and slap him." As for scholarship, well, we asked Mr. White to produce just three fathers prior to A.D. 400 who understood the rock of Matthew 16:18 to be Christ. Would you believe after two years and constant pleadings from me, Mr. White still hasn't given them to me? He tried to pass off four fathers, without giving the references, to an Internet inquirer who was also at the debate, but even that person realized that Mr. White was giving him a snowjob. The four fathers he gave said nothing close to what Mr. White was challenged with at the debate.
10 Points Addressing White's Exegesis of Matthew 16:18f
I could go on and on but now I would like to get to the technical portion of Mr. White's arguments. In regard to Matthew 16:18, he writes:
"'And I say to you (soi)' is singular, addressed to Peter and to Peter alone. This is continued in the first part of the main statement, 'You (su) are (singular) Peter.' This is known as direct address. Jesus is speaking in the first person, and Peter is in the second person, being directly addressed by the Lord. Up to this point, all is clear and understandable.
"Then we run into the phrase at issue. [kai epi tautee tee petra] is indeed singular; there is only one 'rock' in view. The issue is, to what does [tautee tee] refer? As a pronoun, it has an antecedent, a referent that it is pointing back to. Rome insists the referent is Peter. But if it is, why use a demonstrative pronoun at all? Jesus has used two personal pronouns of Peter already in this sentence, soi and su. He could have easily said, 'and upon you the rock,'...But again, he didn't. Instead, he switches from direct address to the demonstrative 'this.'"
Notice how White argues from silence. Yes, Jesus "could have easily said," but the fact that he did not say "and upon you the rock" does not prove or even suggest that he didn't want Peter to be the referent. Moreover, there are perfectly plausible reasons why he didn't say "you the rock." Here are some:
(1) To say "you...you...upon you the rock" is a bit awkward, if not bad grammar. In fact, there is no place in Scripture where a second person pronoun is placed before a metaphor for clarification on the identity of the metaphor. Thus, Mr. White is asking for something that Scripture itself does not feel obliged to do.
(2) Since in Matthew 16:18 Jesus has already assured us that he is addressing Peter by the use of the two singular personal pronouns ("you"), there is no reason, unless he wanted to engage in redundancy, to use a third personal pronoun. In fact, since Jesus has already established the person whom he wishes to emphasize (Peter), he now has the literary license to use another form of speech (a demonstrative with a metaphor) to give theological substance to the "you" he just introduced one clause earlier. Since Jesus happens to be in Caesarea Philippi which housed a rock structure, and Peter's name happens to mean "rock," gee, I wonder what would have made Jesus use the metaphor "rock" in his statement?
(3) If, as Mr. White insists, the referent for rock is the faith of Peter but not Peter himself, where is the precedent for such an interpretation in Scripture? Where does Scripture ever employ the word "rock" for a non-person or mere volitional capacity such as faith? Nowhere. Scripture never equates "rock" and "faith" together. When "rock" is assigned to a referent it is always a personal being.
(4) Where does Scripture ever suggest that the Church is to be built on the faith of someone as opposed to the person, or persons, themselves? Nowhere. Ephesians 2:20 says, "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets," not "built on the foundation of the faith of the apostles and prophets." Faith is but one part of a person's relationship to God, and thus we can understand why Scripture never singles it out as the foundation of the Church.
(5) Why is Peter as the referent for "rock" so hard for Mr. White to see when we have the crystal clear testimony of John 1:42, "You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas (which, when translated, is Peter)" (NIV). Mr. White knows that "Cephas" in Aramaic means nothing but "rock." Thus, if the name "Peter" is identified as a "Cephas," what conclusion can we come to other than Peter is a genuine rock? Also significant is that in John 1:42 Jesus says "You are Simon son of John," which happens to be the same wording he uses in Matthew 16:17 ("Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah [John]"). It doesn't take much intelligence to see that Simon's name is being changed to Peter in both passages, and the only difference in the name exchanges is that John 1:42 couples the exchange with the addition of the word "Cephas" while Matthew 16:18 couples its exchange with the word "rock," but we're supposed to believe from Mr. White's analysis that it is just a coincidence that "Cephas" is equivalent to "rock." Go figure.
(6) If Jesus said "You are Peter BUT upon this rock I will build my church," we could understand how the demonstrative "this" could be pointing to someone or something other than Peter. Since "but" (Greek: alla) serves to separate two clauses or phrases, the intensity of the demonstrative (i.e., "this very" rather than "this") would then serve to intensify the separation between Peter and rock. In this scenario one could admit that Peter is a rock, "but" there is a greater or another rock upon which the church would be built. But if "and" (Greek: kai) is used in place of "but" then the intensity of the demonstrative serves to join even more forcefully the nearest noun, that is, to join Peter to the word "rock." Thus, it is no surprise that Jesus says, "You are Peter AND upon this rock," not "...but upon this rock." Moreover, according to the companion passage in John 1:42, Jesus, in Matthew 16:18 could have said "You are Cephas and upon this rock." In this case there would be absolutely no room to argue against "rock" referring back to "Cephas," since both mean the same thing. Since in saying "Cephas which when translated is Peter," John 1:42 shows us that "Cephas" is equivalent to "Peter," thus Peter is equivalent to rock.
This is a simple syllogism: If (1) Cephas = rock; and (2) Cephas = Peter; then (3) Peter = rock.
(7) As I argued in Jesus, Peter and the Keys, another thing that compels us to identify Peter as the rock is what Jesus did not say. He did not say, "upon THE rock" or "upon A rock," both of which would have made the identity of the rock that much more ambiguous. Of "this," "the," and "a," the word "this" is the only one that would substantially limit the identity of the rock to Peter. This is especially noticeable when we add the words "this same rock" or "this very rock" to the sentence to clarify any apparent ambiguity, as I suggested in Jesus, Peter and the Keys. The KJV translators had no problem translating the Greek tautee tee as "this same" or "the same" because they recognized the demonstrative force this adjective could carry (cf. 2 Cor. 9:4-5; 8:6; 1 Cor. 7:20; Acts 13:33), as did other translations such as the NIV, NEB, and NASB in other verses of Scripture.
(8) The attempt by Mr. White to divorce Peter from his faith/revelation is not well supported by the testimony of the early Fathers. In our papacy debate, we pointed out to Mr. White that the preponderant evidence shows that the Fathers understood Peter's faith and Peter's person as one. If Mr. White would like us to reproduce that evidence we would be happy to do so. This makes perfect sense in light of #5 above. Since in John 1:42 Jesus had already assigned the word "rock" to Peter's person, not any sort of faith/revelation, then this should serve as the exegetical precedent in assigning the identity of the word "rock" in other places that use Peter's given name, i.e., Matthew 16:18. In other words, in John 1:42 there is no faith/revelation elicited from Simon that prompts Jesus to change his name to Peter, yet we know from John 1:42 that Simon is definitely given a name that only means "rock." Thus, there is simply no biblical precedent to conclude that his name change in Matthew 16:18 must necessarily be due to something other than Peter's person. We understand, of course, that the "person" encompasses all that Peter is, including his faith/revelation given from the Father, but this cannot be separated from his person, and it cannot exclude any other aspect of his person. Attempts to do so are simply not supported by Scripture.
(9) Regarding my argument on page 25 of Jesus, Peter and the Keys that nouns do not have person and thus one cannot say that "you" must be divorced from "rock" in Matthew 16:18 based on the grammatical argument of "person," Mr. White writes:
"I have consistently used the term 'person' in its English equivalent, attempting to communicate the fact that Jesus is shifting in His terminology by referring to something other than Peter by using [tautee tee]. It is a hollow victory indeed that only proves that I do not always use technical terminology when attempting to communicate a point to non-Greek speaking audiences. Hence, leaving the matter of the term 'person' aside and dealing with the argument as I have presented it above, and as I presented it in 1990 in my published works, does Sungenis succeed in responding to the argument itself? No, he does not. In fact, if one removes the terminological issue, Sungenis fails completely to interact with the argument as presented!"
Let's examine Mr. White's little tirade. First, I suspect that Mr. White realizes that he got caught with his grammatical pants down by claiming that an indirect address is equivalent to "third person." English grammars do not define indirect address in terms of "person." Hence, to argue, even on an elementary level which Mr. White claims he is doing, that
"Next, note that when Christ speaks to Peter, He does so in the second person; that is, direct address. Yet, the term "this rock" is third person (indirect address indicated by the use of [tautee tee]), making the differentiation between "Peter" and "this rock" complete..." (Answers to Catholic Claims, 1990, p. 105)
is very misleading, especially for the untrained and uneducated audience that Mr. White says he was appealing to. White's use of "person" implies that there is a well-recognized grammatical rule which negates any association of a direct address with an indirect address. Who among his novice audience would have been the wiser unless some Catholic apologist pointed it out?
Even without the terminological details of "person" that I first used to rebut Mr. White's comments, his argument is still totally fallacious. Irrespective of "person," there is no English grammar rule that says that because an indirect address follows or is in the vicinity of a direct address then the indirect address cannot be identified with the direct address. That is totally bogus, and if Mr. White continues to propound such illegitimate arguments then I will continue to press the technical argument of "person" to his audiences, as well as the fallaciousness of his "direct/indirect" argumentation.
Mr. White continues:
"Does he [Sungenis] deny that the context and flow of the passage must be taken into account to answer this question? None of the real issues are touched upon at all by Sungenis, and this despite the fact that I pointed these things out to him in the Boston College debate earlier the same year!"
Here we find Mr. White doing his usual grandstanding to his audience. The reality is that I touched on many of the "real issues" in Jesus, Peter and the Keys, having contributed over 20 separate pieces to the book, some of considerable length. By the way, one piece I am quite happy to have included was a rebuttal to Mr. White's arguments concerning the "imperative mood" of Acts 15:13 in which the bishop James says, "Listen to me, brothers" and of which Mr. White claims that by this "command" James is exerting indisputable authority over the assembly of elders and bishops at the Jerusalem council, which, in turn, does not place Peter at the top. This is one of the most lame arguments I have ever heard from a Protestant apologist. You will find my rebuttal on pages 96-97 of Jesus, Peter and the Keys. It shows that Mr. White does not know Greek as well as he thinks he knows it.
(10) If Mr. White chooses not to accept these explanations, then he must give us a compelling reason why the reference to "rock" in Matthew 16:18, since Peter's name means rock (as proved from John 1:42), cannot, under any circumstances, refer to Peter. I have never heard him declare, verbally or in writing, that Catholicism possesses a perfectly plausible explanation of Matthew 16:18. He can claim all he wants that "rock" refers to Peter's confession, but what he must answer is this: if he requires his students not to see even the possibility that Peter is the rock of Matthew 16:18, what specifically in the text of Matthew 16 prohibits us from identifying the rock as Peter? If there is nothing that prohibits us from doing such, and if there is nothing in the text that requires us to divorce Peter's person from Peter's faith, then Catholicism has a perfectly plausible explanation of this passage.
On the other side, the level of difficulty with the passage has been proven by no less than two competing Protestant interpretations of the account, one saying that the rock refers to Peter's confession, the other saying that rock refers to Christ. With such diametrically opposed explanations, we must insist that the text is not as clear as Mr. White presumes it to be. So much for Sola Scriptura.
Hence, unless there is some overwhelming and compelling evidence to doubt the historic Catholic interpretation, then we're just going to continue on as before and Mr. White can go pound his Protestant sand. Regardless, let me offer again to Mr. White that I will debate him, anytime and anywhere, on this or any other subject. Let this serve as an open invitation to him.
Robert Sungenis
Any portion of this open letter may be cited and quoted by anyone wishing to use it.
James White and Robert Sungenis on Matthew 16:18
by David Palm, Copyright (c) 11 June, 1997
Protestant apologist James White recently placed on his Web site a reply to some observations made by Robert Sungenis in the latest major book on the papacy, Jesus, Peter, and the Keys ( henceforthJP&K; see White's article Robert Sungenis and epi taute ). There Sungenis argued that the demonstrative pronoun ("this") in Matt 16:18 may be emphatic, thus the translation might run: "You are Rock, and on this very rock I will build my Church" (JP&K, 25). It is a minor, albeit interesting, exegetical observation. But the response it elicited from Mr. White raised so many of the fundamental questions that surface as we debate the meaning of Matt 16:13-20 that I was moved to respond myself. Mr. Sungenis has his own set of replies to Mr. White's arguments (see above); the thoughts presented here are my own.
[It is not easy to label concisely the different interpretations of Matt 16:18 without prejudice. For this paper, I will speak of the interpretation in which "this rock" is taken as Peter's confession as the "confessional interpretation" and that in which "this rock" refers to the person of Peter as the "personal interpretation."]
Mr. White acknowledges on strictly grammatical grounds the validity of Sungenis's observation that the demonstrative ("this") may be emphatic ("this very"). But he continues to question the validity of the identification between Peter and the Rock. He says, "the translation 'and upon this very rock I will build My church' does not shed any light whatsoever upon the identity of the 'rock'". Indeed, he attempts to turn this argument against the Catholic view: "The more ["this"] is emphasized, the less likely the antecedent is Peter. That is, the stronger ["this"] is translated, the stronger the disjunction between Peter and this rock."
I would note first that the basic rule of grammar is that a demonstrative generally refers to its nearest antecedent. So Mr. White should acknowledge candidly that he is arguing against this rule from the start. And strangely, he seems to be relying rather heavily on the English distinction between the proper name Peter and the noun rock. The distinction he draws seems fairly plausible when one prints the verse as, "You are Peter and on this rock..." but I think that virtually anybody will see that to say (as we have in the Greek), "You are Rock and on this [very] rock I will build my Church" does seem to indicate and emphasize a direct connection between the demonstrative and its immediate antecedent.
Nor can any great mileage -- either lexical or grammatical -- be derived from the difference between the Greek words petros and petra. As Greek scholar D. A. Carson says,
"Although it is true that petros and petra can mean "stone" and "rock" respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry. . . . The Greek makes the distinction betweenpetros and petra simply because it is trying to preserve the pun, and in Greek the feminine petra could not very well serve as a masculine name. . . . Had Matthew wanted to say no more than that Peter was a stone in contrast with Jesus the Rock, the more common word would have been lithos ("stone" of almost any size). Then there would have been no pun -- and that is just the point!" ("Matthew," in The Expositor's Bible Commentary [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984], 8:368)
But before I rest my case, let's look a little more closely at White's argument. White asserts that, "one is struck with how strange it is that Jesus takes the 'long way around' to get to the equation 'Peter = rock' if in fact that is His intention. It would have been much simpler to say, 'You are Peter, and on you I will build My church.' But He didn't say that."
Actually, it does not strike me as strange at all that Jesus would take the "long way around." The Lord so frequently speaks in parables, metaphors, and aphorisms, all delivered with that typically Semitic delight in robust and colorful language, that to me this argument falls quite flat. There is simply no inherent reason to expect the Lord to express Himself in the most pedestrian prose. Indeed, we may turn this argument around. Would it not be strange for the Lord, immediately after calling Simon the "Rock," to expect His hearers to understand his next reference to "rock" to refer to a completely different antecedent? Is this not the "long way around"? If He meant to express what Mr. White insists that He does, then why not take the shortest route and simply say, "You are Peter and on your confession I will build my Church"? Or better yet, as Mr. Sungenis has suggested elsewhere, why not use alla instead of kai to join these clauses and say, "You are Peter but on your confession I will build my Church"?
This is exactly what Mr. White wants the Lord to say, phrased in the most direct possible way. There would be no possibility of ambiguity if this was our text. But, to quote White, "He didn't say that."
White also asserts that, "A natural reading of the passage . . . makes it plain what must function as the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun." To him, the "natural" antecedent is the confession made by St. Peter that Jesus is the Christ. But Mr. Sungenis has, in private correspondence with me, noted that there is no explicit word or phrase in the preceding verses that can function as this "confessional" antecedent for the demonstrative. Mr. White must supply some words such as "Peter's confession" or "Peter's faith" to act as the antecedent, since no such words actually appear in the text. This is hardly a natural reading. But there is an explicit antecedent sitting right next to the demonstrative pronoun, namely, "Rock," to which "this rock" quite naturally refers. For this reason Protestant scholars have almost universally abandoned attempts to link "this rock" to some remote and unspoken antecedent and have rightly labeled post-Reformation attempts to do so as the product of Protestant bias, not of grammatico-historical exegesis. [This shift in Protestant scholarship is well documented in JP&K. See my essay above "James White vs. Jesus, Peter, and the Keys" for further details on patristic exegesis of this passage.]
But White develops his argument a bit further and here we get to the heart of a challenge that he and some other Protestant apologists have floated for a while. He seeks to derive considerable mileage out of the fact that the Lord "begins with direct personal address to Peter" but then "switches from direct address to the demonstrative 'this'." White asserts that this change in address proves that "'this rock' is referring to something other than the person who was being addressed in the preceding phrase. . ."
At most one may concede that such a switch might indicate the change that White avers, although it is far from the conclusive (or even compelling) argument that he supposes. I think, rather, that White is simply being insensitive to common use of a rhetorical device. A prime minister might say when eulogizing a famous humanitarian,
"You are a Beacon of Hope, and to this beacon all Europe will look as a source of comfort in these dark days."
Or a king says to his champion,
"You are The Hammer, and under this hammer all the enemies of England will be crushed."
These are solemn, even stylized pronouncements. But we all understand immediately what is being said. Far from inclining us to hunt for some separate referent to which the demonstrative refers, we see immediately that the same person is addressed. To introduce (indeed, to insist on) a separate referent is not only foreign to the rhetorical device, but destroys it. These examples illustrate the almost jarring disjunction that the confessional interpretation introduces into the text.
But Mr. White argues that the context of Matt 16:18 makes this disjunction necessary:
"The content of [Peter's] confession is, in fact, divine revelation, immediately impressed upon the soul of Peter. This is the immediate context of verse 18, and to divorce verse 18 from what came before leads to the errant shift of attention from the identity of Christ to the identity of Peter that is found in Roman Catholic exegesis. Certainly we cannot accept the idea, presented in Roman theology, that immediately upon pronouncing the benediction upon Peter's confession of faith, the focus shifts away from that confession and what it reveals to Peter himself and some office with successors based upon him! Not only does the preceding context argue against this, but the following context likewise picks up seemlessly with what came before: the identity of Jesus as Messiah."
The careful reader will notice that Mr. White has had to jump around the true immediate context, both preceding and following this phrase, in order to make this point. For immediately prior to proclaiming that "upon this rock I will build my Church," the Lord focused His attention on the person of Peter: "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 immediately following the statement concerning "this rock" our Lord declares to Peter, "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." As New Testament scholar R. T. France says,
"The word-play, and the whole structure of the passage, demands that this verse is every bit as much Jesus' declaration about Peter as v.16 was Peter's declaration about Jesus." (Matthew, [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985], 256)
So Mr. White is trying to introduce a oblique and remote reference into what is rather a seemless declaration of Peter's new role in the Kingdom. Reformed theologian J. Knox Chamblin, taking quite a contrary view to White, very neatly packages all of these observations in his own exegesis of the passage:
"By the words 'this rock' Jesus means not himself, nor his teaching, nor God the Father, nor Peter's confession, but Peter himself. The phrase is immediately preceded by a direct and emphatic reference to Peter. As Jesus identifies himself as the Builder, the rock on which he builds is most naturally understood as someone (or something) other than Jesus himself. The demonstrative this, whether denoting what is physically close to Jesus or what is literally close in Matthew, more naturally refers to Peter (v.18) than to the more remote confession (v.16). The link between the clauses of verse 18 is made yet stronger by the play on words, 'You are Peter (Gk. Petros), and on this rock (Gk. Petra) I will build my church.' As an apostle, Peter utters the confession of verse 16; as a confessor he receives the designation this rock from Jesus." ("Matthew" in W. A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Commentary on the Bible [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989], 742; cited inJP&K, 30)
White is also ignoring the broader biblical context as well. Too few Protestant apologists take sufficient notice of the name change, from Simon to Peter (Rock). Name changes in Scripture indicate a change in role, usually bound up closely with that person's new prominence in salvation history. So, for example, God changes Abram's name to Abraham and Scripture tells us of the significance of this change:
"No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come forth from you" (Gen 17:5-6).
Similarly, the Angel of the Lord changes Jacob's name to Israel and speaks of the significance of this change:
Then he said, "Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed" (Gen 32:28).
So when Jesus declares to Simon that "You are Peter," the biblically literate reader is primed by this name change to expect some explanation of the significance of this change and of Peter's new role in salvation history. And this they get in the traditional, Catholic understanding of this verse: "I tell you, you are Peter [Rock], and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it." So the view championed by Mr. White has to ignore not only the most immediate context of the pronouncement but this broader biblical precedent as well.
I believe that, far from being the "significant argument" that White supposes it to be, this appeal to the demonstrative as support of a switch in subjects misfires on many fronts. Basic rules of grammar tell against it; it is forced to supply an implicit and remote antecedent when a near and explicit antecendent already exists; it is insensitive to stylistic language; it destroys the word play in the passage; the immediate context both preceding and following the phrase tells against it; and it ignores broader biblical examples.
White insists that Catholic apologists cannot continue to rely so heavily on Matt 16:18-19 until they respond to his "meaningful challenge" to their exegesis. We have so responded. The challenge now goes the other way. In light of a host of exegetical observations as well as the massive testimony from the early Church Fathers, will Mr. White finally admit what even the finest conservative Protestant exegetes now readily acknowledge, that Peter is the Rock of Matt 16:18?
David Palm