of senses. We may therefore ask: which of these significations corresponds best with the facts recorded of him and his ministry? Sometimes the term is used to signify a spring or source. Again, Christ Himself is described as the Rock or Foundation. Then, again, it is applied to one who has made a good or successful beginning in the work of the Gospel; or it is used to designate persons of distinguished merit in the establishment of the Church. In the two latter applications of the metaphor there can be no doubt that Peter was evidently a "foundation of the Church. At his first appearance as a public minister of the Gospel, he converted 3000 persons in one day; and immediately after that signal triumph a Christian Church was, as it were, born into the world. The same apostle may, perhaps with some propriety, be regarded as the beginner of a Church among the Gentiles, by the conversion of the Centurion Cornelius, his family and friends; and to the merit, if we may so speak, of this transaction, he himself lays claim publicly, and without contradiction before the Council assembled at Jerusalem.

In the sense, therefore, of a beginner, or first builder of the Gospel edifice, Peter, his faith and his labours together, were in exact conformity with the standard of merit set up by Christ himself, the foundation or rock upon which the Church was built; and for this task he was especially qualified by the strength of his faith, the ardour of his zeal, and the natural activity of his character. He, therefore, took the lead in the great work in hand; and the post was assigned to him with gratitude and reverence by his colleagues and fellow-labourers.

It may, perhaps, be contended that these acts of St. Peter were in fact the acts of a chief and leader; and that inasmuch as they were done in the face of the whole Church, and with the full concurrence and approbation of the Apostolic College, they raise some presumption of an acknowledgment of a leadership or primacy in him; and that in such a way as to connect their conduct in this respect with the words of Christ, 'Thou art Peter; and upon this Rock will I found my Church,' &c., and thus to furnish such a practical exposition as would suffice to invest him with the character of an acknowledged chief or primate.'—P. 15.

He continues with the following comparison of the relative labours of S. Peter and S. Paul, and their results as bearing on the question at issue, in which, although he has said more than due reverence for S. Peter and that divine inspiration of which he was the subject can approve, the main substance of his

remarks remains.

'On the other hand, it will be observed, that although St. Peter took the lead in the first construction of a Church, he did not insist upon that lead afterwards. When St. Paul stepped in, another "master-builder" appeared upon the scene-a man of equal energy and greater steadiness of purpose -one whose convictions were equally strong, and whose learning and powers of address were incalculably greater. When, therefore, Paul claimed his exclusive mission for the conversion of the Gentiles, Peter put forward no claim to interfere with that branch of the work in hand, on the score of his own initiative act in the same cause. Again, neither in the extant works of any of the apostles, nor in those of St. Peter himself, is any claim to such a primacy alleged on his behalf. It is not probable that if

1 This, at least, is opposed to what S. Paul tells us of himself: 'His bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.'-2 Cor. x. 10.

such a claim had been known to, and admitted by the apostles, it should thus have remained unnoticed. This neglect could not have arisen from want of occasions, during his and their lifetime, for bringing it forward and affirming it. We cannot presume that-acting as they did, under the direction of the Holy Spirit-they would, if it had been known to them, have wilfully disregarded, or sinfully suppressed it. Perhaps still less should we be justified in supposing, that if the apostle Peter himself had been conscious of so great a trust reposed in him, and so high a duty cast upon him by his Lord, he would have shrunk either from the assertion of the one, or the performance of the other.'-Pp. 16, 17.

With regard to the second question, of S. Peter's personal residence in Rome, we decidedly differ from our author. Mr. Greenwood is among the few who hold that S. Peter never was at Rome at all. Consistently with this view, he rejects the opinion of those who conclude from Eusebius that the Babylon where he wrote his first epistle was Rome; and, like Salmasius, Dupin, and a few others, he contends for the original Babylon of Mesopotamia.1

In the age of the apostle Peter, the Babylonian settlement of the Dispersion was probably the most important colony of the nation. The mission of that apostle was to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel," a designation especially applied by Christ to the Jews of the Dispersion, denoting their final severance from the land of promise. Conf. Gal. ii. 6—9. It is reasonable to believe that, with this special mission on his mind, his attention would be turned principally to this most appropriate field of labour; and when we find the same apostle afterwards dating a letter to his converts of the immediately adjoining provinces from that city by name, it would be difficult to persuade us that it was written from a city between two and three thousand miles off, where he had little business connected with his peculiar mission, and where, in fact, his colleague Paul was labouring with so much assiduity and success.-P. 243.

But these reasons seem historically insufficient. We know that in the age of Strabo, Babylon was already much deserted; ἐρημία μεγάλη ἐστιν ἡ μεγάλη πόλις. In the reign of C. Caligula, happened the defeat and death of Anileus, the Jewish governor of Babylon, and the consequent ill treatment of the Jews by the Babylonians which drove them to Seleucia. There they were almost exterminated in a massacre; the few who escaped fleeing to Ctesiphon. But Ctesiphon being near Seleucia, and the Jews still fearing the Seleucians, they finally

To these Mr. Greenwood adds Valesius (p. 245), but in this he is in error.Valesius, as might be expected, is express on the other side-his words are 'Sunt qui in dictâ Petri Epistolâ, Babylonis nomine non Romam sed Babylonem ipsam, quæ caput fuit Assyriorum, designari contendunt. Verum hi omnium veterum Patrum testimoniis refelluntur, &c.; and he proceeds to argue out at length that it could have been no other place but Rome. Annot, in Euseb. Hist. II. xv. Nor is Peter de Marca as decided on the question as Mr. Greenwood thinks; he concludes with the words 'utcunque se res habet;' though no doubt he does, of the two, preter the opinion above ascribed to him.

Pearson's Opusc, Ed. Churton, II., Diss. I. cap. viii,

betook themselves to the cities of Neerda and Nisibis.1 It seems clear, therefore, that there could have been no sufficient number of Jews at Babylon, in the time of S. Peter, to induce him to go thither. We agree with Bishop Pearson, that there were probably at that time more Jews at Rome than in Babylon for the account of Josephus seems to imply,' as the Bishop says, that all the Jews then of those parts dwelt not in Babylon, but either in Ctesiphon or in Neerda and Nisibis.'

:

We think, with Bishop Pearson, that the Babylon in question was the Babylon in Egypt, near Heliopolis, of which the names of the Bishops are found appended to the acts of the Councils of Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. That this is so, is rendered more probable by the mention in the first epistle of S. Mark, who, we know, certainly visited Egypt, and founded the Church in Alexandria. Bishop Pearson supposes him, after his rejection by S. Paul, to have gone straight to S. Peter at Antioch, and with him to have travelled into Egypt, and there, after that apostle's death, to have written his gospel. But it may be objected to this, that Eusebius states, both in his Chronicon and in his History, that S. Mark was martyred in the 8th of Nero, before S. Peter. But as the Alexandrian Chronicle puts it in the year 67, the 13th of Nero, and Tillemont, among the moderns, not without cogent reasons, in 68, the best date, on the whole, perhaps, of S. Peter's death, we cannot depend implicitly on the account of Eusebius, which not only has the above authority against it, but is, besides, inconsistent with other events of the history.

But Mr. Greenwood conceives the internal evidence of S. Peter's first epistle to be against such a view.

If,' he says,' 'the genuineness of the second epistle of Peter be taken for granted (though it be admitted that up to the middle of the fourth century doubts were still entertained upon that point-(Euseb. lib. iii. c. 3,) that apostle, when he wrote it, anticipated not only his speedy martyrdom, but foretold the manner of it, "even as the Lord had showed him." (2 Pet. i. 14.) This Epistle contains, moreover, an intimation that it was intended for the use of the same persons, and that it was written from the same place, as the first Epistle. (2 Pet. iii. 1.) If, therefore, Peter did not die in the Mesopotamian Babylon, he must have quitted it very shortly after he wrote this second epistle; and in the short interval between the writing of that epistle and his own death, he must have travelled to Rome to honour that city by his martyrdom.'

We answer, that if for the 'Mesopotamian' Babylon he reads Egyptian,' there is no reason why this order of events may not have held. What precise space of time the words Taxivý eσTIV ἡ ἀπόθεσις may have embraced we cannot say. Mr. Greenwood would, we think, make the author's death follow the

1 Josephus, Antiq., book xviii. chapter 9.

writing of that letter more speedily than there is any necessity for; and he thinks both events happened in the same place, Babylon of Mesopotamia. But there is no reason why S. Peter may not have written his first epistle in Babylon of Egypt, and soon after have travelled to Rome; there have written the other, and suffered in the persecution of Nero, as history relates. It is true that S. Peter addresses his second epistle to the same class of persons to which he had written the first: the circumcision dispersed throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia: but there is nothing in this epistle to prove that it was written immediately after the first, or from the same place.

However this may be, it is certain that S. Peter is personally connected with Rome by the explicit declarations of the fathers from S. Ignatius and S. Irenæus inclusive, and by the universal tradition of the Church. This, Bishop Pearson and Cave have proved almost to demonstration. Mr. Greenwood, too, is quite aware of the number of witnesses on this side of the question, for he has dedicated nearly a chapter and a half to their consideration; but with a strange want of appreciation of the weight of their evidence-unanswerable in the case of some, and overwhelming in the whole-he sums up, and finally decides against them.

We know that at the outset there are great difficulties in the chronological part of the question; yet, as these difficulties can extend but over a few years, twelve at the most, (i. e. from A.D. 54 to 66, our date of his martyrdom); and as they are, in part at least, the result of our ignorance of S. Peter's life and acts, they are, if any evidence at all, a merely negative one; and as such, few, we presume, will think them sufficient to set aside the positive testimony of so many independent witnesses, from almost the very time of S. Peter himself.

One of the arguments on which Mr. Greenwood relies for the support of his opinion, is contained in the following passage, which we insert as we find it, with every wish to do justice to himself and his statements :

'It is manifest that Peter was not at Rome when Paul, very shortly before his own death, wrote his second epistle to Timothy; for it is inconceivable that, if he had been there at that moment, the latter should have omitted all notice of so eminent a colleague, not only in the body of the letter, where he mentions several of his fellow-labourers by name, but also in the salutations he sends to his disciples from their common friends at Rome. (2 Tim. iv. 21; Conf. Macknight on the Epistles, iv. 153). But Peter and Paul are said both to have suffered about the same time; neither is it improbable that they did; yet we think it extremely doubtful that they suffered in the same place. And when we take into the account that Peter's mission was to "those of the circumcision," as Paul's was those of the uncircumcision," it is most natural to suppose that both bore

"to

their testimony where it was most likely to conduce to the providential purpose the conversion, to wit, of Gentiles by Paul, and of Jews by Peter.'

-P. 244.

And then

'We cannot, therefore, help thinking it far more probable that St. Peter suffered in the Mesopotamian capital than that he travelled at the latest period of his life to Rome to partake the honour of martyrdom with his colleague St. Paul,'-P. 245.

It might be true that S. Peter was not at Rome when S. Paul wrote that letter to S. Timothy, and apparently such was actually the case: if so, the Romish tradition that he was bishop of that city for twenty-five years is greatly endangered, if not quite destroyed. But Mr. Greenwood seems to conclude that S. Paul's death followed almost immediately on that letter being written. On the contrary, that S. Paul had no such expectation when he wrote it, is clear, or he would not have sent to Ephesus for S. Timothy to come to him: and there seems no reason why S. Peter may not have arrived during the interval which must have elapsed between the despatch of S. Paul's letter and the arrival of S. Timothy.

Eusebius in his Chronicon says that S. Peter came to Rome in the 3d of C. Caligula [A.D. 39,] (which is too early, and is clearly a mistake), founded the Church there, and remained Bishop of the city twenty years: but, in his History, he puts this visit a few years later; about the 2nd of Claudius [A.D. 42]; and states that its specific object was the detection and punishment of Simon Magus. The Alexandrian Chronicle puts it still later; in the 7th of Claudius A.D. 47, but the statement of Eusebius, with the account in the Chronicon of his martyrdom in the 13th year of Nero, has given ground for some Romish writers to maintain that he was Bishop of Rome for twenty-five years but they have been unable to answer the objection that, in A.D. 42, S. Peter had not left Judæa; for he was in that country during the whole of Herod Agrippa's reign, which did not terminate till the 4th of Claudius, A.D. 44; nor have they given any satisfactory solution of the difficulties arising from the fact, that when S. Paul wrote to the Romans, in A.d. 53, no apostle had then visited them-for he says expressly that he would build on no man's foundation; and that in the letters written by him during his first visit to the city (60 to 62), Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, not only is there no mention made of S. Peter, but in Colossians iv. 10, 11, he expressly confines the number of his ovvépyou to Aristarchus, Marcus, and Jesus surnamed Justus.' There is, however, one fact which may be thought in some degree to support their view. Eusebius says, from S. Clement Alex. (and it is generally received), that S. Mark wrote his Gospel at the request of