Peter and the Inversion of the Pagan World

Thanks to Brandon Robbins for pointing me to a particular context for Peter’s confession in the Gospel of Matthew which I will attempt to unpack more here.

In Matthew 16, Jesus and the disciples visit the town of Caesarea Philippi. It is here that Peter makes his famous confession of Jesus as the “anointed one,” the Christ, the son of the living God, to which Jesus replies that Peter is the “rock” upon which the church will be built, and the gates of Hell (or Hades) will not prevail against it.

It is here, as he always does, that Jesus points to the sacrificial system that underlies pagan culture, and then inverts it.

At Caesarea Philippi were considerable rock formations atop a spring, and at this site pagan rituals took place, originally organized around the Greek god Pan (and perhaps even earlier to the Canaanite god Baal). In Jesus’s day, Philip the Tetrarch, missing neither an opportunity to flatter his patrons nor himself , had consecrated the worship to Caesar Augustus, the “son of god” in the pagan Roman pseudo-theocracy of the time, but given the general friendliness of paganism to the pantheon, it does not seem unreasonable to consider that some worship to Pan may have continued to take place there. [N.B.: Pan was a half-goat, half-man god, a “monster” that is typically seen at the “end of the world” when the mimetic frenzy has reached its highest heights. Both Pan and Baal were fertility gods; one is instantly reminded of the lush, fertile landscape of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the narcissistic actor Nick Bottom finds himself with a donkey’s head amid all the mimetic frenzy of the night intended to evoke lustful celebrations of May Day.]

Pagans would come to these rock formations and throw animal sacrifices into the water, which was believed to be an access point to the pagan underworld of death — Hades. How the waters treated the sacrifice told the worshipper if the gods had accepted the sacrifice or not.

As we know from Girard, animal sacrifice always derives from human sacrifice. At no point does a culture begin with animal sacrifice; a culture always starts on human sacrifice. We can only assume that, whether to the god Pan or to Baal, some sort of ritual around the guilt of a human victim would have begun at these springs, allowing the “gods” to sort out the guilt of a scapegoated victim by their survival or death and removing the immediate bloodshed from the community — thus improving the benefits of the sacrificial mechanism. Later, to become more beneficial and less costly, animal sacrifice would have evolved.

It is here, at the site of pagan temples currently organized around worship to the “son of god,” the divinized Caesar Augustus, that Jesus asks:

“Who do people say that the son of man is?”

The disciples answer back the usual list of answers: Elijah, John the Baptist, a prophet, etc.

Jesus first addresses the perceptions of the crowds. Then, he presses further, asking for what the disciples themselves think: “But who do you say that I am?”

Simon replies, “You are the Christ [the anointed one], the son of the living God.”

Simon gives an answer not listed in the litany of answers given earlier, the answers assumed by the wisdom of the crowds. He gives his own individuated reply, addressed directly to Jesus, in a one-on-one conversation. (Poetically — as always occurs in the Bible — Simon Peter’s denial of his association with Jesus will play out later in tragic detail.)

Simon’s answer inverts the assumptions of the pagan world around them, the pagan world in which they are merely travelers, not residents, the pagan world around which they live but is alien to them. Simon’s answer denies that it is Caesar Augustus, faraway in Rome, who is the son of god; it is instead this itinerant Jewish rabbi standing in front of him.

Jesus responds, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven” [Jesus’ response here notes that Simon is not imitating this answer from someone around him, at his level, but is receiving wisdom from on high, above him] “and I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

Peter, “petra” in the Koine Greek, refers to a large rock, a cliff, a cave. As noted by Robbins in the video linked above, the Gospel of Matthew does not use “lithos” here - a stone, a pebble. It is very clear that Matthew intends to liken Peter to the large rock formations around them, upon which pagan worship and sacrifice has been organized. Jesus is saying that he, unlike the pagan gods, will not have worship organized around ritualistic sacrifice of scapegoated victims, but instead will start it simply on Peter’s confession of faith in him as the “anointed one.”

It is immediately after this that Jesus begins to speak to the disciples that “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” Jesus begins discussing his own role as the risen, innocent victim in light of this. Peter’s confession of faith is a pivotal moment in the Gospel of Matthew.

What exactly is Peter’s confession of faith? He confesses, even though he doesn’t know it at the exact moment in time, that Jesus is the true innocent victim, the anointed one, the Christos. The remarkable exchange between Peter and Jesus inverts the pagan paradigm. Jesus suggests a way of being in human togetherness that is simply a human acknowledgement of the truth of the innocent victim, and his primacy. This acknowledgement is not received from others in flesh and blood; instead, this is a revelation from on high.

And the gods who keep the gates of death cannot prevail against it.