(Sorry!
—clarification: Let’s make that: “the literal sense of the bone-headed
original-at-one-remove.” The holy Ghost is no bonehead, and you can quote me on that. God’s Hebrew must not be blamed for St. Peter’s Aramaic, or for Zondervan’s gawd-awful English prose.)
Both of Simon Peter’s primal papal epistles are tucked away near the back of the New Testament. Paul insisted that all of his own epistles must come first, before Peter’s – not just because Paul always needs to be first, but the other reason he gave is that Silvanias peppered the holy Ghost's original thoughts with unintended howlers. Paul didn’t mind so much that the book of
1 Peter is addressed to "Elected strangers" (“
eklektos paropid-E-mos”). What annoyed Paul is that the Peter’s first epistle, from the first sentence, invites ridicule, beginning as it does with a rude allusion to those post-crucifixion holes in the Lord's thorn-pierced brow, and nail-pierced hands and feet, and sword-pierced side. Silvanius wrote it down, just so: “
rhantismos haima i-E-sous” (“Jesus, the human blood-sprinkler” [
1 Peter 1:1-2]). Which was a stupid thing to say.
“Jesus!” prayed Paul (when he read that), “just how
asynetos can this Cephas
get?”).
Today, even the most conservative Bible scholars concede that Simon Peter, try as he may, could not match Paul’s fine literary style. But I thank God for it. Here a few representative nuggets from Saint Peter’s epistles, translated word for word, from the Greek:
For unto us did the prophets minister the things which [...] the holy Ghost sent down from Heaven, which things the angels desire to look into, which is why ye must wear a girdle around the loins of your brain (1 Peter 1:12-13).
He that is blind cannot see afar off. (2 Peter 1:9)
Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by reminding you, knowing that it will not be long now before I must stop wearing a tent. (2 Peter 1:13-14)
(In 1969, I overheard one translator of the
New International Version remark that he lay awake nights wondering how to make St. Peter's prose "less infelicitous" (i.e.,
less funny in English than in Greek).
Simon Peter explained to his first-century readers— i.e., those who could make sense of Silvanius’s ungrammatical Greek —that his two books were not for laughs, but "to stimulate you to wholesome thinking." His chief concerns were, as always, the twin evils of male lust and female insubordination— the two vices that Peter, speaking from experience, names as the root of all unpleasantness (
2 Peter 3:1). "Woe unto those men," he declared, who "walk according to the flesh in the filthiness of lust!" and woe unto those "women who despise authority!" In his two epistles, no less than in his sermons, Simon Peter could not stop the holy Ghost from drumming on those same two, highly stimulating themes: "Got male lust? Repent! Got female insubordination? Repent!" (e.g.,
1 Peter 1:14, 2:11, 4:2-3;
2 Peter 1:4, 2:10, 2:18, 3:1-5).
One such passage in
1 Peter was aimed by the holy Ghost directly at Simon Peter's unwholesome and insubordinate wife, Maria:
Fear God. Fear also the emperor. Slaves, obey your masters with all reverence, no matter whether they are good and gentle, or abusive... Even so, you wives must remain in total subjection to your husbands ... just as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him her lord and master. (1 Peter 2:17-18, 3:1)
Maria refused to read it. She said to Peter, "
You read it."
Peter said, "C'mon, Maria, you
know I cannot read."
That Maria! What a shrew! “Okay, okay,” she said. She then pretended to read, to her husband, what Silvanius had written down—but she tricked him: "Throw off the yoke, ye slaves. Even so, ye wives, cuckold your husbands, just as Sara cuckolded Abraham, first with Pharaoh, then with Abimelech, calling them ‘lord’ and ‘master’" (
Gen. 12:10-20, 20:2-7).
“Whuh?” said Peter. (Manuscript copies of
1 Peter had already been dispatched to the churches of Judaea, Galilee, Samaria, and Syria.) "Silvanius has made a mistake!"
But Maria was just jerking his chain. Cruel.
Simon Peter surely deserves more respect than he ever got from Maria. Though hen-pecked, he went on to become the world’s first Pope (
Matt. 16:18). Also, the first married Pope (
Matt. 8:14-19). Also, the only evangelical Pope, ever (
2 Peter 1:1). Also, the only circumcised heterosexual Jewish Pope. Also, the only Pope who ever walked on water, for a short distance (
Matt. 14:29-30). Also, the only Pope ever to be crucified upside-down and butt-naked (although he was surely not the only Pope who deserved it).
As far as Popes go, I am partial to the new one, Joe "Benedict XVI" Ratzinger. He’s a mensch, and a smart fellow, and well-read (and I’m not just talking about Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx—this Pope has read St. Bruno of Querfurt!). But despite his relatively higher IQ, Benedict XVI has no bragging rights over Simon Peter I. Nickname notwithstanding, Pope “Cephas” was not so much literally "dumb as a rock" as just slightly off-kilter.
Reality Deficit Disorder, would be my guess.
– L.
(
Tomorrow: Simon Peter's little brother, bashful Andrew!)
