How Did Peter Die? The Evidence Under the Vatican

Cold open

Picture this. Rome, 1939. Beneath Saint Peter's Basilica, workmen are digging a tomb for a pope who has just died. And their shovels break through... into the roof of an ancient Roman tomb. Over the next ten years, they'd uncover a whole street of tombs, buried for sixteen hundred years.

And somewhere in that buried cemetery, right under the high altar, according to one of the oldest traditions in Christianity, lies a fisherman from Galilee.

Peter. The rock. The man with the keys. The man who denied even knowing Jesus, three times in one night. Not his finest hour.

The Bible tells us a great deal about how Peter lived. But it never tells us how he died. So how did he die? And is he really down there?

Today, we're going to find out what we can actually know. And we're going to be honest about it. When something comes from the Bible, I'll tell you. When it comes from early church tradition, I'll tell you that too. And when it's legend... well. You'll know.

Let's begin.

Simon, also known as Rock

Scripture

He starts out as plain Simon: "Simon bar-Jonah" in Matthew, "Simon, son of John" in John's Gospel. John says he came from Bethsaida, on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mark puts his house in Capernaum, just along the coast. And the trade is in the text: Mark says Simon and his brother Andrew were "casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen."

He was married, too: Jesus heals his mother-in-law, and Paul later mentions Peter's wife travelling with him. We're never told her name.

Then comes the nickname. In John's Gospel, the first time Jesus meets him, he says: "You shall be called Cephas." Kepha is Aramaic for rock, or stone. In Greek, that becomes Petros. So Jesus nicknamed him... Rocky.

And in Matthew's Gospel, the nickname becomes a promise. "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church... I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven."

Scholarship

What that verse means has divided Christians for centuries, and even early church writers read it differently: Augustine said the rock could be Christ himself, and left his readers to choose. Briefly and fairly: Catholic teaching sees Peter himself as the rock, with a role handed on to the bishops of Rome. Orthodox Christians honour Peter as first among the apostles, and many Orthodox writers stress the faith he confessed, shared by every bishop. Protestants read the rock as Peter's confession, as Christ himself, as Luther did, or as Peter personally, with no office handed down.

The man who got it wrong

Scripture

The Gospels don't polish Peter. He's the one who climbs out of the boat to walk on the water... and starts to sink. At the Last Supper he asks, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus answers, "Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward." And Peter insists he'll lay down his life.

That same night, in the high priest's courtyard, he denies even knowing Jesus. Three times. Then the rooster crows. And Luke adds one devastating detail: "The Lord turned and looked at Peter." Peter goes out, and weeps bitterly. All four Gospels record the denials.

But John's Gospel has a second chance. By the Sea of Galilee, after the resurrection, Jesus asks him three times: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Three denials. Three questions. Many readers have noticed that match.

And then Jesus says something strange. "When you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go."

And John explains: Jesus said this "to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God."

Hold on to that. It's the closest the Bible ever comes to telling us how Peter died.

Where the Bible goes quiet

Scripture

In Acts, Peter is the star of the early chapters: preaching, arrested, flogged, imprisoned. Then an angel breaks him out of jail... and Luke writes one of the most frustrating sentences in the Bible: "He departed and went to another place."

Another place. Thanks, Luke.

He appears once more, at the council in Jerusalem, and Paul says he opposed him to his face in Antioch. Paul mentions him a few more times. Then he's gone. The New Testament never says Peter went to Rome. It never describes his death. Not once.

And when Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, he greets more than two dozen people by name, but not Peter. That doesn't rule out Peter arriving later. But it's worth knowing.

So is there any hint in the Bible? Just one.

The letter called First Peter ends: "She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings, and so does Mark, my son."

Scholarship

Babylon? Most scholars read it as a code name for Rome, as in the Book of Revelation. Others suggest the real Babylon in Mesopotamia, or a place in Egypt also called Babylon. And many scholars think First Peter was written in Peter's name after his death; others defend Peter as its author. One hint. Two question marks.

The first witnesses

So, for Rome, we turn to the earliest Christian writers. Exactly what each one says.

Tradition

Witness number one: a letter from the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, usually dated to the nineties AD, and known as First Clement. It says that "Peter, through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two, but numerous labours; and when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him."

So: martyrdom, within living memory. But it doesn't name the place, the time, or the method. It's written from Rome, though, and right after Peter and Paul it mentions, in one translation, "a vast multitude of the elect" who "set a brave example among ourselves". Suggestive. Not spelled out.

Witness two: Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to execution in the early 100s, writes to the Romans: "I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you." Which suggests Peter and Paul had a special standing with that church. But again, no death scene.

Witness three, around 170: Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, quoted by the historian Eusebius. He says Peter and Paul "taught together in like manner in Italy, and suffered martyrdom at the same time". The Greek can also mean "about the same time".

Then, around 200, a Roman Christian named Gaius throws down a challenge to a rival, again preserved by Eusebius: "I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church."

A trophy. On the Vatican. Remember that word. Gaius doesn't say which apostle lies where, or whether a "trophy" means a grave or a victory monument. Eusebius takes it as Peter at the Vatican, Paul on the road to Ostia.

Head downwards

Tradition

Around the year 200, Tertullian of Carthage writes of Rome: "Where Peter endures a passion like his Lord's!" And elsewhere he spells it out. Quoting John 21, he says Peter is "girt by another, when he is made fast to the cross", in Rome, under Nero.

Then the famous twist. Eusebius, in the early three hundreds, drawing on a lost commentary by the scholar Origen, says of Peter: "at last, having come to Rome, he was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way."

One honest footnote: Origen's commentary is lost, and we only have Eusebius's summary, so we can't be sure which details are Origen's own.

Legend

But the story everyone remembers comes from the Acts of Peter, a religious novel from the late one hundreds that never became part of any Bible.

In it, Peter is fleeing Rome to escape arrest, and on the road out he meets the Lord coming the other way. "Lord, whither goest thou?" Or, in modern English, "Lord, where are you going?" The Latin tradition made that question famous as Quo vadis? And the answer: "I go into Rome to be crucified." "Lord, art thou being crucified again?" "Yea, Peter, I am being crucified again."

So Peter walks back into Rome, and in the end is crucified, at his own request, head downwards.

And an echo: "Lord, where are you going?" is the very question Peter asks at the Last Supper in John's Gospel. In the Latin Bible, word for word: Domine, quo vadis? Hard to miss.

In the novel, Peter's reason for hanging upside down is a mystical speech about the first man falling head first into the world. Nothing about being unworthy.

Tradition

The reason you've probably heard, that he wasn't worthy to die the way his Lord did, turns up later, around 392, in the writings of Jerome. Same pose, different explanation.

Scholarship

So when did he die? The earliest witnesses name no emperor. From Tertullian onwards, the tradition says Nero, who reigned until AD 68. Tacitus describes Nero's attack on Christians after the great fire of Rome in AD 64: some were "fastened on crosses". He names no one, but many historians link Peter's death to it. Under Nero: the steady tradition from about 200, and most historians find it plausible. The exact year: nobody knows.

Under the Vatican

Scholarship

Back underground. Pope Pius XII ordered a full excavation of that cemetery, mostly pagan family tombs. And right beneath the high altar, archaeologists found a small shrine, built against a wall plastered in red: the Red Wall. Brick stamps from a drain built with it date it to around AD 160. The shrine was simple: niches, a stone slab, two little columns. Most scholars think this is Gaius's "trophy".

That's the solid part. In the early three hundreds, the emperor Constantine's builders cut away a hillside and filled in a whole cemetery to build his basilica around this little shrine. Whatever they thought was there, they went to enormous lengths to put it at the centre.

In December 1950, Pius XII announced: "The tomb of the Prince of the Apostles has been found." But on the bones, he was cautious.

The grave beneath the shrine had been disturbed long ago, and bones found there came from more than one person, and even some animals.

Then the story turns into a detective novel.

Running at right angles to the Red Wall is another wall, scratched with hundreds of Christian graffiti. The epigrapher Margherita Guarducci spent years studying them. In 1953, by her account, she learned that early in the dig a workman had emptied a marble-lined niche in that wall, on the orders, he said, of Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, the basilica's administrator. The bones went into a wooden box... and into storage for about a decade, without, she says, the archaeologists knowing.

An anthropologist, Venerando Correnti, examined them. His findings: the human bones came from one individual. Male. Robust build. Aged roughly sixty to seventy. Guarducci reported that the earth on them matched the soil under the shrine, and that scraps of cloth with them were purple, woven with gold.

And from the red plaster where the two walls meet came a small broken fragment with a few Greek letters. Guarducci read them as Petros eni: "Peter is here", or "Peter is within." Others read the start of "Peter, in peace", a prayer rather than a label. The fragment is incomplete, and experts still disagree.

Guarducci argued that the bones were Peter's. And in June 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that the relics of Saint Peter had been "identified in a way that we can consider convincing". He added, frankly, that this would not end "the research, the verifications, the discussions and the controversies". Carefully worded, and not a dogma.

Antonio Ferrua, one of the original excavators, never accepted the identification. Critics point out that the bones spent years in a box with no proper record, and that a robust man in his sixties would fit Peter... and a great many other Romans.

When Pope Francis gave nine fragments to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 2019, the reliquary's inscription said, carefully, that they are believed to be Peter's.

So how sure can we be?

Scripture

The Bible: a fisherman, a leader, a failure, forgiven, and a foretold death with hands stretched out. No Rome by name, no cross, no date.

Tradition

Early tradition: martyrdom, by the 90s. A link to Rome's church, by the early 100s. Rome and martyrdom together, by about 170. A Vatican "trophy" and crucifixion, by about 200. Head downwards, in Origen, as Eusebius reports him, in the 200s. None of these writers claims to have seen the death. But none of them points anywhere other than Rome.

Legend

The oldest surviving telling of the upside-down cross, though, is the legend: the Acts of Peter, from the late 100s.

Scholarship

Today, most historians, Catholic, Protestant and secular, accept that Peter probably died in Rome under Nero. Even the Lutheran scholar Oscar Cullmann, who rejected any line of papal successors, concluded so in 1952. A minority disagree: in 2009 the classicist Otto Zwierlein argued Peter never went to Rome at all, though most scholars remain unconvinced. Whether the bones in that box are his... is still open.

Close

So. Back to that buried street under Saint Peter's. The Bible never takes us there. John's Gospel leaves Peter on a beach in Galilee, hearing two words: "Follow me."

After that: tradition, archaeology and argument. A martyr within living memory. A little shrine, built against a red wall a century later. And an emperor who built right on top of it.

The fisherman who once swore he didn't know Jesus... ended up, if the tradition is right, giving his life for him.

Not bad... for a man who sank.

Next time: Peter's brother. Remembered as "the First-Called", and forever linked with an X-shaped cross. Andrew. But does the evidence actually say X?