A friend's refutation of my Papacy tract.

[goldenchild17]

Oh, okay. That's something I heard but wasn't too sure on. So Petros really doesn't mean "small rock or stone" like so many people seem to think. That's pretty cool. And another thing. Would it be a good thing for me to include the lexicons for each of these words to show that I'm not just making this up?
I'll make the changes soon.

[goldenchild17]

Is this better?



Next, from our first passage Matthew 16:13-19, we look at this line. “And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” What Jesus is doing is calling Peter the “Rock” on which the Church is going to be built. Many opponents of Catholicism like to look at the original Greek of this sentence. In the original Greek Christ calls Peter “Petros” which many people think means “little rock or pebble”. They also say that Jesus calls the “rock” upon which the Church is to be built “Petra” or “large rock”. Some people believe this means that Jesus is contrasting Peter and the “rock” that the Church will be built upon. There are a few major flaws to this argument. First, Petros does not mean “small rock, or pebble”. The King James Version New Testament Lexicon says HERE that Petros actually means “a rock or a stone”. This is supported by protestant Greek scholars, D.A. Carson and Joseph Thayer, who say that there is no reason to believe that Petros means something different than the Greek word petra(1). There is no indication that Petros refers to a small pebble or rock. Second, Greek nouns are assigned a gender; each noun is either masculine or feminine. “Petros” is a masculine word, while “Petra” is a feminine word. It would very silly for Jesus to use a feminine word in regards to Peter, a male. In fact, if Jesus was truly trying to call Peter a “small rock, or pebble” then He would undoubtedly have used the Greek word “lithos”, which more accurately refers to a small rock or stone. (KJV New Testament Lexicon) and is also a masculine noun. In this passage, pay special attention to the pronoun used ‘taute’, which means “this” or “this very”. So the line would read “you are Peter, and upon taute(this very) petra I will build my Church.” When this Greek pronoun is used along with the Greek word for “and”, which is ‘kai’, the pronoun is referring to the previous noun. Basically what this means is that the passage would read like this, “you are Peter kai upon taute petra”. In english, “you are Peter and upon this very rock I will build my Church.” So, we can see that in the Greek, Peter is the same rock that the Church is to be built upon. If Jesus truly meant for the rock upon which the Church built to be something or someone other than Peter, he could’ve used the word “alla” for “and”. By this Jesus could’ve avoided the connection between Peter and the “rock”, but He doesn’t do this.

But let’s take this a bit further, let’s use the language that Jesus and his disciples would’ve spoken, Aramaic. This discourse that took place between Jesus and Peter in Matthew 16 is most likely in Aramaic. In Aramaic the word for rock is “kepha” and unlike in Greek, there is no gender assignment to Aramaic nouns. Then if we go to John 1:42, we see something very remarkable. We see that the name Jesus gives Peter is “Kephas” or “Cephas”. John 1:42 says “Then he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, "‘You are Simon the son of John; you will be called Kephas’ (which is translated Peter).” (see 1 Corinthians 1:12, 1 Corinthians 3:22, 1 Corinthians 9:5, 1 Corinthians 15:5, and Galatians 2:9, 11, 14 Clearly Peter’s name was “Kephas”.) Kephas means “Rock” and Jesus specifically gave Peter this name Kephas “Rock”. “You are Kephas and upon this kephas I will build my Church.” Finally, Aramaic also has a word for “little rock, or pebble”. This word is Evna. In His native language, if Jesus meant to call Peter a “small rock or pebble” then he would have called Him “evna”. But He doesn’t, He clearly gave Peter the name of “Kephas”


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(1). [Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1996), 507; D.A. Carson, "Matthew," in Frank E. Gaebelein, ed., The Expositor's Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), vol. 8, 368.].

[phatcatholic]

looks good. and yes, i would provide links to online lexicons as much as possible, so they can see for themselves.

[goldenchild17]

k, it'll be up in a sec.

[Robbi]

Sorry to everyone for butting in like this, but ive been following prot vs cath debates back and forth for a while now, and had learnt a bit of greek along the way too!!

Especially on justification, works of the law - there was a good point made how the Protestants try to justify "faith alone, works of the law etc..", and it got down to the nitty gritty Greek translations.
As an example, all the tenses of 'dikaioo' and what they can or cannot mean, the Reformed Protestants feel comfortable in presuming to tell the Greek Orthodox how to understand Greek, since the Orthodox share the Cath views and dont believe in "faith alone" either.

Keeping that in mind, why dont the Greek Orthodox beieve in the Papacy since that too comes down also to the greek translations - unless they dont agree with the translations Catholics use for Petra / Petros etc...

[yiannii]

nice work goldenchild17!

[goldenchild17]

Thanks, Yianni. It's a little project I'm working on, putting up a website with this kind of stuff on it. If you'd like to check it out you can access it from my signature.

[goldenchild17]

Another thought. Should I put in something about the significance of God changing a person's name? You know, how Jesus changed Peter's name to "Kephas" and Abram's name to "Abraham" and Sarai name to "Sarah" etc...?

I just thought about it, and think it would be quite relevant. What says all of you?

[phatcatholic]

[quote name='goldenchild17' date='Dec 18 2004, 01:02 PM'] Another thought. Should I put in something about the significance of God changing a person's name? You know, how Jesus changed Peter's name to "Kephas" and Abram's name to "Abraham" and Sarai name to "Sarah" etc...?

I just thought about it, and think it would be quite relevant. What says all of you? [/quote]
oh, definitely! that is a good point to make as well. when you do that, make sure you provide what the original name means, and then what the new name means. use this:
[b]--[url="http://bible.crosswalk.com/Dictionaries/HitchcocksBibleNames/"]Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary[/url] [/b]

[goldenchild17]

Alright I'll do that. That names dictionary is pretty sweet. This might be a more difficult find(I haven't found what I'm looking for yet) but how about a link that has like a list or something of all the people in Scripture that had their names changed? Something to that effect would really help a lot.