The Apostle Peter in Rome
Jesus’ chief disciple examined
Nicola Denzey Lewis
May 13, 2025
89 Comments
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In this blog post, Brown University Religious Studies professor Nicola Denzey Lewis answers frequently asked questions about the apostle Peter. Denzey Lewis appears in the CNN series Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery, which aims to investigate artifacts that shed light on the world in which Jesus lived.—Ed.
What traditions connect the apostle Peter to Rome?
The Repentant St. Peter by El Greco. Photo: The Phillips Collection.
Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter (also called Simon Peter or Cephas), has been associated with Rome for nearly 2,000 years. The earliest testimony to the apostle Peter’s presence in Rome is a letter from a Christian deacon named Gaius. Writing probably toward the end of the second century C.E.—so, around 170 or 180 C.E.—Gaius tells about the wondrous things in Rome, including something called a tropaion (see below for more) where Peter established a church—in fact, the Church, the Roman Catholic church at the site where St. Peter’s Basilica is today. But there are other traditions besides Peter’s tropaion.
One early Christian text, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, recounts many things that Peter did in the city. At one point in Acts of Peter, Peter is taunted by a flamboyant heretic, Simon Magus. Simon challenges Peter to a flying contest around the Roman Forum, but Peter’s prayers make Simon crash to the ground, proving that Simon’s powers are not as great as his own.
At the end of this text, Peter, not wishing to be martyred for his faith, flees from Roman authorities on the Via Appia leading out of the city. Rather unexpectedly, Peter meets Jesus, who is traveling in the opposite direction. He asks Jesus, “Where are you going?” Jesus tells Peter that he is going to Rome “to be crucified again.” Peter realizes, from this, that he cannot flee from his fate.
“Where are you going?” in Latin is “Quo Vadis?” and there’s a medieval church in Rome called the Church of Quo Vadis at the spot where Peter met Jesus. To prove that his vision was real, you can still see there a bit of marble pavement which the faithful say miraculously preserve Jesus’ footprints.
Is it likely that the apostle Peter went to Rome and founded the church there?
Interestingly, the Bible says nothing about Peter ever traveling to Rome.
When the gospels end, Peter is in Jerusalem. It’s the same in the Book of Acts. The apostle Paul, in his letters, also talks about meeting Peter in the eastern Mediterranean. After Jesus’ death, Paul says that Jesus’ brother, James, and Peter are the co-leaders of the “church,” or assembly, of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem.
In short, there is no early textual evidence for Peter in Rome, so for some people, it’s very hard to believe that he ever traveled there. Not only is it a very long way, according to the New Testament, Peter was a fisherman who was not very educated and who spoke only Aramaic; he was not the type of person that might travel widely across the Roman Empire to a large city where Latin and Greek were the dominant languages.
The absence of connection between Peter and Rome in the New Testament, the lack of references to him in our earliest Roman Christian literature, and what we know of Peter’s background and character all combine to make it unlikely, to my mind, that he ever went to Rome.
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Is there any evidence that the apostle Peter died in Rome?
St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the traditional burial site of the apostle Peter.
There is no solid evidence—textual or even archaeological—that Peter died in Rome.
Starting around the end of the second century, Christian pilgrims went to see Peter’s tropaion. But a tropaion is not a tomb. The word itself is very unusual; sometimes translated as “trophy,” it means something like a war memorial or a cenotaph (i.e., an empty grave). It’s not the word used in the Roman Empire for a burial place. Yet this spot—which was originally in the middle of an ancient cemetery—was quickly understood as the place where Peter was buried.
When it was excavated in the 1950s, archaeologists were shocked to find that there was no grave and no bones under the tropaion. Only later were some bones produced from that excavation, and it’s a fascinating story we talk about in Finding Jesus. Are these Peter’s bones? That appears to be a matter of faith. The official Vatican position, first stated in 1968, is that they might be.
Why are there two places in Rome where the apostle Peter was supposedly buried?
This is another fascinating thing we explore in Finding Jesus. Most people know about Peter’s traditional burial site at St. Peter’s. But it turns out that there’s a second site in Rome where pilgrims went for hundreds of years, which was known as the Memoria Apostolorum (the Memorial to the Apostles). It’s off the Via Appia at the modern site of the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, and you can still go and visit it today, although the memorial itself is largely built over.
What’s amazing is that the site preserves around 600 graffiti scrawled by Christian pilgrims in the early Middle Ages, most of them prayers to Peter and Paul, the joint patron saints of Rome. It certainly looks like people believed that Peter was buried there, but excavators found no evidence of a tomb there, either!
As far as I can tell, this leaves us with two options: Either Peter’s body was at both these sites at one point and moved from one to the other, or Peter’s body was never at either site, but people still associated him with the site. It didn’t always take a body or a tomb for a site to be sacred, after all.
Nicola Denzey Lewis, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, specializes in Gnosticism, Late Antiquity, Roman social history, the history of Christianity, and women and gender. Her recent publications include Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and the Graeco-Roman World (Brill, 2013) and Introduction to “Gnosticism” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on March 31, 2017.
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How do you address 1 Peter 5:13?
Good point! Babylon was a code word for Rome.
Where is the BIBLICAL evidence that Peter was ever in Rome? Any other source of evidence that he was in Rome (or even died there) is otherwise fantasy perpetuated by Catholic tradition, not through Biblical evidence.
There is no Scriptural evidence that Peter ever was in Rome. Paul’s letter to the Romans, in chapter 16, never mention Peter in the long list of people he mentions in that chapter. Also, in 1 Peter 5:13 it states “The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son.” This verse seems to imply that at the time that Peter wrote this letter, around 60-63 AD, he was in Babylon, in what is today Iraq, if one is to take Babylon in its literal sense. At some point, Babylon came to be symbolic of Rome, but there is no reason to believe that Peter would be so plain, with no symbolic language, in this letter, and then use a symbolic meaning for Babylon.
It would make a lot of sense that Peter would be in the city of Babylon, and not in Rome, where a large Jewish population exists, due to the Jewish Exile during the later part of the Old Testament Jewish History. So, it is even more likely that Peter was talking about the actual city of Babylon and not its symbolic meaning.
You failed to mention the evidence of Peter’s tomb being discovered in Jerusalem. There have been several archaeologists who have studied the ossuary and inscription originally discovered in the 1950s by Bellarmino Bagatti, but it hardly ever receives much notice. There are a few who claim that the inscription isn’t clear, but their motives are in question because of Roman Catholic links. An honest and objective analysis shows that it is most likely what it appears to be. The Roman Catholic Church is a very powerful religio-political institution and they have the ability to downplay such discoveries, and they have numerous times in the past with other discoveries. The Mount of Olives / Dominus Flevit tomb is a significant discovery which should not be overlooked.
From that verse at 1 Peter 5:13, it is apparent that Peter was in Babylon, at last when he wrote 1 Peter…………as the article stated the internal evidence in the Bible itself does not ever mention Peter going to Rome.
My name is Peto Veritatem.
With the absence of biblical as well as historical evidence, we are left with the Roman Catholic tradition of Peter being in Rome and his being the first pope. Since history has shown the RC church to be a lying church, we shall take its tradition with a ton of salt. In other words, it’s pure fantasy. As this article explains, Peter was a simple fisherman and could only speak–and probably not even write—Aramaic. It has been scientifically established that Peter never wrote the epistles ascribed to him. How could he have anyway not knowing the Greek language.
@Keith I’m not sure where you got your “scientifically established” information that Peter did not write the two epistles ascribed to him, but I can tell you that by the scripture itself, it can be proven that the Apostle Peter did, indeed, write 1 & 2 Peter. I will believe Scripture over “science” any day.
2 Peter 1:16-18 says:
“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made know unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.”
These verses are referring to the Transifuration of Jesus Christ, as recorded in Mathew 17:1-13 and Luke 9:28-36. There were only three other people present during the Transfiguration: Peter, James, and John. Also, these verses indicate that the writer of this epistle was an eyewitness to this event. Therefore, one can only conclude that it was Peter that wrote 2 Peter. And, due to the similarities between 1 & 2 Peter, one can only conclude that Peter was the writer of both epistles.
Also, in 1st century Israel, Koine Greek was the common language due to the Hellenization of that region by the Roman Empire. So, one can only assume that Peter was fluent in Koine Greek, the language in which 1 & 2 Peter were written in.
The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son” (1 Peter 5:13) Marcus is a very typical Roman name, 1 Peter 5:12 mentions Silvanus, another typical Roman name.
Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in the 2nd century:
…by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul…
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ix.iv.iv.html
As a Coptic Christian, we’ve always believed that St. Peter never preached in Rome. This fact is very clearly attested to in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans and further testified to by the Acts of the Apostles. He might have gone to Rome towards the end of his life. This is a fact yet to be proved by history and archaeology. However, to reject the possibility of his ever going to Rome based on his simple status and not knowing Latin or Greek is far-fetched. We shouldn’t forget that St. Peter was invested with the Gift of Tongues by which he could bring 3000 people to the faith through one sermon on the day of Pentecost.