February 2021 – Classic Theology

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not in the top 1 percent of pastors for Bible memorization. Some people out there know every verse by heart, and the appropriate chapter and verse number. Not I. I know the broad strokes pretty well, but I can easily get stumped by the smaller stuff. For example, I played an old Bible Trivia game with my wife a few months back (more fun than it sounds, I swear), and one of the questions was about Samson violating his nazarite vows by eating honey out of a dead lion corpse. I had no memory of this happening and was thoroughly grossed out (if any of YOU break a promise to God by eating honey out of a dead lion corpse, I will judge you so hard, and not just for the promise-breaking). I’d still give myself maybe a 6.5 or 7 out of 10 on the pastor Bible memory scale, but on the whole, I rely on looking stuff up rather than just knowing it.

But this… this threw me.

Did you know Peter had a WIFE??? And this isn’t some lame, click bait title that refers to some apocryphal (non-canonical) book to get to a crazy conclusion. It’s in the New Testament:

When Jesus came into Peter’s house, he saw Peter’s mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever. He touched her hand and the fever left her, and she got up and began to wait on him.
Matt 8:14-15, NIV

How do you get a mother-in-law without a wife? You don’t. You need a wife to get a mother in law. This isn’t a one-off story either. It’s also recorded in both Mark and Luke.

Another passage that seems to confirm the rumor is 1 Corinthians 9:5:

Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?
NIV

Why would Paul specifically reference Peter (the Greek translation of the Aramaic name Cephas) to prove that he has the right to get married unless Peter was actually married and traveling with his wife? It’d be a pretty poor example otherwise.

Historically, there’s only one person I’ve ever heard someone talk about Peter’s wife: my mom. She brought it up to me a handful of times when we were chatting, and I always just nodded my head and smiled thinking, “ok, mom, whatever you say…” I’d never heard it in church. I’d never heard it in seminary. It’s just not all that popular to talk about! Probably because Peter’s wife never actually appears in the Bible. She’s just referenced indirectly. Nevertheless, it seems like a pertinent detail to me! My whole mental image of Peter is changed if he had a wife!

Looking around, it’s pretty rare to see someone challenge that Peter was married. Obscure though the reference in the Gospels may be, it is largely accepted as a legitimate translation. Peter was married. The bigger question in the tradition doesn’t seem to be “was Peter married,” so much as “was Peter’s wife alive at the time of the Gospels?”

There isn’t a ton of evidence to make things clear. We have the verses from earlier, and then we have a few references from the Church Fathers. Clement of Alexandria writes:

They say, accordingly, that the blessed Peter, on seeing his wife led to death, rejoiced on account of her call and conveyance home, and called very encouragingly and comfortingly, addressing her by name, “Remember thou the Lord.” Such was the marriage of the blessed and their perfect disposition towards those dearest to them.
Clement, The Stromata, Book VII

This is where things are a bit murky. Eusebius references Peter’s wife as well, but uses Clement’s citation to do so:

Clement, indeed, whose words we have just quoted, after the above-mentioned facts gives a statement, on account of those who rejected marriage, of the apostles that had wives. “Or will they,” says he, “reject even the apostles? For Peter and Philip begat children; and Philip also gave his daughters in marriage. And Paul does not hesitate, in one of his epistles, to greet his wife, whom he did not take about with him, that he might not be inconvenienced in his ministry.”
Eusebius, Church History III.31

Eusebius’s source is of especially poor quality, not only because it’s a secondary reference, but also because he references Paul having a wife. Paul directly writes that he is unmarried in 1 Corinthians 7:8. Certainly not a slam-dunk of a source, which leaves our primary patristic source as Clement.

Clement is a relatively controversial source to have. He was the teacher of Origen, a wildly popular Christian teacher and theologian in the early church, but he was anathematized (declared no-good) after his death for a variety of theological oddities, such as the belief in the existence of human souls before human birth and belief in potential of souls to be saved and fall again after death. The Alexandrian school of the early church was famous for their thinkers, but they were also heavily influenced by native Greek philosophy. They adopted its best pieces to develop their theology, while publicly rejecting other popular pieces that they saw as competing with the Gospel. It’s only natural that Alexandrians like Origin and Clement thought in ways that seem jarring to us today. Clement was also venerated in the Roman Catholic church until the 16^th century when he was removed from the calendar by Pope Clement the VIII for being too controversial (or because he wanted to the top Clement in Church history and he had to dethrone this guy to get there). Either way, Clement is famous enough to have clout, but also controversial enough to raise an eyebrow.

The evidence for Peter’s wife being dead hinges on her absence in the Bible. If he’s married, where is his wife? Why isn’t she there? At minimum, she ought to be with her sick mother, right? Fair point. Unfortunately, it also has to contend with the 1 Corinthians reference. I regularly found the attempts to dismiss that passage clumsy. Some commentators said that “wife” didn’t actually mean wife in that context. Whenever I hear someone try to get clever with translations, I settle the matter by looking at the different translations in the most popular Bibles. NIV? Wife. NRSV? Wife. ESV? Wife. NASV? Wife. You get the picture. The lone outlier is the King James Version, which says “a sister, a wife,” which still comes across to me as a Shakespearean attempt to say “a sister in the faith aka a believing wife” given the context. In any case, I’ll take the legion of Bible translators that worked on all these versions over lone wolves that swear they have better translation skills. But there’s still the big question, “If Peter is married, why are there so few references to his wife?” That’s something I can’t answer.

I suppose the evidence could lead in either direction, depending on how you think. It’s not like this is a hill anyone really needs to die on. Peter’s marital status is not doctrinally crucial. The Scriptures were not written to illuminate Peter’s love life.

I stumbled down this whole rabbit hole last week after I found a reference to her in Martyrs Mirror (the Anabaptist martyr collection from last week’s entry). It portrayed her as an early martyr for the faith and illustrated the devotion to God that both of them had in their marriage. Personally? I love the idea. Not only is the evidence reasonable enough for my tastes, but I love the possibilities it brings to the table. It adds another woman in the apostolic era worthy of respect. It adds a married man among the disciples. They support each other in the faith, even through pain and suffering. I love it! Hopefully that excitement isn’t outweighing my logic. I totally acknowledge that the evidence is a little scarce for a figure as public as Peter. But even if I’m wrong and Peter was a widower, I think the story of Peter’s wife has so much to offer. It gives us a picture of a man that wasn’t just passionate about Jesus; he was someone who was alive! He lived! He loved! He lost! That is so human, and a human faith is one that grows deep roots in our souls. I hope that this little journey helps me share the story of the first generation of Christians in a more human way.

In a tearful, faltering, sobbing voice, the man cried out, “What should I say to my boy if I took money from you for our shame?”
Captain Snegiryov, Brothers Karamazov

Captain Snegiryov isn’t a major Brothers K. character at all. He is publicly beaten by the hotheaded Dmitri Karamazov for no particular reason and yanked around Town Square by his beard. All the townspeople laugh at the sight, except for the captain’s son. He begs the crowd for help with tears in his eyes before kissing Dmitri’s hand and begging for mercy. When Alyosha Karamazov, Dmitri’s kind brother, finds out what happened, he tries to make amends with Captain Snegiryov. The man is poor. He lives in a wretched shack. Half of his family has disabilities, and none of them are capable of working. 200 rubles would change his life, and Alyosha (who runs in some particularly wealthy circles) wants to help… but the scene ends in disaster. The captain realizes that taking money from one of the wealthy Karamazovs after his humiliation would prove to his son that the rich can do whatever they want to the poor, and justice is dictated by the powerful. In a deeply conflicted moment, he throws the money on the ground at Alyosha’s feet and storms away in tears. His integrity demands he not accept their money, but that same sense of integrity has doomed him and his family to a life of poverty.

His cry for justice resonated with me this week as I’ve been pondering how we address injustice in our churches. Anybody who’s been in a church knows that sin happens, often in a way that never gets addressed. Time passes and circumstances improve, tempting us to move on from our frustration and live into the new, comfortable norm. But should we? Does forgiveness involve letting go of injustices that will never be accounted for? Or is accepting the new post-frustration reality the equivalent of taking our 200 rubles and selling out?

A few asides before I investigate: I want to avoid the standard response of, “well, if mistakes were made in the church, you should seek out a leadership position and do your best to make sure they don’t happen again.” Churches are massive entities, often with deeply entrenched power structures, and change takes years of work to realize. Being wronged shouldn’t condemn the victim to years of work in the hope of making a difference. And what about people whose talents lie elsewhere? Should they be pressed into leadership because they were sinned against? I hope not. I also recognize that as a person in church leadership, I’ve made wrong choices. Not all of my decisions were the right ones, or even fair ones for that matter, and it definitely frustrated people. Leadership is hard. Every decision has the chance of being unpopular or erroneous. I hope the ones that I’ve made haven’t pushed anyone out of churches I’ve served in, but I am as much a perpetrator of injustice as I am a victim. I don’t get to rail against the authority, since I’m a part of it.

Onward to the question!

It’s not that sin within the institutional church is especially rare. Gobs of famous saints were persecuted by other Christians. There’s St. John of the Cross (thrown in prison), John Chrysostom (exiled), Evagrius Ponticus (anathematized after death and followers persecuted) , John Calvin (exiled, attacked), Martin Luther (exiled, anathematized, attacked)… you get the picture. Churches are supposed to be beacons of hope! The hands and feet of God! The joy and goodness of the future on Earth now! But here are some of our famous saints, beaten down by the very hands that were supposed to hold them up. Some of the frustration can obviously be chalked up to the fact that they were usually persecuted by people who didn’t recognize them as properly Christian, but that doesn’t change the fact that institutional churches (full of people that bare the title ‘Christian’) have historically caused a great deal of injustice against the very people that they now recognize as worth listening to.

What do we do with the memory of injustice after we are hurt? How do we honor our integrity while moving on?

All of this got me to go pick up Martyrs Mirror. I stumbled across this Anabaptist classic during a day of community service about 10 years back. I was assigned to washing windows throughout the town with a Mennonite lady. I wasn’t much good at washing windows. I swear I tried my best, but I was a 21 year old guy with a messy apartment and she had spent over 10 years as a housekeeper. As you can imagine we had different standards of cleanliness. I’d see a spotless window and she’d see a mess. In any case, we got to chatting as she politely redid my work, and somehow she brought up Martyrs Mirror. I told her I’d never heard of it and she insisted that every Mennonite household owned one before sharing some stories from it.

It’s turned out to be a great tool to help work through some of this. The early Anabaptists (a broad category of Christians including modern Mennonites and Amish) were pretty much killed by everyone when they first popped up in Reformation-era Europe. It didn’t matter if you were Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic; you probably hated Anabaptists. Martyrs Mirror is their book of remembrance. Here, they weaved together the accounts of their persecution with the historical stories of persecution from Christian tradition, both in the institutional church and outside of it. On one page, there’s someone who died for witnessing their faith in a region where Christianity was punishable by death. On the next, you’ll find someone who was destroyed from within the church for getting behind an unpopular doctrine or making the wrong enemies. They moved beyond the triumphal stories of people who won handily in the church through sheer prestige and charisma (lookin’ at you, Augustine) and sought out the stories of the wronged to find solidarity. In these pages, there’s no sense that good theology or good people will win the day. If anything, bad theology and bad people win far more often than you’d hope! Real Christians face real pain, both in the church and outside it. Faith isn’t always about thriving materially in this world, so much as witnessing beautifully to it.

The intro cuts right to the core of the work:

Most beloved, do not expect that we shall bring you into Grecian theatres, to gaze on merry comedies or gay performances… True enough, we shall lead you into dark valleys, even into the valleys of death (Ps. 23:4),where nothing will be seen but dry bones, skulls, and frightful skeletons of those who have been slain…Yet to look upon all this will not cause real sadness, for though the aspect is dismal ac-cording to the body, the soul will nevertheless rejoice in it, seeing that not one of all those who were slain preferred life to death, since life often was proffered them on condition that they depart from the constancy of their faith.
Martyrs Mirror, 10

You’re not about to get your happy worlly show. That’s right out. Instead, you’ll get something morbid: death. But this death is livelier than anything that Homer could churn out. This is the vital death of Christ that we have the privilege of living out.

The imagery moving forward is distinctly triumphal. These are heroes, fighting in glorious combat, seizing the ultimate prize. At one particularly noteworthy part, they reference “the knight of Christ” (no idea who he is) who was killed. The resulting theological poem, Accolade to a Champion, is downright Arthurian:

Climb up your golden height, champion of the band of holy souls, who followed God’s red banner of blood, in oppression and in the midst of misery; where naught but the smoke and vapor of human burnt sacrifices ascended to the clouds; yet thou, hero, didst go before them, yea, didst fight thy way through the strait gate to the wide Heaven.
Martyrs Mirror, 11

It’s worth mentioning that Anabaptists are traditionally peace churches. All violence is considered to be a sin. It’s better to die than to kill. Here, traditional heroic imagery of the brave knight is subverted to make the murdered victim the hero of renown. It’s certainly not an unheard of stylistic choice, but it seems especially powerful when it’s used by someone for whom violence was never an option. You know that at they genuinely believe, even in tremendous suffering, that “all things work together for good to them that love God,” (Rom.8:28).

There’s a million martyr stories in this book, but one that I’ve always held up as particularly awesome (and that the window washing Mennonite particularly enjoyed) is the story of Dirk Willems. Dirk got arrested for being an Anabaptist in the Catholic Netherlands. He managed to escape the prisons by making a rope out of bed sheets, and he was running across a frozen lake to his freedom with a guard hot on his heels. Dirk was so malnourished from his time in prison that he could run across the ice without trouble, but the guard had eaten well while Dirk starved. The ice broke beneath him, and he fell in, screaming for help. Dirk heard the guard’s cry for help and turned around. He pulled the drowning guard out of the freezing water. His choice to help was a costly one: he was recaptured, tortured, and burned at the stake. He saved the man who doomed him.

There’s not many stories that illustrate injustice as well as this one, but Dirk isn’t remembered because the Catholic Church must now be punished, or because Anabaptists are now obligated to create structures that somehow correct the problems that occurred in this instance. The remembrance isn’t a burden; it’s a joy. Dirk was a hero. We remember him because we hope to be like him, and ultimately, like Jesus.

What do we do with our injustices? How do we remember them? Maybe we don’t. We remember the good that was done in spite of the evil that was wrought. That’s not to say we’re barred from seeking change or finding a new community to be with if the hurt is too much to bear, but we can’t count on the institutional church to be just! It is limited by ignorance, sin, and flaws just as much as anything in this world. The only way to move forward after injustice is the hardest way of all: be the Christian we’re meant to be. Forgive the sinners. Shine with all the holiness that God offers and know that regardless of what our church did or what it does in the future, we are free to be what God called us to be: a saint.

Month: February 2021

The Apostle Peter Had a WIFE?!?!

Life After Injustice in the Church