When you study the early Church, you find that Peter is affiliated with three cities. Ironically these three cities became the three early Patriarchates of the Church. These are Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. Peter had a hand in the early stages of each Church.
Peter was very close with St. Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark. He was a key figure in the Church in Alexandria. Peter’s connections to Antioch and Rome are far more apparent. He was the first bishop in Antioch then left in 42 AD to become the first bishop of the city of Rome.
Now we’ve all heard the story that Peter and the other early apostles were Muslims. They would have denied the death, resurrection, and divinity of Jesus Christ. Of all these three major cities we don’t find any traces of Islam at all. If Paul is the bad guy who snuffed out Islam he obviously can’t be in multiple places at once. He’d have had to work overtime in snuffing out the Islamic Christian faith while promoting his own.
Eventually in the 7th century Antioch and Alexandria were captured by Muslim armies. You would think that the people in those cities would have known about this religion from before. If St. Peter himself was affiliated with founding of both of those sees it would have been a slam dunk, no question. Oh of course, them again!!!
This argument has to be in my top three arguments of Islam. The fact that we have no record of Islam existing in those cities. It’s funny because we know of an ensemble of minor heretical sects the MENA region. Alexandria and Antioch have also been at the heart of the Christology debates in the 5th and 6th centuries. Again, different on minor issues but never questioning that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh. Of course they believed in Christ’s death and resurrection as well.
Now, Rome as a city never became Muslim. However, Rome was the belly of the beast. For the first 300 years of the Church it was home to a pagan emperor. A pagan emperor who often persecuted the Christian population. When there is persecution of a religious minority that gives factionalism a whole new face. Obviously the Church in Rome or any other city in the Empire wouldn’t have had imperial tools at their disposal to deal with heretics and that’s why so many heretical groups left their mark.
If a Muslim wants to convert me, they’ll have to show that Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria had Islamic populations before the 7th century. These churches are affiliated with the chief apostle St. Peter so there should be plenty of Islam if what they say is true.
Allan, there is no historical evidence that Peter had any substantial connections with Rome or Antioch, or any other city. Peter is not even mentioned in any text written by an historian. You are only basing yourself on Church legend, written hundreds of years after the alleged events.
There is also no evidence that Mark’s Gospel (which, like the others three, is anonymous) is based on Peter’s dictations or utterances. The only “evidence” you have to support your claim comes indirectly from Papias (whom Eusebius calls a man of very limited intellect). We have no direct writings from Papias; we only have what Eusebius alleges that he said (which for the sake of argument, let’s assume is reasonably accurate). Via Eusebius, Papias tells us that one “John the elder” (not John the apostle) told him that he had copied down what Peter (possibly the apostle) told him. That is double hearsay (from Peter to John to Papias)! And then from Papias to Eusebius. So your claim that “Peter was very close with St. Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark” is very tenuous. And who is this St. Mark that you mention? Where does Papias/Eusebius even mention him?
My reply is mainly going to be posting articles I’ve written.
I’ve refuted the Gospels being anonymous here.
http://allanruhl.com/bart-ehrman-refuted-the-gospels-arent-anonymous/
I’ve written a lot about Peter and the Early Church in Rome. Here are some tangentially related articles.
http://allanruhl.com/the-real-simon-of-cyrene/
http://allanruhl.com/babylon-is-rome-in-1-peter-5/
http://allanruhl.com/why-didnt-st-ignatius-mention-the-bishop-of-rome/
http://allanruhl.com/refuting-james-whites-fav-argument-against-the-papacy/
I was also recently on Reason and Theology where I talked about the episcopate, Peter being in Rome, and Peter being the first Bishop of Rome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlhE71Vlptg
Also, I would also recommend reading the first two of the eight lectures in Trevor Jalland’s book on the Papacy. It deals with it from an Anglican perspective but also very historical. As an Anglican he has not dog in the fight like Catholics do.
One more thing. I think you’re a Muslim, though I could be wrong but if you are this is for you. If you’re not Muslim, you can ignore this.
“That is double hearsay (from Peter to John to Papias)!”
Then you must deny every single Hadith because the Hadiths are double double hearsay. They’re usually narrated through four people so that’s horrible by your standards. I assume that you’re a Koran only Muslim. Or not a Muslim at all and you can ignore this argument.
God bless,
Allan
I think that the average Muslim views Jesus similar to how Christians view Adam, in the sense that they feel like they lived in an ancient, primeval age so far removed from our own that we cannot possibly know anything about them, except for the revelation of God.
That this is the case, I think is supported by the embarrassing conflation the Mary Mother of Jesus with Miriam sister of Moses and Aaron from thousands of years prior. It reminds me of the inflated ages in the early chapters of Genesis in the way that the timelines are apparently “messed up”.
To anyone who has studied church history, it is fairly clear that the church would have had to be thoroughly “compromised” by the end of the first century for the standard Islamic conception to be true, and probably before the destruction of the temple. But Muslims who take Jesus as an almost-mythical figure, from profoundly long ago, historical arguments are not even in the correct category to be relevant.
At the inception of Islam, 600-700 years prior was a very long time relative to 0-100 years, so it was much easier to think this way, especially without modern historical study. Nowadays, 1400 years feels a lot like 2000 years and so treating Jesus as “too long ago to think about historically” is a dangerous game, especially if you’re trying to vie with the Western Academy.
This is just to say that this argument is probably only successful once you’ve convinced a Muslim that we can reliably know anything at all about the early church. But once you’ve done that it’s potentially very potent. My guess is that the main responses would be:
1. What we know about Christian theology is different cities is largely lost to time. What we do know come from Orthodox Christian sources, who are biased. The medieval Christian church probably razed the evidence for “Islamic Christianity” in these places.
2. They might say the evidence that those cities were founded by Peter is tenuous and comes from non-Muslim Christian sources, and are therefore unreliable. The claims could have been fabricated to add legitimacy to the non-Muslim churches against the Muslim ones. Regardless of how well you can rebut this it’s going to be an uphill battle to get a lay Muslim to engage with the historical evidence of something so long ago. If it’s an uphill battle with Protestants, it will be like that for Muslims too.
3. The cities you’re talking about could have been founded by the Muslim Peter, but then quickly apostatized, not due to the apostle Paul, but due to the Pagan influences of floods of Gentile converts. But that doesn’t mean that other cities also apostatized and that Pre-7th century Islam ceased to exist. The historiographical evidence we have is biased because it’s generally only in the large cities that anything of note occurs, and where people are educated to write, etc. but the large cities were contaminated by paganism early on, whereas the more rural areas flourished as Muslims without documentary evidence. Paul did contaminate the church, but he only exploited a weakness in a church which had converted many Gentiles too quickly without properly explaining monotheism.
Of course, none of these responses are very good, but the more steps required to rebut them, the less likely it is that the Muslim will actually be bothered. There’s a lot of rationalization that can go on.
Hi Allan, I will refer to your links, for which thanks.
Meanwhile, no I am not Muslim, and never have been. Culturally and from upbringing, I am Christian.