Matthew 16:18

Petrine Primacy? 📜
In “Antioch’s Aftershocks” (When Judaism and Christianity Began: Essays in Memory of Anthony J. Saldarini, Brill, 2004), Price proposes that if Galatians gives an accurate picture of early apostolic disputes and if Matthew’s Gospel was written in Antioch, then Matthew should be seen as the product of a community divided between Petrine, Jacobean, and Pauline factions. (One faction adds the text in which Peter has the faith to walk on the water just like Jesus; another faction revises it to say Peter’s faith was inadequate and he sank anyway; and so on.) He ascribes the rehabilitation of the disciples (in comparison with Mark) and the church foundation statement to the Petrine Christians in particular.
According to Casey,
It has frequently been argued that Jesus’ expectation of the coming of the kingdom in the near future is well attested and excludes the founding of the church. This is true, as we shall see in Chapter 6, but as an objection to the authenticity of this passage it presupposes conventional Greek and modern translations, from which we get ‘church’ or the like. Aspects of the Matthaean tradition imply an Aramaic background. Jesus addresses him as ‘Simon Bar Iōna’, a Greek version of the Semitic ‘Simeon’ followed by the Aramaic for ‘son of Jonah’. ‘Flesh and blood’ is a Semitic expression, though it is one which was known to Greek- speaking Jews. More important is the Aramaic original for the central declaration. In Matthew’s Greek, there is a pun between Peter (Petros), and the rock (petra). We have however seen that in Aramaic Jesus called him Kēphā, which means ‘rock’. Thus the pun works perfectly well in Aramaic too, and that is not likely to be a coincidence. Moreover, Jesus must have meant something, and since Simeon really was the leader of the Twelve, and thus the leader of the Jesus movement second only to Jesus himself, this is the obvious thing for Jesus to have meant.
The question therefore should be whether there is an Aramaic word which Jesus could have used to refer to his movement, and which would cause a reasonable translator to put Matthew’s ekklēsia, which is normally translated here as ‘church’, though it meant any kind of assembly, and it is regularly so translated when it occurs in other Greek texts. Much the best answer is the Aramaic qehal. In the Septuagint, ekklēsia almost always translates the Hebrew qahal, and this normal word for ‘assembly’, ‘congregation’, ‘community’, is found in Aramaic too. It was therefore an entirely reasonable term for Jesus to have used for the movement which he founded, and Matthew’s ekklēsia is a perfectly reasonable translation of it. So far, then, this could be a saying of Jesus.
Equally, however, some aspects of Jesus’ speech appear to be secondary. The first is its connection with ‘Peter’s confession’, as it is usually called, in the immediately preceding verse (Mt. 16.16). In Mark, this is ‘You are the Christ’ (Mk 8.29). In Greek, as in English, this is a sound Christian confession, but any possible underlying Aramaic would mean only ‘You are (a/the) anointed’, a possible thing to say, but not enough to be a major confession.21 It is therefore secondary, a product of the early Christian church, and perhaps written by Mark himself. Matthew has elaborated it into ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt. 16.16). This is accordingly secondary too. It follows that most of Mt. 16.17 is secondary, and the end of it is indeed very typically Matthaean: ‘flesh and blood did not reveal (this) to you, but my Father who (is) in the heavens.’ Jesus also had no reason to add Mt. 16.19, giving Simeon the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and power to bind and loose. The saying as a whole has on the other hand an excellent setting in the Jerusalem church in the early years after Jesus’ death, when Simeon the Rock was in charge of that church, so we should infer that this passage was rewritten there. Accordingly, Jesus’ original saying had nothing to do with ‘Peter’s confession’.
It was what Jesus said when he gave Simeon the epithet Kēphā, and it included this: Blessed are you, Simeon son of Jonah, and I tell you that you are (a/the) Rock (Kēphā), and on this rock (kēphā) I shall build me a/the community (qehalā). This provides a proper and historically appropriate reason why Jesus should give Simeon this epithet, an epithet which he fully justified in his leadership of the community, both during Jesus’ life and afterwards in his leadership of the Jerusalem church, when Jesus’ saying was rewritten and updated. Its present position is the responsibility of Matthew the Evangelist, but he may have been given (secondary) reasons to put it where he did. – Jesus of Nazareth 188-89
Davies and Allison, Matthew 2.627, describe as wasted ingenuity the various attempts (some ancient, some designed to refute Roman Catholics) to avoid the purport that Jesus’ church is built on a Peter who has confessed what God revealed to him. These include proposals that kephã means “stone,” not “rock,” or that the rock is not Peter but Christ or Peter’s faith.

Diarmaid MacCulloch notes in his A History of Christianity that our earliest attestation of that verse being used to claim Roman ascendancy in the broader Christian church doesn’t come until 256, when a sort of pre-Donatist controversy about the standing of the “lapsed” erupted:
In Rome the argument was mainly over whether there could be any forgiveness at all for those who had lapsed. The priest Novatian, a hardliner on this issue, opposed the election of his colleague Cornelius as bishop, since Cornelius held that forgiveness was possible at the hands of a bishop. The Church in Rome was bitterly divided as to whom to support. Cyprian and Cornelius, who had arrived at similar conclusions about the powers of a bishop, allied with each other and the supporters of Novatian found themselves an isolated minority. Matters became worse when, in their initial enthusiasm, the Novatianists started making new Christian converts in North Africa as well as in Rome. When many of their sympathizers decided that the division had gone too far, and the newly baptized applied to rejoin the Catholic Church in communion with Cyprian and Cornelius, Carthage and Rome were faced with the problem of deciding the terms. Was Novatianist baptism valid? Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome’s growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).
46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence. In the end, North Africa and Rome agreed to differ on the issue of baptism, the North Africans saying that valid baptism could take place only within the Christian community which is the Church, the Romans saying that the sacrament belonged to Christ, not to the Church, and that therefore it was valid whoever performed it if it was done in the right form and with the right intentions.
As MacCulloch notes, Rome’s centralization of power and prestige took centuries to accomplish and drawing a clear demarcation line of when this process was “finished” is probably impossible, but it certainly was not as clear as modern narratives make it out to be. There were schisms but also at times a thawing of the relationships between east and west, and the full separation probably wasn’t complete until the early second millennium, where we can truly see the modern city bishops in Constantinople, Rome, Moscow, etc. in something resembling the authoritative form we find them in today, though again those positions are always evolving and changing.

So does Matthew 16 refer to Peter being a bishop in Rome? Probably not, and it certainly doesn’t seem to have been received that way until around 2 centuries after Jesus’ and Peter’s deaths.

Casey argued that this speech “seems to be a mixture of primary and secondary traditions”
…this could be a saying of Jesus. Equally, however, some aspects of Jesus’ speech appear to be secondary. The first is its connection with ‘Peter’s confession’, as it is usually called, in the immediately preceding verse (Mt. 16.16). In Mark, this is ‘You are the Christ’ (Mk 8.29). In Greek, as in English, this is a sound Christian confession, but any possible underlying Aramaic would mean only ‘You are (a/the) anointed’, a possible thing to say, but not enough to be a major confession. It is therefore secondary, a product of the early Christian church, and perhaps written by Mark himself. Matthew has elaborated it into ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Mt. 16.16). This is accordingly secondary too. It follows that most of Mt. 16.17 is secondary, and the end of it is indeed very typically Matthaean: ‘fl esh and blood did not reveal (this) to you, but my Father who (is) in the heavens.’ Jesus also had no reason to add Mt. 16.19, giving Simeon the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and power to bind and loose. The saying as a whole has on the other hand an excellent setting in the Jerusalem church in the early years after Jesus’ death, when Simeon the Rock was in charge of that church, so we should infer that this passage was rewritten there. Accordingly, Jesus’ original saying had nothing to do with ‘Peter’s confession’. It was what Jesus said when he gave Simeon the epithet Kēphā, and it included this: Blessed are you, Simeon son of Jonah, and I tell you that you are (a/the) Rock (Kēphā), and on this rock (kēphā) I shall build me a/the community (qehalā) Jesus of Nazareth, 188-89