Henceforth the writings of the New Testament are entirely silent as to
the chief apostle. Not a hint is given of the few remaining actions of
his life, nor of the mode, place, or time of his death; and all these
concluding points have been left to be settled by conjecture, or by
tradition as baseless. The only passage which has been supposed to give
any hint of the manner of his death, is that in the last chapter of
John’s gospel. “Jesus says to him――‘I most solemnly tell thee, when
thou wast young, thou didst gird thyself and walk whither thou wouldst;
but when thou shalt be old, another shall gird thee, and carry thee
whither thou wouldst not.’ This he said, to make known by what sort
of death he should glorify God.” It has been commonly said that this
is a distinct and unquestionable prophecy that he should in his old
age be crucified,――the expression, “another shall gird thee and carry
thee whither thou wouldst not,” referring to his being bound to the
cross and borne away to execution, since this was the only sort of
death by which an apostle could be said, with much propriety or force,
to _glorify God_. And the long-established authority of tradition
coinciding with this view, or rather, suggesting it, no very minute
examination into the sense of the passage has ever been made. But the
words themselves are by no means decisive. Take a common reader, who
has never heard that Peter was crucified, and it would be hard for
him to make out such a circumstance from the bare prophecy as given
by John. Indeed, such unbiased impressions of the sense of the passage
will go far to justify the conclusion that the words imply nothing
but that Peter was destined to pass a long life in the service of his
Master,――that he should after having worn out his bodily and mental
energies in his devoted exertions, attain such an extreme decrepid old
age as to lose the power of voluntary motion, and die thus,――at least
without _necessarily_ implying any bloody martyrdom. Will it be said
that by such a quiet death he could not be considered as _glorifying_
God? The objection surely is founded in a misapprehension of the nature
of those demonstrations of devotion, by which the glory of God is
most effectually secured. There are other modes of martyrdom than the
dungeon, the sword, the axe, the flame, and the stone; and in all ages
since Peter, there have been thousands of martyrs who have, by lives
steadily and quietly devoted to the cause of truth, no less glorified
God, than those who were rapt to heaven in flame, in blood, and in
tortures inflicted by a malignant persecution. Was not God truly
glorified in the deaths of the aged Xavier, and Eliot, and Swartz, or
the bright, early exits of Brainerd, Mills, Martyn, Parsons, Fisk, and
hundreds whom the apostolic spirit of modern missions has sent forth
to labors as devoted, and to deaths as glorious to God, as those of
any who swell the deified lists of the ancient martyrologies? The
whole notion of a bloody martyrdom as an essential termination to the
life of a saint, grew out of a papistical superstition; nor need the
enlightened minds of those who can better appreciate the manner in
which God’s highest glory is secured by the lives and deaths of his
servants, seek any such superfluous aids to crown the mighty course of
the great apostolic chief, whose solid claims to the name and honors
of _Martyr_ rest on higher grounds than so insignificant an accident as
the manner of his death. All those writers who pretend to particularize
the mode of his departure, connect it also with the utterly impossible
fiction of his residence at Rome, on which enough has been already
said. Who will undertake to say, out of such a mass of matters, what is
truth and what is falsehood? And if the views above given, on the high
authority of the latest writers of even the Romish church, are of any
value for any purpose whatever, they are perfectly decisive against
the notion of Peter’s martyrdom at Rome, in the persecution under
Nero, since Peter was then in Babylon, far beyond the vengeance of the
Caesar; nor was he so foolish as ever after to have trusted himself
in the reach of a perfectly unnecessary danger. The command of Christ
was, “When you are persecuted in one city, flee into another,”――the
necessary and unquestionable inference from which, was, that when
out of the reach of persecution they should not wilfully go into it.
This is a simple principle of Christian action, with which papist
fable-mongers were totally unacquainted, and they thereby afford the
most satisfactory proof of the utter falsity of the actions and motives
which they ascribe to the apostles. One of these stories thus disproved
is connected with another adventure with that useful character,
Simon Magus, who, as the tale runs, after being first vanquished so
thoroughly by Peter in the reign of Claudius, returned to Rome, in the
reign of Nero, and made such progress again in his magical tricks, as
to rise into the highest favor with this emperor, as he had with the
former. This of course required a new effort from Peter, which ended in
the disgrace and death of the magician, who, attempting to fly through
the air in the presence of the emperor and people in the theater, was
by the prayer of Peter caused to fall from his aspiring course, to
the ground, by which he was so much injured as to die soon after. The
emperor being provoked at the loss of his favorite, turned all his
wrath against the apostle who had been directly instrumental in his
ruin, and imprisoned him with the design of executing him as soon as
might be convenient. While in these circumstances, or as others say,
before he was imprisoned, he was earnestly exhorted by the disciples
in Rome, to make his escape. He accordingly, though very desirous of
being killed, (a most abominably irreligious wish, by the way,) began
to move off, one dark night; but had hardly got beyond the walls of
the city,――indeed he was just passing out of the gate-way,――when, whom
should he meet but Jesus Christ himself, coming towards Rome. Peter
asked, with some reasonable surprise, “Lord! where are you going?”
Christ answered, “I am coming to Rome, to be crucified again.” Peter
at once took this as a hint that he ought to have stayed, and that
Christ meant to be crucified again in the crucifixion of his apostle.
He accordingly turned right about, and went back into the city, where,
having given to the wondering brethren an account of the reasons of his
return, he was immediately seized, and was crucified, to the glory of
God. Now it is a sufficient answer to this or any similar fable, to
judge the blasphemous inventor out of his own mouth, and out of the
instructions given by Christ himself to his servants, for their conduct,
in all cases where they were threatened with persecution, as above
quoted.
_Referring to his being bound to the cross._――Tertullian seems
to have first suggested this rather whimsical interpretation:
――“Tunc Petrus ab altero cingitur, quum cruci adstringitur.”
(Tertullian, Scorpiace, 15.) There seems to be more rhyme than
reason in the sentence, however.
The rejection of this forced interpretation is by no means a
new notion. The critical Tremellius long ago maintained that
the verse had no reference whatever to a prophecy of Peter’s
crucifixion, though he probably had no idea of denying that
Peter did actually die by crucifixion. Among more modern
commentators too, the prince of critics, Kuinoel, with whom
are quoted Semler, Gurlitt and Schott, utterly deny that a
fair construction of the original will allow any prophetical
idea to be based on it. The critical testimony of these great
commentators on the true and just force of the words, is of the
very highest value; because all received the tale of Peter’s
crucifixion as true, having never examined the authority of the
tradition, and not one of them pretended to deny that he really
was crucified. But in spite of this pre-conceived erroneous
historical notion, their nice sense of what was grammatically
and critically just, would not allow them to pervert the passage
to the support of this long-established view; and they therefore
pronounce it as merely expressive of the helplessness and
imbecility of extreme old age, with which they make every
word coincide. But Bloomfield, entirely carried away with the
tide of antique authorities, is “surprised that so many recent
commentators should deny that crucifixion is here alluded
to, though they acknowledge that Peter suffered crucifixion.”
Now this last circumstance might well occasion surprise,
as it certainly did in me, when I found what mighty names
had so disinterestedly supported the interpretation which I
had with fear and trembling adopted, in obedience to my own
long-established, unaided convictions; but my surprise was of
a decidedly agreeable sort.
The inventors of fables go on to give us the minute particulars
of Peter’s death, and especially note the circumstance that he was
crucified with his head downwards and his feet uppermost, he himself
having desired that it might be done in that manner, because he thought
himself unworthy to be crucified as his Master was. This was a mode
sometimes adopted by the Romans, as an additional pain and ignominy.
But Peter must have been singularly accommodating to his persecutors,
to have suggested this improvement upon his tortures to his malignant
murderers; and must have manifested a spirit more accordant with that
of a savage defying his enemies to increase his agonies, than with that
of the mild, submissive Jesus. And such has been the evident absurdity
of the story, that many of the most ardent receivers of fables have
rejected this circumstance as improbable, more especially as it is
not found among the earliest stories of his crucifixion, but evidently
seems to have been appended among later improvements.