| Kommentar | I've always liked to think that Jesus might have spoken some Greek, just because he seems to have been a smart person, there's a fairly large period of his life that we know nothing about, and Greek was one of the languages used in his multiethnic society. But that may be a minority hypothesis; most modern scholars now seem to emphasize that very few adults in his day were even literate, and especially not Jewish peasants, based on what we know just in a general way from anthropology and archaeology.
In any case, it's clear that Aramaic was his primary language, and that of Peter as well; there would have been no reason for Jesus to speak to him in Greek. There's also no reason that Jesus himself would have used the specific word 'church' (ecclesia), since that whole concept of a named, organized local group of his followers evidently developed only after his death, when the Jesus movement was growing and spreading around the Mediterranean.
On a broader level, just as a basic principle of interpretation, we should be very cautious about mentally equating the text of the gospels with words that the historical Jesus actually literally said, except in a very fragmentary way. It's very unfortunate that most Bible studies don't seem to teach this to most laypeople in the pews, but most scholars are well aware that the gospels were written many decades after the events they describe, with a didactic and liturgical rather than a purely historical purpose. There wasn't any press secretary with a smartphone, or even a disciple with a wax tablet and a stylus, at the trial or anywhere else; the best-known sayings were probably passed down orally after Jesus's death, collected still later, and rewritten in the form of composed texts still later. So for the most part they are not transcripts of actual speech, but rather ritual remembrances and literary portraits of Jesus as an idealized figure, expressing what later generations of his followers saw as his deeper significance.
(OT: One group of scholars that has, commendably, tried to share this knowledge with lay readers is the Jesus Seminar in the US. They've gotten a lot of flak for their bold pedagogical approach of issuing their own translation of the gospels and color-coding the 'words of Jesus' in red, pink, gray, or black according to how close they think each passage is to what Jesus might have originally said. But if you don't take that technique too literally either, it's a very helpful way to illustrate the general principle of how the texts came into being, with a large framework gradually built up around relatively small core fragments. Their commentary on this passage:
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This is a stylized scene shaped by Christian motifs that Matthew has borrowed from Mark and elaborated. Jesus rarely initiates dialogue or refers to himself in the first person.
Similar episodes in Thom 13:1-8 and John 1:35-42; 6:66-69; 11:25-27 indicate how readily the primitive Christian community created scenes like this. What is memorable in each of these scenes is the confessional statement of the disciple, not the words of Jesus. The disciple's statement of faith becomes a model for others (compare John 6:68; 11:27). ...
The play on Peter's name (petra in Greek means "rock") makes him the foundation on which the congregation is built (v. 18); this undoubtedly reflects Peter's position in Matthew's branch of the emerging Christian movement ... the budding institution.
—The Five Gospels: The search for the authentic words of Jesus (Macmillan, 1993), Funk, Hoover, et al., p. 207
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They color-code it as black, meaning that all two dozen or so of the scholars agreed that it was composed well after Jesus's time, so that it 'represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition' [p. 36].)
Being later than Jesus doesn't negate the passage's significance, but it also doesn't mean we have to read it literally as an instruction to support Catholic claims to unique authority, much less every facet of the modern Catholic church. The whole point of Christianity is that the church, the body of Christ, is living, growing, and changing, continually renewed and reformed/re-formed by the Holy Spirit. If nothing else, we can be grateful to the gospel writers for having preserved such a memorable literary play on the word 'rock,' which also ties in with many other biblical images. The rock as an image of strength and constancy is balanced by other images of fluidity and change that also represent God, such as water and wind.
(*f5* The text of 'Rock of Ages,' though -- one of my least favorite hymns BTW -- may be something of a mishmash. It appears to take a general idea of Jesus as God, and of images of God as the 'rock of salvation,' 'my rock and my fortress,' etc. from the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (KJV), and then perhaps to conflate that with an allusion to a specific verse about 'the cleft of the rock,' which I would have to look up to find.)
We can also see passages like this as casting light on conflict and diversity in the church. The quote evidently reflects a faction who looked to Peter as their model, perhaps in contrast to Paul and others, in a period when the leadership and direction of the Jesus movement was still very fluid, with tension around defending vs. reforming Judaism, and around either of those vs. reaching out to the Gentile world.
Certainly the tradition emphasizing Peter's role as the first bishop of Rome, and the attempt to draw an unbroken line back to him through a direct, formal succession that is probably more legendary than historical, was a largely political move three centuries later, around the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. It can be seen as an attempt to further strengthen a Roman, imperial model in the period when Christianity became the official state religion. We can understand that without necessarily wanting to perpetuate all elements of that authoritarian model two millennia later in a very different world.
In any case, we can read scripture in the light of reason and history, and debate which passages reflect our best guess about the historical Jesus, and which characteristics of the early church are worth preserving in the modern world, without having to resort to a literal misreading of the passage such as that in #22. I haven't ever seen that attempt at an explanation before either, and I'm afraid I can't support it. Someeone must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick there, or perhaps Puppengesicht just wasn't remembering clearly.
One more very short OT note (sorry, I know this is already too long): since Dipi recommended the Palestrina setting of 'Tu es Petrus' (#24), I'd also like to put in a good word for the one by Poulenc. (-:
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