St Peter was the Prince of the Apostles and the ‘Rock’ on which Jesus founded the Christian Church. What relics of this saint survive today? What can they tell us about the traditions connected to him?
By Dr. Georges Kazan
St Peter the Apostle is venerated as the principal founder of the Christian Church. In particular, he is held to have established two of the greatest centres of early Christianity, the Church of Rome in Italy and the Church of Antioch in Syria.
There is no contemporary, 1st-century evidence for the tradition that St Peter preached and was martyred in Rome. However, a grave in Rome’s Vatican necropolis has been venerated by Christians as that of St Peter the Apostle since ca. 150. The human remains it contained could confirm details about the life of the person interred there, such as the genetic population group from which they originated, their sex and when they died. In principle, these remains could provide the only material evidence for St Peter’s life and his presence in Rome.
Unfortunately, the site was severely looted by non-Catholic forces on at least two occasions, by Arab raiders from North Africa in 846 and in 1527 by mutinous Protestant troops serving the Holy Roman Emperor.
After that, the grave lay relatively undisturbed until its archaeological excavation in the 1940s, which uncovered the remains of several individuals. Human remains of St Peter are first reported at other sites in Rome: at Rome’s Lateran Cathedral and at the church of Santa Maria in Cappella. However, these are only recorded from the 11th century. The Lateran remains consist mostly of skull fragments. These were also desecrated in 1527.
None of these bones have been scientifically dated or can be identified conclusively as St Peter. Their identification as relics of St Peter must therefore rest on personal faith rather than scientific fact.
In 2015, I initiated a study in collaboration with the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford to examine relics of St Peter using modern science. One of these studies was featured in CNN’s documentary film series Finding Jesus (see Press & Media).
The relic, one of two teeth said to belong to St Peter, dated to an era in which Christians were being persecuted by the Roman state. However, rather than dating to the persecutions attributed to the reign of Nero (AD 54-68), in which St Peter is said to have died, the relic dates to the era of persecution (AD 303-313) that took place in the reign of a later emperor, Diocletian.
Amazingly, this would support the tradition that this was a relic of St Peter: not St Peter the Apostle, but St Peter the Exorcist. This St Peter was martyred at Rome alongside the Christian priest Marcellinus, in AD 304. Their remains were venerated by Rome’s Christians inside the catacombs that bear their name.
Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe Basiliek,
Tongeren – Belgium
So far, with the permission of the churches and museums involved, we have analysed seven relics of St Peter. These include a number which, according to early medieval sources, were received from Rome before AD 846 – the date when the Tomb of St Peter was first disturbed. The results of our study will finally shed new light on the story of the relics of St Peter in the Latin West.