As early as the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo wrote that with the words “you are Peter”, Jesus did not institute Peter as the cornerstone of the church; these words do not refer to Peter's human person, who is called “flesh and blood”; they refer to the revelation of the Divinity of the Christ, confessed by the apostle: “Thou art the Christ, Son of the living God.” The cornerstone of the church, says Augustine, is Christ; Peter's confession, but not his human person, is the cornerstone, which can have successors through the ages, while the Divinity of Christ is the permanent truth.
Augustine's conviction is that he never revoked, not even in his later book “Retractations”.
Later, for reasons of consolidation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Councils adopted the idea that today prevails in theology: that Jesus instituted Peter as the unshakable foundation of the church – the same man that Jesus called flesh and blood, and shortly after Satan: “Vade retro, Satana”.
Nor did Paul of Tarsus accept the idea of Peter's primacy and infallibility, as stated in the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, for Jesus publicly rebuked Peter for having “aberrated from the truth of the Gospel,” demanding that Christian neophytes be circumcised.
As for Peter's alleged pontificate at the seat of Rome, it is a blatantly anti-historical idea. Peter may have lived in Rome for about three months, in 67, but not for 25 years, and he never directed the church in Rome. It is known that in the year 64, the terrible persecution of Christians by Emperor Nero broke out, persecution that continued for nearly three centuries until the year 313. During this period, no known Christians survived in Rome, let alone the spiritual head of Christianity.
In fact, Peter's first Epistle is dated Babylon and must have been written in the mid-1st century.
In 58, in the city of Corinth, Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans, a genuine treatise on Christology, because no one in the capital of the Roman Empire could give these clarifications – not even Peter.
At the end of the Epistle, he sends his regards to numerous known Christians in Rome – no greetings to Peter, who was not known in the empire's capital.
In the years 60 to 62, Paul was imprisoned in Rome, and in prison, he wrote the Epistles to the Philippians, the Ephesians, the Colossians, and the private letter to Philemon. Paul mentions the Christians who visited him in the Roman prison in these letters, but he does not mention Peter, who did not visit him because he was not in Rome. According to ancient historians, it is known that during Nero's persecution, Peter and Paul secretly went to visit surviving Christians in Rome; they were discovered, arrested and killed; tradition locates the death of Peter and Paul on June 29, 67.
To unify the dozens of Christian groups, each of which claimed to represent true Christianity, the first Christian Emperor Constantine the Great, by the Edict of Milan in the year 313, gave freedom to Christians and proclaimed Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, and to establish unity in the various litigants, he also decreed that the bishop of the capital of the empire be considered primus inter pares. 1
The so-called infallibility of the pope was decreed only by the first Vatican Council in the year 1870; for the rest, the pope did not assert his supposed infallibility, not even in the most vehement controversies, especially after the noisy encyclical “Humanae Vitae”, violently contested by bishops and cardinals.
Whoever confesses Christ as the supreme and only rock of the church agrees with the Gospel and with the words of Christ himself.
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1)- Primus inter pares is a Latin phrase that means first between equals. The bishop of Rome was elected as the leader of the movement created by Constantine, which later gave rise to the creation of the papacy.
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