Word: cullmann
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Residence and martyrdom in Rome, Cullmann argues, hardly warrant the Catholic claim that Peter transferred the leadership of the church to that city. To begin with, "Peter was the leader of the entire church only at Jerusalem." When Peter left Jerusalem, he turned over leadership of the church to James, the brother of Jesus,* and himself became merely the subordinate head of the "Jewish Christian mission." It was his job to preach the Gospel to Jews outside the Holy City, just as it was Paul's parallel mission to preach to the Gentiles...
Peter sent his public addresses to James, and in Antioch, as Cullmann notes, when involved in a church dispute, Peter had occasion "to fear the people who come from James." Says Cullmann, answering the Roman Catholic view: "Peter does not leave Jerusalem in order to transfer the primacy elsewhere; he leaves rather to spread the Gospel...
Protestant Cullmann here seems to side with the Catholics. There is scant doubt, he says, that the Matthew text is both accurate and very old. Furthermore, the meaning of the original Aramaic is crystal-clear. "Kepha" was the Aramaic word for "rock"; it is also the name by which Christ called Peter...
...there Cullmann stops. To construe the text as warrant of the papal succession, he argues, is something vastly different from clearing its literal meaning. Peter's leadership, he says, was an "example and pattern," nothing more. It was not until the third century that a bishop of Rome cited the Matthew text in support of his primacy. Says Cullmann: "It is arguing in a circle . . . to assert that, since on the one hand the promise of Jesus to Peter exists and on the other hand the fact exists that Rome exercised a primacy from a relatively early date...
...Cullmann concludes that Peter, the original head of the apostles, was the founder of the church without being the founder of a visible church succession. Says he: "Foundation and building may not be interchanged . . . In so far as Peter is the rock, he is such in the temporal sense of laying the foundation as an apostle. In every generation, Christ intends to build His church on the foundation of the apostles,, and among them Peter is the most important . . . The significance of individual churches for the church at large comes and goes. But the rock, the foundation for all churches...