Some people doubt that the story of Jesus is true. But what about the story of Saint Peter?

According to sources, the naive and impulsive fisherman accompanied Jesus throughout almost his entire public life, but ended up making a fool of himself time and time again.

Many phrases that have become proverbial originated from Jesus’ rebukes to Peter: ‘Get behind me, Satan’, ‘You of little faith’, ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword’, and so on.

After his famous three denials, Peter did not meet the same fate as Judas simply because he was the sort of man more likely to burst into tears in an alleyway than to take the law into his own hands by hanging himself from a branch.

Even in the early years of the Church, Peter proved to be narrow-minded, cautious and wary of anything new.
At first, he was unwilling to accept converts from polytheism, but only those from Judaism.
He later accepted them, but tried to impose the rite of circumcision on them.
He eventually set this aside too, but insisted that the two groups eat separately.

Each time he had to make an effort to overcome his prejudices, and what saved him, as always, was his ability to admit his mistakes, combined with his ability to see the good in everyone, provided someone forced him to reflect on it long enough.
(After all, he was putting up his mother-in-law in his own home: he must have been used to losing his patience and then regaining it).

Now, it is true that many of these sources come from circles that identified more closely with St Paul, St John or other more charismatic apostles, in comparison with whom Peter served as a benchmark of narrow-mindedness and traditionalism.

Yet he remains, by far, the most real character ever mentioned in any text from the ancient world.
His reactions are so human and believable that at times it feels as though we have known him in person.

What is more, even as the Christian community in Rome began to gain ever greater prestige and prominence, no one sought to censor or embellish the image of Peter presented in the Gospels.
On the contrary: second-century apocryphal texts, such asthe Apocalypse of Peter —which was the first popular depiction of heaven and hell—emphasised his simplicity of spirit and his struggle to understand God’s plans.

The legend of the ‘Quo vadis?’ recounted in the Acts of Peter depicted a man who was unaware of what he was doing, even just a few hours before his martyrdom.

According to this legend, whilst Peter was trying to make his escape from Nero’s Rome, he had a vision of Jesus and asked him: ‘Lord, where are you going?’ ‘I am going to Rome, to be crucified once more.’ It was only after this encounter that the elderly apostle came to his senses, retraced his steps and allowed himself to be put to death at the foot of the Vatican Hill, where the basilica in his honour stands today.
This martyrdom is, indeed, historically confirmed by archaeological excavations, at least insofar as a fragment of a tombstone has been unearthed bearing the Greek inscription ‘Petros eni’ ( ‘Peter is here’).

Apparently, the idea that the Church had as its cornerstone a man who was neither pure nor perfect, nor the possessor of any arcane knowledge of the universe, and, all things considered, not even particularly open-minded, did not trouble Christians: on the contrary, it heartened them.
Even in the fictional legends composed centuries after his death, the character of Peter therefore remained fairly true to how he had been described, whilst he was still alive, in Paul’s letters or the Gospel of Mark.

But if we put ourselves in the shoes of the early Christians – those who recorded the story of Jesus in writing and took care to include Peter’s countless mistakes – it is entirely legitimate to ask ourselves: what purpose would it have served, for a group of people of that era, to recount the misguided reactions of their founder in the face of fictional situations?

If Jesus’ actions were truly unreal, what would have been the point of adding reactions from Peter that were so realistic as to be embarrassing?

Could it not be, rather, that the undeniable reality of Peter’s reactions is in fact one of the many factors supporting the authenticity of the entire account?