One may read with surprise
in the Jewish legends of Peter that his name meant "Dispenser". The
legends were fully translated into English by Foakes Jackson (Peter,
Prince of Apostles, by F.J. Foakes Jackson, New York 1927, p. 275) in 1927
and the relevant passage runs: "He [Rabbi Simeon] withheld them [the
Nazarenes] from the observance of all the commandments of the Law of Moses,
both ordinances and statutes. So they changed the name of Rabbi Simeon Kaipha
to Poter (Dispenser) because he dispensed them entirely from all the many
prescriptions of the Law of Moses. And he dwelt there all his days in the stone
tower. Because of the rock which was his habitation the Jews called the name of
Rabbi Simeon Kaipha [stone]." There are three forms of the legend but it
is in the third of these that the story is recounted most explicitly how Simeon
became a convert to Christianity only in seeming, gaining a great position
among them and using it to dissuade the Christians from active persecution of
the Jews or their forcible conversion. Under the pretext of contemplation he is
said to have lived in a stone tower [like the Castel S. Angelo?] in order not
to be defiled with Christian foods and Christian idolatry. All this reads like
a Jewish answer to the Clementine Recognitions and is no doubt of the Byzantine
period, but the attempt to fix the sense of the name Peter may well be much
earlier. The legend uses פוטֵר giving an arbitrary vocalization to the three
consonants P-T-R, as if the name Peter was taken straight from Hebrew or
Aramaic. The result, after vocalization, is the production of the
Kal-participle of the verb פָטַר, as if the name Petros meant "the one
separating or dispensing or setting free".
When one finds the same
explanation of the name Petros given by Cyril of Alexandria3, the plot
thickens. He seems to have been won over to this explanation from the more
obvious one of Kephas-rock, for at some time later than 429, when he came to
preach his homilies on Luke, he gave, while dealing with the names of the
Apostles (Lk 6. 14-19), as the meaning of Peter's name έπιλύων ή έπιγνούς i.e.,
"one who dispenses or who has special knowledge". (PG 72. 588). R.
Payne Smith, in his edition of the Syriac version of these homilies (Oxford,
1859) gives an adequate explanation of the two derivations. Dispenser comes
from פָטַר as explained above, while "having special knowledge" may
come from פָתַר a verb which means "to interpret a dream" and which
is used in Gen 40 and 41 but nowhere else in the Old Testament. The two words
differ in Hebrew only by the change of the middle radical, and their meanings
are connected, for every interpretation is a solution or a setting-free, though
the contrary is not true. Cyril was a careful student of Greek and affected a
florid style of diction which is singular among the Greek Fathers. He was
well-read in the classical authors, but he seems to have had no qualms about
accepting as true a Hebrew explanation of the Greek name Petros which no
scholar in his senses could for a moment countenance. Why? Not by mere inert
acceptance of what he had been taught in youth before his critical powers
awoke, for the passage from his commentary on John is there to show that he had
before 429 known the correct derivation. It may then be supposed that somewhere
about this time he has been presented with a list of derivations of the names
of all the apostles from Hebrew which seemed to him to be of some authority,
and, not knowing that language (Omne ignotum pro magnifico), he has mutely
acquiesced in its correctness, even though its derivations of the names Philip
and Andrew are harder to stomach than that of Peter.
. . .
That earlier writers were
not troubled by any vision of Peter as dispenser may be seen from Clement of
Alexandria. In his Hypotyposes (frag. 4, GCS. 196. 5, or Euseb. HE. 1. 12. 2)
he offers as an explanation of the quarrel between Paul and Kephas (Gal.2.11)
the astounding conjecture that this Kephas was not the Apostle but another man,
one of the 72 disciples and Peter's namesake (ομωνυνον Πετρω). If Clement sees
that Kephas and Petros are identical names, the equation of Peter and dispenser
can have meant nothing to him. At the same time many passages where Clement
uses the term επιγνωσις denote a privileged knowledge of divine matters
available only to Christians (cf. Stählin's Index verborum, s.v.) show that in
Clement's writings the fertile ground is prepared in which the seed of the new
etymology will find good harbourage and will bear fruit, Clement, in the only
passage where he uses Mt 16. 17 (for the next verse, 16. 18, is entirely
without comment in his extant writings), calls Peter' the true Gnostic (γνωστικος)
who was enabled by the power of the Father to recognize (γνωριζειν) the Son
(Strom. III 16, 101 = GCS 499. 2). He does in fact couple the ideas of
"special recognition" and "setting free" in a passage of
the Paedagogus (I 6, 29 = GCS 107. 33). Gnosis, he says, is an enlightening; it
dissipates ignorance. That which ignorance had bound down so mischievously is
nobly restored to freedom by this Gnosis (διά της έπιγνώσεως αναλυεται).
Peter's double title of dispenser and possessor of special knowledge would seem
but natural to one who had made this statement.
There is another clue which
may explain how a mistaken etym- ology came to be accepted so easily by such
men as Cyril of Alex- andria, and it comes from II Pet 1. 20. There it is said
that prophecy does not admit of private interpretation (ϊδίας έπιλύσεως ού γίγνεται). If Peter is by name ο επιλυων or the
Interpreter, surely the right of interpreting prophecy and of saying how the
Old Testament is fulfilled in the New belongs to him. To one who already
believed in the primacy of Peter, the explanation of his name as the
Interpreter would seem quite natural, just as to Optatus, who believed in the
primacy, the false etymology of Kephas-kephalé had been able to recommend
itself, through the very fact of his belief in that primacy. (Joseph Crehan, “Peter
the Dispenser,” in Vom Wort des Lebens: Festschrift Für Max Meinertz zur
Vollendung des 70 Lebensjahres 19 Dezember 1950, ed. Nikolaus Adler [Münster:
Aschendorff, 1951], 61-62, 64-65)
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