For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Now, I had heard this in more than one Yeshivah, but then I finally tacked down a more extended source for this.

So was he beheaded, or did he just walk away?

It could have been both if the legend of Saint Winifred is anything to go by.

Her suitor, Caradog, was enraged when she decided to become a nun, and decapitated her. In one version of the tale, her head rolled downhill, and, where it stopped, a healing spring appeared. Winifred's head was subsequently rejoined to her body due to the efforts of her maternal uncle, Saint Beuno, and she was restored to life.

I don't know who could have stuck Peter's head back on, though, because he wasn't friends with Simon Magus in the Pseudo-Clementine novel.

Seriously, though, it's an interesting story. Maybe the original idea that Peter had returned to his Jewish roots is something to do with ideas in the Pseudo-Clemintine novel about Peter and Simon Magus. There are theories which say that Peter represents the original Jewish sect about Messiah Jesus while Simon Magus represents Pauline Christianity. (It gets even more complicated when other theories see elements of Gnosticism retained in the epistles forged by Marcion even after the 'orthodox faction' had been adapting them.)

Whatever it's all about, it seems that some factions were determined to promote the idea that Peter had something to do with Judaism and Christianity was a false religion.

Back to Eusebius. The quote from the (lost to us) Tertullian work is -

4. The Roman Tertullian is likewise a witness of this. He writes as follows: "Examine your records. There you will find that Nero was the first that persecuted this doctrine, particularly then when after subduing all the east, he exercised his cruelty against all at Rome. We glory in having such a man the leader in our punishment. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing was condemned by Nero unless it was something of great excellence."

Eusebius was one of the chroniclers promoting the idea that Christians had been horribly persecuted since the beginning. One of his own works is the Martyrs Of Palestine where he reveals an unhealthy obsession with describing torture.

He could have been working with a team who were out to forge records, including the details that Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified. After an horrendous amount of forging, however, the result was a fake letter from a fake pope making somewhat vague suggestions that Peter, Paul and an unspecified number of women had been martyred. Eusebius couldn't have provided gory details about Peter and Paul without giving the game away but he's the kind of man who would have noticed that the word's 'beheaded' and 'crucified' had been left out.

Why go to all the trouble of forging letters from Clement and Dionysus etc. when all you had to do was 'find' a letter written by somebody who had supposedly lived through Nero's persecution? For example, a poor woman somewhere outside Italy had written to a cousin who was also outside Italy. She said she had barely escaped with her life while her husband and brother (or whatever) had been captured and tortured to death. The 'finder' could have said that the letter had been 'discovered' amongst some old family records because the cousin was his ancestress. Something like this wouldn't require anyone in the past to remember it and mention it in a letter or book.