Saint Peter the Apostle [antikvár]

PREFACE For many years I have wondered why there were so few books about Saint Peter, compared to the vast number on Saint Paul. The Apostle to the Gentiles has had a perennial fascination for writers, even for those—one is tempted to say especially for those—of skeptical bent. The Apostle to the Hebrews has found many champions and opponents, but few chroniclers. This book is not offered as an exhaustive or definitive survey of the material, much less as an authoritative interpretation of it. I am too well aware of my own limitations to make any such attempt. Yet if painters and sculptors are permitted to imagine how the Prince of the Apostles looked under various circumstances, perhaps a writer who makes no claim to be an exegete or a theologian may endeavor at least to paint his portrait in words, not in this or that incident merely, but in the whole range of his unique and adventurous life, against his own social and historical background. Such a purpose, considering the subject, does not justify fictionalizing, but it does require considerable liberty to imagine and to conjecture. This, I infer, is licit so long as the reader is not led to mistake suppositions for facts. It has been a great help to have the permission of the Mac-millan Company to quote freely from The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, translated into English from the original Greek by the Very Reverend Francis Alo-ysius Spencer, O. P., (New York, 1943); for many facts about Saint Peter are made clearer in the Greek text than in the Vulgate or its Douay derivative. Quotations from the Old Testament are from the Douay Version. To conform to the usage of Father Spencer, however, I have followed the Hebrew spelling of proper names (Isaiah, for example) rather than the Latinized form of the Vulgate (Isaias); though I have called Peter's father Jonas to distinguish him from other lohns in the narrative.