Peter and His Successors: Tradition and Redaction in Matthew 16.17-19

In all three synoptic gospels, sometime after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus asks his disciples who the people think he is; on being told that the popular view is that he is either an Old Testament prophet or John the Baptist returned to life, he asks his disciples whom they themselves take him to be. Peter, acting as their spokesman, says ’You are the Messiah’ (so Mark; ’The Messiah of God’, Luke; ’The Messiah, the son of the living God’, Matthew). Jesus then tells them not to speak in these terms to other people and proceeds to warn them that his mission will involve suffering and death. Mark and Luke seem to many of their readers to imply that Peter’s term ’Messiah’ is misleading, dangerous even; in Matthew, however, we certainly have no sense of Peter’s confession being of ambivalent validity, for the words ’flesh and blood has not revealed this to you ... ’ and ’he told the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah’ (16.17, 20) seem to indicate that Matthew totally approves of the title ’Messiah’. Immediately after Peter’s confession