A Roman tradition handed down to us through the medium of early Christian art, curiously seems to connect the angelic deliverance of the Apostle S. Peter with Rome. On some twenty of the early Christian sarcophagi preserved in the Lateran Museum, the arrest and imprisonment of S. Peter by the soldiers of Herod Antipas form the subject of the sculpture. Why, pertinently ask these writers, was this special scene in the life of S. Peter selected as the subject graved on so many of these ancient coffins of the Roman Christian dead? They reply—The connexion which traditionally existed between this imprisonment and the angelic deliverance with the first coming of the apostle to Rome.
Bishop Lightfoot somewhat strangely remarks (Clement of Rome, vol. ii. p. 491): “S. Paul could not have written as he writes to the Romans (i. 11, xv. 20–24) if they had received even a short visit from an apostle, more especially if that apostle were S. Peter.”
It is difficult to see how he makes this deduction from S. Paul’s words in the passages in question. In the first passage (Rom. i. 11), S. Paul, after addressing the Roman Christians, and thanking God that their faith is spoken of throughout the whole world, adds that he longs to see these Christians, that he may impart to them some spiritual gift to the end that they may be established. Then he explains or, as it were, recalls what he has said, that he might not seem to think them insufficiently instructed or established in the faith, and therefore in the words which follow closely, “that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me,” turns the end of his coming to them to their mutual rejoicing in one another’s faith, when he and they shall come to know one another.
In the second passage (Rom. xv. 20–24), S. Paul plainly states that his work had been to preach the gospel “not where Christ was named, lest he should build upon another man’s foundation”—that is, not where Christ was preached by another before me.
Then he adds, that he considered the preaching of Christ where he had not been named the most needful work; he therefore declined going to Rome, where was a Church already planted; but now, having no more Churches to plant in the regions where he was sojourning, he signifies his resolution of visiting the Roman Church.
Any deduction that could be drawn from these two passages in S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, would seem to be exactly the contrary to that suggested by Lightfoot.
[8] See above, pp. [7–12], where the question of the foundation of the Church in Rome is fully discussed.
[9] Such as the heresies of the Nicolaitans and Cerinthians, and certain of the false Docetic teachings.
[10] The Church in the Roman Empire, xi. 6.