Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/236

 *tuted a church, over which he ordained a bishop. Thence northward, into Pontus, where he visited the cities of Sinope and Amasea, on the coast of the Euxine sea. Then turning eastward into Paphlagonia, stopped at Gangra and Claudiopolis; next into Bithynia, to the cities of Nicomedia and Nicaea; and thence returned directly to Antioch, whence he shortly afterwards went to Jerusalem.

This ingenious piece of apostolic romance is due to the same veracious Metaphrastes, above quoted. I have derived it from him through Caesar Baronius, who gives it in his Annales Ecclesiastici. (44, § 10, 11.) The great annalist approves and adopts it, however, only as far as it describes the journey of Peter to Antioch; and there he leaves the narrative of Metaphrastes, and instead of taking Peter on his long tour through Asia Minor and back to Jerusalem, as just described, carries him off upon a far different route, achieving the great journey westward, which accords with the view taken by the vast majority of the old ecclesiastical writers, and which is next given here. Metaphrastes also maintains this view, indeed, but supposes and invents all the events just narrated, as intermediate occurrences, between Peter's escape and his great journey, and begins the account of this latter, after his return from his Asian circuit.

To connect all this long pilgrimage with the story given in the sacred record, the sage Baronius makes the ingenious suggestion, that this was the occult reason why Agrippa was wroth with those of Tyre and Sidon; namely, that Peter had gone through their country when a fugitive from the royal vengeance, and had been favorably received by the Tyrians and Sidonians, who should have seized him as a runaway from justice, and sent him back to Agrippa. This acute guess, he thinks, will show a reason also for the otherwise unaccountable fact, that Luke should mention this quarrel between Agrippa and those cities, in connection with the events of Peter's escape and Agrippa's death. For the great cardinal does not seem to appreciate the circumstance of its close relation to the latter event, in presenting the occasion of the reconciliation between the king and the offending cities, on which the king made his speech to the people, and received the impious tribute of praise, which was followed by his death;—the whole constituting a relation sufficiently close between the two events, to justify the connection in Luke.

THE FIRST VISIT TO ROME.

But the view of this passage in Peter's history, which was long adopted universally by those who took the pains to ask about this "other place," mentioned by Luke, and the view which involves the most important relations to other far greater questions, is, that Rome was the chief apostle's refuge from the Agrippine persecution, and that in the imperial city he now laid the deep foundations of the church universal. On this point some of the greatest champions of papistry have expended vast labor, to establish a circumstance so convenient for the support of the dogma of the divinely appointed supremacy of the Romish church, since the belief of this early visit of Peter would afford a very convenient basis for the very early apostolical foundation of the Roman see. But though this notion of his refuge has received the support of a vast number of great names from the very early periods of Christian literature, and though for a long period this view was considered indubitable, from the sanction of ancient authorities, there