Peter Kirby

You say that Peter was a common name. Can you support that claim?

best,
Peter Kirby

rlogan

Peter Kirby, for one.

Happy to admit I spoke quickly there. But I'll get back to you.

- best to you, too..

rlogan

So Peter, you wanted confirmation that "Rock" was a common name. As always, these things are more complicated than you think. One can inquire whether it is common in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew - and then one discovers further that there are various "rock-type" names and not just simply "rock".

I settled on looking at ancient hebrew to see if there was a historical basis for it, and here's what I found for names:

Elizur - Rock of God.
Beth-zur - House of Rock
Helkath-hazzurim - Field of Rock
Zur

I found three of these in the OT as personal names in many places. But the "field of rock" I thought was a strange personal name, and when I looked for it in the OT I only found it used as actually a place. nevertheless, it is supposedly a personal name too.

There were some others I found that said they were Hebrew for "rock" in the source, but I don't think so:

Cephas (Aramaic, isn't it?)
Sela - also means rock? found one OT place named this.
Evan or Eban (maybe modern hebrew versions? not in OT)

Anyway - that is enough to convince me that naming people "rock" or "rock-thing" was common to the OT Jewish heratige. I didn't even try stone.

In Aramaic, it seems to be Cephas or Kephas or Kepas. I don't Know what Jesus was speaking when he said it - some say Aramaic and some say Hebrew. But I found an interesting source that claims there is more than one Peter, and that the Aramaic name goes at least to 400 B.C:

Two different Peters

As far as ther Greek goes, that is Petros. The female form was Petra. There's some ancient city by that name in what is now jordan.

I have seen it stated that Petros would not have been a Greek name at the time, and one source says it was a borrowed hebrew name for a person as opposed to Greek:

Petros is hebrew adaptation?

Uh, I'm a little burned out on the Peter thing now. I think that I've established an ancient Jewish tradition of naming people rock-type names and that when Jesus spoke he could have been using Aramaic or Hebrew-Borrowed Greek, and although the translation to Petros may have been uncommon name for a Roman citizen- that Jesus naming someone "rock" was not extraordinary.

There were other "rocks".

spin

That should read that Cephas was the Greek form of an Aramaic name, KYP'.


spin

spin

This is the list of "apostles" found near the beginning of The Epistle of the Apostles :

One writer (see link above) comments that the document was written circa 160 CE.


spin

Amaleq13

Thanks for responding but the "Simon" comes from the Gospels, it isn't found in Paul. I think rlogan answered my question, though. It apparently wouldn't have been necessarily unusual for a Jewish man to be named Cephas/Peter.

Thank you VERY MUCH for this link! I've been searching in vain for an online source of the text but I've been looking under "Letter of the Apostles" and only found references to the NT letters. This is a strange piece of evidence.

Is it just me or did those ancient Jews need some more names to give folks? They have, what, about 7 or 8 to spread around? No wonder everybody had to have a title connected to their names (e.g. "the Just", "the Galilean").