Saint Peter: A Biography

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a concise, sober, readable assessment of as much of the historical Peter as can be sifted from the New Testament sources. While Grant amply illustrates how deeply problematic the sources are as history, he nevertheless argues convincingly that they show that Peter's passionate faith in Jesus and his ability to hold together the disconsolate band of followers after the Crucifixion make him a truly significant historical personality. In addition to summarizing the problems for the historian in locating facts, Grant offers useful thumbnail sketches of what is known of the historical Paul and James and their testy relationships with Peter. The book, which is mercifully free of overelaborate theses, is further buttressed by 17 illustrations, two maps and extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter and at the back. There are also a table of dates, an index, a list of sources and notes. History Book Club main selection; BOMC, QPBC alternate selections. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Grant (humanity, Edinburgh Univ.) has collected what little is known about the biblical figure of Peter and shapes it into a lively, informative book. Some may object to his refusal to treat the miraculous as historical, but his insistence on historical objectivity is one of the book's many strengths. Pulling Peter out from the shadow of the apostle Paul, Grant provides a good, clear review of the available sources and a detailed historical background, making it all easy to follow. He highlights Peter's pivotal role in resuscitating Jesus' small band of followers after the crucifixion and suggests that his biblical subordination to Paul was born of the latter's jealousy. Against this, the author also reasons that James was more prominent than Peter among Jewish Christians and that Peter was more likely a missionary to Rome than the leader of that city's church. Grant wisely avoids assessing tradition's claim on Peter as the first pope, and while he admits that his book reports little not written elsewhere, his skill is in bringing so much previous scholarship together in one relatively brief volume. For subject collections.-W. Alan Froggatt, Bridgewater, Ct.

Steve Schroeder

Grant's biography of St. Peter is an interesting case study in the historical reconstruction of a character about whom there is almost no historical evidence. This life of Peter is written by a process of negation that is instructive as both a historical and a literary technique. Grant brackets legendary and mythical material, including accounts of miracles. He highlights narrative techniques available to communities with a stake in remembering Peter and, against the background of those techniques, fills in accounts of Jesus, Paul, James, and others with whom Peter was associated in his lifetime. In the midst of the bracketing, the highlighting, and the filling in, Peter emerges more as an absence than a presence. Particularly in cases where historical evidence has been suppressed for personal or political reasons, this process of negation is a creative way to encounter characters who would otherwise remain hopelessly obscure. Since that description fits virtually every life worthy of historical investigation, Grant's study is a valuable contribution to the art of biography as much as to the memory of Peter.

From Barnes & Noble

Drawing on the latest advances in archaeology and anthropology, as well as on his own extensive knowledge of the ancient world, classical historian Michael Grant narrates and interprets the life of Peter, one of the great icons of Christianity. Heroic, elusive, and enigmatic, this fisherman-turned-saint has remained more a figure of legend than of history, despite his "visibility" as Jesus's favored apostle and the first Pope of the early Church. In what The Spectator has called "...a coolly dispassionate attempt to disentangle the Peter of history from the Peter of faith and iconography," Grant examines tradition, legend, and apocrypha and probes the problems of classical scholarship and its research methods. The result is an impeccable and elegantly written biography that sheds as much light upon our relationship to the past as it does upon the complex face of Simon-Peter. black-and-white illustrations.