basilica of S. Peter, is due not to any want of reverence or respect for the noble Apostle of the Gentiles, but solely because Rome and the pilgrims to Rome were deeply conscious of the special debt of Rome to S. Peter, who was evidently the real founder of the mighty Church of the capital.
The writer of this work is fully conscious that the conclusion to which he has come after massing together all the available evidence, is not the usual conclusion arrived at by one great and influential school of thought in our midst; nor does it accord with the conclusion of that eminently just scholar Bishop Lightfoot, who while positively affirming the presence of S. Peter in Rome, whence, as he allows, he wrote his First Epistle, and where through pain and agony he passed to his longed-for rest in his Master's Paradise, yet cannot accept the tradition of his early presence in the metropolis.
The writer of this study has no doubt whatever that the teaching of the vast majority of the Roman Catholic writers on this point is strictly accurate, and that S. Peter at a comparatively early date, probably somewhere about the year of grace 42-3, came to Rome confirmed in the faith—taught—strengthened with his own blessed memories of his adored Master—the little band of Christians already dwelling in the capital of the Empire. Under his pious training the little band, in the six, seven, or eight years of his residence in their midst, became the strong nucleus of the powerful Church of Rome.
Then, most probably, he left Rome when the decree of the Emperor Claudius, A.D. 49, was promulgated: the decree which was the result of the disturbances among the turbulent Jewish colony,—disturbances no doubt owing to bitter and relentless opposition to the fast spreading of the Christian faith in their midst. As Suetonius (Claudius, 25) tersely but clearly tells us: "Judæos, impulsore Christo assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit."
From the year 49, when he left the Queen City, S. Peter apparently was absent from the Church in which for some seven or eight years he had laboured so well and so successfully, continuing his work, however, in other lands. Then in A.D. 63-4 he returned, resumed his Roman work, wrote the First
