Is Peter the rock on which the Church is built?

Question

In Greek, nouns have gender. It is similar to the English words actor and actress. The first is masculine and the second is feminine. Likewise, the Greek word "petros" is masculine; "petra" is feminine. Peter, the man, is appropriately referred to as Petros. But Jesus said that the rock he would build his church on was not the masculine "petros" but the feminine "petra." Let me illustrate by using the words "actor" and "actress": "You are the actor and with this actress I will make my movie." Do see how the gender influences how a sentence is understood? Jesus was not saying that the church will be built upon Peter, but upon something else. What, then, does petra, the feminine noun, refer to?

Answer 1

You are trying to make a religious point (anti-Catholic) in the Languages section of Yahoo! Answers. Shame on you for trying to hide a doctrinal attack in an "innocent" question. Jesus spoke Aramaic and whatever he said is shrouded in a Greek translation. The Greek author of Matthew used a very common stylistic technique where nouns COULD be used ambiguously in two different genders. NO Greek speaker would EVER interpret "petra" as "female" so your illustration of "actor" and "actress" is 100% wrong. Greek "gender" is just a noun classification system and has NOTHING to do with gender or sex. It is called "gender" ONLY because human nouns tend to fall into different noun classes. Since petra is NOT a human noun, the use of gender is completely irrelevant. Greek puns which mix noun classes are VERY common and have NOTHING to do with sex.

Answer 2

It refers to Peter; grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex, and Jesus specifically renamed Simon and gave him the name Peter BECAUSE he was the rock on which the church was to be built. Remember also that Jesus would have spoken to Simon/Peter in Aramaic, not Greek, so the genders of Greek nouns are totally irrelevant here.

Answer 3

You are complicating something without need. Why ?
In Spanish is the same situation, but nobody, at least that I know of, has tried to complicate things that way.
It is a close enough association for people to understand the point. He did refer to Peter.
You are forgetting that Jesus did not speak Greek, but Aramaic

Answer 4

"Peter", or it's ancient equivalent actually, meant "rock" it was a knickname of the time that implied toughness or referred to a large or strong man (sort of like the knickname we have today, "Rocky"). In this light, Jesus' statement was a play on words. Not to denigrate what he said, of course... in ancient times, such wordplay was common and in a mostly oral tradition (most people of the time were illiterate and news travelled via word-of-mouth) such turns of phrase helped people remember important points about things that were said when they subsequently passed news on to another person or persons. It's a mostly forgotten art really, like the rhymes and phrasings of African griots, or wise men, who pass down generations of knowledge wholly by word-of-mouth.

Answer 5

I do not know Greek. Your question is very interesting. Christ spoke Aramaic not Greek, so what the translator was trying to convey, I do not know. Unfortunately we do not have the original texts.

Answer 6

rock=God