Whenever I hear apologists talk about how good the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is, I always think about the appearance to Peter.

According our earliest source (1 Cor 15:5), the risen Jesus appeared to Peter before anyone else, giving Peter’s experience pride of place before the appearances to the twelve, James, the five hundred, etc.

The fact that our earliest source places the appearance to Peter first shows how important that event was for the earliest Christians and how central Peter’s role was among the apostles.

That also makes it very important historically. Since hallucination and psychological contagion are common naturalistic explanations for the appearances, it’s important for the apologist to show that the first experience, that of the influential Peter, was not a hallucination.

What did this crucial experience consist of? How long was it? Was anybody else present? What did Jesus say, if anything at all? What did Peter himself say about it, beyond the bare fact that it happened?

These are the kinds of details we would expect from “good evidence”.

But on all these questions 1 Corinthians 15 is completely silent.

And so is Mark, our earliest gospel... and Matthew, our second earliest.

In fact, the two earliest gospels don’t even mention an appearance to Peter.

Luke isn’t much help either.

After spending 20 verses on the appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Luke gives barely a sideways nod to Peter:

“The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon” (24:34).

But again, no details.

The only possible account of the appearance to Peter in the NT that gives us anything substantial is John 21, but there are several factors that make this account highly suspect.

The most immediately obvious issue is the fact that John places the appearance to Peter LAST instead of FIRST.

This makes for a very awkward progression in John’s narrative, going from the dramatic appearances in Jerusalem to Peter carrying on the family fishing business in Galilee as if nothing much had happened.

Fundamentalist interpreters like to explain away the discrepancy in the order of our sources by saying that John 21 describes a completely separate appearance to Peter to that mentioned by Paul and Luke, one not mentioned elsewhere in the NT.

But a much more likely explanation, given the awkwardness of the progression in John’s account, is that the author of the fourth gospel has rearranged the order of the appearances for his own purposes.

But why would he do that?

One likely reason is that he didn’t like what the traditional order of the appearances communicated about Peter’s position of authority.

Remember that for the earliest Christians, seeing the risen Jesus was a crucial qualification for apostleship (e.g. 1 Cor 9:1).

By placing the appearance to Peter last, the fourth gospel seems to be tacitly diminishing Peter’s authority.

This is confirmed by the way the gospel consistently usurps Peter’s centrality in that story by his repeated references to the “beloved disciple”.

Just as the beloved disciple “outran Peter and arrived at the tomb first” (20:4) and “saw and believed” before Peter (20:8), so he understands and announces to Peter “It is the Lord!” (21:7) and takes the spotlight in Jesus’ last words (21:20-23).

All of this is intended to lend special credibility to his account, over and above the stories told in other communities.

IOW it’s highly sectarian, which raises a big red flag concerning the credibility of our source.

But an even bigger problem arises when we compare John’s account of the appearance to Peter with Luke’s account of Peter’s original call at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Luke 5.

Here are some of the similarities between the resurrection appearance to Peter in Jn 21 and the original call of Peter in Lk 5:

- Peter, the sons of Zebedee, and other disciples are in a boat near land

- they have caught nothing after fishing all night

- Jesus is on the shore

- Jesus tells the men to cast their nets

- they obey and take in a miraculously large catch

- Jesus speaks with Peter

- Peter is overwhelmed with guilt

- Jesus commissions Peter to catch people/feed Jesus’ sheep

- Peter follows Jesus/is told to “follow me”

How do we explain so many similarities?

Again, apologists often try to harmonize the accounts by saying that the same thing must have happened twice, but that’s extremely unlikely given the extent of the similarities and the fact that neither gospel includes the other episode.

It’s much more likely that Luke transplanted a post-resurrection story into a pre-resurrection setting, or that John transplanted a pre-resurrection story into a post-resurrection setting.

Or perhaps we’re dealing with some kind of memory conflation, with the details of two separate but related events in Peter’s past being blended into a single and much more dramatic event.

These are all possible explanations, and any honest account must admit the difficulty of arbitrating between them with any confidence.

But again, this significantly hampers our ability to anything worthwhile about the appearance to Peter.

Not only is our only account of perhaps the most important appearance of the risen Jesus tainted by the blatant one-upmanship of the writer/community that preserves it, but it’s also greatly muddled by its relationship to another story.

How can we possibly say, given the willingness of the gospel writers to change such a crucial story to suit their own needs, that the story wasn’t substantially changed already by the time it reached them?

How can we say with any confidence and that the bedrock historical event behind these changing stories was a concrete, bodily encounter?

How do we know that Peter’s experience was not simply a projection of his own desires, a reflection of his need to reduce dissonance over the Messiah’s terrible death and his own grievous betrayal?

The moral of the story here is that we have a very small window of access is into the days after Jesus’ death.

And not only is our window of access small, it’s stained glass, reflecting at every point the particular interests, biases and agendas of the people telling the story.