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HTM001: A married fisherman walks off his boat one morning, follows a rabbi for three years, denies him three times in the dark, and ends up buried under the high altar of the largest church in Christendom. That’s the arc.

In the pilot episode of Holy Troublemakers, Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Simon Peter, son of Jonah, husband, business owner, fisherman from Bethsaida, who walked away from a working life on the Sea of Galilee because Jesus told him to get out of the boat.

The episode moves through the places where the story actually happened. The house in Capernaum, plastered floor to ceiling and covered in pilgrim graffiti in Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Hebrew, with a 5th-century Byzantine octagonal church built directly over the walls of a 1st-century home. The northern hills of Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?” in front of a pagan shrine to Pan known locally as the Gates of Hades, and Peter answers. The high priest’s courtyard, where a servant girl asks Peter a question by a charcoal fire and Peter gives the wrong answer three times before sunrise.

Then a second charcoal fire, on a beach in Galilee, where Jesus cooks breakfast and asks Peter the same question three times: “Do you love me?” Same Greek word for the fire. Not an accident.

Dom also walks through what came after Pentecost: the sermon that converted 3,000 people, the healing at the temple gate, the vision at Joppa that cracked open the Gentile mission, the imprisonment and angelic escape under Herod Agrippa, and the road south from Rome where, according to the apocryphal Acts of Peter (late 2nd century, referenced by Origen and Ambrose), Peter met the risen Christ walking back toward the city and turned around.

The episode closes under the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where archaeological excavations beginning in 1940 uncovered a 2nd-century shrine at the spot pilgrims had venerated since at least AD 160. In 1953, Margherita Guarducci identified bones in a niche in a nearby graffiti wall as those of an elderly man wrapped in purple and gold cloth, with the foot bones missing, which she argued was consistent with being cut down from an inverted cross. Pope Paul VI announced in 1968 that the relics of Saint Peter had been identified in a manner considered convincing. The evidence is contested, and Dom lays out both sides.

The thesis underneath all of it: Peter is the saint who accompanies. The man who was put back on his feet by a question asked over breakfast.

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Links for this episode:

• Saint Peter — Wikipedia
• Saint Peter the Apostle — Britannica
• Catholic Encyclopedia (NewAdvent)
• The House of Peter — Biblical Archaeology Society
• St. Peter’s Church, Capernaum — Wikipedia
• Petros-petra Wordplay — Jerusalem Perspective
• The Rock Explains the Papacy — Catholic Answers
• Denial of Peter — Wikipedia
• Domine, quo vadis? — Wikipedia
• Quo Vadis: St. Peter’s Call to Martyrdom — Catholic Exchange
• What is the evidence that Peter was crucified upside down? — Evidence for Christianity
• Was Peter Crucified Upside Down? — Sean McDowell
• Saint Peter’s Tomb — Wikipedia
• St. Peter’s Basilica — his tomb? — National Geographic

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