Jesus simply said, to Peter: You are 'rock,' and upon this rock, I will build.
See, here's the thing:
Petros is translated 161 times as Peter, and 1 time (one single time!) as stone.
The only time it's translated as "a stone" is in John 1:42, where it's providing a translation for Peter's name. It is never used in the figurative sense.
Petra on the other hand is used and translated 16 times as a mass of rock, either literal or figurative, literal in that it meant a projecting rock, cliff, or ledge, or a large stone, or metaphorically as a man like a rock, by reason of his firmness and strength of soul, which Peter had neither. In fact, if anything, Peter was a basket-case of a believer. If you pay attention to him throughout the four Gospels, you see he tried hard to be strong spiritually, but he failed in so many ways, even going so far as to deny his Master 3 times.
No, Petros was far from being a petra, and Jesus needed a petra to build His church on, not a petros.
There's no reason aside from anti-Catholic bias to take it in another way.
This is an appeal to tradition, a logical fallacy.
It's the most natural, plainest reading of the verse.
And now you're just asserting things without supporting it.
Have you ever heard of Hitchens's Razor? It's similar to Occam's Razor, which is that the simplest explanation (ie, the one that makes the fewest assumptions) for something is usually the correct one.
Hitchens's Razor follows along the same lines:
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
You have presented no evidence (other than an appeal to tradition and a dismissal of evidence) that Peter is the rock Jesus built His church on, whereas I and SOC have presented not only the definitions of both petros and petras, and how Peter was not a very solid rock (figuratively speaking) in the first place, and now I have told you how both words are used throughout the NT.
Going back to Hitchens's Razor, then, you can't dismiss our argument as "anti-Catholic bias," because we have presented evidence that contradicts your interpretation of scripture, and using Occam's Razor, your argument assumes not only that petra and petros mean the same thing (they don't), and that Peter was a good rock to build on (he wasn't), and that any argument against your position must be anti-Catholic (ours is not), whereas our position looks at the proper meaning of the words petros and petra, it looks at Peter's stability as a whole throughout scripture, and does not appeal to tradition, but rather assumes that Scripture has authority over the church, and not vice-versa.
Idolater, the Bible says that two or three witnesses shall establish a matter.
We have provided you with the witness that Peter was not a petra in his spiritual life, the witness that petra and petros are not the same word, the witness that petros only means stone 0.6% of the time it's used, and the remaining 99.4% it's used as a name, the witness that petra means a literal mass of rock, and it means (in the figurative sense) a man who is spiritually sound (which as I said just a moment ago that Peter was not), and the witness that Scripture has authority over the church, and not the other way around, and the witness that Jesus, elsewhere in scripture, is called petra, whereas Peter is never called petra.
That's more than enough witnesses to establish that Peter was not the foundation of the church
