Post-Resurrection Notes (i)

Peter, the Resurrection, and the Transformation of a Fisherman

I am writing this as an observer who has travelled, in my imagination, into the days just after Jesus died and was raised. And among the extraordinary things of that moment, the figure that arrests my attention is Simon Peter.

A Simple Fisherman

Simon Peter was a simple man — a fisherman. He ran a fishing business on the Sea of Galilee, until the day Jesus walked into his life. Remember the story of Jesus’ early encounter with Peter recorded in Luke’s gospel: Jesus borrows Peter’s boat after a fruitless night of fishing, instructs him to try again, and produces a catch so overwhelming that the nets begin to break. And Peter’s response to this is not gratitude or amazement. It is collapse.

“When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.’” (Luke 5:8)

He told Jesus to go away, citing his own sinfulness. This is a man who recognises holiness and immediately measures the distance between it and himself. He does not ask to become a disciple. He asks to be left alone.

My inclination is that Peter, by his own social and theological logic, would have believed that a man like Jesus should have appeared first to the noble and educated of society — to those groomed by the academies of Jerusalem, the philosophers, the scribes, the teachers of the law — not to a fisherman whose hands smelled of the sea. If my inclination is correct, that self-assessment was, in an important sense, accurate.

Here is why.

Peter’s Background and Limitations

I cannot assume Peter was scripturally illiterate. Synagogue attendance in first-century Galilee would have given him what we might call passive scriptural familiarity — much like church attendance today. He would have heard the Torah, known the broad contours of the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic law, the Davidic promise. But I think that was about it.

But to interpret the law — that is a different story.

In the world of first-century Judaism, men spent years in dedicated study under a rabbi, and that formation produced a man qualified to interpret the law. It was costly, selective, and deliberately cultivated — much like today, when people attend highly selective programmes at Oxford, Cambridge, seminaries, and schools of theology, spending years building a deep knowledge of philosophy, the formation of the universe, and whether there is a God behind it all and a way to reach Him. Peter had none of that.

This is echoed in Acts 4:13, where Peter and John stand before the Sanhedrin and are described as “unschooled and ordinary men.” The Greek word used is agrammatoi — a term that in its first-century context refers not to simple illiteracy but to the absence of formal scribal training.

So what Peter knew, he knew from sermons he had caught here and there.

In fact, John’s Gospel, in recording the events of Easter morning, echoes this. When the disciples ran to the empty tomb, John records a detail that is easy to pass over:

“for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” (John 20:9)

John does not say the disciples were ignorant of Scripture generally. He says they did not understand the Scripture. Consider what this means. These men had walked with Jesus for three years — heard him teach, watched him heal, witnessed his authority over demons. And yet not one of them arrived at the empty tomb with a scriptural framework that said: this was always going to happen.

So in that moment, their conclusion may well have been, in line with what was being rumoured, that the body of Jesus had been stolen.

The Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 provides a useful close parallel for understanding Peter’s relationship with Scripture. Here is a man of evident intelligence and sincere devotion, sitting in his chariot reading from the scroll of Isaiah — the very prophet whose words the disciples would later cite as pointing to Jesus. Philip asks him: do you understand what you are reading? And the eunuch answers honestly: how can I, unless someone guides me? His problem was not access to the text. It was the absence of an interpretive framework that could unlock its meaning. Peter before Easter was that eunuch. He had proximity to the words. He lacked the key.

In this precise and important sense, the Peter we know before the resurrection was no different from the average person sitting in any congregation today.

And scriptural interpretation was not the work of ordinary men. It was the exclusive preserve of those who had sat under years of rigorous training at the feet of a rabbi — men who had given their lives to the study of the law.

And this is key to understanding Peter.

And yet…

Peter After Pentecost: A New Depth

Do you notice what happens to Peter in the weeks after resurrection morning? It is, on any honest reading, remarkable. A man with no formal training becomes a teacher of the law — and the scholars are the ones left fascinated. Look at how he cites and synthesises Scripture across the early chapters of Acts:

1. In Acts 2:16–21, addressing the crowds who witnessed Pentecost, he cites the prophet Joel to explain the outpouring of the Spirit as prophetic fulfilment.

2. In Acts 2:25–28, he quotes Psalm 16:8–11, arguing that David was not writing about himself but prophetically about Jesus — specifically, about the deliverance from corruption that the resurrection would bring about. Remember John 20:9: before Easter morning, Peter either did not know this Scripture or, like the Ethiopian eunuch, had no framework to understand it. David wrote these words centuries before Jesus walked the earth, and yet Peter now not only knows the text — he knows exactly what it means. Wow!

3. In Acts 2:34–35, he quotes Psalm 110:1 to argue that Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God.

4. In Acts 3:22–23, he cites Deuteronomy 18:15–19 — the promise of a coming prophet like Moses, a text the Jewish community held with high expectation — and identifies Jesus as its fulfilment.

5. In Acts 4:11, standing before the Sanhedrin, he quotes Psalm 118:22 to argue that Jesus is the rejected stone that has become the cornerstone.

I will stop there. This is not a man reciting memorised texts. This is a man constructing theological arguments from multiple scriptures, across public settings — some of them high-stakes legal ones. What trained scribes spent years preparing to do, Peter is doing without their training.

What Peter Saw in Psalm 16

The argument from Psalm 16 in Acts 2 deserves particular attention, because it illustrates the nature of Peter’s transformation most precisely. Peter’s claim is that when David wrote “you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption”, he was not writing about himself. He was writing, prophetically, about Jesus. This is not the obvious reading of the psalm. It is a typological reading — a claim that the text operates on two levels simultaneously, and that its ultimate meaning was not accessible to its first readers.

This typological reading of Psalm 16 was not the standard synagogue interpretation of Peter’s day. This was not something he heard in a sermon growing up. It was the kind of reading that becomes available only when an event has occurred that demands a rereading of everything that came before it.

And in this entire episode, the reaction of the Sanhedrin is striking. Acts 4:13 records that when the council observed the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were formally untrained, they marvelled. This is not the testimony of Peter’s friends. This is the astonishment of his opponents — the men who held the institution of Jewish biblical scholarship, who were responsible for the training Peter had never received. They are looking at a man who has just made a sophisticated scriptural argument before a high court and thinking: how is this possible?

And consider how bruised the ego of these men must have been. They had spent years in rigorous academic formation, holding interpretations that their institution had upheld and validated — and here was a fisherman, with no credentials and no training, challenging them. In a sense, a nobody. That kind of confrontation does not produce marvelling unless what they were hearing was impossible to dismiss.

So, I start to wonder, what happened to Peter in the stretch of time between when the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples and the day of Pentecost?

The Revelation Following the Resurrection

Credit must be given where it is due. Peter did not simply wake up after Pentecost with a fully formed theology. The evidence in Acts suggests that he and the other apostles made a deliberate commitment to the dogged study of Scripture in light of what they had experienced. Acts 6:4 is quietly revealing: when administrative disputes threatened to consume the apostles’ time, Peter’s response was to protect the priority of prayer and “the ministry of the word” — a phrase that in context almost certainly refers to the ongoing work of studying and interpreting Scripture, not simply preaching. They structured their common life to make room for it.

And it is out of those periods of dedicated study that the revelations must have arrived in waves. Oh — this is what he meant when he said that. This is what the prophet was pointing to when he wrote those words.

The scrolls had not changed — nothing new was added, nothing rewritten. And yet they were, in another sense, locked: the fullness of their meaning still inaccessible. There is an image in Revelation 5 that captures this well: a scroll held in the hand of the One on the throne, bound with seven seals, containing God’s plan for judgment and redemption, with no one able to open it. The prophetic texts were like that scroll — present, visible, but not yet open. The resurrection was what opened them.

And Peter had the key. With it, the texts that had been opaque became luminous.

This is what is called an epistemic rupture: the meaning was always there, but it could only be seen from the other side of the event. The tomb had to be empty before the scriptures could be read for what they always were.

Why This Matters

The resurrection is celebrated each year as an event of triumph and joy, and rightly so. But it is worth pausing to consider what it meant for the first people who carried it as a message — not a comfortable private belief, but a public claim made in the face of institutions that had already killed the man they were claiming had risen.

Peter knew what was at stake.

He had watched what happened to Jesus. He had witnessed the arrest in Gethsemane, the trial, the execution — the full, brutal, public machinery of Roman and religious authority working to silence Jesus. He knew that carrying this message forward meant walking into that same machinery himself. And he had already shown, under relatively mild pressure — the question of a servant girl by a fire — that his nerve was not guaranteed.

And yet this same Peter stands before the Sanhedrin — the same institution that had delivered Jesus to Pilate — and speaks with a boldness that his questioners cannot account for. Without fear.

Several further considerations sharpen this. Scholars generally place Peter in his mid-to-late twenties during this period. He was not a man at the end of life with nothing left to lose. He had a family — the Gospels record that Jesus healed his mother-in-law. He had, in every practical sense, an exit available to him. He had a trade he could have returned to. In fact, John’s gospel records that he did return to his trade after Jesus’ death, before Jesus appeared to him post-resurrection.

So how do you explain this? Jesus is publicly and brutally executed by the Roman state. And then, not long after, a young man with a future, a trade, and a family he could have retreated to begins claiming to have seen Jesus alive — in a sense, a far more provocative message than the one that got Jesus killed. Not just claiming it, but holding to that claim under persecution, imprisonment, and death.

The standard martyrdom argument holds that people may die for things they believe to be true, but not for things they know to be false. What makes Peter’s case more pointed is that he was not a third-generation believer whose faith was inherited. He was an originator — one of the people from whom the account comes. If the resurrection were a fabrication, he would have known it. The lie would have been his own. And people do not die at the hands of torturers for things they know to be lies. But here is what is equally striking: even for something you believe to be true, silence is always an option. It is, arguably, the more natural one. A man in his twenties with a young family, who had stood close enough to see Jesus tortured and crucified, had every reason to hold whatever he believed privately — to protect himself, to protect the people he loved. Survival is not cowardice. It is instinct. Peter overrode that instinct entirely.

Peter’s behaviour was extremely unusual. It was the behaviour of a man who simply could not unsee what he had seen.

Even from an atheistic viewpoint, this behaviour demands explanation. You may resist the resurrection as a historical conclusion — but you still have to account for Peter. And Peter is not easy to account for. At the very least, an atheistic view would arrive at the conclusion that something extraordinary happened that Easter morning, something that produced a conviction so unreasonable it could not be silenced by a court, a prison, or a cross — and that observation belongs as much to the sceptic as it does to the believer.

Among the recorded evidence of the resurrection is the person of Peter himself — what he became, what he knew, how he read, and what he chose to do with that knowledge, given everything it would cost him. When John reaches for language adequate to the weight of this conviction that the apostles carried, he does not reach for abstraction. He reaches for the senses:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.” (1 John 1:1)

Heard. Seen. Touched. The claim being made is not that a doctrine is coherent, but that an encounter occurred. And it is from that encounter — and from the rereading of the scrolls that the encounter made possible — that everything Peter did, said, and suffered follows from.

And boy! Peter suffered!

I counted three recorded imprisonments in the book of Acts. Whipped and flogged in many of those instances. Tradition holds that he was crucified — upside down at his own request.

So I ask: why do we think Peter would dedicate himself to studying the scrolls, carefully tracing the writings of the prophets, interpreting them in the light of the resurrection, knowing he would risk imprisonment, suffering, and death for doing so?

Why?

Because Resurrection.

Peter’s transformation illustrates this: there is a category of conviction that cannot be produced by argument and cannot be dismantled by argument, because it was not argument that produced it. It was encounter.

The reflection this calls for is simple: do my own convictions and consecration carry that same weight?

The more personal reflection, then, is not only whether my convictions carry weight — but whether my life shows it. Peter’s life was evidence of the resurrected Christ. Can the same be said of mine?

It is worth asking, what testimony do we offer to a watching world?

Because when I consider Peter — the miracle of a changed man — I see the distance between the Peter of John 18, the man who denied Jesus three times before a servant girl, and the Peter of Acts 2, the man who stands before thousands, with his opponents listening, and declares that the authorities of Jerusalem crucified the Lord of glory. And I find myself reaching for the prayer of Paul the Apostle:

“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection.” (Philippians 3:10)

And I say that prayer here and now, for every disciple of Christ reading this: may the good Lord help us to know Christ deeply and to live daily in the power of His resurrection.

And may every reader who follows this argument to its conclusion find themselves not merely persuaded by it, but encountered by the one it points to.

Amen.

image source: freepik

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