| OF BONES AND BONERS: SAINT PETER AT THE VATICAN [W]e believe it our duty, in the present state of archaeological and scientific conclusions, to give you and the church this happy announcement, bound as we are to honor sacred relics, backed by a reliable proof of their authenticity… [I]n the present case, we must be all the more eager and exultant when we are right in believing that the few but sacred mortal remains have been traced of the Prince of the Apostles, of Simon son of Jonah, of the fisher-man named Peter by Christ, of he [sic] who was chosen by the Lord to found His church and to whom He entrusted the keys of His kingdom … until His final glorious return.
Pope Paul VI, June 26, 19681
 own in the basement of the Vatican, less than twenty feet beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, there is an ugly, graffiti-covered brick-and-plaster wall. Inside the wall there is a rectangular cavity containing nineteen clear Plexiglass boxes filled with old bones, some of which are claimed to be the mortal remains of St. Peter himself. A small breach in the wall allows two of the boxes and their bony contents to be seen through the open bronze work of a gate set some distance in front of the wall. Ten of the bones thus carefully preserved at this most holy focal point in all of Christendom, however, are the remains of domestic animals — goats, sheep, cows, swine, and a chicken.2 Scripture tells us [Mk 14:30,72] that Peter denied his master thrice before the cock could crow twice. Could this chicken be the remains of Peter’s fabled cock? The presence of pigs at the most sacred focus of a church such as St. Peter’s is startling, to say the least. When we reflect that Simon Peter was supposed to have been Jewish before converting to Catholicism, the mixing of his alleged remains with those of swine cries out for an explanation. None of the popes, however, has ever even mentioned that pigs were being venerated in their cellar – let alone offered an explanation for this astounding fact.3 (i) One box contains the skeleton of a mouse. Perhaps it is being kept as the universal standard church mouse. The rest of the boxes, stowed away to await the Second Coming, contain what arguably may be considered to be the fragmentary remains of a man who was over the age of sixty at the time of his death. The bones have been certified to be the veritable remains of the Prince of Apostles himself, St. Peter. That these are the actual remains of St. Peter we cannot doubt: a successor of St. Peter, Pope Paul VI, has confirmed the fact — although he never made it clear how the mouse bones and barnyard cattle parts functioned in Peter when he was alive.4 (ii) Most precious among the relics remaining of Peter’s skeleton in the Vatican are 29 fragments of one of his skulls. (St. Peter’s other skull is preserved in a reliquary at the Cathedral of St. John Lateran.) (iii) The skeleton and skulls now venerated as the remains of St. Peter are not the only relics of the Prince of Apostles to have been discovered by the Roman Church, however. In 1949,5 Vatican archaeologists discovered a different skeleton of the bony saint, several yards away from the wall in which the bones presently worshipped reside. The bones were reported to have been found in a “hypogeum” — apparently a rough cavity hollowed out at the base of a wall coated with red plaster (the so-calledMuro Rosso or “Red Wall” against which the graffiti-covered wall abuts, see Fig. 1). They were reported to have been found in “a sepulchral urn of plain terra cotta.”  A rather surprising answer to this question was given by Venerando Correnti,7 an anthropologist hired by the Vatican in 1956 to study the pope’s prized bones — the ones found in what Pius had certified to be the genuine tomb of St. Peter. Correnti first suspected that something was amiss when he pulled a third fibula from the pile of bones the pontiff had been hoarding for so long. Normal humans, of course, have only two fibulas — one in each leg. Then he discovered five tibias to supplement the three fibulas. This meant that he was dealing with five to eight legs! Although Peter was noted for his aquatic exploits — both as a fisherman and a water-walker — he was never mistaken for an octopus. And so, Correnti quickly must have realized the pope had been guarding the remains of more than one person: two men and an old woman, he finally decided. The men were adjudged to have been in their fifties when they died, the woman in her seventies. |
 | In addition to the human remains, Correnti’s collaborator Luigi Cardini identified bones that once galumphed around as hogs, sheep, and goats — and some that scratched around as chickens. Perhaps a fourth of the bones extracted from the alleged authentic grave of Peter — fifty or sixty fragments altogether8 — came from a Roman barnyard instead of from the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Unlike the bones said to have been found inside the graffiti-covered wall, the bones actually taken from the “true tomb of the Prince of Apostles” are not venerated. Quietly, they have been stored away in some secret location. The mixing of sows and saints certainly creates a problem for Catholic apologists. The presence of animal bones mixed in with human bones can easily be explained by a variety of believable hypotheses if St. Peter never existed as a historical figure or if the bones have nothing to do with an actual St. Peter; it is very difficult to explain if any of the human bones discovered really are those of a historical Prince of Apostles and first pope. There are other problems too. Why, for example, should the remains of the most famous person in Catholic history be stashed away in a grubby hollow wall instead of being placed in a magnificent sarco-phagus inside something looking like a tomb? (According to the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis, the emperor Constantine built the basilica at the site of the “Temple of Apollo” and enclosed St. Peter’s body in a five-foot-high, cubical bronze structure.9) Why is there no carefully chiseled Latin inscription reading:
In his Ecclesiastical History [II xxv 6-7], Eusebius tells of an ecclesiastic named Gaius who, around the year CE 200, was quarreling over who had the best holy sites with a certain Proclus. “Gaius,” Eusebius writes, “in a written dialog with Proclus, the leader of the Phrygians, says the following about the places where the sacred relics of the apostles mentioned [Peter and Paul] are deposited: ‘But I can point out the tropaia of the apostles; for if you go to the Vatican or the Ostian way, you will find the tropaia of those who founded this church.’” Even Catholic apologists agree that Gaius was wrong about who founded the Church of Rome, but they still grasp at his allusion to the tropaia of Peter and Paul. But what are tropaia? Monuments? Graves? Tombs? Memorials? Relics? Despite the arguments of Catholic apologists, from the context of Gaius’ argument with Proclus it is clear that tombs or graves can be ruled out as meanings of tropaia, The Red Wall structure cannot be a Tropaion of Gaius.
Why all the secrecy? Cianfarra explained:
In a personal memoir by one of the excavators, the Jesuit Engelbert Kirschbaum, we are told that “A heap of human bones was found, as if expressly concealed in the earth, beneath the Red Wall, at the spot where its foundations show the triangular break. They lay in a heap, and to a depth roughly, of 30 centimeters.”14 A footnote, however, tells us that “The corresponding sketches in Esplorazioni… do not bring this out and require emendation.” No corrected diagram is presented, leaving us with nothing that even claims to show the true discovery site and situation of the Red-Wall bones. Concerning the space in the graffiti wall — the cavity which today contains the Plexiglass-boxed relics from Old MacPeter’s Farm — the official report notes only that “In this little box we found remains of organic material and of bones, intermingled with dirt, a strip of lead, two strands of silver thread, and a coin from the Viscounty of Limoges, datable between the 10th and 12th centuries.”15 There is only one photograph of these bones of contention in the Explorations report. Reprinted in nearly every book written on the subject of St. Peter’s bones, it shows several human bones lying on the dirt inside a triangular crevice under the Muro Rosso. Readers of the report can only suppose that this is what the excavators saw when they first reached this spot. But the photograph was faked. A footnote in Kirschbaum’s memoir reveals that “They [the Red-Wall bones] had to be removed temporarily from this spot before they could be photographed.”16 What kind of archaeology is this? Not only is there no minutely detailed account of the layout and disposition of the bones when they were discovered, there is instead a completely false picture of the discovery! Instead of being shown a picture of bones piled up about a foot deep — thus indicating that this was not an original burial — we see two or three bones lying on the ground in what conceivably could be an original burial. Just why is it that the bones had to be removed before they could be photographed? Only nefarious reasons come to mind as possible answers. Although the official report gives no useful information on the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the bones under the Red Wall, Kirschbaum, as we have seen, does mention the subject several times in his memoir The Tombs Of St Peter & St Paul17 and tries to account for the fact that the bones were found piled up, not scattered on the ground as implied by theExplorations report and the faked photograph. “It might be surmised,” he writes, “that scattered remains had at one time been collected and placed beneath the Red Wall. In that case, anatomical investigation would have showed that they belonged to different skeletons. Medical examination, however, gave the contrary verdict, i.e., that all these bones belonged to one and the same person. That person was further described as an elderly and vigorous man. The skull is missing.” A dead ringer for St. Peter! Especially since it was believed that Peter’s skull was in a reliquary in the Cathedral of St. John Lateran.18 (iv) But alas, poor Engelbert! As we have seen, Correnti’s anthropological study of the Red-Wall bones subsequently showed that they were the remains of at least three individuals (one of them a very old woman) and included 29 skull fragments and some livestock parts. Moreover, Kirschbaum’s comment that the bones had been found in a small heap — implying that they had been piled up by someone — is at variance with the original report, of which he was a co-author. It had claimed that the bones were found “scattered and intermingled on the ground.” Both accounts contradict the report in The New York Times indicating that the bones had been in a terra cotta urn in the middle of a hypogeum. Worse yet, all three seem to contradict the pope’s comment that the original set of bones was found “at the side of the tomb”! What difference does it make whether the bones were scattered or piled up when found, exposed or enclosed in an urn or wall? A great deal, as it turns out. When Constantine built the old St. Peter’s Basilica over the surface of a magnificent pagan cemetery ca. CE 320-325, numerous tombs and burials were violated in the process. As the supreme pontiff of the Roman religion, Constantine could grant official pardon for thisviolatio sepulchri. Even so, care was taken to minimize the degree of outrage committed. When his builders could not avoid disturbing a burial, the bones were carefully stacked within sarcophagi. But this respectful procedure for dealing with the remains of disturbed burials existed long before the time of Constantine, and was clearly practiced at the time the so-called graffiti wall was built beside the Red-Wall shrine alleged to mark the site of St. Peter’s burial. On the north face of the so-called “Tomb of the Egyptians,” one of the many tombs discovered beneath the floor of St. Peter’s, a pre-Constantinian, chest-like masonry structure was discovered filled with human bones, obviously the remains of earlier burials reburied when the tomb was built.19 The mixtures of bones found by the Vatican investigators — whether we consider the bones found beneath the Red Wall or in the cavity of the graffiti wall — can be explained simply as bones unavoidably or unexpectedly uncovered and collected by tomb builders. Margherita Guarducci was a devoutly Catholic epigrapher engaged by the Vatican in September of 1953 to study the graffiti exposed over a decade earlier – including the graffiti which covered the so-called “graffiti wall.” She decided that many of the graffiti involved a Christian secret code, revealing not only that the spot had been frequented (probably secretly) by Christians up to the time Constantine built his basilica over it, but also that a cult of Peter had existed there. Much of her “decipherment” is fanciful and fails to recognize possible Mithraic significance in at least some of the graffiti. (Abundant archaeological finds attest the worship of Mithra as well as the Great Mother on the Vatican hill very close to the site of the present church. (v)) Naturally, Guarducci concluded that all these Petrine graffiti meant she was close to a site of great significance to Peter-worshipers. What else could it be but Peter’s grave, as Pius XII already had concluded? Moreover, one fragment of incised Red-Wall plaster seemed to clinch it. Written in tiny Greek capital letters – letters no taller than the capitals in the title of this article – the graffito when whole (see Fig. 2) is claimed to have read  (Petros eni, “Peter is inside”). But inside what? Were these tiny letters on a big wall all there was to mark the most important tomb in all of Christendom? If they were inscribed on the Red Wall, wouldn’t it imply Peter was on the other sideof the Red Wall rather than below it? If Peter really was under the Red Wall as originally supposed, shouldn’t the graffito have been the Greek equivalent of “Peter is below” instead of “Peter is inside”?![[Image of Petros Eni Fragment]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vkc-uKdwB0nPpCDNpe23dmXwya8Ej6Onj9oXLeF4kQDYY_ZZGmRky30_sY8eJOmx_aor1I5rfHl4tsCM_j5xZM_yUWKUoJ3JBHpXF5kTtG2iu78EYVAX-GKC-sGpN79Br6-rypkuq366EogCmbg_AneNOFfyFGYbuWeEuyVLA6mJgV=s0-d) As is often the case with evidence adduced to support religious claims, one has to use a bit of imagination and “reconstruction” to get from what is real to what is claimed. In point of fact, not all of the letters in the supposed message are to be found on the surviving bit of plaster, and not all of what can be seen upon the piece necessarily fits easily into the reconstruction. If the piece of plaster simply fell off the Red Wall, wouldn’t it be logical to examine the Red Wall carefully to see if the missing letters are still therein situ? No one reports having done this, or even suggests that it would be desirable to do so. The closest thing to recognition of the problem is found in Guarducci’s official report of her study of the graffiti.22 “The detachment from the wall,” she writes, “unfortunately had the consequence of altering the margins of the fragment so that it is no longer possible to restore it to its exact position on the face of theMuro Rosso.” How handy! If the graffito were in fact Mithraic or of some other pagan nature, we will never be able to know. All we have left is a tiny fragment which arguably fits into a sentence meaning “Peter is inside,” and we have no way of knowing if the fragment had been altered while in the possession of Antonio Ferrua. Why had a common workman done such a thing? A monsignor had made him do it. The monsignor had been none other than Msgr. Ludwig Kaas, nominal head of the excavation project and author of the glowing preface for the Explorationsreport. It was the same monsignor who told of the “methodical exploration” conducted “with the strictest scientific principles,” of solving “scientific and technical problems with the most rigorous method and absolute objectivity.” It was the same Msgr. Kaas who assured readers of the official report concerning “scientific scruples” and wrote of “illustrating with sober objectivity and documented completeness the discoveries and ascertained facts of the last decade, determined to clear the path of the prejudices of now-outworn polemic, the path on which we seek the truth and nothing but the truth,” concluding with a reference to the “very serious work carried out with objective criteria, sustained by rigorously scientific arguments.”24 Encountering effusions such as these, one naturally is led to say, “Methinks he doth protest too much!” — and rightfully so in the case at hand. For Kaas is charged with having sabotaged much of the excavation proceedings and having made any pretense of “scientific objectivity” a laughing matter. If any part of the charges be true, the entire matter of St. Peter’s grave and bones need be taken no more seriously than a Three Stooges film. The Reader’s Digest editor John Walsh indicates that very early in the proceedings a rift had developed between the four excavators and Msgr. Kaas – who “knew little or nothing of archaeological technique.” Soon nearly all contact between Kaas and the team had ceased. Walsh elaborates:
Can we be certain that the bones in the wooden box really were once inside the graffiti wall? Can we be certain that whatever bones were in the graffiti wall were once in the cavity beneath the Red Wall? Can we be certain that the Red-Wall structure really was the “Tropaion of Gaius”? And even if it is, is there any reason to suppose Gaius had reliable knowledge? Is there the slightest reason to suppose that any of the non-barnyard bones found near the monument belong to Peter? According to Walsh,26 Segoni filed an affidavit (now in the Vatican archives) on 7 January 1965 which noted, among other things, that the bones were all stark white. But apart from the mouse bones, none of the bones examined by Luigi Cardini27 (vi) were white. Many were quite dark, yellowish or brown, due largely to adhering soil. Moreover, the note attached to the bone box indicates the bones had been in an urn –urna – just as reported by The New York Times back in 1949. That would seem to rule out the graffiti wall, which no one has reported to have contained an urn.(vii) Was Segoni lying about the color of the bones or about which bones had been in the wall? Of course, he might just have been confused – considering how many bones he had helped to hide. As to whether or not the bones in question had once been in the ground beneath the Muro Rosso, studies of the soil associated with the bones in the box produced by Segoni indicate they never resided in the “true tomb of Peter.” Thermal analysis curves published by Lauro and Negretti28 rule out the Red-Wall site, and these authors themselves relate the bone-box soil to a different grave. Did Gaius know where Peter’s tomb really was? We must realize we are dealing with a second-hand report given by the notorious Eusebius of Caesarea – a not especially trustworthy source. Moreover, the Latin version of Eusebius’ version of what Gaius had written a century before him places the Tropaion of Peter at a different place than does the Greek version! The Greek version has it on the Vatican hill itself; the Latin places it on a public road leading to the Vatican.29 Reflecting on the fact that Eusebius knew of the newly-built St. Peter’s Basilica when he retailed the polemic of Gaius, it is impossible to believe he would not have mentioned the incorporation of the Tropaion into the basilica if that had in fact occurred. We can only conclude that whatever the mysterious Tropaion might have been, it is not to be found under the high altar of St. Peter’s. The Vatican hill in ancient times was a place where many deities were worshipped – including some I believe contributed much to the “biographies” of St. Peter, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. Numerous altars to Cybele (the Great Mother or Magna Mater and prototype of Mary) have been found very close to St. Peter’s Cathedral, and in 1949 a pagan altar was dug up in the Piazza San Pietro – just several yards north of the statue of Saint Pete himself! The altar is inscribed with the names not only of the Great Mother, but of Mithra and her son Attis as well.30 Attis, we may remember, was a dying and resurrecting god who bore the title of Papa (“Father”), just as did the Mithraic pontiff and the pope today. Mithra, the dying and resurrecting god born of a virgin on 25 December, not only bore the epithet Peter (“Rock”), but was often represented as carrying the key to a gate of heaven. A key was just as much a Mithraic symbol as a symbol of St. Peter – and Mithra had it earlier! Very close to the Vatican cult complex is the Janiculum hill where, according to the testimony of the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, Peter was crucified upside-down. Here too in ancient times the oldest of Italian gods, Janus, was worshipped. (By the first century, Janus had largely fused with Mithra – and with St. Peter as well.) Interestingly, the Feast of St. Peter is celebrated on 18 January, the date on which the sun enters the sign of Aquarius – an alias of Janus and the beginning of the Mithraic zodiac. Janus too was a fisherman, since Pisces follows Aquarius. He is the oldest god said to have held the keys to the gates of heaven. Given just this sampling of information on the religious significance of the Vatican hill and its environs, can we be surprised that someone was able to convince Constantine that St. Peter was to be found there? For at least a century before Constantine, “tour guides” were taking advantage of Christian credulity by “pointing out” (to use a phrase of the second-century churchman Origen) the sacred sites where every miracle in the Bible supposedly took place. It can hardly be doubted that Constantine’s mother St. Helena (a former barmaid who gave up entertaining the troops when she became attached to Constantius, the future Caesar) was duped by such con artists when she “discovered” the site in Bethlehem where Jesus was born and the place on the Mount of Olives whence he was yanked up to heaven. We can only suppose the fellow who led her to the “true cross” on which Jesus was crucified was richly rewarded by the gullible empress. Although we have no documentary evidence to indicate that St. Helena was involved in the siting of her murderous son’s Vatican basilica, it is altogether possible. But if it was not she who led Constantine to the building site, certain it is that there was no shortage of entrepreneurs who, when asked about a man who had borne the keys of heaven, could have “pointed out” the same or an equally suitable spot. When Pope Pius XII told his Christmas radio audience that the tomb of St. Peter had been found, he was wrong. When Pope Paul VI announced in June of 1968 that the bones of the apostle had been identified, he too was wrong. An aura of chicanery amplified by incompetence surrounds these modern relics no less than it enfolds all the other relics of Catholic Christianity. We have just as much reason to believe that Peter’s eleventh-century skull at the Lateran is genuine, or that all the teeth claimed to have come from John the Baptist are genuine – teeth numerous enough to fit out dentures for a crocodile. And that, of course, is no reason at all. ![[top]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ufWSXyzBAH0YcToBiFKUZ3oVl9WI676COX2PzxdxYpSHYSxygeC2-041-LbGKBEvvk3237ubIh1lVKpskQTOICpNTq9haW7F-0aSBR3oUu0y0D_AITo0ulpHLBBhbNfnuATvssvkdMgM7WOb3OFW-Pn2aApfI=s0-d){kind=small} Footnotes: (i) Luigi Cardini, who identified the numerous pig bones taken from the alleged grave of Peter, noted that the combination of species was typical of “those which one normally finds in any rural area close to farm houses and barns,” adding that one “is induced to think that this locality was especially devoted to the rearing of hogs.” The perfect place to build the most famous church in Christendom! ![[back]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vNxHqopqxpibpxVrJ0uAsxNqHykTXADQz2DZ5y3KKvLlkCY5ndormDAe3VdLnoQyUR0AVLctHw8po07IsSh9r1HpypHri15eNPwvP-8WFFculg6khQ3-VjYTbcrRJz9ZnESERkudKv1hLYULHAlipmDvMlJz1F2Xnz=s0-d){kind=small} (ii) In 1968, Paul VI described this set of bones as “once living members of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, destined to glorious resurrection.” (iii) Back in 1910, a German scholar by the name of Arthur Drews in a book titled Die Petruslegende argued that St. Peter was a mythical character, partly evolved from the Roman god Janus — famous for his two-faced nature. Perhaps Drews was too conservative, having Peter be two-faced when in fact the relics show him to have been two-headed! (My annotated English translation of this book is being brought out by American Atheist Press under the title The Legend Of Saint Peter.) (iv) Pope Paul also authorized Correnti to examine the Lateran relic. In secret, Correnti studied the fragments and expressed the opinion that “no conflict existed between the Lateran skull and the graffiti wall bones.” Not surprisingly, no official or scientific report has ever been published, nor has any explanation been provided for the existence of two skulls of St. Peter. (v) We know that Mithra was worshipped within yards of the Vatican high altar in ancient times, and Mithraic graffiti could be expected. Mithra, who also bore the epithet of Rock (Petros in Greek), was a keeper of the keys to the gates of heaven, and the many key-shaped graffiti found by Guarducci could apply to Mithra as well as St. Peter. Moreover, the supposed Chi-Rho crosses interpreted as proof-positive of Christian presence at the site could be Mithraic as well. The symbol was used as an abbreviation for Chronos as well as for Christos. Chronos, the god of time, was a popular embodiment of Mithra. (vi) Photographs in the same book clearly show the contrast between the white mouse bones and the dark animal and human bones. (vii) The Times reported that Vatican staff had found bones in aterra cotta urn, not a marble-lined cavity. Was the story of the urn made up by some Vatican official, or is an important part of the evidence still being hidden? 1 "Text of Announcement by Pope Paul VI Concerning the Relics," The New York Times, 27 June 1968. 2 Luigi Cardinio "Risultato Dell'esame osteologico dei resti scheletrici di animali," in: Le Reqliquie di Pietro Sotto La Confossione della Basilica Vaticana, by Margherita Guarducci, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965, pp. 161-168. 3 Luigi Cardini, ibid., p. 168. 4 New York Times, op. cit. 5 Camille M. Cianfarra, The New York Times, 22 August 1949, p. 1. 6 John Evangelist Walsh, The Bones of Sait Peter, Collins Fount Paperbacks, Bungay, Suffolk, 1982, p. 59. 7 Venerando Correnti, "Relazione dello studio compiuto su tre gruppi di resti scheletrici umani gia rinvenuti sotto la Confessione della basilica vaticana," in Le Reliquie di Pietro Sotto La Confessione della Basilica Vaticana, by Margherita Guarducci, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Rome, 1965, pp. 83-160. 8 Walsh, Op. cit., p. 103. 9 Engelbert Kirschbaum, The Tombs of St Peter & St Paul, translated by John Murray, St. Martin's Press, N.Y., 1959, pp. 51, 219 n. 3. 10 "Text of Announcement by Pope Paul VI Concerting the Relics," The New York Times, June 27, 1968. [Emphasis mine] 11 Hugo Gressmann, Eusebius Werke, Dritter Bank, Zweiter Teil, Die Theophanie. Die Griechischen Bruchstucke und Ubersetzung der Syrischen Uberlieferung, 2nd Ed. by Adolf Laminski, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller Der ersten Jahrhunderte, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1992, p. 175. 12 B.M. Apollonj Ghetti, A. Ferrua, E. Josi, and E. Kirschbaum, Esplorazioni Sotta La Confessione Di San Pietro In Vaticano Eseguite Negli Anni 1940-1949, Two Volumes, Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, Citta del Vaticano, 1951. 13 Esplorazioni, Vol I, p. 120. 14 Kirschbaum, op. cit., pp. 91, 223. 15 Esplorazioni, Vol I, p. 162. 16 Kirschbaum, op. cit., pp. 91, 223. 17 Kirschbaum, op. cit., pp. 195f. 18 Walsh, op. cit., p. 166. 19 Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1956, p. 53. 20 Walsh, op. cit., p. 75. 21 Walsh, op. cit., p. 160. 22 Margherita Guarducci, I Graffiti Sotto La Confessione Di San Pietro In Vaticano, Vol. II, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Citta del Vaticano, 1958, p. 396. 23 Walsh, op. cit., pp. 87ff. 24 Esplorazioni, Vol. I, pp. VII-XI. 25 Walsh, op. cit., pp. 78ff. 26 Walsh, op. cit., pp. 168-169. 27 Cardini, op. cit., p. 168. 28 Carlo Lauro and Gian Caro Negretti, "Risultato dell'analisi petragrafica dei campioni di terra," in: Le Reliquie di Pietro Sotto la Confessione della Basilica Vaticana, by Margherita Guarducci, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965, pp. 169-179. 29 Daniel Wm. O'Conner, Peter in Rome: The literary, Liturgical, and Archaeological Evidence, Columbia University Press, New Yor, 1969, pp. 95-96. 30 Esplorazioni, Vol. I, p. 15. Formerly a professor of biology and geology, Frank R. Zindler is now a science writer. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the American Schools of Oriental Research. he is the Editor of American Atheist. |
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