I sort of suspected something like this when I encountered VatiLeaks. Thanks for doing this legwork, Roger!Roger Pearse wrote:I've just looked at that web page and attempted to verify a few details...ficino wrote: On VatiLeaks I read allegations that Pope Leo in the fifth century supervised the concoction of a fake tomb of Peter, and another one of Paul:
http://www.vatileaks.com/_blog/Vati_Lea ... invention/
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2013 ... the-great/
This is Tony Bushby's site.
Re tomb, spinning off my #7 above: more plausible than to suppose that a pagan child's grave Gamma was built inches from an already venerated tomb of Peter some 60 years older is to speculate that the burial plot next to Gamma and Theta was owned by a Christian in c. 130-150 CE, and that this person made it available for interring bones that by then were supposed to be Peter's. Why on this spot? Presumably there was a story that Peter had been martyred nearby, although there is a rival story of his martyrdom elsewhere in Rome (I forget where at the moment).
One easily imagines a wide tract of desolate land where people were crucified, and that some were buried near their place of execution. That is not what we have in the area under the present Vatican basilica. The excavations make clear that in the first half of the second century CE, this area was already crowded with graves, and that from c. 130 or 140, it began to become more heavily built up with mausoleums. These required level spaces, unlike the natural hillside site reflected in the position of earlier graves like Gamma and Theta. The leveling off did a lot to raise the ground level above some of the older tombs, and a second raising occurred around 160 with construction of the so-called Muro Rosso.
Unless I see solid first century evidence, I peg the sub-Vatican tomb of Peter to the better part of a century after the apostles purported death.