Peter's Sword: Getting the Imagery Rightby
Warren F. O'Rourke
Back before most people in the Christian world could read and write, religious instruction depended heavily on sermons and on the public display of Biblical stories in the form of stained glass windows, paintings, statues, and all sorts of frescoes and murals and other kinds of images. In fact, some people have called the enormous number of these old Biblical works of art "The Poor Man's Bible" because most of what illiterate people knew of the Bible came from works of art, not from a printed page. Frequently, however, the images created by the artists distorted or obscured what the Bible actually says. Consider, for example, what Luke says about the night that Jesus was arrested.
Judas Iscariot leads a squad of Temple guards armed with clubs and swords into the Garden of Olives so that these men can arrest Jesus without starting a riot. Caiaphas, the high priest of the Temple, has ordered the arrest, but he is not personally present. His personal assistant Malchus is there to make sure that the right suspect is arrested. Judas has agreed to identify Jesus. Iscariot will embrace his former master and give him a kiss of greeting.
The disciples are clearly surprised by this middle-of-the-night arrest in a fragrant grove of olive trees, but Peter leaps into action. He draws a sword and cuts off one of Malchus' ears.
The foregoing scene based mostly on Luke's account (Luke 22) has frequently been depicted in mosaics, frescoes, murals, cartoons, clip art, and paintings such as those reproduced at the end of this essay, but almost always the artists get Peter's weapon very wrong. Forget for the moment about the irony of a follower of the Prince of Peace who is packing a lethal weapon. For the moment, let's just concentrate on getting the sword imagery right.
The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are in Greek, and Luke wrote in Greek. Every time in Chapter 22 of his Gospel that Luke mentions a sword he uses the Greek word MAXAIPAN. In the English alphabet the word is "machairas" and it was eventually borrowed into Latin as "machaera." Generally speaking it is the usual Greek word for "sword" used throughout the whole New Testament. (By the way, the word has survived in present-day Greek where we find Machairas is the name of a monastery in Greece where a couple of Greek Orthodox saints about the 10th Century had to use such knives to cut away the underbrush from a cave where, according to the legend, a holy icon was located.)
In its Latin form, the word MAXAIPAN was well-known in Jesus day. There were, for example, gladiators in the 1st Century known as dimachaeri, or "two-knife guys," so-called because they carried a machairas in each hand. Also, the small desert fortress where John the Baptist was imprisoned and beheaded was called Machaerus, or "the small sword."
Later on, Saint Jerome translated the Greek manuscripts into Latin. His version of the Bible was known as the Vulgate and was the most familiar version of the Bible where people spoke and/or read Latin. In Jerome's version of Luke, everywhere that Luke wrote MAXAIPAN, Jerome writes gladius or what we call in English "a sword." Evidently Jerome was unaware that an exact equivalent for the Greek word existed in Latin.
You don't have to know much about ancient edged weapons to realize that a Roman gladius is nothing at all like a Greek machairas. Absolutely no resemblance! The gladius was the basic infantry weapon with which Roman legionnaires conquered most of the world they knew. A gladius is a wide-bladed, seven or eight pound sword from 40 to 44 inches long. On thrusts, the broad blade did such horrific damage to internal organs that survival of a wound to the body was pretty much impossible. (That's why noble Romans bent on suicide would fall on their own swords.) On overhand smashes, the huge, heavy blade would break through shields, body armor, head gear, skulls, bones, and so forth. The weapon was designed to deliver only killing blows. Only members of a Roman legion (or perhaps members of the Temple Guard) would have had legal access to a gladius. Members of Jesus' "gang" couldn't have walked around Roman-occupied Jerusalem carrying huge military broadswords without getting arrested. Carrying such a difficult to conceal weapon around a big town like Jerusalem would have been pretty much like walking through downtown Birmingham or Atlanta or Chicago carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. A civilian like Peter would have been carrying a smaller, more easily concealed weapon such as a machairas.
The machairas was from an entirely different class of edged weapons than the gladius. It belongs to the same category of edged weapons as Nepali, Pakistani, and Indian kukris. These are weapons about 14 to 18 inches long and weigh less than one and one-half pounds. Their special quality is being as sharp as a razor. Back during the Korean War, Turkish troops collected Chinese and North Korean heads with super-knives like the machairas. The famous Ghurka soldiers of Nepal even today carry their rifles in their left hands and their kukris in their far more important right hands...unless they are left-handed...and then, Bubbah, you are done for...a left-handed Ghurka with a kukri is going to take off your head every time! If you think of Bowie knives, you will be in the right ball park on size, sharpness, and weight.
It is also possible that what Peter used on the poor fellow's ear was a kind of dagger or fighting knife called a sica or sicarius. Let me explain the history behind this.
By the time Jesus was involved in his public ministry, there was a more or less secret anti-Roman society developing known as the Zealots. The Zealots advocated the use of violence to rid their land of the Romans. The most extreme wing of that group was a group of terrorist/assassins known as Sicarii. That's right! They were named for their weapon of choice just like modern Middle Eastern terrorists are called suicide bombers. Before the Zealots were finally exterminated at Masada, their zealous Sicarii brethren conducted a long campaign of assassinations against Roman officials and Jewish officials who collaborated with the Romans in order to stay in power. I remember reading somewhere or other (probably in Josephus) that one of the Sicarii's first and most successful hits was actually a high priest of the Temple named Jonathan, a son-in-law of Caiaphas. The assassin took Jonathan out with a sica. And that makes it important to note that Simon Zelotes, one of the Twelve, was a Zealot and could have influenced Peter to carry a concealed sica. And there is also a very good chance that the "two swords" mentioned in Luke 22:38 belonged to Simon Peter and Simon Zelotes.[Since I first wrote this, one of the professors who teaches a course in the New Testament at Jefferson State Community College suggested another possibility involving the sica. According to Rev. Rick Owen, Peter may have intended to slit Malchus' throat with either a Zealot's sica or perhaps even with the sort of knife that commercial fishermen usually have with them at all times.]
Click here or on either of the knife images to find more information than anyone needs to know about the sica and the machairas.
I'm not really certain whether Peter used a machairas or a sica or a fisherman's knife, but one thing does seem certain to me. With all due respect to Jerome's Latin translation, Simon Peter did not use a Roman gladius. If Peter had used a real gladius, Jesus would have had to heal a lot more than a severed ear. Even a clumsy, glancing blow to the side of the head with such a monstrous weapon would have caused a fractured skull, a severed ear, and more. The momentum of an overhand smash with such a weapon would have buried the sword an inch or two deep into the collar bone or into the neck at a point quite near the jugular vein. If Peter had actually used a military gladius in the overhand manner most artists depict, he would have pretty much chopped Malchus "half in two" and Jesus would have had to add one more to the list of folks he raised from the dead.
Getting the weapon right turns Peter's attack on Malchus into a much more deliberate act than we usually see in the images our artists have created. The typical picture showing Peter launching a wild overhand smash with a Roman gladius clearly depicts an angry and impulsive attempt to kill Malchus; the much more deliberate act of taking an ear with a smaller knife seems more likely to be a cold-blooded attempt to maim Malchus, not murder him. It could even have been a symbolic act. After all, Malchus was a personal servant of Caiaphas, the sort of non-aristocratic man who hopes to rise to power by performing unsavory services for great men like Caiaphas. Malchus probably was one of that kind of shady character who spies and eavesdrops and reports back to his masters. In a sense, he was an extra "ear" for Caiaphas; he probably had been observed by Peter as he hung around the edges of the crowds listening to Jesus. What would be more fitting than for Peter to deliberately take the ear of the eavesdropper who had been spying on Jesus for so long and who showed up in the garden with the traitor Judas and an armed detachment of soldiers?
Losing an ear would have been a real problem for anyone who wished to exercise power at the Temple. Just before Herod the Great became king, there were two brothers, Aristobolus and Hyrcanus, who were vying against each other for power in Judaea. In fact, they both wanted to be high priest. When Aristobolus got the upper hand over his brother, he sliced (or bit) off Hyrcanus' ear and the resulting mutilation rendered him ritually unfit to serve as high priest. Was Malchus ambitious to make his way to the office of high priest? Did Peter deliberately take Malchus' ear in order ruin his chance of promotion?
Please notice that only the first three of the images below get the sword imagery right.
