Scripture says nothing to link Peter and his death to Rome, and the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city. Nevertheless there are strong witnesses in tradition and archaeology that at least as early as the mid-second century the Christians of Rome were confidently asserting that Peter was buried among their dead, in a cemetery across the Tiber beyond the western suburbs of Rome.91 The leadership of the Western Church went on to build on that memory or claimed memory over a thousand years,
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