Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” So they said, “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus answered and said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then He commanded His disciples that they should tell no one that He was Jesus the Christ. (Matthew 16:13–20)

Given the various opinions among the Jews in their conceptions of Jesus, let us see the ways some people talk about Jesus out of certain unsound beliefs. For, some were saying that Jesus was John the Baptist, similar to Herod the Tetrarch, who said to his servants, This is John the Baptist; he has been raised from the dead, and for this reason the powers are working within him. But others were saying that the one called Jesus was Elijah, who either underwent a second birth, or, being alive in the flesh from that time onward, again appeared in the present. There were those who claimed that Jesus was Jeremiah; not because Jeremiah was simply a type of Christ, but because they were perhaps motivated by the things said about Christ in the beginning of Jeremiah, since these were not then fulfilled in the prophet. Instead, these things began to be fulfilled in Jesus, whom God appointed to uproot, raze, destroy, rebuild, and replant the nations and kingdoms, because God made him to be a prophet to the Gentiles to whom he preached the word.…

Then Peter, being the kind of person who was not a disciple of flesh and blood but who made room for the revelation of the Father in heaven, confessed Jesus to be the Christ. What Peter said to the Savior, namely, You are the Christ (although the Jews did not know that He was the Christ) was a great confession. What was greater, however, was that Peter knew Him not only to be the Christ, but also the Son of the living God, who said through the prophets, I live, and, They have abandoned me, the spring of living water.

Origen, Commentary on Matthew 12:9