you and she brought great expertise but also that desire, and when you put those two things together you have a risk, a risk of maybe exceeding or going beyond the evidence. as the vatican refuse further scientific analysis, we may never know if the bones really belong to peter. you can understand why the vatican would be so reluctant to haved bones dated, because they could always come back with the wrong answer. what s more, there is no definitive evidence that peter actually stepped foot in the eternal city. given that roman catholics think that the pope has a very special role in delivering god s message on earth, precisely because he s the descendant of peter, it is all important that peter made it there. if he didn t, then the foundations of the catholic church start to crumble.
first century villa. some people have speculated that maybe when peter came to rome he stayed in that villa, and he actually lived here, so that s the association with peter. not one so much of burial, but that he actually was active in this place. there s no disputing that these traditions were very, very strong. we have literary traditions. we have archaeological evidence. we have this graffiti. we have material culture. so we have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but we don t have anything that ties us back to the exact time and place which we would really need to say definitively that peter was here in this place. it s controversial, but could science now provide that missing evidence? professor tom higham and dr. georges kazan are relic hunters from oxford university. they aren t allowed access to the bones found beneath the vatican, so they ve tracked down two teeth, believed to come from peter, to a basilica in
and she sees something that nobody else had seen before in these inscriptions, right, she thinks that she sees a secret language. one piece of plaster which had broken off the wall caught guarducci s eye. she thinks that the language can be translated as peter is within. for guarducci, this is enormously exciting, and then she discovers that there are actually some bones in a nearby niche that had been discovered previously, and they had then been stored in a shoe box. these remains were stored away in a vatican storeroom, along with multiple artifacts that were recovered. their true significance was not evident to the people who stored them away. guarducci becomes convinced these bones are a significant find. guarducci is able to persuade the pope to have these bones analyzed by the same team from the university of palermo. amazingly, these scientists confirmed that these bones are in fact from a powerfully built man who had died between the age
2013, but are these really peter s bones? once the vatican has made a statement like, we think these are the bones of peter, no one s ever going to have the freedom to return to them in order to disprove that claim. the vatican believes that further scientific investigation is unnecessary, because these remains have been authenticated. but ever since the bones were discovered, margherita guarducci s work has come under intense criticism. there are a couple of problems with guarducci s claims. one is the graffiti. so there s this graffiti on a wall. it s truncated, which means it s shortened. we don t know how it finishes. guarducci says that it reads peter is here, but other scholars have said, well, it could actually say that peter is missing. i think part of margherita guarducci s story was that she wanted very much to find peter,
they had no idea that such things existed. they d never been made public, and they d been kept inside in a private chapel for the pope and for his inner circle, so this is a very thrilling moment for for believing catholics all over the world. if these are the bones of peter, then they are one of the catholic church s most significant discoveries. it s very exciting, because it puts us into direct contact with the historical peter. peter was the most important disciple of jesus. peter is, in the traditions of the church, the first pope. he s the first pope in a line that lasts all the way to pope francis today. i think peter was jesus best friend. i think he was his brother. according to the gospel of matthew, peter is the rock on which christ will build his church, but clear evidence that