Peter is the New Testament's most vividly flawed apostle — impulsive, wrong out loud, and the one who denies knowing Jesus three times on the crucial night — and the tradition made him first anyway. The restoration scene is deliberate mirroring: three denials, then three times asked do you love me, then feed my sheep. Catholic teaching reads the rock saying as establishing an office continued by the bishops of Rome; Orthodox and Protestant readings take the rock to be his confession rather than his person. The whole papal question turns on that sentence.