Like John the Baptist and the Apostles of Jesus, Zoroaster also believed that the fulness of time was near, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand.
In his addresses on the future of the Protestant Church (Reden fiber die Zukunft der evangelischen Kirche, 1849), he finds the essence of Christianity in Jesus's conceptions of the heavenly Father, the Son of Man and the kingdom of Heaven.
When it was necessary to account for this position, theologians quoted the text of the Gospels, where St Peter is represented as the rock on which the Church is built, the pastor of the sheep and lambs of the Lord, the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew also uses the Marcan narrative, but adds to it a new section from some other source which suggests that the name of Peter was conferred on this occasion - not, as Mark says, at the first mission of the Twelve - and confers on him the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the right of binding and loosing.
He became leader of the so-called sect of the Hieracites, an ascetic society from which married persons were excluded, and of which one of the leading tenets was that only the celibate could enter the kingdom of heaven.
