Second Epistle of Peter

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The Second Epistle of Peter is a brief New Testament letter, three chapters long, written in the voice of the apostle Peter and addressed to no named community. Its occasion is a quarrel: teachers within the churches are denying that Christ will return to judge the world, and the letter answers them. It belongs to the genre of the farewell testament — a leader’s parting charge, delivered as though from the edge of death.

The argument turns on time. The letter’s opponents press a plain objection, quoted in its own pages: the fathers have died, the world goes on as before, and the promised day of the Lord has not come. Against this the author makes two replies. God does not reckon time as humans do — “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years” — and the delay is mercy, room left for repentance before the end. The day will arrive unbidden, the letter holds, like a thief, and the heavens will dissolve in fire. A second concern runs alongside the first: how scripture is to be read, with a warning that prophecy is not a matter of private interpretation.

Modern scholarship treats the letter as among the latest writings in the New Testament and very widely regards it as pseudonymous — composed after Peter’s lifetime by someone writing in his name, a common and not necessarily deceptive practice in the ancient world. Several features point this way: a polished Greek style unlike the first letter ascribed to Peter, the situation of a settled second or third Christian generation, and a long passage adapted from the Epistle of Jude. The early church itself hesitated over it. Of all the books that finally entered the canon, this was the most disputed; Eusebius in the fourth century listed it among the contested writings, and its place was not secure until later.

One line has carried weight far beyond the letter’s polemic. Its opening holds out the promise that believers may become “partakers of the divine nature.” Eastern Christian theology took the phrase as a charter for theosis — the teaching that the human person is destined not merely to be pardoned but to be drawn into the life of God, made godlike without ceasing to be creaturely. Read that way, a letter mostly occupied with heresy and the calendar of judgment also names a high doctrine of ascent, one that later mystical and contemplative currents in Christianity returned to repeatedly. What the author meant by the words, and what the tradition came to make of them, are not quite the same question, and the letter does not settle either.

→ Related: First Epistle Of Peter · Epistle Of James · Epistle To The Hebrews · Canonization