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 author marks the posture explicitly. He knows, he writes, that the putting off of his body is soon, as the Lord has shown him, and he means to leave behind a record his hearers can call up after his departure. A testament, in the Jewish writings of the period, gathers two things in the mouth of a dying patriarch: moral charge to those who remain, and disclosure of what is to come. Both are here, and the second is the burning one.

The voice presses its own authority hard. It speaks as one who did not follow cleverly devised myths but was an eyewitness of the Lord’s majesty, present on the holy mountain when the voice came from heaven — the scene the Gospels call the Transfiguration — and it stakes the whole defense of the future return on that remembered glimpse of glory. The claim to have seen is the credential behind the warning: a man who watched the Lord shine has standing to say that the Lord will come again. Around this center the letter sets a chain of exhortation, urging its hearers to add to faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, and love — a ladder of growth laid down at the start, against which the corruption of the false teachers will be measured in the chapter that follows.

The quarrel over time

The argument turns on time. The letter’s opponents press a plain objection, quoted in its own pages: scoffers will come in the last days, walking after their own desires, asking where the promise of his coming has gone — for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. The complaint is exact and damaging. The first generation has died; the world runs on; the return the earliest churches expected within living memory has not come. This is the problem the New Testament calls the delay of the Parousia, and no book confronts it as directly as this one.

Against the objection the author makes two replies. The first dissolves the measure the scoffers are using. God does not reckon time as humans do: one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day — a line that reaches back into Psalm 90 and turns the whole arithmetic of waiting into a category mistake. The interval that looks like abandonment from inside human duration is no interval at all on the scale that matters. The second reply reads the delay as deliberate and merciful. The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, the letter holds, but patient, unwilling that any should perish, leaving room for repentance before the end. What the opponents take for a broken word is grace held open.

The end, when it comes, will not be gentle. The day of the Lord will arrive unbidden, like a thief, and the heavens will pass away with a roar, the elements melting with fervent heat, the earth and its works laid bare. The cosmos the letter describes is not eternal but reserved — kept by the same word that made it, and stored against a judgment by fire as the old world was once destroyed by water. This is among the few passages in the New Testament to imagine the dissolution of the physical heavens themselves, and its picture of a universe undone and remade has fed Christian eschatology and the long expectation of the Second Coming ever since.

The teachers the letter answers are drawn with hard strokes. They are charged with despising authority, with following their own appetites, with promising freedom while themselves enslaved to corruption; the second chapter, the fiercest stretch of the work, heaps up examples of the doomed — the fallen angels, the flood, the cities of the plain, the prophet Balaam who loved the wages of wrongdoing — to fix the fate of such men. But beneath the moral indictment lies a doctrinal one, and it is the doctrinal charge that organizes the whole. To deny that Christ will return to judge is, in the letter’s eyes, to deny that the world is governed at all — to hold, with the providence-denying philosophies of the age, that the order of things simply continues and answers to nothing. The denial of the Parousia and the loosening of conduct are, on this account, one error seen from two sides: if no judgment is coming, nothing restrains the appetites, and the freedom the teachers promise is the freedom of a world without a reckoning.

A second concern runs alongside the first, and the two are joined at the root. The author insists that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of a person but as holy men were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The point answers the opponents on their own ground: if they read the prophetic promise of judgment as their private possession, to be explained away when it proves inconvenient, they have mistaken what scripture is. The letter binds the defense of the future to a doctrine of how the future was foretold.

The latest hand in the New Testament

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. The Greek is elaborate, dense with rare and ornamental words, and reads nothing like the First Epistle of Peter; the two letters do not seem to come from one hand. The situation is that of a settled second or third Christian generation, with the founding apostles already a memory and a body of teaching to be guarded rather than first proclaimed. The letter speaks of Paul’s collected correspondence as though it were a known group of writings, and ranks it alongside the other scriptures that the unstable distort — a way of speaking that fits a time when Paul’s letters had begun to be read as scripture, well after his death. And the long central section reproduces, almost wholly, the argument and examples of the Epistle of Jude: the parallel runs through the whole of the second chapter into the third, and the direction of borrowing — that the longer, smoother text of Peter has worked over the shorter, fiercer Jude rather than the reverse — is the position most specialists hold. Taken together these mark the letter as a document of the late first or early second century, with proposed dates ranging from around 80 to as late as the 130s or 150s.

The testament form itself complicates the question of forgery. A reader of the period who recognized the genre — a dying apostle’s final charge, written down by another — may have understood the attribution as a transparent convention rather than a fraud, the way later readers understood a speech put in a famous mouth. On this reading, urged at length by the English scholar Richard Bauckham, the letter is a faithful follower’s attempt to deliver what Peter would have wanted said to a later crisis, not a counterfeit meant to deceive.

The early church itself hesitated over it longer than over almost any other book that finally entered the canon. There is no certain trace of the letter in the writings of the second century — the earliest fathers who cite Peter draw on the first letter, not this one — and the surviving manuscript record begins late, the oldest copy among the Greek papyri dating from the third or fourth century. The Alexandrian scholar Origen, in the third century, is the first to name it, and he notes that its authenticity was already doubted. The historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his church history in the early fourth century, set the books of the New Testament into grades and placed this letter among the disputed writings — the antilegomena, the ones spoken against — useful and read by many, but not securely received. Jerome, late in the same century, knew the standing objection that its style differed from the first letter, and explained the difference by supposing Peter had used different secretaries. Its place was not fully secure until the canon settled in the later fourth century, when the festal letter of Athanasius in 367 listed the twenty-seven books that have stood ever since. Among them, this was the one whose admission had been hardest won.

”Partakers of the divine nature”

One line has carried weight far beyond the letter’s polemic. Its opening holds out the promise that, through the gifts given in Christ, believers may escape the corruption of the world and become “partakers of the divine nature.” The phrase sits near the start of a letter otherwise consumed by heresy and the calendar of judgment, and it has had a life almost wholly independent of its surroundings. Eastern Christian theology took it as a charter for theosis — the teaching that the human person is destined not merely to be pardoned but to be drawn into the very life of God, made godlike without ceasing to be a creature. The Greek Fathers, and after them the whole Byzantine tradition, read deification as the true end of salvation: not the soul becoming God in essence, which would erase the gulf between creator and made thing, but the soul taking on, by grace, the qualities and the life of God. Bauckham, surveying the verse, judged it the boldest expression in the New Testament of the destiny of the redeemed as participation in the being of God — and it is precisely this sense that the Eastern doctrine of ascent draws out.

Read that way, a letter mostly occupied with false teachers and the deferred end also names a high doctrine of union, one that the contemplative and mystical currents of Christianity returned to repeatedly.

Text and scholarship

The letter is read in the Christian Bible as one of the seven Catholic Epistles, its three chapters carrying the chain of argument from the opening list of virtues, through the central attack on the false teachers, to the defense of the deferred judgment that closes the work. The primary text is short enough to be read whole; the third chapter, with the scoffers, the thousand years, and the world reserved for fire, is the hinge on which the whole letter turns (2 Peter, King James Version).

The decisive modern study is Richard Bauckham’s Jude, 2 Peter in the Word Biblical Commentary (Word Books, Waco, 1983), which set the terms for the later debate: the reading of the work as a testament, the analysis of its relation to Jude, and the close treatment of “partakers of the divine nature” as the New Testament’s furthest reach toward participation in God. Jerome H. Neyrey’s 2 Peter, Jude in the Anchor Bible series (Doubleday, New York, 1993) reads the letter against the Greco-Roman polemics of its day, treating the denial of providence and judgment as a recognizable philosophical position the author is answering, and is cataloged in the Anchor Yale series (Yale University Press). Behind both stands the sharp earlier verdict of Ernst Käsemann, whose essay “An Apologia for Primitive Christian Eschatology,” collected in Essays on New Testament Themes (SCM Press, London, 1964, pp. 169–195), read the letter as the document of a community shaken by the failure of the end to arrive — and judged its eschatology thin, a defensive holding action rather than a living hope. The contrast between Käsemann’s reading and Bauckham’s, between a theology in retreat and a faithful testament under pressure, frames much of how the letter is studied (Open Library record).

The long parallel with Jude is the most worked-over textual problem the letter presents. The whole of the second chapter and the opening of the third run alongside the body of Jude, sharing examples, sequence, and a great deal of vocabulary, so closely that one text must depend on the other; the consensus that the smoother, fuller letter has reworked the shorter Jude rather than the reverse rests on the way it softens Jude’s quotations of the non-canonical Book of Enoch and the lost dispute over the body of Moses — material a later writer, addressing a church wary of such sources, might quietly drop.

There is a distance the letter never tries to close. As argument, the work is an occasional polemic — a sharp, local answer to a sharp, local crisis, written to keep frightened churches from concluding that the promise had failed. As doctrine, one clause of its preface became, in other hands and other centuries, the scriptural ground of the loftiest claim Christian theology makes about what a human being may become. The same three chapters that defend the long patience of God before the fire also hold open the end that patience is for: not the burning of the world only, but the gathering of the creature into the life that made it.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

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