3. Specific Ethical Teachings: How To Be Holy In The Midst Of Unbelievers (2:11–5:11)
3. SPECIFIC ETHICAL TEACHINGS: HOW TO BE HOLY IN THE MIDST OF UNBELIEVERS (2:11–5:11)
The UBS Greek text (31975) has a present infinitive but the present imperative apechesthe has several excellent MSS supporting it (p72 A C L P 33 81 Cyprian) and may be the better reading. Both readings would carry continuing imperatival force.
Peter does not use the definite article in the phrase hēmera kriseōs (day of judgment) in 2 Pet. 2:9; 3:7, but does use it in the phrase tēs ton theou hēmeras (‘the day of God’) in 2 Pet. 3:12; cf. 1 John 4:17. It seems that no firm conclusions can be drawn from the use or non-use of the article alone, and the sense must be gained from the other words in the phrase.
The forced acknowledgment of Christ’s Lordship which then results in God’s glory, in Phil. 2:11, is different from the active glorifying of God indicated by doxazō.
The Gk. phrase is ‘by means of your good deeds’, and modifies the verb ‘they may glorify’. Similar examples of ek with genitive used to designate the instrument or means by which something is done are found in Rom. 3:20; 4:2; Jas 2:18, 21, 3:13; 1 Pet. 4:11, etc.
Beare, p. 138, unjustifiably assumes that ‘in a day of visitation’ refers to the final judgment and says that the verse gives the ‘attractive thought’ that unbelievers may change their minds at the last judgment—an idea not in this text or elsewhere in Scripture. Even if the phrase is understood to refer to final judgment, it would have to refer to those who had become believers beforehand and then glorified God for his grace on the day of judgment (cf. a similar idea in Luke 16:9).
Against Kelly, pp. 108–109, and J. Jeremias, TDNT 1, p. 366, who want the verse to teach subjection to every human creature, but with no evidence that hypotassō could ever take such a broad meaning, and without adequate treatment of Hort’s discussion of the use of ktisis to refer to governmental bodies. Other examples of ktisis used in this sense are Diod. Sic. 13.59.4; 13.90.3; Polybius 10.21.3; cf. the verb ktizō used of founding not only cities but also a temple (Polybius 9.27.7); also of ‘colonizing’ a country (Herodotus 1.149; 2.44).
Peter often uses the same Gk. construction found in the phrase ‘through him’ (dia with genitive) to speak of the person or thing through which God does something (1:3, 5, 23; 2:14; 3:1; 2 Pet. 1:3, 4; cf. 1 Pet. 5:12). The king appears here not as the source of the governor’s authority, but as the channel by which Divine authority is conveyed to him’ (Hort, p. 141).
Hort (p. 145), followed by Selwyn (p. 173), says that houtōs, ‘thus’, in the Gk. text (which says literally, ‘for thus is the will of God’) refers back to vv. 13–14, since houtōs must always refer to what precedes. But BAGD. p. 598, 2, gives many examples of houtōs referring to what follows. Hort has simply concluded too much from the examples remaining after excluding twenty-four ‘exceptions’.
Hort, p. 145, understands ‘as free men’ to modify ‘be subject’ in v. 13, with v. 15 as a parenthesis. This is possible grammatically, and is not inconsistent with the interpretation given here, although it would emphasize the voluntary nature of a Christian’s submission.
The tense is different, however. The first ‘honour’ is an aorist imperative, not here specifying the beginning of an action and certainly not an action to be done only once, but rather using the aorist as the ‘unmarked’ tense, the one to use when an author wanted simply to command the action without specifying anything more about it. In the second case, ‘honour the emperor’ uses a present imperative and therefore emphasizes the continuing nature of the obligation: ‘honour and keep on honouring the emperor’. cf. C. F. D. Moule, An Idiom-Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge: University Press, 21959), pp. 135–136; but BDF, sec. 337 (2), unnecessarily uses a catch-all category ‘complexive’ for some aorist imperatives which are simply ‘unmarked’ with regard to the nature of the action (1 Pet. 1:17a; Jas 5:7, etc.).
‘Most persons in slavery were treated well; they had been born in the house of their owner and they had been trained to perform important domestic, industrial, business, or public tasks’ (S. Scott Bartchy, MALLON CHRÉSAI: First-century Slavery and the Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:21, SBL Dissertation Series 11 [Missoula, MT: SBL, 1971], p. 174). Bartchy’s description of 1st-century slavery (pp. 38–87 especially) is an excellent recent summary of the evidence. Cf. also IDB supplementary vol., pp. 830–832; and A. H. M. Jones, ‘Slavery in the Ancient World’, in Slavery in Classical Antiquity, ed. M. I. Finley (Cambridge: Heffer, 1960), pp. 1–15.
See Jones, art. cit., p. 2.
However, my student Jonathan Lunde notes that some weighty arguments favour the sense ‘fear of God’ here: (1) ‘All fear’ seems too strong toward one’s master; (2) the previous verse says to ‘fear God’; (3) Peter elsewhere says not to fear men (3:6, 14).
The Greek text has dia with accusative, which specifically means ‘because’. The NASB rendering, ‘for the sake of conscience toward God’, does interpret the word syneidēsis in a common sense (it can mean either ‘conscience’ or ‘consciousness’), but the translation is improbable because (1) it must understand the genitive theou ‘of God’, in an unnatural and perhaps unprecedented sense (an author would commonly use pros or eis with accusative to say ‘toward God’), and (2) it changes the emphasis of the context from trusting in God to striving to obey God, an idea not foreign to Peter but foreign to the mental attitude Peter encourages in this passage (note the model of Christ’s mental attitude in v. 23, ‘he trusted to him who judges justly’).
My student T. Matthew Arnold has called my attention to two other clear examples of anapherō meaning ‘bear’ (reproach or sin) in the LXX of Num. 14:33; Ezek. 36:15.
The use of the verb in Eph. 5:21 (‘be subject to one another’) has been usually cited to support this view, and the phrase ‘mutual submission’ has been used to describe the relationship thought to be advocated by this verse. However, the following context defines what Paul means by ‘be subject to one another’ in Eph. 5:21: He means ‘be subject to others in the church who are in positions of authority over you’. This is explained by what follows: wives are to be subject to husbands (5:22–24)—but husbands are never told to be subject to wives. Children are to be subject to their parents (to ‘obey’ them, 6:1–3), but parents are never told to be subject to or to obey their children. Servants are to be subject to (‘obey’) their masters, but not masters to servants. The misunderstanding of this verse has come about through an assumption that ‘one another’ (allelous) must be completely reciprocal (that it must mean ‘everyone to everyone’). Yet there are many cases where it does not take that sense, but rather means ‘some to others’: for example, in Rev. 6:4, ‘so that men should slay one another’ means ‘so that some would kill others’; in Gal. 6:2, ‘Bear one another’s burdens’ means not ‘everyone should exchange burdens with everyone else’, but ‘some who are more able should help bear the burdens of others who are less able’; 1 Cor. 11:33, ‘when you come together to eat, wait for one another’ means ‘those who are ready early should wait for others who are late’; etc. (cf. Luke 2:15; 12:1; 24:32). Similarly, both the following context and the meaning of hypotassō require it to mean ‘those who are under authority should be subject to others among you who have authority over them’ in Eph. 5:21.
The Gk. text includes no word for ‘their’ (Peter could have made it clear with autōn), leaving open the possibility that Peter intends to say that unbelieving husbands will be won not simply by seeing the submissive behaviour of their own wives but by observing the pattern of Christian marriage exemplified by wives generally within the Christian community.
The UBS Greek text has an aorist participle but the textual variant epopteuontes (present participle) is found in some of the best manuscripts (p72, Sinaiticus, etc.). It would place more emphasis on observation of the Christian wife’s conduct over a period of time.
The aorist tense here for ‘obeyed’ need not refer only to one incident, for the aorist indicative is frequently used in a ‘constative’ sense simply to say that something ‘happened’, with no implication of whether it happened at one point in time or over a very long period of time (cf. the aorist indicatives in Eph. 5:25, ‘Christ loved the church’; Rom. 5:14, ‘death reigned from Adam to Moses’; Rev. 20:4, ‘they … reigned with Christ a thousand years’; also BDF, sec. 332). Selwyn (p. 185) and Kelly (p. 131) say that Peter is referring to Gen. 18:12, but this is hardly likely since no obedience to Abraham is mentioned in the passage, and Sarah is there speaking to herself, not to Abraham.
Kelly, p. 132, says the verb synoikeō has special reference to sexual intercourse, but neither BAGD (p. 791) nor LSJ (p. 1721) indicate such a sense, and it is impossible in Deut. 25:5 (‘if brothers dwell together’); Wisdom 7:28 (‘God loves … the man who lives with wisdom’); Ecclus. 25:16.
One book that deserves mention here (simply because it contains so much practical wisdom on this subject) is James Dobson, Man to Man about Women (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1976; = What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew about Women [Wheaton: Tyndale, 1977]).
These two arguments are adopted from the thorough treatment by John Piper, ‘Hope as the Motivation of Love: 1 Peter 3:9–12’, NTS 26 (1980), pp. 212–231. Piper’s discussion of the flow of the argument is excellent, even though he surprisingly fails to give much consideration to the very likely possibility that the ‘blessing’ of v. 9 is God’s blessing in this present life, rather than final salvation.
Note a very similar construction in 3:6, ‘not fearing any fear’; cf. also Mark 4:41, ‘they feared a great fear’ (i.e. ‘they were greatly afraid’); Matt. 2:10. This is a common Heb. idiom (‘cognate accusative’) found frequently also in the LXX; cf. BDF, sec. 153 and Robertson, Grammar, pp. 477–479.
Selwyn, pp. 197, 315, 317 says ‘in which’ (en hō) cannot refer to ‘in the spirit’ in v. 18, because there are no other instances in the NT where a relative pronoun (here, hō, ‘which’) has as its antecedent an ‘adverbial dative’. This objection is unpersuasive, however, and factually incorrect (see discussion in Appendix, pp. 234f.).
As argued by France, pp. 268–269. France rightly sees the contrast in v. 18 as between the ‘natural human sphere of existence’ and the ‘eternal spiritual state of existence’ (p. 267), but then (p. 268) overly restricts the ‘eternal, spiritual sphere’ to mean only the resurrected state of Christ. The ‘flesh-spirit’ contrast in v. 18 is rather between two spheres of activity than between the pre- and post-resurrection states of Christ.
Reicke, pp. 110–111, understands en hō to mean not ‘in which’ but ‘on which occasion’ (as in 2:12; 3:16). But the words and the phrase itself are so common that there is no reason to think that Peter only used it in one specialized way: relative pronouns should be understood to refer to whichever (grammatically correct) antecedent makes the most sense in each particular context. Here, ‘spirit’ is near at hand and makes good sense; it is the antecedent Peter’s readers would have naturally understood.
In the Appendix, I examine the arguments of Selwyn and Dalton in detail and compare them with an extensive survey of extra-biblical literature.
See below, pp. 242–245, for discussion of grammatical point.
I am following here the perceptive analysis of David Cook, JTS 31 (1980), pp. 72–78. Cook lists several other parallel examples from secular Greek writers where this construction means ‘escaped into …’.
Verses 18 to 19 have sometimes been used to support the idea that between his death and resurrection Christ ‘descended into hell’. The phrase itself comes from the Apostles’ Creed (‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead …’), while scriptural support for this concept has been found primarily in 1 Pet. 3:18–19, along with Acts 2:27, 31; Rom. 10:7; Eph. 4:8–9; and 1 Pet. 4:6. However, many question whether any of these texts clearly support this idea, and the phrase itself is a late addition—it does not appear in any versions of the Apostles’ Creed until AD 390 and then not again until AD 650 (see Phillip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom [New York: Harper, 1882], vol. 2, p. 54). Against the view that Christ descended into hell may be mentioned Luke 23:43, 46; John 19:30.
Kelly (pp. 161–162) follows Dalton (pp. 215–224) in seeing ‘removal of dirt from the body’ as a reference to circumcision. But they adduce no direct linguistic parallels, only some expressions which are conceptually similar at certain points, but dissimilar at others, and the argument is unpersuasive.
The grammatical construction here (‘first class condition’) does not imply that Peter thinks the readers actually are being reproached, but only that Peter assumes it momentarily for the sake of the argument (see note on ‘you may have to suffer’ at 1:6).
The idea of the Holy Spirit’s strengthening would be assumed if not stated, for strength is what one needs in time of trial. The rather strongly attested textual variant ‘and of power’ would make it explicit.
Dennis E. Johnson, ‘Fire in God’s House: Imagery from Malachi 3 in Peter’s Theology of Suffering (1 Peter 4:12–19)’, JETS 29:3 (Sept, 1986), pp. 291–292. O. Michel says, ‘oikos theou is a fixed term for the sanctuary in the LXX’ (TDNT 5, p. 120).
I have given my own translation of the LXX here, to bring out the verbal parallels with 1 Pet. 4:17.
Johnson, art. cit., p. 292.
Readers of less literal modern translations, in particular the NIV and TEV, have no chance of discovering these OT parallels which make the passage understandable, for the two key terms have been lost in translations which only contain generally related ideas: ‘purifying fire’ has become ‘painful trial’ in the NIV in v. 12, with the idea of ‘fire’ totally lost; and ‘house of God’ has become ‘family of God’ in v. 17. (The TEV is similar, with ‘painful test’ and ‘God’s own people’; RSV and NASB are better, but still have ‘household of God’ instead of ‘house of God’; only the AV has ‘house of God’.)
