1 Peter In Recent Study
1 PETER IN RECENT STUDY
A certain amount of discussion has focused on the question of authorship, with a tendency to see the letter as pseudepigraphic. 19 But if we ask why the author should have written in the name of Peter rather than in his own name, nobody seems to have come up with a convincing reason. The writing contains orthodox teaching of the kind that any member of the early church might have been happy to claim. There is nothing that might have demanded authorization from some strong source before it stood a chance of being accepted in the church at large. Nor is it apparent why Peter should be held to be writing to the churches in the provinces named.
The one consideration with some force behind it is the allegation that the persecutions the readers are undergoing could not have taken place during Peter’s lifetime and that therefore we must place the letter during one of the persecutions that we may fairly say afflicted the provinces in question. Furthermore, the letter places special emphasis on suffering simply "because of the name of Christ” or "as a Christian” (1 Pet. 4:14, 16) rather than for specific crimes. This, it is urged, means the time of Domitian or Trajan (there is documentary evidence of persecution in part of the area Peter names during Trajan’s reign).
But the argument is not cogent. There is no real evidence of an empirewide persecution under these emperors, and the references in 1 Peter do not correspond to what is known of the persecutions under the emperors named. Thus Pliny writes to Trajan about the official inquiries he has made into the Christians, and he speaks of tortures he has inflicted, neither of which features in 1 Peter. 20 This aspect of modern discussions overlooks the widespread suspicion of Christians from much earlier times, and the fact that, if an enemy wronged them or accused them falsely, they could rarely look to government officials with confidence for protection. On the contrary, they could almost always be safely assailed, and this must have led to a good deal of oppression by petty local officials. It should perhaps be added that Peter calls on his readers to share in Christ’s sufferings (1 Pet. 4:13), but not his death. There is no martyr piety in this letter.
Some recent writers link the epistle with baptism, seeing it as a baptismal homily or liturgy. In 1911 R. Perdelwitz pointed to a break in the letter’s argument at 1 Pet. 4:11. He thought that the sufferings of the Christians were spoken of earlier as potential, but as actual from 4:12; joy is present in 1:6, 8 and future in 4:12ff. "Briefly” (5:12) would not be a good description of the whole letter, which is of respectable length by the standards of the day, but would apply to the part from 4:12 on. 21 Having separated the two, he drew attention to the baptismal motifs in the first part and suggested that it was a baptismal homily. H. Preisker has taken this view further with the suggestion that this part of 1 Peter is in fact the baptismal liturgy of the Roman church, the actual words that would be used when a candidate was baptized. On such views the baptism would take place after 1:21, the act not being mentioned because of the church’s policy of keeping such things secret. 22 F. L. Cross sees it as the liturgy for an Easter baptism. 23
Some of the arguments put forward in support of such hypotheses overlook important parts of the evidence. First, baptism is mentioned once only in the entire letter (1 Pet. 3:21), which is very strange if it is at the heart of the writing. Again, a key part of the argument is the assertion that the tenses of the verbs in 1:3-21 show that sanctification is future, whereas in 1:22 we have the past: the baptism has now been accomplished, and the baptized person is "sanctified.” But this overlooks the fact that as early as 1:3 the past tense in "he has given us new birth” shows that the writer is addressing people who have already been brought into the church. 24 And there is no reason for understanding the present participle in 1:5 (translated "are shielded”) as though it were future. The language does not sustain the argument.
Baptismal views also overlook the variety in the earlier part of the letter. While those who advocate them have done us a service in emphasizing the possibility of linking some of the letter’s teaching with baptism, they have not demonstrated that all that is said points to a baptismal homily or a baptismal liturgy. The early church seems to have been quite interested in baptism and all that it means, for it was indeed the decisive step in turning away from paganism and identifying oneself with God’s people. So we find references to it in a number of epistles where there is no question of liturgy (e.g., Rom. 6:3; 1 Cor. 1:13-17; Col. 2:12). Nor do proponents face the difficulty that there is no evidence that a fixed liturgy was in use as early as this letter. And if there was, they give no reason the Roman liturgy should be sent to Asia Minor. For all the learning and the devotion with which the thesis is argued, we must surely say that its adherents have overemphasized some of the evidence and soft-pedaled what does not fit their theory. 25 This is not the way 1 Peter should be understood.
A good deal of modern discussion is taken up with the liturgical interest that many see in the letter. It is widely agreed that phrases from the liturgy are to be found in many of the New Testament writings, and 1 Peter is seen to have its share. There may also be fragments from Christian creeds. The identification of such phrases is a rather subjective matter, and there cannot be said to be wide agreement as to precisely which are the liturgical expressions. But passages such as 1 Pet. 1:3-12; 2:4-8, 21-25; 3:18-22 frequently come into the discussions, and there is widespread agreement that the liturgy must be understood to stand behind the letter. So also with the early church’s paraenesis. First Peter clearly includes some of the teaching that was as a matter of course imparted to converts to the Christian way. This does not mean that we are to think of a number of documents having been put together to make up this writing. Partition theories are not widely accepted, and scholars usually affirm the unity of the letter, whatever expressions from liturgical sources the author may have chosen to include.
This has its effect on some of the earlier controversies, for example, those that deny Petrine authorship on the grounds that there is too much Paulinism in the letter. It is widely accepted that both Paul and Peter include a good deal of the common stock of Christian teaching, and it becomes perilous to argue that either writer depends on the other. Rather, both are members of the early church, and they write out of the common concerns of its membership.