2 Peter In Recent Study
2 PETER IN RECENT STUDY
Modern writers do not pay a great deal of attention to 2 Peter, often regarding it as a comparatively mediocre writing and thus unworthy of serious attention. Debates over authorship have mostly died down with the wide acceptance of the view that the writing is pseudonymous. It is held that it is an example of the ascription of a testament to a great figure of the past, in this case a testament that bears its witness to "early catholicism” and helps to shape the church in that model. Ernst Kasemann gives it serious attention in "An Apologia for Primitive Christian Eschatology,” 15 in which he argues that "the Second Epistle of Peter is from beginning to end a document expressing an early Catholic viewpoint and is perhaps the most dubious writing in the canon.” 16 He argues that faith for this writer means no more than "the saved state of the citizens of heaven,” 17 and with an element of caricature to bring out the meaning, "revelation is now a piece of property which is at the community’s disposal.” 18 The Christian community no longer distinguishes between Spirit and letter. 19 The meaning of "apostle” has changed so that instead of being the messenger of the gospel, he has become "the guarantor of the tradition.” 20 Most students have seen in the letter an emphasis on eschatology, but Kasemann denies this. He sees the Pauline view of the parousia as pointing us to God’s final triumph: "The Kyrios comes to take possession of his creatures and his world,” 21 but in 2 Peter there is the thought of the partaking of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), and its eschatology means no more than that "the Judge of the world has become the instrument of the apotheosis of the pious man.” 22
While many recent scholars endorse what Kasemann has said, there are other viewpoints. Childs cites A. Vogtle as one "who describes the letter as offering a significant key to the phenomenon by which the apostolic tradition was rendered into scripture.” 23 Most of the New Testament writings were in fact occasional writings, but they have come down to us as sacred Scripture. None of the writers of the early church tells us how this change comes about, but Vogtle’s point is that we learn more about the process in 2 Peter than we do in most other places. Childs himself goes along with the modern consensus that the epistle did not come from Peter; his main hesitation is apparently not with the view itself but with the way this is interpreted. His reluctance to use the term "pseudepigraphy” with respect to this letter arises from the fact that it leads people to concentrate on the motivation of the man who adopted the pseudonym instead of engaging in "a close reading of the text which has with great freedom assigned an astonishing variety of functions to the putative author of the apostolic tradition in performing its particular canonical role.” 24 In other words, Childs is deeply concerned that those who write about pseudonymity here are more interested in drawing attention to what they see as the letter’s limitations and its failure to conform with what they think Peter would have written than in its important achievement. Whoever wrote the letter (and whenever he wrote it), he performed a significant service to the church by the part he played in establishing the canon and the criteria by which canonicity is to be determined.