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Second Epistle of Peter

Book of the New Testament

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Authorship and date

According to the Epistle itself, it was composed by the Apostle Peter, an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry. 2 Peter 3:1 says "This is now the second letter I have written to you"; if this is an allusion to 1 Peter, then the audience of the epistle may have been the same as it was for 1 Peter, namely, various churches in Asia Minor (see 1 Peter 1:1).

The date of composition has proven to be difficult to determine. Taken literally, it would have been written around AD 64–68, as Christian tradition holds Peter was martyred in the 60s by Nero, and also because Peter references his approaching death in 2 Peter 1:14 ("since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me").

The questions of authorship and date are closely related. Scholars consider the epistle to have been written anywhere between c. AD 60–150, with "some reason to favour" a date between 80 and 90, while general critical views date it to within the 2nd century. Dates suggested by various authors include:

  • c. 60 (Bigg)
  • 63 (Giese, Wohlenberg)
  • 64 – 110 (Davids)
  • Mid 60s (Harvey and Towner, M. Green, Moo, Mounce)
  • c. 70 or 80 (Chaine)
  • 75 – 100 (Bauckham, perhaps about 80–90)
  • 80 – 90 (Duff)
  • c. 90 (Reicke, Spicq)
  • Late first or early second century (Perkins, Harrington, Werse)
  • c. 100 (Schelkle)
  • 100 – 110 (Knoch, Kelly)
  • 100 – 125 (James, Vogtle, Paulsen)
  • 100 – 140 (Callan, perhaps about 125)
  • 130 (Raymond E. Brown, Sidebottom)
  • 140 – 160 (Jörg Frey)
  • 150 (L. Harris)

The scholarly debate can be divided into two parts: external and internal evidence. The external evidence for its authenticity, although feasible, remains open to criticism. (There is debate as to whether 2 Peter is being quoted or the other way around.) Much of this debate derives from Professor Robert E. Picirilli's article "Allusion to 2 Peter in the Apostolic Fathers," which compiles many of the allusions by the Apostolic Fathers of the late first and early second centuries, thus demonstrating that 2 Peter is not to be considered a second-century document. Despite this effort, scholars such as Michael J. Gilmour, who consider Picirilli's evidences to be correct, disagree with classifying the work as authentic but rather as a pseudepigrapha, arguing among many other things that Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:1–2) had to warn against contemporary pseudo-Pauline writers.

The internal debate focuses more on its style, its ideology, and its relationship to the other works and stories. Some of the internal arguments against the authenticity of 2 Peter have gained significant popularity since the 1980s. One such argument is the argument that the scholar Bo Reicke first formulated in 1964, where he argued that 2 Peter is clearly an example of an ancient literary genre known as a 'testament', which originally arose from Moses' farewell discourse in Deuteronomy. Richard J. Bauckham, who popularized this argument, wrote that the 'testament' genre contains two main elements: ethical warnings to be followed after the death of the writer and revelations of the future. The significant fact about the 'testament' genre was not in its markers but in its nature; it is argued that a piece of 'testament' literature is meant to "be a completely transparent fiction." This argument has its detractors, who classify it as a syllogism. Others characterize the writing as a 'farewell speech' because it lacks any semblance of final greetings or ties with recipients.

One of the questions to be resolved is 2 Peter's relationship with the Pauline letters since it refers to the Pauline epistles and so must postdate at least some of them, regardless of authorship. Thus, a date before AD 60 is improbable. Further, it goes as far as to name the Pauline epistles as "scripture"—one of only two times a New Testament work refers to another New Testament work in this way—implying that it postdates them by some time. Various hypotheses have been put forward to improve or resolve this issue; one notable hypothesis is that the First Epistle of Clement (c. AD 96), by citing as Scripture several of the Pauline letters, was inspired by 2 Peter because it was considered authentic. This would mean that even the recipients of 1 Clement, the inhabitants of Corinth, would have also considered it authentic, which would indicate that the letter must have been in circulation long before that time. The earliest reference to a Pauline collection is probably found in Ignatius of Antioch around AD 108.

Another debate is about its linguistic complexity and its relationship with 1 Peter. According to the scholar Bart D. Ehrman, the historical Peter could not have written any works, either because he was "unlettered" (Acts 4:13) or because he was a fisherman from Capernaum, a comparatively small and probably monolingual town, in a time and province where there was little literacy. Bauckham addresses the statistical differences in the vocabulary of the two writings, using the data given by U. Holzmeister's 1949 study; 38.6 percent of the words are common to 1 and 2 Peter. 61.4 percent peculiar to 2 Peter, while of the words used in 1 Peter, 28.4 percent are common to 1 and 2 Peter, 71.6 percent are peculiar to 1 Peter. However, these figures can be compared with other epistles considered authentic, showing that pure statistical analysis of this type is a weak way of showing literary relationship. Bauckham also notes that "the Greek style of Second Peter is not to the taste of many modern readers, at times pretentiously elaborate, with an effort at pompous phrasing, a somewhat artificial piece of rhetoric, and 'slimy Greek'"; contrary to the style of the first epistle, "2 Peter must relate to the 'Asiatic Greek.'" The crux of the matter is how these differences are explained. Those who deny the Petrine authorship of the epistle, such as, for example, Kelly, insist that the differences show that First and Second Peter were not written by the same person. Others add that 2 Peter was a specific type of pseudepigraphy common and morally accepted at the time, either because it was a testamentary genre or because the works of the disciples could bear the names of their masters without any inconvenience.

Those who defend Petrine authorship often appeal to the different amanuenses or secretaries Peter used to write each letter, as first suggested by Jerome. Thomas R. Schreiner criticizes people who regard arguments in favor of the authenticity of 2 Peter as mere arguments of religious conservatives who impotently try to invent arguments to support authenticity. People of this mindset, according to Schreiner, object to the claim that different secretaries may have been used but then claim that the corpus of the two letters is too small to establish stylistic variation. Schreiner states:

When we examine historical documents, we are not granted exhaustive knowledge of the circumstances in which the document came into being. Therefore, we must postulate probabilities, and in some cases, of course, more than one scenario is likely. Moreover, in some cases the likely scenarios are not internally contradictory, but both constitute plausible answers to the problem posed. Suggesting more than one solution is not necessarily an appeal to despair, but can be a sign of humility.

The scholar Simon J. Kistemaker believes that linguistically "the material presented in both documents provides substantial evidence to indicate that these letters are the product of a single author." However, this view is very much in the minority. Most biblical scholars have concluded Peter is not the author, considering the epistle pseudepigraphal. Reasons for this include its linguistic differences from 1 Peter, its apparent use of Jude, possible allusions to second-century gnosticism, encouragement in the wake of a delayed parousia, and weak external support.

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