1 Peter: Intro & Background

Significance of 1 Peter

The life of Jesus and the believer’s life are inseparable in Peter’s thought.

First Peter encourages a transformed understanding of Christian self-identity that redefines how one is to live as a Christian in a world that is hostile to the basic principles of the gospel.

First Peter challenges Christians to reexamine our acceptance of society’s norms and to be willing to suffer the alienation of being a visiting foreigner in our own culture wherever its values conflict with those of Christ.

The new birth that gives Christians a new identity and a new citizenship in the kingdom of God makes us, in whatever culture we happen to live, visiting foreigners and resident aliens there.

Date and Authorship

The weightiest evidence that 1 Peter is a pseudonymous work has rested on 3 points:

(1) the Greek of the epistle is just too good for a Galilean fisherman-turned-apostle to have written.

(2) the book’s content suggests a situation both in church structure and in social hostility that reflects a time decades later than Peter’s lifetime.

(3) Christianity could not have reached these remote areas of Asia Minor and become a target for persecution until a decade or more after Peter had died, at the earliest.

Date- Arguments for a 64-ish AD date

• Tradition universally has Peter in Rome at time of his death (66 a.d.) and the “coded” Babylon location is almost universally considered Rome (as in 2nd Temple literature and Revelation).
• Virtually silent that he was much anywhere else (Acts 12:17) except Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, etc.
• Peter could have easily traveled to and from Rome to Jerusalem and elsewhere after release in Jerusalem to his martyrdom.
• Paul and Peter may have overlapped areas, but not necessarily communities.
• Persecution in region fits Nero's early reign.

Audience

Arguments for a Jewish Audience

• The letter contains direct quotations from the OT and abounds in allusions to it, in phrases, characters (Sarah and Abraham), and in references that evoke Jewish history (dispersion, 1:1; exiles and aliens, 2:11; Babylon, 5:13).
• Absence in the letter of any reference to tension with Christians of Jewish origin, as one regularly finds in Acts and the Pauline epistles, for example, could also argue for a Jewish origin of the readers.
• Those who take a Jewish audience at times do so out of dispensational eschatology and “replacement theology” concerns putting a distinction between the church and Israel.

Arguments for a Gentile Audience

• References to the unholy state of their pre-conversion life (e.g., 1:14, 18; 2:10, 25; 4:3–4)
• On the basis of 1:18, most modern commentators disagree that the audience was primarily Jewish Christian; that verse refers to the “the useless way of life you inherited from your ancestors” This understanding is reinforced by the further description in 4:3, “For the time past was [more than] enough to do what the Gentiles like to do, as you went along with acts of abandon, lust, drunkenness, revelry, carousing, and licentious idolatries.”

Conclusions

The metaphors of exile can be attributed to both Jews and Gentiles. Jews in the classical definition of being in exile (out of the promise land) and gentiles in the sense of being in exile in their homeland based on their citizenship in God’s kingdom. Regardless of whether the audience is primarily Jewish or Gentile it should be seen as written to the church, which is defined as Jew and gentile in the NT. Peter encourages these churches with phrases connected with God’s chosen people in the OT such as a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, God’s possession, and people of God.