Transcription
I want to take 10 minutes and show you the case for why Second Peter is pseudapigraphic. Now, this is a really big word that basically just means it's not written by the person it claims to be written by. So, we have two epistles of Peter in the New Testament. First Peter and Second Peter. I'll cover First Peter in another video.
Now, scholars have famously thought that Second Peter is probably not authentic. And in this video, I want to walk you through the arguments why. Now, the most obvious place to start looking at authenticity is in the text itself. And before I start on Second Peter, I want to show you something at the end of First Peter. So First Peter ends by saying, "Through Sylvanius, who I consider a faithful brother, I have written this short letter to encourage you and testify that this is the true grace of God." So First Peter is essentially saying that somebody wrote this letter on um Peter's behalf. And this is kind of an important place to start in the question of Second Peter's authenticity. Um, because obviously we have this argument that maybe um Peter, if he's an illiterate fisherman from the Galilee and Acts does say that Peter and John were both illiterate. The word there in Greek for the two of them is anthropo a grammaty. If they're illiterate, how could they write these Greek letters? And one obvious answer is maybe they used what's called an amanuensis, which is basically somebody who writes on your behalf. Imagine a professional letter writer, a professional scribe who can write down a letter on your behalf. Sometimes you will hear people say that even though Second Peter seems to be really good Greek, um Peter using an amanuensis, and they'll say that gives us a reason to explain how um Peter, an illiterate fisherman, could write a nice letter like Second Peter.
But as we kind of assess this, I think there are a couple clues in the text that tell us that the question is more complicated than just whether somebody wrote this down for Peter. Um, and one of the first places I would start when I start reading this. Thus he has given us through these things his precious and very great promises so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust and may become participants of the divine nature. For this reason you uh must make every effort to support your faith with excellence, excellence with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. So like, this just sounds like good Christian writing. But one of the really wild things when I come over here and look at the Greek, um, I'll try to highlight some of the main words in Greek. So this is like aretē here, aretē. Um, this is the word for virtue, and this is a, this is a Greek philosophical word, especially common among the Stoics um at this point in time. This is a word for virtue, and we actually have the virtues here. So gnōsis, knowledge, is actually a Stoic virtue. We have um, some of these aren't the main Stoic virtues, but they were very common virtues among the Stoics. Egkrateia is self-control. Stoics famously were about controlling yourself. Um, to so to self-control he wants us to add hypomonē, which means endurance, another very common um Stoic verb, to eusebeia, which could probably be translated something like piety. Um, to eusebeia is also a Stoic virtue, to philadelphia, brotherly love, which I, I don't think this one is as common among the Stoics, maybe somebody who knows the literature better than me can um can say, and to this love as well. So what we have here already, when we start to look at the language of Second Peter, I think it's, it's pretty well written. Like, it's somebody with a, with a pretty good grasp of Greek. So even if you want to overcome this by saying, you know, Peter had access to a professional scribe, it is interesting that you have these like Stoic virtue, Stoic ideals kind of embedded in the text. So I guess even if we were assuming Peter wrote this, we would have to start asking questions about what does authorship mean? Like, could a fisherman really kind of share these Stoic virtues? I, I don't know. It. To me, this is like, it's only one of the cases against, but to me, this is already not looking good for authenticity.
But then there's a few things within the text itself that kind of suggest that maybe this is a little less authentic than we would like it to be. So, there's some clues here in Second Peter 3, and I'll start here at verse um 3. This one used to actually scare me as a kid. I used to read this verse, and I remember having doubts about my faith. As an aside, but this verse actually scaring me because it, it says, "In the last days scoffers will come, um scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.'" So, I remember like being a kid and reading this and being like, "Yeah, I can't question this because other people have, you know, people have always questioned." I don't know. Anyway, it's a weird, some of these weird little things that are built into uh built into the New Testament. But what is this actually saying? "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation." Now, you have to ask here, who are our ancestors here? Um, somebody's waiting for Jesus to come back. Who's waiting for Jesus to come back? Arguably the earliest Christians. And you have this, we see it in Paul, too. You have this problem of the expectation that Jesus is going to return. Once it doesn't happen, the church kind of needs to pivot and figure out like, what's it all about. But here this author, as well, is pointing out that there will come scoffers who will, you know, kind of laugh at this idea that Jesus is going to come back. Um, "For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were." Now, ancestors here could be um, could be maybe like the ancestors of like Israel or something. I can look over here at the Greek. Okay. So here it's actually "since the fathers fell asleep." I think this is what the King James has too. "Since the fathers fell asleep." So yeah. I mean, who are the fathers? Are these the earliest Christians? Are these like Jewish forefathers? I think you could probably see it as the earliest Christians. And in any case, you're already imagining this world where people are saying Jesus isn't coming back because it's been a really long time. He's not coming back. So, is this the Apostle Peter writing this? Maybe he would be um, presumably a very old man, which is, I think, what people who argue for authenticity want to argue for.
But that's only one of the clues in chapter 3. We also get another interesting clue down here at verse 15. And it says, um, "So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters." So this is a point where, oh, let's keep going. Sorry. "There are some things in them hard to understand, um, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do to the other scriptures." Yes, that's important. So somebody here, Paul's letters are circulating um, maybe even like a collection of Paul's letters. We could, we could kind of hypothesize it is plural, and he's calling them scriptures. This is really important. So this is written at a time when Paul's letters are circulating as scripture. So we assume that Paul wrote the bulk of his letters between 50 and 60 is kind of the decade that that scholars place it at. So if we assume that Peter is sort of about the same age as Jesus might have been, um, Paul's writing what, like 20, 30 years later? So is this like Peter is like between 50 and 60 at the point of the composition of Paul's letters? Um, and then you have to imagine the place where not only are these letters composed, but they're collected, circulated, and eventually they start to be seen as scriptures. And, you know, if you even read Paul's letters closely, you can see it's pretty clear that, as it says in Second Corinthians, his letters are weighty, but his physical presence is weak. But we don't generally get a sense from Paul's letters that his letters were regarded as scripture yet. That's certainly not something that there's any evidence for.
The other really wild thing about Second Peter, and I need to open up this document to show you, Second Peter actually has a lot of similarities with Jude. So many so that scholars have argued that one of the two copied each other. So we have some kind of relationship between Second Peter and Jude. Um, I lined a few of these up. I won't read them all, but let's read this one. 2 Peter 2:4 says, "For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment." Jude 6 says, "And the angels who did not keep their own position, uh, but deserted their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains and deepest darkness for the judgment of the great day." 2 Peter 2:6. "And if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to destruction, he made them an example of what is coming to the ungodly." Jude 7. "Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities in which, in the same manner as they indulged in sexual immorality, pursued an unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing punishment of eternal fire." Uh, here 2 Peter 2:12. "But these, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not, and shall utterly perish in their own corruption." Jude 10. "But these speak evil of those things with which they know not, but what they know naturally as brute beasts, and those things they corrupt themselves." So obviously, it's a question of which direction the relationship goes. I think there's a sort of general belief that Second Peter came after and finessed it. But either way, there's a relationship between these two. Now, Jude is also alleged to be the brother of James, which would make him the brother of Jesus. So maybe, maybe you have this family like in Jerusalem hanging out, sharing, uh, sharing letters. Um, hard to say, but it seems, uh, it seems unlikely.
You then have to come to the problem that nobody really knows about Second Peter. And when it starts getting um referenced, we have people referencing it, and almost nobody thinks it's authentic. So you have Origen saying that Second Peter is disputed. You have Jerome saying that Second Peter is disputed. You have Eusebius saying that Second Peter is, uh, disputed. And unlike a modern apologist, they never say, "Oh, don't worry. It was written by an amanuensis." They just say it's like, they, they dispute it. They question its authenticity. So, it's interesting that it's completely absent for 200 years of church history. Um, well, maybe 150. And then all of a sudden, um, when it does show up, people question its authenticity. That's important. It's also missing from the famous Muratorian Canon, which was a maybe late second-century, third, maybe even as late as the fourth, but um, optimistically, maybe late second-century canon of scripture um that was kind of like our New Testament but a little bit different. Second Peter is also not in the Syriac Peshitta either, so they didn't accept it into their canon. It just became um common in the Western canon.
So, one final thing, let's come back to my text here for a minute. "Through Sylvanius, who I consider a faithful brother, I have written this short letter to encourage you and testify that this is the true grace of God." And fasten it. "Your sister church in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you greetings." Uh, and so does my son Mark. Interesting thing to include because Mark is Peter's apparently amanuensis. If you know Papias, if you know the um history of tradition, the tradition of the Gospel of Mark is that Mark don't wrote down the recollections of Peter. And all of a sudden, we have Peter writing here with Sylvanius. So maybe, maybe there's something here that we have Peter and, and, you know, Peter likes Mark, or maybe there's a later tradition that knows that if you're talking about an amanuensis for the Apostle Peter, you need to bring in the word Mark here because we all know that Mark wrote on behalf of Peter. So this thing in First Peter kind of seems like fiction too, which I will talk about in in another video. But it is important to stop and think this through, that we have a tradition that Peter didn't write that Mark wrote on his behalf. And all of a sudden, we have here a letter from Peter at a time when letters and writings from apostolic figures were sort of like exploding like crazy. And we know that a lot of them weren't real. So, it really does cause us to question whether we can actually trust if Second Peter is authentic.
That was a quick overview of the arguments for the authenticity of Second Peter. I hope you found it interesting. I hope it all made sense. Let me know in the comments down below if it did, if it didn't, if you're convinced. Um, or if you have more questions. I'd love to know about it. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Hit that bell icon to get notified when I have new videos coming up. CJhornth.com is my website. You can join my mailing list there, too. Thank you so much for being here.