And so I get to 2 Peter in my journey through the bible. Another letter to the church urging the faithful to keep the faith and live the way a good believer should. Just another run of the mill New Testament letter. Or is it? It seems 2 Peter has a little controversy attached to it.

Time to write

I was simply going to review 2 Peter with 1 Peter, to save a bit of time and keep up with these posts. However, I wanted to take a little look at the issue of who actually wrote it. Throughout the New Testament there are a lot of books that claim to be written by people who ‘scholars’ think may not have been. Of all these books 2 Peter is perhaps one of the most questioned.

The main reason for questioning whether Peter wrote this letter is because the language used is so different to 1 Peter, in fact it is very different to the rest of the New Testament. Now there are several reasons why this could be and yet still be ‘written’ by Peter. The main one being that as Peter was a simple fisherman, he probably used someone else to write the words anyway, and perhaps this scribe was a little more colourful than the one used for the previous letter.

Psuedepigraphy

But there is another option that is quite popular. It is possible that Peter didn’t write this letter, and that it was written by someone else blatantly pretending to be Peter. Psuedepigraphic writing was common during the time the letter was penned. Quite often a famous person was named as the author to add authority and gravitas to text. And it is suggested that this is what 2 Peter was.

Does it matter?

As always that is the big question. Personally I don’t have a problem with it being Peter or someone else. It doesn’t say anything that is out-of-place, and 2 Peter 1:5-9 seems like a good rule to live by. However, it does leave some feeling uneasy about something that today we would see as a downright lie. Either it is Peter or it is lying, and I suppose that would be unacceptable. As to whether it ultimately matters, I’d have to say no, because we can’t be sure one way or the other. We have no way of proving whether Peter wrote it or not. But I thought I’d mention it anyway.

We last came across Peter in the book of Acts. In that book he had already begun the transition from fisherman, with a penchant for acting before thinking. But here he is with his very own letter, written to the church. It’s a change on the scale of Bowie going from Ziggy Stardust to a Young American. Once he denied Jesus but now he’s the Rock, can you smell what he’s cooking? Okay enough of the pop culture references Darren, what’s the letter about?

Anyone for fishing?

Life’s a pain, and then you live

The main thrust of the letter is about keeping going through suffering and hard times. He points out that yes there is a lot of pain at present but those who believe have something to look forward to; God’s return. And he’s not asking the followers of Jesus to do anything that Jesus wouldn’t do, in fact that’s point, suffer as Christ suffered – this isn’t for the sake of suffering, or to look for suffering, just that it can be endured. Weaved around this theme Peter also talks about orderly living, looking out for one another and not acting like those who don’t know Jesus.

A career change

Peter was originally a fisherman, and yet here he is some twenty or thirty years later writing an articulate letter to a church who see him as an authority figure. Admittedly the letter states that it is co-authored with Silvanus, so perhaps he is the literate one here, however there is still a huge change from who Peter was to who he is now. And perhaps that is something that struck me when reading through this letter. An encounter with Jesus had a big effect on Peter’s life. Can such an encounter have the same effect on us?