Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians

A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1-2 Peter

Ben Witherington III

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780830867226
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblischer Kommentar

Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, Volume 2 is the third of three volumes extending Ben Witherington's innovative socio-rhetorical analysis of New Testament books to the latter-Pauline and non-Pauline corpora. By dividing the volumes according to the socioreligious contexts for which they were written, Witherington sheds fresh light on the documents, their provenance, character and importance. Throughout, Witherington shows his thorough knowledge of recent literature on these texts and focuses his attention on the unique insights brought about through socio-rhetorical analysis that either reinforces or corrects those gleaned from other approaches. "Bridging the Horizons" sections point to the relevance of the text for believers today, making this volume of special value to pastors and general readers as well as to students and scholars.

General Introduction to
1 and 2 Peter

In this last of the three volumes in this series, we will be dealing with two quite different documents: 1 and 2 Peter. We will be arguing that the early church fathers were right that 1 Peter is written by Peter to Jewish Christians, much as the Johannine Epistles were written to these same sorts of folks in the neighboring region of Asia Minor. Our assumption, as argued in the first two volumes, will be that the Jewish Christian congregations founded by persons like the Beloved Disciple, Peter, Jude, emissaries of James, and the author of Hebrews basically had a life of their own, when compared to the Pauline churches. Often these churches were in the same regions as various churches founded by Paul and his coworkers, and they may well have had considerable interaction with the Pauline churches. There is no evidence that the Jewish and Pauline churches would have regarded each other as heterodox, but nonetheless they each had their own existence. The Jewish Christian churches were not amalgamated with or incorporated into the Pauline ones before the late first century or early second century, and many of these Jewish Christian churches actually appear to have continued to have their own existence well beyond the era in which the New Testament itself was written.

The ongoing viability and vibrancy of Jewish Christianity is shown not just by the existence of the Ebionites, or documents like the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, which continued to support and educate these groups, but also by the continued warnings of some of the church fathers well into the fourth century about “Judaizing.” In other words, we have done a disservice to Jewish Christianity if we think that it quickly disappeared due to the rising tide of Pauline and Gentile Christianity even as early as the first century A.D. This is simply not so, and the very number of documents in the New Testament canon originally addressing groups that were largely if not wholly composed of Jewish Christians eloquently testifies to their ongoing existence.

Some of these Jewish Christian groups, particularly the ones located in or near the Holy Land, were more traditionally Jewish (e.g., the audience of Matthew or Jude); some were more Hellenized (e.g. the audience of 1 Peter or the Johannine Epistles); but it is certainly something of an irony that documents like Hebrews, James, Jude, the Johannine Epistles, and 1 Peter were lumped together under the heading of the “Catholic Epistles.” Nothing could be further from the truth than the suggestion that these documents were a bunch of general encyclicals written to all Christians everywhere in the Roman Empire. The label “Catholic Epistles,” by which was meant universally directed epistles, was not placed on these diverse documents until long after they were written. It does not reflect how the original authors or audiences viewed these documents.1 Apparently Eusebius first called seven of these letters the “general epistles” (Eusebius Hist. eccl. 2.23.35). Hebrews was not included in the General or Catholic Epistles group since it was thought to be by Paul and fairly early was grouped with the Pauline corpus.

But what about 2 Peter? In many ways this is the most enigmatic book to make it into the canon, arriving with some considerable doubts. We will reserve most of our analysis of it for later. Here it is enough to say that in my view it is clearly a composite document based on earlier resources—resources that go back to Peter and Jude. But it is also a document promulgated in a time when a collection of Pauline letters is circulating, as the last chapter of 2 Peter attests. As such it appears to have been compiled and composed at the very end of the New Testament period. It is a sermon more than it is a letter, lacking all personalia, and even the audience seems to be of a broad and generic sort. Here finally then, we may have a general encyclical trying to preserve and pass on some of the apostolic legacy to another generation. Later in this volume we will say more on this matter.

For now it is enough to say that 2 Peter appears neither to be written by Peter nor to be a pure pseudepigraphon, not least because we do not have a falsely attributed audience in this document. The compiler of 2 Peter clearly knew 1 Peter (see 2 Pet 3:1) as well as other apostolic literature, and the epistle raises various issues of intertextuality. It is something of an anthology of a general sort, and as such it deserves to be treated as the final addition to the documents that came to be called the General Epistles, and chronologically the latest canonical document to be written. It is the only more “general” epistle among the General Epistles. In it we glimpse not only the dying of the apostolic light but also the willingness and concern to consolidate and preserve the apostolic legacy and begin to treat it not merely as wise words, but also as sacred texts. Significantly, by the time we come to Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century, church leaders, though they might see themselves even as monarchial bishops, were well aware that the apostolic era was over. For example, in a letter Ignatius says, “I do not address you as Peter and Paul. They were apostles . . .” (Ign. Rom. 4.3; cf. Ign. Trall. 3.3). Similarly Polycarp (Phil. 6.3) sees apostles, like Old Testament prophets, as being figures of a bygone era and having just as much authority as those prophets of old. What then was the church to do when it recognized it was beyond the apostolic era? As we shall see, 2 Peter gives some guidance on this matter.

Introduction to 1 Peter

It has been said that in the first century Christianity was a social world in the making.1 This is certainly true, but questions remain: What sort of social world was being constructed by the external evangelistic program, and by the internal ordering of Christian communities based in house churches? Was it an ordering that baptized various forms of the social status quo and called it good? Was the aim to make clear that Christianity was not a revolutionary new religious sect in the Roman Empire? Was it an attempt to extend largely Jewish values and beliefs to a wider audience? And what role was 1 Peter meant to play in this social constructing of a “new world” or at least a new Christian society and subculture? These are germane and crucial questions to address as we study 1 Peter, which has in some circles been taken to be the least revolutionary and most socially conservative of all New Testament documents.

Often missed in such a sociological study of 1 Peter is the fact that the author is also busily constructing a rhetorical world, a world of advice and consent, of persuasion or dissuasion, inculcating certain beliefs and behaviors not merely for social reasons but also for theological or ideological ones. When we analyze 1 Peter as rhetoric, what do we learn about the aims and purposes of this document, broadly speaking? Is it meant to steel the audience for persecution by persuading them about the value of Christlikeness? Is there some considerable rhetorical exigency or problem this discourse is meant to overcome? And what do we make of the intertextual echoes in this document, not only of the Old Testament but also of material from Jesus’ rhetoric, James’s rhetoric, and Paul’s rhetoric as well?

Carl R. Holladay remarks: “For all its Pauline echoes, however, 1 Peter also has close affinities with the synoptic tradition and to a lesser extent with the Gospel of John, Hebrews, and James. There are remarkable convergences with Peter’s speeches in Acts. Since 1 Peter resonates with such a wide spectrum of early Christian witnesses, some scholars have suggested, only half jokingly, that its author knew the whole New Testament! . . . Part of 1 Peter’s enduring appeal stems from the breadth and depth of common tradition on which it draws and its appropriation of the earlier, apostolic consensus in giving authority to its distinctive voice.”2 Where was our author placed, geographically, socially, temporally, rhetorically that he would have known all of this material, and does such evidence provide clues to the authorship of this document? Could 1 Peter really be the masterpiece and last grand act of the great apostle who had personally known Jesus, James and Paul, including their rhetoric, and now was making their contributions serviceable for his own audience? Was our author at the font from which the apostolic tributaries flowed forth, and so in touch with the origins of Jewish and Gentile Christianity and its leaders, or was he at the place where all those tributaries came back together at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second? All of these sorts of questions are intertwined in a study of 1 Peter, and an orienting discussion is required at the outset to see the lay of the land. For now it is interesting to recognize that though 2 Peter is a composite document deeply indebted to its predecessors, this sort of indebtedness to previous Christian sources also characterizes 1 Peter, though in a quite different way. The Petrine legacy in the canon is tradition rich.

READING 1 PETER IN ITS SOCIAL MILIEU

The sociological study of 1 Peter has in fact been going on longer than the modern rhetorical discussion of this document, and so not surprisingly has borne more fruit. We may attribute the real impetus to examine 1 Peter in terms of social history and sociological theory to the stimulating and at times provocative work of John H. Elliott, who wrote his classic work A Home for the Homeless in 1979 (published in 1981). This led the study of 1 Peter down various productive roads, which are still being traveled and analyzed today, not least because of Elliott’s massive commentary on 1 Peter, published in 2000. Elliott was right that a document like 1 Peter should not in the first instance be given a history of ideas treatment, as if its main focus, concern, purpose was to attack wrongheaded ideologies at odds with the author’s own thought.3 Much less is 1 Peter a purely theological message for Christian pilgrims and strangers in this world, inculcating an otherworldly attitude and approach to life. To the contrary, this document is an ad hoc pastoral document, and even the theological discussions present serve as the undergirding for the ethics, values, virtues, practices being inculcated by the author.

The paraenesis is not an afterthought or an add-on to the discourse in 1 Peter. On the contrary it is at the heart of the socially formative purposes of the author, who is constructing the ethos of a community under fire and enduring some persecution and suffering, with the possibility of more on the way. The advice about rulers, masters, wives, husbands, elders, young men is the outworking of the theology and ideology of the author. He is not interested in merely endorsing a conservative household code; he is interested in constructing the Christian household and individual Christian behavior in a more Christlike manner. We need to be asking questions about what sort of social networks and social relationships the author envisions Christians being involved in, and how their faith affects their behavior in these relationships. Understanding the social context of a persecuted minority religious sect is paramount to understanding the response this document gives to the social situation. But there is more.

First Peter itself is part of an ongoing social relationship between the author and the audience. As such, it has a certain social dynamic to it. We may ask what it tells us about the state of the relationship between the author and the audience. Does he see them as peers (“fellow elders”), as followers, as friends, as converts? Does he view them as largely Jews, largely Gentiles, or a balanced mixture of the two ethnic groups? What is the social level of the author and the audience? Is it commensurate? Is there disparity? What is the social strategy of our author to help the audience cope with its now alien world, from which they are increasingly alienated by their faith? As Leonhard Goppelt stresses in his 1 Peter commentary, this can be said to be the only New Testament document that systematically addresses the issue of Christians being resident aliens within the macrostructures of the larger society.4 Why does 1 Peter have this character and peculiar distinction within the canon? These sorts of questions lead to a deeper understanding of the social dimensions of this document, particularly its ethical and practical content, but also its theology.

As one of Elliott’s real contributions to our study of 1 Peter, he has demonstrated that the language in this document about being resident aliens and visiting strangers should not be treated in a purely spiritual sense. He is arguing that the terminology has a clear social and political sense in 1 Peter, whatever else we may want to say in addition. He points out that all the uses of the term paroikos and its cognates in the New Testament (with one possible exception: Eph 2:19) do refer to actual social conditions, indicating that the persons in question have legal status of something less than a full citizen; indeed, the noun means a resident alien who has some limited legal rights (cf. Lk 24:18; Acts 7:6, 29; 13:17; Heb 11:19; 1 Pet 1:17; 2:11), and can be contrasted with the term xenos, which refers to a foreigner who has no legal status or rights. The Latin equivalent is peregrinus, which strangely enough is the origin of the word pilgrim, but paroikos/peregrinus does not mean either “exile” or “pilgrim” and should not be so translated. It literally refers to someone who lives beside or outside the house. In other words, it refers to someone who is not part of the in-group in that particular social locale. The usage of paroikos to refer to an actual resident alien status of Jews in exile from Israel is prevalent in the LXX (cf. 1 Chron 29:15; Ps 119:19, where the proper rendering is “I am a resident alien in the land,” not “a stranger on the earth”; cf. Ps 119:53-54).

This usage to refer to literal exiles in a foreign land, in particular in Babylon, we find in the postexilic literature as well (LXX: Jdt 5:7-10; Wis 19:10; 1 Esd 5:7; 2 Esd 8:35 [= Ezra 8:35 ET]). In some cases the term paroikia is a virtual synonym for the term diaspora.5 Furthermore, twelve times in the LXX diaspora is the rendering of the Hebr...