Dr. Will Ryan and Pastor Matt Mouzakis
Peter: Background and Intro

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.

Other considerations
Babylon in 1 Peter
Rural conversions
Early Pseudepigraphal views
Allusions to Jesus’ teachings

Date- Arguments for a 64-ish AD date

• 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.
• Letter’s destination fits early colonies in Asia Minor

Conclusions
Because the evidence used against Petrine authorship is not conclusive and because of further evidence that points the letter to the lifetime of Peter, many other prominent interpreters believe that an amanuensis wrote under Peter’s personal direction.

Audience
Peter describes his audience as “aliens” and “strangers in the world,” foreigners in this sense: their commitments to the lordship of Jesus Christ have led to transformed attitudes and behaviors that place them on the fringes of their communities.

Arguments for a Jewish Audience
• The letter contains direct quotations from the OT (e.g., 1:24*; 2:6*; 3:10–12*) and abounds in allusions to it, in phrases (e.g., 1:16*; 2:3*, 7*, 8*, 9–10*, 22*, 24*; 3:14*; 4:18*; 5:5*), characters (Sarah and Abraham, 3:6*; Noah, 3:20*), and in references that evoke Jewish history (e.g., 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*; cf. 3:6*)
• 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 (παρεπίδημος= resident alien) 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.

Occasion
• The current situation from the text implies that there are doubts and confusion in these churches about God's work and presence in their lives, causing some to doubt or waver and abandon the faith to old ways.
• Strengthen and teach the churches of the true grace from God through Jesus Christ and his life, death, and resurrection.
• Teach how to live as citizens in God's kingdom as his family, while being foreigners and resident aliens in the interim.
• To encourage or command certain courses of behavior and action in resistance to societal pressures, persecution, and scorn.