1 Peter: Who Wrote It, When and Why

[00:00:01] First Peter who Wrote it, when, and why? [00:00:06] Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch now that I have laid out the major themes and emphases of First Peter in my previous post, I can move on to questions of who wrote it, when and why. [00:00:21] The final issue, in some ways, is easiest at least when it comes to the overarching purpose of the letter. [00:00:28] As we have seen, the author is concerned about Christians reactions to their persecutions and is intent that they give their opponents no grounds for opposition but lead upright lives, being a witness to those who challenge their faith and imitating Christ in suffering unjustly. [00:00:47] Whoever wrote the letter and when, it seems reasonably safe to assume this was the major reason for it. [00:00:54] We will see later, however, that there may be at least one less obvious reason as well for the issues of who wrote it and when. What I provide here is largely based on my more extended study why the Bible's Authors Are not who We Think They Are the Book First Peter claims to be written by Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and there is no doubt that the the author is claiming to be Jesus closest disciple, Peter. [00:01:25] Peter was not a personal name before Simon, son of Jonah himself, was given it as a nickname by Jesus himself. [00:01:34] And so according to the Gospels, this disciple's real name was Simon. But Jesus indicated that he would be the rock on whom the church would be founded, and so he called him Rocky or Peter. [00:01:50] See Matthew 16:13 18. [00:01:55] Jesus, of course would have been speaking Aramaic. The Aramaic word for rock is Kephas, and that is how Peter's name occurs when given in its Aramaic form. [00:02:06] I'm not saying that I think the account in Matthew is historically accurate in describing Peter as the rock of the church, but I do think it highly probable that Jesus renamed Simon the rock during his public ministry. [00:02:21] End of footnote so far as we know, there were no other persons named Peter until later times when Christians started naming their children after the great apostle. And so the author of 1 Peter is certainly claiming to be that Peter. This is borne out by his comment in 5:1 that he was personally a witness of the sufferings of Christ. [00:02:46] It should not be objected that Peter did not actually see the crucifixion of Jesus and so was not a witness to his sufferings. Whoever wrote this book almost certainly did not have the Gospels to read. We can't know what he thought about Peter's involvement in the last hours of Jesus. [00:03:06] Was he that Peter? [00:03:08] There is one important issue to consider from the letter itself. [00:03:12] When he wraps up his letter, he sends greetings from the Christian church that he is allegedly writing from. [00:03:19] She who is in Babylon, who is also chosen, greets you. [00:03:25] Scholars have long realized what this last bit means. [00:03:29] Babylon was the city that was seen as the ultimate enemy of God among Jews, since it was Babylon that had defeated Judah and destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in the 6th century BCE. [00:03:42] By the end of the 1st century, Christians and Jews had started using the word Babylon as a code word for the city that was the enemy of God in their own day, the city of Rome, which also destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in the year 70. [00:03:57] See, for example, Revelation 14:8 and 17:5. [00:04:03] The author then is claiming to be writing from the city of Rome. [00:04:07] This makes sense given the later traditions that associated Peter with the city of Rome, in fact, as its first bishop, the first pope. [00:04:17] But tradition also indicates that Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero in 64 CE. [00:04:23] Would it make sense that he would be calling Rome Babylon before the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70? [00:04:31] By the time that catastrophe hit, Peter was long dead. [00:04:35] An even more important reason for doubting that Peter, the disciple of Jesus, wrote the letter, but that it was someone else later claiming to be him, is an issue I've dealt with a number of times on the blog, but none more important than in the current context. [00:04:51] Could Peter even write, let alone in Greek, let alone in highly literate and sometimes even artistic Greek? [00:04:59] Peter the Aramaic speaking, lower class, uneducated fisher from rural Galilee? [00:05:06] To deal with that question, we need to deal with the broad and crucial matter of literacy in antiquity, and in particular the historical Peter's own time and place. [00:05:16] Scholars of antiquity have been diligent over the past 35 years or so in trying to understand every aspect of ancient literacy and education. [00:05:26] In what is now the classic study, the 1989 book Ancient Literacy, William Harris, professor of Ancient History at Columbia University, showed that modern assumptions about literacy simply are not applicable to ancient times. [00:05:41] Today, in modern America, we live in a world where nearly every child goes to school and learns to read and write. Just about everyone we know can read the sports page and and copy out a page of a novel if they choose. But the phenomenon of massive and widespread literacy is completely modern. Before the Industrial Revolution, societies had no compelling reasons to invest enormous amounts of money and other resources into creating a literate population. [00:06:09] It was only with the development of the industrial world that such a thing became both desirable and feasible. [00:06:17] Harris argues that in the ancient world, at the very best of times, fewer than 15% of the population was reasonably literate by the best of times, he means something like Athens, a center of learning in the height of its intellectual power during the days of Socrates and Plato, 5th to 4th century BCE. [00:06:37] Most of these literate folks were men, as might be expected in a highly patriarchal society, and all of them were in the upper classes, the socially and economically elite, who could afford the leisure and who had the money? Well, their parents had the money to afford an education. [00:06:54] Lower class people did not learn how to read, let alone write, and the vast majority of people in the ancient world were in the lower classes. To the surprise of many people, the middle class is another invention of the industrial revolution. In the ancient world, virtually everyone was high or low or very, very low. [00:07:14] The only notable exceptions were slaves, who were naturally a very low class indeed, but who were sometimes educated at their master's expense so they could carry out household duties that required literacy skills, such as taking care of the house finances, helping with correspondence, or teaching the children. [00:07:34] When I say few people could read, let alone write, I mean to signal something else quite significant about the ancient world. When upper class people were instructed in literacy, reading and writing were taught as two different skills. [00:07:49] Among the many excellent studies of ancient education systems, see especially the study of Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001. [00:08:07] End of footnote Today we learn reading and writing together, and we naturally assume that if people can read, they can also write. Not necessarily write a novel, but at least a letter. But that's because of the way we have set up our educational system. There is nothing inherent in learning to read that can necessarily teach you how to write. I know this full well. Personally. I can read Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and, well, a range of other languages. But if you ask me to compose a letter letter in any of these languages, forget it. I learned how to read all of them in graduate school so I could read ancient documents in their original languages and modern scholarship in the languages of Europe. But I never learned how to write them. [00:08:52] Most people in the ancient world could not read, and those who could read often could not write. And in this case, by write I mean that most people, even if they could copy down words, could not compose a sentence, let alone a well argued treatise. [00:09:06] On the contrary, the people who could compose an ethical essay, a learned philosophical discussion, or an involved religious treatise were highly educated and highly exceptional. [00:09:18] And that was, in the very best of times. Very, very few people indeed were able to perform these skills in a language other than the one they were raised with. I'm not saying that just 1% of the population could do such a thing. [00:09:32] I am saying that Far fewer than 1% of the population could do is sometimes thought that Palestine was an exception, that in Palestine, Jewish boys all learned to read so that they could study the Hebrew Scriptures, and that since they could read, they could probably write. [00:09:50] Moreover, it is often argued that in Palestine most adults were bilingual or even trilingual, able to read Hebrew, able to speak the local language, Aramaic, and communicate well in the language of the broader empire, Greek. [00:10:04] Recent studies of literacy in Palestine, however, have shown convincingly that none of these assertions is true. [00:10:11] I'll continue with these thoughts in my next post.