Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Is First Peter more like First Paul by Bart D. Ehrman read by John Paul Middlesworth in my previous post I started explaining that if you were to read First Peter and didn't see his name as the first word, you would probably never suspect it was written by Jesus Disciple.
[00:00:20] On the contrary, it sounds a lot like something Paul would have written.
[00:00:25] All this is taken in edited form from my book Forgery and Oxford University Press.
[00:00:31] This is an academic book, but I've tried to make it completely legible to non scholars.
[00:00:36] It has nonetheless become virtually de rigueur among scholars to discount the Paulinisms of First Peter, as evidenced in such major commentaries as those of Gapelt, Achtenmayer and Eliot, and especially in such a full length study as that of German scholar Jens Herzer. It should be pointed out that a book like Herzer's Petrus Odor Paulus was perceived to be necessary precisely because First Peter does bear so many resemblances to a deutero Pauline letter. As we will see, Hertzer's lengthy analysis shows that the structure of the letter and the individual terms and phrases that it uses may sound like Paul, but they are not really like Paul. This is a fair enough observation, but it leads to a false conclusion, since the incongruity is precisely the point. If an author has his own point of view and wants to advance his own message, or but at the same time wants to sound like someone else, he will use the characteristic words and phrases of the other author, although obviously in his own sense.
[00:01:38] The result will be a book that on the surface sounds like that of the other author, but that underneath is quite different.
[00:01:45] That is why Ephesians and 2 Timothy seem both like and unlike Paul himself.
[00:01:50] On the surface there are numerous parallels to Paul's writings.
[00:01:54] Dig deeper and they look odd by comparison.
[00:01:57] So too one Peter.
[00:01:59] It is important in this connection to stress that no one is asking if Paul wrote First Peter. The question is whether the book sounds like Paul and to pursue the question of why.
[00:02:11] The arguments that Herzer uses are precisely those that would be used to determine whether or not Paul was really the author of Colossians or 2 Thessalonians.
[00:02:20] But that is not the issue.
[00:02:22] Indeed, if 1 Timothy had Peter's name attached to it as the author, it would seem a lot less like one of Paul's writings than One Peter does.
[00:02:31] As Eugene Boring has observed in his recent survey of one Peter in recent study, the pendulum is swung too far in the wrong direction away from recognizing the Pauline character of the book.
[00:02:43] The structure of the book itself, as William Shutter has observed, is Pauline, with names of the sender and receiver, a tripartite division of the letter and the conclusion. It is not a slavish imitation of the Pauline letters, but the resemblances are palpable. Yet more significant are the striking instances of important Pauline words and phrases and other features.
[00:03:05] The following list is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.
[00:03:10] The mission field in Asia Minor, as already noted, appears to be Paul's the word revelation apocalypsis in 1:7 1134 13.
[00:03:21] The word appears 13 times in the Pauline corpus, e.g. in Romans 2:5, 8, 191 Corinthians 1:7, 2 Corinthians 12:1, etc.
[00:03:32] God judges all impartially according to their deeds. 1:7 Compare Romans 2 and 2 Corinthians 5:1 God raised Christ from the dead and gave him glory.
[00:03:45] Chapter 1, verse 21. Compare that with Philippians 2:6 10 the gospel as the word of God 1:23.
[00:03:55] Compare that to 1 Thessalonians 2:13 Christ's teaching as milk in chapter 2, verse 2 giving oneself as a sacrifice, chapter 2, verse 5.
[00:04:11] See Romans 2:1 and Philippians 2:17.
[00:04:14] The quotation of Isaiah 28:16 in chapter 2:6 I am laying in Zion a stone, and of Isaiah 8:14 in chapter 2, verse 8 a stone of stumbling for both. See Romans 9:33.
[00:04:32] The quotation of Hosea 2:25 in chapter 2, verse 10.
[00:04:37] Compare Romans 9:25 opposition to desires connected with flesh in chapter 2, verse 11. Compare that to Galatians 5:16 be subject to every human institution, chapter 2, verse 13 compared to Romans 13:1 7.
[00:04:57] The view of Christ's death as a substitutionary atonement in chapter 224 and 3 18.
[00:05:04] This should not be thought of as a view shared by all early Christian writers with Paul. It is missing from the speeches of Acts, including Paul's, and from the gospel of Luke dying to sin and living to righteousness in chapter 2, verse 24 compared to Romans 5:27 6:21 do not return evil for evil in chapter 3, verse 9 compared to Romans 12:17, which has a verbatim agreement the in Christ formula in 3:16 and 5. 10.
[00:05:39] Baptism as salvation in chapter 3, verse 21. Compare that to Romans 6:1 6 flesh and spirit applied to humans in 4, 6.
[00:05:51] See Romans 8:5 and Galatians 5:17.
[00:05:56] The end of all things is at hand in chapter 4, verse 7.
[00:06:01] See 1 Corinthians 10:11 preeminence of love in chapter 4, verse 8 see Corinthians 13 and Galatians 5:14 rejoicing in sufferings 4:13.
[00:06:15] Compare 2 Corinthians 6, 10, 13:9 and generally 2 Corinthians, where Paul revels in his sufferings in 2 Corinthians 13, 4, 7, 12 and 11 23:30 suffering with Christ leads to glory in chapter 4:13.
[00:06:34] Compare that to Romans 8:17 and as noted, the conclusion in 5:12:14, including the references to Silvanus. Compare that to 2 Corinthians 1:19, 1 Thessalonians 1:1 and 2 Thessalonians 1:1 references to Mark, Philemon 20, 4 Colossians 4:10 and 2 Timothy 4:11 and the injunction to greet one another with a kiss in Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20, 2 Corinthians 13:12 and 1 Thessalonians 5:26.
[00:07:08] Some of these words and phrases were or became traditional stock in the Christian traditions, but some are distinctively Pauline, and there are so many of them. It is striking that other features of the letters resonate with the Pauline tradition known from the Deutero Pauline letters, including the redeem.
[00:07:27] Compare that to Titus 2:14 the Haustoffel that is the list of rules in conduct in two person relationships of various social standing that's in chapter 2:18 through 3:7.
[00:07:40] Compare that to Colossians 3:18, 4:6 and Ephesians 5:22:6, 9, especially within these instructions the command for wives to be submissive in chapter 3, verse 1. Compare that to 1 Timothy 2:11, 15, Ephesians 5:22 and the interpolation at first Corinthians 14:34, 35 the opposition to braided hair, gold and costly clothes in 3. 3.
[00:08:10] Compare with 1 Timothy 2. 9.
[00:08:13] Leaders are to oversee the flock in chapter 5 too. Compare that to 1 Timothy 3, 1 and Titus 1:7 the word devil diabolos in 5:8. Compare that to Ephesians 4:27, 6:11 1 Timothy 3, 6, 2 Timothy 2, 26, 33 Titus 2:3 but never in Paul.
[00:08:37] There are simply too many Pauline parallels to be written off. They are scattered throughout the whole of this short letter.
[00:08:43] It is not a matter, as sometimes thought, of literary dependence on one of the other Pauline epistles, e.g. romans and Ephesians.
[00:08:51] This author is someone claiming to be Peter, who is trying to sound like Paul. As Fisher and Schenke have stated the case. This author actualizes for a new situation the Pauline heritage, and that in the name of Peter the counterarguments by those who refuse to see Pauline influences on the letter can be seen in their starkest form in the observation of Andreas Lindemann that The author of 1 Peter does not advance a view of justification by faith.
[00:09:21] One could just as well argue on the same ground that Second Corinthians is not Pauline, since it too does not use the term or advance the concept.
[00:09:31] Paul Achtamier too, moves in the wrong direction when he points out words and phrases of Paul not found in the letter, such as flesh, church oppression, the old and new, Adam, the body of Christ, righteousness by faith apart from the law, the tension of Israel and the Church.
[00:09:48] No one is claiming or should claim that the author of 1 Peter wanted to hit upon every Pauline Theologumenon, that is every key theological term in his brief letter. The author of the pastoral epistles certainly did not do so. But one would be very hard pressed indeed to argue on that ground that he did not go out of his way to make his reader think that the letters were written by Paul First. Peter sounds much more like Paul than Titus does, and it sounds so much more like Paul than the Paul of Acts does.
[00:10:20] The Paul of the Acts preaches to Gentiles about the importance of Jesus without ever mentioning that his death was salvific.
[00:10:28] One could go a step further. The Peter of 1 Peter sounds a lot more like Paul than the Peter of Acts does, even though Acts has as one of its overarching agendas to reconcile the two apostles. Theologically, the Peter of Acts does sound like the Paul of Acts as opposed to the Paul of the undisputed letters. The Peter of 1 Peter sounds like the Paul of the letters, both undisputed and deutero.
[00:10:54] This is not necessarily because he happened to have access to the same letters of Paul that we have, although he may well have done so, but because, however, he inherited his Pauline traditions of Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology, he used them to good effect to make the letter written by Peter sound like Paul. This is not to say that the author lacked an agenda of his own. In fact, there are distinctive features of the letter that make it clearly stand out from what now survives as the undisputed Pauline letters. While the many references from the Pauline letters are interesting, it is important to stress again that this author was not trying to write a deutero Pauline letter claiming to be Paul.
[00:11:35] He was writing a letter claiming to be Peter. But the letter written in the name of Peter sounds very much like a letter of Paul.
[00:11:44] So why did the author not simply claim to be Paul?
[00:11:48] I'll continue from this point in the next post.
