1 Peter: Intro & Background

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.


Date- Arguments for a 64-ish AD date


Tradition universally has Peter in Rome at time of his death
(66 a.d.) and the “coded” Babylon location is almost universally
considered Rome (as in 2nd Temple literature and Revelation).

Virtually silent that he was much anywhere else (Acts 12:17)
except Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, etc.

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.



Audience


Arguments for a Jewish Audience


The letter contains direct quotations from the OT and abounds
in allusions to it, in phrases, characters (Sarah and Abraham),
and in references that evoke Jewish history (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)

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 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.