2 Peter: The Last Book Written

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It says Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ (1:1), and it claims to have been on the mountain with me. Almost all critical scholars think it was written long after Peter’s death, by someone using his name. Even in the early church, many doubted it.

When: Most scholars place it between about 80 and 150. Many think it was the last book of the New Testament to be written.

Written for: Believers whose hope for my return was fading. Mockers laughed at the delay, and false teachers were leading people astray. The letter does not say which churches.

What it remembers of me: The day on the mountain when Peter, James and John saw me changed, and heard a voice say This is my beloved Son (1:17). And something I made clear to Peter about his death (1:14).

How close it stays to me: Close on God’s patience and a world made right. Far in its harsh words for false teachers.

If you only read three chapters: It has three. Read them.

Words to Know

Tartarus — in Greek myth, the deepest pit of the underworld, where the gods imprisoned the Titans. This letter is the only book in the New Testament that uses the word.

Mockers — people who laughed that I had not come back.

Pseudonymous — written under a false name. In the ancient world, writing in a famous teacher’s name was common. Whether it was meant and taken as a tribute or as a trick is still debated.

Testament — a farewell speech, in which a famous man looks ahead to his death and warns of what will come after.

The Book in Brief

Simon Peter writes to fellow believers. He lists the qualities to add to faith, ending in love, and promises a share in God’s own nature and an entrance into the eternal kingdom. He says he will soon die, and wants them to remember. He says he saw my glory on the holy mountain and heard the voice from heaven.

Chapter 2 warns that false teachers will arise. They live in greed and lust and lead many astray. The writer recalls how God punished rebel angels, the world of Noah’s day, and Sodom and Gomorrah, while saving Noah and Lot, and says the same judgment waits for these teachers.

Chapter 3 says that mockers will ask where the promise of my coming is, since everything goes on as before. The writer answers that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years, that the Lord is patient and wants everyone to repent, and that the day will come with fire. He tells the readers to live holy lives and look for new heavens and a new earth. He calls Paul a beloved brother, says Paul’s letters are hard to understand, and ends with a call to grow in grace and knowledge.

It opens with Peter’s full name, Simon Peter. It says Peter knows he will soon die, even as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me (2 Peter 1:14). It insists that its writer saw me with his own eyes. And it is very probably not by Peter.

We were eyewitnesses

For we didn’t follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honor and glory when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” We heard this voice come out of heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain (2 Peter 1:16–18).

The gospels tell that day. I took Peter, James and John up a high mountain, and he was changed into another form in front of them. Peter, frightened, offered to build three tents, For he didn’t know what to say (Mark 9:2, 6).

No other letter in your New Testament makes so strong a claim to have been there. And that is part of the problem. A writer who really was there would hardly need to insist on it so hard.

Why scholars doubt it

The reasons are many, and some of them are old.¹

The Greek. It is ornate and full of rare words, and it is very different from the Greek of 1 Peter. Jerome noticed this around 400. He wrote that most people rejected the letter because its style did not match the first one.

Jude. Most of the second chapter is a rewritten version of the short letter of Jude. The same false teachers, the same examples, the same images, in the same order: angels kept in darkness, Sodom and Gomorrah, Balaam, clouds and springs without water.² Most scholars think this writer had Jude in front of him. It would be strange for Peter, the leader of the twelve, to copy most of his warning from a much smaller letter by someone else.

Paul’s letters. The writer speaks of our beloved brother Paul and of all of his letters, and he puts them beside the other Scriptures (2 Peter 3:15–16). That means Paul’s letters had already been collected and were being read as scripture. That took time. It most likely did not happen in Peter’s lifetime.

The fathers. The mockers in this letter ask what happened to the promise of my coming, from the day that the fathers fell asleep (2 Peter 3:4). Most scholars take this to mean the first generation had died. The writer is looking back at them.

The church. It was one of the most doubted books in the New Testament. No early writer clearly quotes it before the 200s. Origen knew it was disputed. Eusebius put it on his list of disputed books.³

So who wrote it? Someone who honored Peter, writing in the form of a farewell testament, as Jews and Christians of that age often did for great figures of the past. He wanted Peter’s voice to speak to a new crisis. I am not going to call him a liar. But when you read We heard this voice, you should know that you are most likely not hearing Peter.

Go deeperHow 2 Peter won its place

How did a letter that so many doubted end up in the New Testament?

Early readers were unsure. Origen, in the 200s, said that Peter left one letter that everyone accepts and perhaps a second, which is disputed. Eusebius, about 325, wrote that he had been taught that the second letter was not part of the New Testament, though many found it useful and read it along with the other scriptures.³

Some churches left it out for centuries. The Syriac-speaking churches of the east used a Bible called the Peshitta. Its New Testament, put together in the early 400s, did not include 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude or Revelation.⁴

In Egypt, meanwhile, people were copying it. Its oldest surviving copy, Papyrus 72, comes from a papyrus book of the third or fourth century that also holds Jude, 1 Peter and several other early Christian writings, not all of which became part of the New Testament.⁴

The turning point came in 367. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote an Easter letter to the churches of Egypt that listed the books of the New Testament. It is the earliest surviving list with exactly the twenty-seven books you have today, and it includes the two letters of Peter. Not long after, in the West, Augustine named the same two letters.⁴

No single meeting settled the question in one day. The letter was accepted slowly, church by church.

Where is the promise?

The new crisis was this. I had not come back.

My first followers expected to see it. Paul told the Thessalonians that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord would meet me (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17). Mark remembers me saying, this generation will not pass away until all these things happen (Mark 13:30).

By the time this letter was written, that generation had passed away. And people were laughing. In the last days mockers will come … saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For, from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (2 Peter 3:3–4).

The writer gives two answers.

The first is that God does not keep time the way we do. Don’t forget this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8). He took that from a psalm: For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past (Psalm 90:4).

The second is the better one. The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness; but he is patient with us, not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).

If the end has been delayed, it is because God is giving people time. That is not a bad answer. And it is the New Testament itself admitting, out loud, that the end did not come when the first believers thought it would.

I said, But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32). Whoever wrote this letter was trying to be faithful to that. The ones who set dates were not.

But the patience has an edge. In chapter 2 the false teachers are born natural animals to be taken and destroyed (2 Peter 2:12), and the blackness of darkness has been reserved forever for them (2 Peter 2:17). I spoke sharply to teachers who led people astray (Matthew 23:13). I also told you to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), and this letter has no mercy for its opponents.

Go deeperWhat later readers did with a thousand years

The writer takes the line one day is with the Lord as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8) from Psalm 90:4 and uses it to calm impatient believers. Later readers used it for something else. They used it to count.

A Jewish book called Jubilees, written in the 100s BC, had already used the same idea. It says that Adam died at 930, before he reached a thousand, because a thousand years are as one day in God’s sight, and God had warned that Adam would die on the day he ate the fruit.⁵

Some Christians then took the days of creation as a map of history. God made the world in six days, a day is a thousand years, and so the world would last six thousand years before the great rest of the seventh. The Letter of Barnabas, written in the early 100s, says it plainly: in six thousand years the Lord will end all things. Irenaeus, a bishop in Gaul around the year 180, agreed that the world would last as many thousands of years as it took days to make.⁵

So a sentence meant to take away the timetable was turned into a timetable. That is the opposite of what the letter does with it. It follows the thousand years with God’s patience, not with a date.

The earth burned up

The same chapter describes the end with fire. The heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up (2 Peter 3:10).

Some people have read that to mean the earth does not matter. If God is going to burn it anyway, why look after it?

Two things to know. First, the oldest copies of this verse do not say burned up. They say the earth and the works in it will be found, meaning laid bare before God, exposed for judgment. The World English Bible follows the later copies.⁶ Second, the writer goes straight on to what he is waiting for: new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). He took that from Isaiah (Isaiah 65:17). The hope was a world made right, not a world thrown away.

And the question he asks next is the right one: what kind of people ought you to be in holy living and godliness? (2 Peter 3:11). The end of the world, in this letter, is a reason to live better now, not a reason to stop caring.

Our beloved brother Paul

There is one more thing in this letter worth noticing.

When Paul and Peter were alive, they had a bitter public quarrel in Antioch, over whether Jewish believers could eat with Gentiles. Paul wrote, I resisted him to his face (Galatians 2:11).

This letter, written in Peter’s name, calls him our beloved brother Paul. It says his letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsettled twist (2 Peter 3:15–16).

The quarrel is gone. The two great apostles are brothers, and the problem is the people who misread Paul. That is how the church came to remember them, side by side, the founders of the church in Rome. It is a kinder picture than the one Paul painted of that day in Antioch. It was also a way of telling people that Paul belonged to the church, not to those who twisted him.

And notice that even inside the New Testament, someone found Paul hard to understand. You are not the first.

Partakers of the divine nature

One more line, because it has had a long life. The letter says that through God’s promises you may become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

The Orthodox churches built a great deal on that sentence. They teach that the goal of a human life is to be drawn so close to God that you share in God’s own life. They call it theosis. Whatever you make of it, it is a large hope to find in a small and late letter.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Peter 3:3–9, then Mark 13:30–32.

You will find: believers being mocked because I had not come back, and my own words that no one knows the day or the hour.

Then compare 2 Peter 2:1–17 with Jude 4–13. Count how much of one is in the other.

The Short Version

• 2 Peter claims to be from Peter and to be an eyewitness, but almost all critical scholars think it was written long after his death, perhaps last of all the New Testament books.
• It copies most of Jude, treats Paul’s letters as a collected scripture, and looks back on the fathers as dead.
• It answers people mocking the delay of my return: a day is like a thousand years, and God is patient, not wishing that anyone should perish.
• Its burning earth leads to new heavens and a new earth, a world made right.
• It calls Paul our beloved brother, and admits his letters are hard to understand.