Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (70 page)

Moreover, there is nothing distinctive to Peter’s views here, at least as these are known from the scant references to them in Paul, the only surviving author to mention Peter during his lifetime (e.g., Galatians 2). Nothing indicates that this author held to the ongoing importance and validity of the prescriptions of the Law: circumcision, kosher food regulations, Sabbath observance, Jewish festivals, for example. The significance of Scripture, for this author, is not that it provides guidelines for cultic activities in the community’s life together. The “word of the Lord” is the gospel of Christ, not the Jewish Scriptures (1:25); the prophets looked forward to Christ and are fulfilled in him and in his new people the Christians (1:12; 2:6, 10); Scripture is important chiefly for its high ethical demands (3:8–12).

There are self-conscious epistolary conventions in the reference to the addressees in 1:1 and the closing greetings of 5:12–13. But both passages make the reader think of Paul, not Peter. The missionary sphere is Asia Minor, where Paul
established churches but which is never associated in other traditions with Peter. The two persons mentioned at the end, Silvanus and Mark, are best known as Pauline associates (Silvanus: 2 Cor. 1:19; 1 Thess 1:1; 2 Thess 1:1; Acts 15:22–18:5; Mark: Col. 4:10; 2 Tim. 4:11: Phlm. 24).
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The injunction to “greet one another with a kiss” is almost straight from Paul (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26) and occurs nowhere else.

The only possible bit of verisimilitude that might make a reader think of Peter is in 5:1, where the author claims to have been a witness of Christ’s sufferings. As widely noted, however, this scarcely sounds like the Peter of the rest of the Christian tradition, at least as it has been handed down to us, who fled after Jesus’ arrest, denied his Lord three times, and was notably absent from the crucifixion.
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It may be germane that the book of Acts stresses Peter as a witness to Jesus, his death, and resurrection (1:8, 22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39, 41). Here too there is no sense that Peter actually observed Jesus suffer, so that there is no reason to suspect that is what the author of 1 Peter 5:1 had in mind either. But even more important, Peter in these other passages is not said to be uniquely qualified as a witness. In every instance he is simply one of the apostolic band who bear testimony to Jesus and the salvation he has brought. There is nothing about 1 Peter 5:1, then, that would make a reader think of Peter in particular from among the faithful band that bore witness to Christ. And this band includes not just the twelve apostles in Acts: Stephen too is called a
(22:20) as, notably, is Paul himself (22:15; 26:16).

In view of all these considerations, the older claim of A. Jülicher and E. Fascher remains valid: “One can absolutely insist that if the first word ‘Peter’ were missing from our ‘letter,’ nobody would have guessed it might have been authored by Peter.”
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In fact, as already suggested above, everything in this letter instead sounds like Paul. This was recognized long ago by F. C. Baur and the “school” that he established. Far too often the view has been tarnished by the guilt of that association, as it was attached by Baur and his followers to his entire, complex, and now universally discounted theory of church history. But that attachment can itself be profitably abandoned without sacrificing all of the data that first brought
it to mind. The Pauline character of 1 Peter stands out independently of the extravagant theories of the Tübingen school.
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It has nonetheless become virtually de rigueur to discount the Paulinisms of 1 Peter, as evidenced in such major commentaries as those of Goppelt, Achtemeier, and Elliott, and especially in such a full-length study as that of Jens Herzer.
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Still, it should be pointed out that a book like Herzer’s
Petrus oder Paulus
was perceived to be necessary precisely because 1 Peter does bear so many resemblances to a (deutero)Pauline letter, as we will see.

Herzer’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, but at the same time wants to “sound” like someone else, he will use the characteristic words and phrases of the other, although obviously in his own sense. The result will be a book that on the surface sounds like that of the other author, but that underneath is quite different. That is why Ephesians and 2 Timothy seem both like and unlike Paul himself. On the surface there are numerous parallels to Paul’s writings; dig deeper and they look odd by comparison. So too 1 Peter.

It is important in this connection to stress that no one is asking if Paul wrote 1 Peter. The question is whether the book sounds like Paul, and to pursue the question of why. 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. But that is not the issue. Indeed, if 1 Timothy had Peter’s name attached as the author, it would seem a lot less like one of Paul’s writings than
1 Peter does. As Eugene Boring has observed in his recent survey of “First Peter in Recent Study,” the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction, away from recognizing the Pauline character of the book.
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The structure of the book itself, as William Schutter 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.
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Yet more significant are the striking instances of important Pauline words and phrases and other features. The following list is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.

• The mission field, in Asia Minor, as already noted, appears to be Paul’s
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•
1:7, 13; 4:13 (the word appears thirteen times in the Pauline corpus, e.g., Rom. 2:5; 8:19; 1 Cor. 1:7; 2 Cor. 12:1, etc.)

• God judges all impartially according to their deeds 1:17 (cf. Rom. 2 and 2 Cor. 5:1)

• God raised Christ from the dead and “gave him glory” 1:21 (cf. Phil. 2:6–10)

• The gospel as the
1:23 (cf. 1 Thess. 2:13)

• Christian teaching as “milk” 2:2 (cf. 1 Cor. 3:2)

• Giving oneself as a “sacrifice” 2:5 (cf. Rom. 12:1; Phil. 2:17)

• The quotation of Isa. 28:16 in 2:6 (I am laying in Zion a stone …) and of Isa. 8:14 in 2:8 (“a stone of stumbling”; for both see Rom. 9:33)

• The quotation of Hos. 2:25 in 2:10 (Rom. 9:25)

• Opposition to “desires” connected with sarx 2:11 (cf. Gal. 5:16, 24)

• “Be subject to every human institution” (2:13; cf. Rom. 13:1–7)

• The view of Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement, 2:24, 3:18 (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
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)

• Dying to sin and living to righteousness 2:24 (Rom. 5:27–6:21)

• “Do not return evil for evil” 3:9 (Rom. 12:17; verbatim agreements)

• The “in Christ” formula 3:16; 5:10, 14 (in Paul, passim)

• Baptism as salvation 3:21 (cf. Rom. 6:1–6)

• Flesh and spirit applied to humans 4:6 (e.g., Rom. 8:5; Gal. 5:17)

• “The end of all things is at hand” 4:7 (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11)

• Preeminence of love 4:8 (1 Cor. 13; Gal. 5:14)

•
4:10 (cf. 1 Cor. 12)

• Rejoicing in sufferings 4:13 (cf. 2 Cor. 6:10; 13:9 and generally 2 Corinthians, where Paul revels in his sufferings 2 Cor. 1:3–7; 4:7–12; 11:23–30)

• Suffering with Christ leads to glory 4:13 (cf. Rom. 8:17)

• And as noted, the conclusion in 5:12–14, including the references to Silvanus (cf. 2 Cor. 1:19; 1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1); Mark (Phlm. 24; Col. 4:10; 2 Tim. 4:11); and the injunction to “Greet one another with a kiss” (Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26)

Some of these words and phrases were, or became, “traditional stock.” But some are distinctively Pauline (“in Christ” etc.). And there are so many of them. It is striking that other features of the letter resonate with the Pauline tradition known from the Deutero-Pauline letters:

•
1:18 (cf. Titus 2:14)

• The Haustafel of 2:18–3:7 (cf. Col. 3:18–4:6 and Eph. 5:22–6:9)

• Especially, within these instructions, the command for wives to be submissive 3:1, 5 (cf. 1 Tim. 2:11–15; Eph. 5:22; and the interpolation at 1 Cor. 14:34–35)

• The opposition to braided hair, gold, and costly clothes 3:3 (cf. 1 Tim. 2:9)

• Leaders are to oversee
the flock 5:2 (cf. 1 Tim. 3:1, 2; Tit. 1:7);