Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (71 page)

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5:8 (cf. Eph. 4:27; 6:11; 1 Tim. 3:6, 7, 11; 2 Tim. 2:26; 3:3; Tit. 2:3; but never in Paul)

There are simply too many Pauline parallels to be written off. They are scattered throughout the whole of this short letter. It is not a matter, as sometimes thought, of literary dependence on one or the other of the Pauline epistles (e.g., Romans and Ephesians).
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This author is someone claiming to be Peter who is trying to sound like Paul. As Schenk and Fischer have stated the case, this author “actualizes for a new situation the Pauline heritage—and that in the name of Peter!”
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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.
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One could just as well argue, on the same ground, that 2 Corinthians is not Pauline.
Paul Achtemeier too moves in the wrong direction, when he points out words and phrases of Paul not found in the letter (“flesh,” “church,”
the old and new Adam, the body of Christ, righteousness by faith apart from the Law, the tension of Israel and the Church).
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No one is claiming, or should claim, that the author of 1 Peter wanted to hit upon every Pauline theologoumenon 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. 1 Peter sounds much more like Paul than Titus does.

And it sounds much more like Paul than the Paul of Acts does. The Paul of Acts preaches to gentiles about the importance of Jesus without ever mentioning that his death was salvific. One could go a step farther. 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-). This is not necessarily because he happened to have access to the same letters of Paul that we have—although he may well have—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 survive as the undisputed Pauline letters.
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Although the many differences 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. 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. So why did the author not simply claim to be Paul?

The most widely proffered, but not fully convincing, explanation for why an author would claim to be Peter when writing like Paul is simply that he is trying to effect some kind of reconciliation between the two apostles, widely known to have quarreled publicly and widely thought to be at loggerheads about major theological and practical issues (as we will see at greater length in the next chapter). This
is the view expressed crisply, for example, by Wolfgang Trilling, who (without invoking Baur) stresses that the names used at the beginning and end of the letter are key. Peter himself was known to be a leading authority figure in the church; Mark and Silvanus were Paul’s coworkers for the church of Asia Minor. And strikingly, all three were closely tied with the church in Jerusalem, whence their mission started. And so the letter is meant to effect a broad reconciliation of Paul with the other apostles and the Jerusalem church, and to show that these Jerusalem apostles embraced Paul’s teachings, rather than rejected them.
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There is much to commend this view, as we will see. But the problem with it and with others of its ilk (going back to Baur) is that it refuses to consider the actual content of the letter of 1 Peter in order to explain its pseudepigraphic function. Surely this is not the best way to proceed. The subject matter of the letter must have some bearing on the reason it was written.

This was recognized by Norbert Brox in an important article that lamented the fact that so much effort had been placed in determining the authorship of 1 Peter and exploring its Paulinism without ever considering the main point of what the letter is actually about.
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Oddly enough, whereas Brox provides a clear assessment of the content of the letter, he never circles back, in the article, to the question of why the letter should be written in the name of Peter in terms that sound like Paul. Earlier he had put forth a rather feeble argument that since the letter was written in Rome it was naturally attributed to the chief authority there, Peter. The association of Peter with Rome may indeed be significant, but there is no reason, if the ascription is false, to think that the alleged location of its origin is true: it may just as well be that since the letter was written by “Peter” it was said to be sent from Rome (“Babylon”) because of Peter’s close associations with the place. And we are still left with the question that Brox resolutely refuses to answer: Why Peter in particular? Why not Paul, also an authority on Roman soil? And is there really nothing in the substance of the letter, rather than the place of its origin, that makes sense of its Paulinisms?
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The letter is rich with themes and subthemes, but the one issue that ties together most of its sundry parts is the emphasis on suffering and endurance. The term
occurs more frequently in this short five-chapter epistle than in any other book of the New Testament—more than Luke-Acts combined, though
suffering is a major concern there as well. For the author of 1 Peter, Christ suffered for the sake of others (2:21–24; 3:18), and his followers will follow in his steps and suffer as well (2:21; 4:1, 13). The believers’ sufferings do not come from imperial authorities, so far as we can tell; these are to be obeyed as those who keep the public order (2:13–14). Instead, the opposition is unofficial and local, former friends and colleagues who are upset that, with their change of heart and lifestyle, the “Christians” no longer participate with them in their social and civic lives. These opponents of the Christians strike out at them in response (4:1–6). The Christians are to give no cause for persecution. They are to engage in no wrong-doing to warrant opposition (2:12; 3:16–17; 4:12–19). But they are always to be ready to explain why they live and believe as they do when called to account for it (3:15–16). Christians are constantly to recall that they are “exiles” in this world and will, as a result, be mistreated in this foreign land. But their real home is above, where they can expect an imperishable inheritance and great reward if they persevere to the end (1:1, 3–9, 11; 5:9–10).

The question of why this letter was forged must relate to the question of why it was written. It was written, presumably, to provide comfort and encouragement to Christians scattered in various places (the fictional designation: five provinces of Asia Minor) who were experiencing opposition and persecution at the hands of their former companions among the pagans. Why, as a subsidiary matter, was it written in the name of Peter in the style of Paul?

It may be worth observing, in this connection, that the book of Acts shares the dominant concern of 1 Peter with the problem of Christian persecution and suffering, and at the same time is completely committed to the question of the unity of the church, as manifest in the unity of the apostolic band. The presentation of the life, ministry, and proclamation of Paul in Acts is, in no small measure, affected by the author’s concern to show that Paul aligned himself in toto with the Jerusalem church. And so, in contrast to Paul’s own claims in Galatians, Acts indicates that immediately after his conversion he went to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles (Acts 9); in further contrast with Galatians, where it appears that Paul needed to use some rhetorical force to persuade the other apostles to agree with his law-free gospel, the author of Acts portrays Peter as the first to recognize that gentiles do not need to observe Jewish Law to be followers of Jesus (Acts 10–11). The Jerusalem conference itself is a virtual love fest in which James, Peter, Paul, and everyone else who matters is in complete agreement (Acts 15). Yet again in contrast to Galatians, where the fall out in Antioch appears severe and possibly permanent (Gal. 2:11–14), in Acts Peter and Paul are portrayed as in complete harmony. So aligned are they that it is virtually impossible to distinguish their public proclamations: Peter sounds like Paul and Paul sounds like Peter.

These ultimate concerns of Acts, involving both external circumstances of the church (persecution and suffering) and internal affairs (complete harmony of the apostles), are intimately related. The harmony of the church in the face of suffering demonstrates that God is at work in the community, despite the hardships that it faces; he is creating a harmonious body in the midst of attempts at
disruption. In fact, hardships are overcome, in no small measure, through the unified efforts of the Christians in the face of it. Where there are splits and divisions in the community, the power of the group is threatened to dissipate (Ananias and Sapphira in
ch. 5
; Simon Magus in
ch. 8
; the “men from Judea” in
ch. 15
). It is only through the forceful and God-driven power of harmony that internal problems are resolved, allowing the church to stand as one in the face of external opposition. In short, suffering requires a unified front.

This lesson is not restricted to the account of Acts. To pick just one other example we might consider the book of 1 Clement, written at roughly the same time as Acts, near the end of the first century, and like 1 Peter, closely connected to Rome. Here the leading issue is harmony in the church, and the problems of schism among the leaders. The leadership in the church of Corinth has been usurped and the Roman church is writing in order to restore order, in this case by compelling the upstarts who have taken over places of leadership to give up their positions and return their predecessors to power. The book is about much more than that—as frequently noted, it is a very long letter indeed—but the overarching theme is unity, so much so that it can well be classified as a kind of literary “homonoia speech.”
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At the outset of the letter, in order to show the terrible results of jealousy and envy (endemic to the Corinthian church and its leadership), the anonymous author points to examples from the Old Testament, before giving examples “in quite recent times.” These latter are “athletic contenders … of our own generation” who suffered persecution from those who were envious of them, struggled, in fact, “even to death.” He cites then just two “recent” examples among “the good apostles,” Peter and Paul.