AUTHOR

First Peter claims to be written by the apostle Peter (1Pt 1:1), and there is no good reason to doubt Petrine authorship. The early church fathers also supported Petrine authorship, and there is wide and early evidence to support such a view.

The most debated introductory question for 1–2 Peter and Jude is whether Peter actually wrote 2 Peter. Almost all non-evangelical scholars claim Peter did not write the letter, and some who identify themselves as evangelicals agree. Petrine authorship is denied for the following reasons:

(1) Peter used Jude as a source, and the letter of Jude was composed too late to have been used by Peter who died in the AD 60s. Furthermore, some think that Peter would have never borrowed from a writer like Jude.

(2) The Greek vocabulary and theology in the letter demonstrate that Peter, a Galilean fisherman, could not be the author. The author must be a person familiar with Greek culture. In addition, the style of the letter differs from 1 Peter, demonstrating a different author from the first epistle.

(3) The false teachers in the letter are identified as second-century Gnostics, and obviously Peter could not have written the letter in the second century.

(4) Paul’s letters are recognized as Scripture (2Pt 3:15-16), but Paul’s letters could not have been collected together and viewed as Scripture while Peter was alive.

(5) The letter is not quoted by church fathers in the second century, and even in the fourth century its canonicity was under attack.

THE RELIABILITY OF 1 AND 2 PETER

Despite the above arguments, Petrine authorship is still the most convincing view, and is supported by the following arguments.

(1) As good historians, we begin with what the letter itself says, and we discover that the letter claims to be written by the apostle Peter (2Pt 1:1) himself. He claims that his death is very near (2Pt 1:14). Even more striking, he claims to have heard and seen Jesus’s transfiguration (2Pt 1:16-18). The author is obviously open to the charge of deception and lying if he was not the apostle.

(2) It is possible that Jude used Peter as a source instead of vice-versa. It seems more likely, though, that Peter did use Jude. In the first century, footnotes were not appended when using other sources, and Peter may have used some of Jude because he thought its contents applied well to his readers.

(3) The claim that the adversaries were second-century Gnostics is not supported from the text of 2 Peter. Gnostics posited cosmological dualism, rejected the material world, and had a defective Christology. None of these elements is clearly present in 2 Peter.

(4) Second Peter 3:15-16 does not indicate that all of Paul’s letters were collected and considered to be canonical. Peter obviously knows some of the Pauline letters and thinks they are authoritative, but that should not be equated with a collected canon of Pauline writings. Those who think that praise of Paul by Peter is impossible are too influenced by the old Tübingen hypothesis advanced by F. C. Baur.

(5) The vocabulary and style of 2 Peter are different from 1 Peter, and he does use Hellenistic terms. But this is not a decisive argument against Petrine authorship. We need to remember that the body of Petrine writings is very small. Therefore, judgments about “Petrine style” should be made with the recognition that we do not have enough writings from Peter to form a solid judgment about his style. Peter may have changed his style to address the situation of his readers, just as Paul did in Athens (Ac 17:16-34). Also, Peter may have asked a secretary to compose the writing, and this may account for the stylistic differences.

(6) The argument that Peter uses a different theology is not convincing either. We need to recall that the letter addresses a particular situation in the life of the churches and therefore is not a summary of Peter’s theology. There is no solid evidence that pseudonymous letters were accepted as canonical. In fact, they were rejected because they were fraudulent and fundamentally deceptive.

THE RELIABILITY OF JUDE

For Jude, the author is identified in the first verse as “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James.” The James mentioned is almost certainly James, the brother of the Lord Jesus Christ and the author of the letter from James (see Ac 15:13-21; 1Co 15:7; Gl 2:9). We can conclude from this that Jude was well-known by his association with his famous brother who played a significant role in the apostolic church. Hence, Jude was also the half-brother of Jesus Christ (Mt 13:55; Mk 6:3). External evidence from the early church also supports the view that Jude, the brother of Jesus, wrote the letter.

Some scholars have argued that another Jude wrote the letter. Calvin identified the author as the apostle “Judas of James” (Lk 6:16; Ac 1:13). But if this were correct, the author would call himself an apostle. Others have speculated that the writer is “Judas, called Barsabbas” (Ac 15:22,27,32), but there is no evidence that the latter was James’s brother. Even more unlikely is the theory that the author was the apostle Thomas. Still others maintain that the letter is pseudonymous, but support for pseudonymity in canonical writings is lacking. To sum up, there are good reasons to accept the view that Jude, the brother of Jesus, is the author of the letter.