A chosen people – their conduct and their suffering

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ. There is only one Peter among the apostles, or indeed in the entire New Testament, and the letter purports to come from his pen. This in itself does not settle the matter. The Second Letter of Peter makes the same claim; but the church has always, with good reason, hesitated to accept it as the work of the apostle. The first letter bears much better credentials. It breathes the authentic spirit of early Christianity and it expounds the central principles of the faith with a seriousness and authority comparable with those of Paul. Admittedly, it is not easy to see how it could have been written by the Galilean fisherman who was a disciple of Jesus. It is composed in polished Greek, such as could hardly have been commanded by a Jew who from childhood had not spoken Greek as his first language; its frequent quotations from and allusions to the Old Testament are from the Greek translation of the Septuagint, which Peter is unlikely to have known, at least until late in life; and the symbolic reference to the place of writing as ‘Babylon’ (5.13) makes it likely that the letter was written, not before 64 ce (the likely date of Peter's death), but after the conquest of Jerusalem in 70 – it was only then that Jewish writers began to liken Rome to the historic Babylon which had similarly sacked Jerusalem six centuries before.