I’m intrigued by Joel Willitts contention (supported by Ben Witherington) that 1 Peter is written to Jewish Christians. I’d never seriously entertained this possibility, and I’d like to hear the arguments without having to fork out for Witherington’s book. In particular I wonder how that idea is squared with:
- “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors.” (1 Peter 1:18 NRSV) To simply refer to the Law as “the futile ways inherited from your ancestors” (ἐκ τῆς ματαίας ὑμῶν ἀναστροφῆς πατροπαραδότου) seems to me rather unlikely for a Jewish Christian writing to other Jewish Christians, not least because of that word “your.” The more Petrine the letter is, the less likely this is to be the interpretation (and Witherington wants to hold to Petrine authorship).
- “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Peter 2:10 NRSV). The author applies this quotation from Hosea, even more obviously than the preceding quotation from Exodus, as if it is freshly true of those to whom he writes. It is hard, again, to imagine he is saying that as Jews they were not God’s people.
One of Joel Willitts apparent objections to seeing a Gentile audience is that it “renders 1 Peter the most thoroughgoing supersessionist text in the New Testament”. On the other hand, if it is written to a Jewish audience, statements such as the above make it I think even more so, since the author would then seem to be rejecting any validity in their Jewish past. “Futile ways” and “not a people” go way beyond supercessionism1 into a complete rejection. I think the natural sense of this language is that it is written to Gentiles.
Notes- Before any pedant asks about the inconsistent spelling of this word, I have left Joel’s spelling in American English. I, however, use British spelling [↩]
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