- Richard Bauckham writes in the HarperCollins Bible Commentary:
- 2 Peter belongs not only to the literary genre of the letter, but also to that of “testament”… In Jewish usage the testament was a fictional genre… It is therefore likely that 2 Peter is also a pseudonymous work, attributed to Peter after his death… These literary considerations and the probable date of 2 Peter… make authorship by Peter himself very improbable.
- Scot McKnight, writing in the Eerdmans Commentary notes that 2 Peter:
- was probably composed within two decades after his death. No book in the Bible had more difficulty establishing itself in the canon. As late as Eusebius (d. 371) some did not consider 2 Peter to be from the Apostle or part of the canon… doubts continued for centuries (e.g., Calvin and Luther)
- McKnight adds:
- There is clear evidence that 2 Peter is either dependent on Jude or on a later revision of a tradition used by the author of Jude and then by the author of 2 Peter… The letter probably emerges from a Hellenistic Jewish context, probably in Asia.
- Neither Bauckham nor McKnight are skeptics, but for Ehrman:
- whoever wrote 2 Peter, it was not Simon Peter the disciple of Jesus. Unlike 1 Peter, the letter of 2 Peter was not widely accepted, or even known, in the early church. The first time any author makes a definite reference to the book is around 220 CE, that is 150 years after it was allegedly written. It was finally admitted into the canon somewhat grudgingly, as church leaders of the later third and fourth centuries came to believe that it was written by Peter himself. But it almost certainly was not… As scholars have long recognized, much of the invective is borrowed, virtually wholesale, from another book that found its way into the New Testament, the epistle of Jude. This is one of the reasons for dating the letter itself somewhat later… it is dependent on another letter that appears to have been written near the end of the first century.