There are affinities, especially with Romans and Ephesians, and would allow that there are close resemblances between 1 Peter and Titus, James and Hebrews, as well as with the Synoptic tradition and 1 Clement (Kelly, Peter and Jude, p. 11); but he attributes these, by and large, to the influence of ‘accepted patterns of teaching and preaching, traditional ideas and ways of looking at things, and a common vocabulary’. There are, it is true, very few identical textual parallels; but the sheer volume of close correlations would reasonably suggest at least the possibility that the author of 1 Peter was familiar with the Pauline corpus.
In spite of robust efforts to maintain genuine authorship for 1 Peter, the tide of scholarship has unquestionably turned in favour of a later date.
The one inescapable reality, however, is that despite the unease of the Christians in Asia Minor, as ‘temporary sojourners in a strange land’, the Church is represented in 1 Peter as well-established, and Christianity as being widespread. The writer’s frequent appeals to loyalty and faith are unlikely to be addressed to new Christians, unless the enthusiasm of their conversion had waned more rapidly than might be imagined; and the admonitions to the various social groupings, whatever might be the origin of these passages, suggest a more settled ecclesiastical situation, at least for this region, than would probably have obtained before the end of the first century.
Few exegetes would be prepared to deny that the nuances of 1 Peter with regard to the persecutions are more reminiscent of the circumstances described by Pliny than of any other period after the time of Nero. We should not fail to notice the mention by Justin Martyr (7 Apol. 4) of the unjust practice in his time of condemning Christians ‘for the name’, and of falsely charging them with murder and theft (cf. 1 Pet. 2.12; 4.15, 16). If we add to this the probability that the author of 1 Peter borrowed from Ephesians, and might also have been familiar with many of the writings which later formed the New Testament, we could hardly rule out a date in the first quarter of the second century. Three additional factors tend to corroborate such a dating: the well*developed baptismal theology, the more cautious approach to eschatological expectation, and the historical perspective in relation to Trajan’s military activities in the east.
It was noted in Chapter 3 that there are close affinities between 1 Peter and the Acts Pet. 12 Apost. on the theme of the necessity and inevitability of hardship and suffering for the Christian community. This same concept appears in other second-century Petrine works.
Lapham concludes, “Pseudonymously written, probably from Rome, it may represent a later counterpart of the Gentile-orientated Epistle to the Ephesians, with which it has much in common”
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