To take first the case of James, the coincidences in this Ep. with 1 Peter can hardly be accounted for on the ground of personal intercourse between the two writers. They seem to imply literary in- debtedness. The relative dates of the two docu- ments (apart from other considerations) supply a decisive argument that the borrowing is on the side of 1 P (see, e.g., Zahn, Hinl. i. p. 95). Mayor (p. exxiv) gives 40 as the earliest, 50 as the latest, year in which James can have been written. Zahn (Einl. i. p. 92) gives 50 as its approximate date. The Epistle would therefore be well known among the Jewish Christians in the Syrian towns, and certainly among those in the Syrian Antioch, in the sixth decade A.D. (see above, note on p. 765). There are reasons for thinking that in this decade St. Peter was working in this district, and that he made Antioch his headquarters (p. 779). It is, then, a natural conclusion that St. Peter studied the Epistle of James soon after it was written, and that some 12 years later many of its graphic phrases were fresh in his memory. In any case, the fact that 1 P is influenced in thought and language by James is an important indication that the mind of the writer was one which received and retained such impressions. ᾿
The coincidences between 1 P and the Pauline Epp. other than Romans and Ephesians are not very close, and are to be accounted for as the outcome of a common evolution of Christian phrases and conceptions rather than as instances of direct bor- rowing. The most striking of them, ἐν ἁγιασμῷ πνεύματος (2 Th 918,1 P 13), would, in fact, naturally suggest itself when the practical meaning of the term πνεῦμα ἅγιον became realized in the Church.
The case of Romans is widely different. There is no doubt that the author of 1 P was acquainted with this Epistle. Nor is this surprising, if the writer is St. Peter. For as St. Paul was familiar with James, so Romans could hardly escape the notice of the Apostles of the Circumcision. Though
* The supposed coincidences between 1 P and (a) Hebrews (see, e.g., von Soden, Hand-Commentar iii. 2, p. 2), (Ὁ) Apoca- lypse (see Spitta, Apokal. p. 511 ff.) will be found in either case to be such as would naturally appear in independent Christian writers of the same period who were well acquainted with the LXX.
PETER, FIRST EPISTLE
addressed to a particular Church, it dealt with fundamental questions respecting both Judaistic Christianity and the relation of ‘all Israel’ to the gospel. It is not therefore an extravagant sup- position that, giving as it did the apostle’s mature views on matters about which he must on more than one occasion have conferred with them (cf. Gal 25), he himself communicated it to the leaders of the Jewish Churches. At any rate it could hardly fail to become known, soon after it was written, at the Syrian Antioch, the great meeting-
int of Jewish and Gentile Christianity in the
ast as Rome was in the West, and so to be brought under St. Peter’s notice.
In regard to the relation of Ephesians to 1 P the case isless simple. Critics of different schools agree in holding that 1 P is profoundly influenced by Ephesians. The nature of some of the coincidences noted above seems to put it beyond doubt that the writer of 1 P was familiar with the language of Ephesians. A list of coincidences, however, in-
equately represents the indebtedness of 1 P to that Epistle. ‘The connexion, though very close, does not lie on the surface. It is shown more by identities of i and similarity in the structure of the two as es as wholes than by identities of phrase’ (Hort p. 5). Salmon (Introd. pp. 443, 445), noting independently the same facts, sug- gests two interpretations of them. (a) ‘ We might conjecturally explain this difference by supposing the Epistle to the Romans to have been so long known to St. Peter that he had had time to become familiar with its language, while his acquaintance with the Ephesian Epistle was more recent.’ (δ) ‘Peter may have arrived at Rome before Paul quitted it, in which case there would be 8 good deal of viva voce intercourse between the apostles, as there had been in former times. The doctrines taught by Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians would also naturally be the subject of his discourses to the Christians at Rome; and these discourses may have been heard by Peter.’ Looking only, however, at the broad facts of the case, we may say that, if Ephesians was written by St. Paul during his first captivity, and if St.
eter visited Rome not long afterwards, the ac- quaintance of the writer of 1 P with Ephesians need cause no difficulty on the supposition that that writer was St. Peter.
From the question of literary we pass to that of doctrinal indebtedness. The writer of 1 P, it is urged (see above), in his theology takes St. Paul as his master. There is nothing, it is added, un-Pauline in the Epistle. The inference drawn is that St. Peter cannot be the author of the Epistle. Two observations cover a large part of the ground occupied by such criticisms. (1) Behind the argu- ment there lies the tacit assumption that the two apostles stood in regard to each other in a position analogous to that taken by the leaders of two factions—a progressive and a reactionary party —leaders who alike by essential differences of principle and by the necessities of party-strife are prevented from learning from each other. Such a view of the mutual relation of the apostles is, it is believed, wholly unsupported by the evidence of the NT and of early Christian literature. (2) The Epistles of St. Pau] form for us so large a part of the apostolic literature of the first age, te. the