self than to suppose that a Pseudo-Petrus wrote our fragment as it now stands from the first verse to the last, soon after a.p. 90, or even from ten to thirty years earlier. Such an assumption is, in my opinion, weighed down by insuperable difficulties.!
So far as extant evidence goes Harnack’s hypothesis of interpola- tion has nothing on which to rest. It remains to consider the chief objections which have been urged to prove that the traditional view is improbable. Peter cannot have written the Epistle (it is said) because (1) it is clearly indebted to Paulinism, (2) it contains no vivid reminiscences of the life and doctrine of Jesus, (3) it is written in better Greek than a Galilean peasant could compass, and (4) it reflects conditions which Peter did not live to see.
The first reason is regarded as decisive by Harnack:? ‘‘ Were it not for the dependence [of 1 Peter] on the Pauline Epistles, | might perhaps allow myself to maintain its genuineness: that dependence however, is not accidental, but is of the essence of the Epistle”. Dr. Chase has examined the affinities between 1 Peter and the Epistles of the N.T., and it is sufficient to state the results at which he arrives. ‘The coincidences with St. James can hardly be accounted for on the ground of personal intercourse between the two writers. . . . The coincidences with the Pauline Epistles other than Romans and Ephesians are not very close and are to be accounted for as the out- come of a common evolution of Christian phrases and conceptions rather than as instances of direct borrowing. . . . There is no doubt that the author of 1 Peter was acquainted with the Epistle to the Romans. Nor is this surprising if the writer is St. Peter. . . . The connexion of Ephesians with 1 Peter (here he adopts the words of Hort) is shown more by the identities of thought and similarity in ‘the structure of the two Epistles as wholes than by identities of phrase. ...” In his summing-up he says: “ All that we learn of St. Peter from the New Testament gives us the picture of a man prompt and enthusiastic in action rather than fertile in ideas. His borrow- ing from St. James’ Epistle shows that his mind was receptive and retentive of the thoughts of others. The Epistle undoubtedly owes much to St. Paul. But it is only when the Pauline element is isolated and exaggerated that it becomes a serious argument against the Petrine authorship of the Epistle.” ὃ ‘
It is to be remembered, also, that St. Paul did not invent Paul- inism and that St. Peter manifests (according to the narrative of
1 Die Chronologie, 464 f. (quoted by Chase, Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, vol. iii. p. 786 Ὁ).
2 Chron. p. 364 (quoted by Chase).
3 Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, vol. iii. pp. 788 f.