must have been written before Α.Ρ. 64, The conclusion is challenged on the ground of the circumstances implied by the document and consequently one or other of the premises is invalidated. The cir- cumstances implied and indicated are suppposed to belong to a date definitely later than the time of Nero; and from this supposition it follows either that St. Peter did not write the Epistle or that he did not perish under Nero. In either case the Epistle is now com- monly assigned to the reign either of Domitian (Α.Ρ. 81-96) or of Trajan (A.D. 98-117). Professor Gunkel (for example) in a popular commentary recently published! ends his introduction with the words: ‘‘ The more precise dating of the Epistle must be determined in accordance with the persecutions above mentioned, with which, it must be confessed, we are not perfectly acquainted. Now the Neronian persecution affected only Rome and not the provinces, On the other hand more general persecutions seem to have taken place under Domitian. The time of Trajan, under whom a persecu- tion (A.D. 112) to which the letters of Pliny to the emperor testify, certainly took place in Asia Minor, is open to the objection that then the Christians were compelled to offer sacrifice—to which the Epistle has no reference. Our Epistle is therefore best assigned to the early period of Domitian’s reign. A still later dating (sc. than the reign of Trajan ?) is excluded by the lack of references to Guosis and the Episcopate.”’
Professor Ramsay similarly suggests, on the basis of the contents of the Epistle : ‘‘ ThevFirst Epistle of Peter then must have been written soon after Vespasian’s resumption of the Neronian policy in a more precise and definite form. It implies relations between Church and State which are later than the Neronian period, but which have only just begun.” ?
Professor Cone ὃ urges that the conditions implied by the Epistle fit the time of Trajan, and argues, as against Professor Ramsay, that ‘since they also fit the later date, they furnish no ground for exclud- ing it in favour of the earlier”. His conclusion is: “The data supplied in the Epistle and in known and precisely determinable his- torical circumstances do not warrant us in placing its composition more definitely than in the last quarter of the first, or the first quarter of the second, century”. For this he relies partly on Pro- fessor Ramsay’s opinion that ‘‘the history of the spread of Chris-
1 Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments neu iibersetzt und fur die Gegenwart εγε]ᾶγέ. . . Gottingen, 1908. 2 The Church in the Roman Empire (sixth edition: London, 1893), p. 282. He assigns it, therefore, to ο. A.D. 80 at the end of Vespasian’s reign. 3 Encyclopedia Biblica III., “ Peter, the Epistles of”.