First and Second Peter, James, and Jude

Perkins's First and Second Peter, James, and Jude (Interpretation, 1995) is a competent pastoral commentary with useful social-contextual background on 1 Peter and solid epistolary analysis, but it carries several serious problems that teachers and preachers should weigh carefully. Most critically, on 1 Pet 1:10–12 Perkins does not merely note interpretive complexity — she explicitly tells readers that 1 Peter's argument is wrong, asserting that "we cannot suppose, as 1 Peter argues, that God had only the Christian community of faith in mind throughout the Old Testament," and then suggesting that Jews may be "obedient to the word of the Lord in the law and the prophets without being obedient to the word of the gospel" — a two-covenant theological position contradicted by every letter she is expounding and introduced without exegetical justification. On James 5:7–8, she confidently asserts that the parousia tou kyriou refers to God the Father rather than Jesus Christ, a minority position directly contradicted by Martin (WBC), McCartney (BECNT), Blomberg/Kamell (ZECNT), and Moo (PNTC), all of whom identify the language as the standard early Christian technical term for Christ's return. She describes the difficult passage 1 Pet 3:18–22 as the text "confusing" its own sequence — unusual and theologically troubling language for a preaching commentary. Her dismissal of apostolic authorship across all four books is stated with more confidence than the divided scholarly field warrants (Bauckham, Moo, and McCartney all argue substantively for authenticity of Jude, James, and 1 Peter respectively), and she never resolves the logical inconsistency of invoking apostolic authority for letters she regards as pseudonymous — since the only reason these letters ever carried that authority is that the church believed apostles wrote them; if it had known otherwise from the start, they would not have been canonized. The commentary's opening frames these letters as "marginal indeed" to the apostolic faith and introduces a parishioner who wasn't sure there was "anything there" — a dismissive posture toward canonical Scripture that stands in striking contrast to the enthusiasm with which McCartney calls James urgently relevant for our age, Blomberg and Kamell call it "probably the first NT document written" and "our roots," and Bauckham argues Jude is a unique and irreplaceable Jewish-Christian witness. Best used cautiously, as a supplement for its social-historical material on 1 Peter, but not as a primary resource for preaching or theological formation.

First and Second Peter, James, and Jude are not amongst the best known books of the NT. As Pheme Perkins points out in her Introduction, all apart from 1 Peter belonged to the disputed edges of the canon until the fourth century, and (with the partial exception of 1 Peter) have remained ever since "practically unknown" and merely "marginal" as far as "expressions of the apostolic faith that form the belief of Christians at large" are concerned. The reasons for this relative neglect are not difficult to find: all these letters appear to be theologically lightweight, and all four, especially 2 Peter and Jude, have obscure passages in them. Hence it is one of the considerable achievements of Perkins's commentary that she shows them to be interesting and relevant, theologically and otherwise. Perkins provides an introduction and section-by-section commentary for all four letters. In keeping with the format of the series, there are no footnotes and she makes only brief reference to secondary literature. The series is not intended primarily for fellow NT scholars, but Perkins shows that she is au fait with recent scholarship on all the works that she is dealing with, without letting this clog up the commentary. In line with the main consensus of modern scholarship, she sees all four works as pseudepigraphical. 2 Peter is taken to be the latest of the four, dependent on (amongst others) Jude. She again stands in the mainstream of modern scholarship in what she identifies as the main theological themes of each work. Here I remain unconvinced by the view that James is permeated by the theme of wisdom. [Full Review]