PROBLEMS OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDY 605 



Rome, this also awaits more perfect substantiation; and if Rome be 

 accepted as the home of the readers, it is still to be decided whether 

 the letter was intended for the whole Christian community in the city 

 to which it was sent, or to a smaller group of Christians. It is evi- 

 dent that all these questions have an important bearing on the contri- 

 bution which this letter makes to our knowledge of early Christianity, 

 since on the decision of them turns in part our knowledge of the extent 

 to which, the region in which, and the time at which the special type 

 of Christian thought reflected in this letter was prevalent. 



First Peter. The authorship and date of the epistle known as 

 First Peter must also be reckoned as among the open problems of 

 New Testament study. The excellent character of the Greek, the 

 distinctly Pauline character of the doctrine, the clear literary depend- 

 ence upon Romans and Ephesians, and the destination of the letter 

 to Pauline churches are serious problems for those who would accept 

 the claim of the letter itself to be from the hand of Peter. Yet an 

 explanation of all these things may be found in the relation of Sylvanus 

 to the writing of the letter, if only it be also admitted as possible that 

 Peter may in the latter years of his life have cooperated with Paul, 

 or have taken up the work that Paul had laid down, and that in this 

 period he came to hold substantially Paul's conception of Christianity 

 and was capable of writing under the dominating, even if temporary, 

 influence of Paul's own writings. 1 To many indeed such a confessedly 

 complicated, and in part conjectural, hypothesis is less probable than 

 the simpler, though not less hypothetical, view that the letter was 

 written long after Peter's death by a Pauline Christian who deliber- 

 ately assumed the name of Peter to give greater weight to his writing. 

 The problem must still be counted among the unsolved. Were the 

 Petrine authorship established, and its date definitely fixed, the letter 

 would make a most significant contribution to the history of the 

 apostolic age. 



Respecting the remaining books of the New Testament canon a 

 very few words must suffice. That there is to-day so wide difference 

 of opinion as still exists concerning the place of James in the early 

 history of Christianity is a testimony possibly to the perversity of 

 men's minds, but even more to the difficulty of the problem which 

 may be presented by a brief book of almost purely ethical and 

 didactic character. Such books may be written in almost any age. 

 Respecting Jude and Second Peter the case is different. The evi- 

 dences of late date are such as almost to exclude them from among 

 the sources for the history of the rise of Christianity. 



But if there are in the New Testament canon books which are 



1 Despite the weight of B. Weiss's name and opinion, we need scarcely reckon 

 seriously with the view that First Peter is earlier than the Pauline letters to which 

 it shows relationship. 



