Introduction to 2 Peter
Author - The Apostle Peter (though many scholars disagree)
Audience - Not mentioned specifically but possibly addressed to the same churches from Peter’s other preserved letter
Setting
Probably written from prison in Rome (see 2 Pet. 1:12–15) not too long before Peter’s death by execution
Sometime during A.D. 64–67
Theme - God’s grace in Christ truly transforms and empowers Christians to live righteously, despite opposition.
Elements within the letter lead many scholars to conclude that Peter wrote during a time of persecution by Rome (perhaps during the persecution by Nero, who died in A.D. 68), while Peter himself was in a Roman prison awaiting imminent execution (2 Pet. 1:12–15). The dating of the letter, then, depends largely on the dating of Peter’s death.
Peter may have included in his letter elements from Jude that he thought would be helpful for his readers. It also could have worked the other way, with Jude using Peter’s letter as his source. The parallels are close but almost never exact, so it is difficult to sort out the relationship between 2 Peter and Jude with any degree of certainty.
Much of the letter falls into place if one grasps that Peter’s horror at false teaching is set over against the reliability of God’s prophetic word. These two motifs converge in the vision of the last chapter, where biblical prophecy about the return of Christ is aggressively offered as a rebuttal of scoffers (false teachers) who denigrate biblical prophecy. In 2 Peter, true and false teaching engage in a combat of huge proportions.
It is the well-nigh universal judgment of scholars, both ancient and modern, that Peter is not the author of Second Peter.
All the evidence converges to prove that Second Peter is a late book. It is not until the third century that it is quoted. The great scholars of the early church did not regard it as Peter's although they did not question its usefulness. The letter has references which require the passing of the years to explain them.
How, then, did it become attached to the name of Peter? The answer is that it was deliberately attached. This may seem to us a strange proceeding but in the ancient world this was common practice. Plato's letters were written not by Plato but by a disciple in the master's name. The Jews repeatedly used this method of writing. And in New Testament times there is a whole literature around the name of Peter--The Gospel of Peter, The Preaching of Peter, The Apocalypse of Peter.
One salient fact makes this method of writing even more intelligible. The heretics used it. They issued misleading and pernicious books under the names of the great apostles, claiming that they were the secret teaching of the great founders of the Church handed down by word of mouth to them. Faced with this, the Church retaliated in kind and issued books in which men set down for their own generation the things they were quite sure that the apostles would have said had they been facing this new situation. There is nothing either unusual or discreditable in a book being issued under the name of Peter although Peter did not write it. The writer in humility was putting the message which the Holy Spirit had given him into the mouth of Peter because he felt his own name was unworthy to appear upon the book.
We will not find Second Peter easy to read; but it is a book of first-rate importance because it was written to men who were undermining the Christian ethic and the Christian doctrine and who had to be stopped before the Christian faith was wrecked by their perversion of the truth.
Pseudonymity
Most scholars, in fact, date 2 Peter in the early part of the second century and consider it the last New Testament book to have been written. The author’s claim to Petrine authorship, therefore, is part of the phenomenon of ’pseudonymity’ in the ancient world, whereby the authority and tradition of a revered religious figure were attributed to a later work by an anonymous author. - Donald Senior, "The Letters of Jude and Second Peter,"
Chapter Divisions
Second Peter is one of the few New Testament epistles in which chapter divisions consistently coincide with thought divisions. - Thomas Constable
The first chapter vividly portrays the nature of the Christian life with its challenge to spiritual growth and maturity, built on a sure foundation.
The second part of the epistle is a ringing polemic against the false teachers who would allure and seek to mislead God’s people
The third chapter deals with the heretical denial of the return of Christ and concludes with some fitting exhortation to the readers.
- D. Edmond Hiebert, "The Necessary Growth in the Christian Life: An Exposition of 2 Peter 1:5-11,"