T&T CLARK STUDY GUIDES TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

1 PETER

Series Editor
Tat-siong Benny Liew, College of the Holy Cross, USA
 Other titles in the series include:

1&2 Thessalonians: An Introduction and Study Guide

1 Peter: An Introduction and Study Guide
2 Corinthians: An Introduction and Study Guide
Colossians: An Introduction and Study Guide
Ephesians: An Introduction and Study Guide
Galatians: An Introduction and Study Guide
James: An Introduction and Study Guide
John: An Introduction and Study Guide
Luke: An Introduction and Study Guide
Mark: An Introduction and Study Guide
Matthew: An Introduction and Study Guide
Philemon: An Introduction and Study Guide
Philippians: An Introduction and Study Guide
Romans: An Introduction and Study Guide
The Acts of the Apostles: An Introduction and Study Guide
The Letters of Jude and Second Peter: An Introduction and Study Guide

T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament:

1 & 2 Samuel: An Introduction and Study Guide

1 & 2 Kings: An Introduction and Study Guide
Ecclesiastes: An Introduction and Study Guide
Exodus: An Introduction and Study Guide
Ezra-Nehemiah: An Introduction and Study Guide
Hebrews: An Introduction and Study Guide
Leviticus: An Introduction and Study Guide
Jeremiah: An Introduction and Study Guide
Job: An Introduction and Study Guide
Joshua: An Introduction and Study Guide
Psalms: An Introduction and Study Guide
Song of Songs: An Introduction and Study Guide
Numbers: An Introduction and Study Guide
 1 PETER

An Introduction and Study Guide

Reading Against The Grain

By
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Bloomsbury T&T Clark

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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© Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 2017

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Series: T&T Clark Study Guides to the New Testament, volume 18

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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Map of Asia Minor (Modern Day Turkey) x

Introduction: How Do You Approach 1 Peter? 1

Chapter 1
R hetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 19

Chapter 2
Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 34

Chapter 3
R econstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 48

Chapter 4
Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 62

Instead of a Conclusion 78

Key Terms 82
Timeline 90
Bibliography 92
Index of Authors 98
 Acknowledgments

You probably have purchased and/or are reading this volume in the Phoenix
Guides to the New Testament in order to learn something about the writ-
ing called 1 Peter. Bible commentaries like this seek to aid in the study of
Scripture by providing explanations and interpretations of a biblical text.
Hence, you may be reading this Guide with the unconscious or conscious
assumption that this is a commentary to 1 Peter. This assumption is correct
but it is not the whole story, since this is not just a commentary but also a
reading guide.
Commentaries focus on background information about the text: author-
ship, history, setting and theme of the writing—that is, ‘correct’ information
about the author, the text, the translation, the context, the recipients and the
the*logy of 1 Peter. In short by thinking of ‘commentary’, you, the reader,
may presuppose that this Guide communicates all the information neces-
sary to understand the text. This presupposition rests on a positivist under-
standing of commentary.
However, the title of this series promises a ‘guide’ to the N*T! This
does not just mean ‘commentary as explanation’ of the text but rather
as a mapping of the text and its interpretations. It not only refers to the
text but also to the author who is writing the commentary as a ‘guide’. In
a commentary context authors are expected to articulate their interpreta-
tion on methodological grounds, be they philological, historical or liter-
ary, but rarely to articulate and elaborate their hermeneutical perspective
and interests. They rarely raise questions of the rhetoric and ethic of inter-
pretation. Advertisements of biblical commentaries assure readers that
the guides/authors of such commentaries are well-known and well-trained
scholars who are able to explain the text in a scientific way but they rarely
(except for traditional orthodox theological commentaries) elaborate their
presuppositions, frameworks, rhetorical goals and interests for interpret-
ing the text. They focus on the authors of biblical texts but rarely on the
perspectives and interests of the commentary writer or the actual read-
ers/hearers of a text such as 1 Peter in the present or in the past. More-
over, it is ironic that most biblical commentaries of biblical writings seek
to engender reading and studying these ancient and, for many readers also
still, sacred texts. However, they do not guide readers to find meaning by
discussing how such reading for meaning could take place and to what
viii 1 Peter

end. In short, they do not raise the hermeneutical questions that need to be
asked. Since many potential readers may not see why I included a chap-
ter on a conscientizing feminist reading process, let me explain from the
start that I did so because this is not just a commentary but also a ‘guide’
to 1 Peter.
In short, this commentary seeks to be a guide to 1 Peter in both senses of
the word ‘guide’: a guide to the text and the author(s) in antiquity and today
as well as to the readers/audience of the rhetoric of 1 Peter in the present
and in the past. It seeks to interpret the text as rhetorical argument of the
author(s) and the audience of 1 Peter, as well as its commentaries in the past
and in the present.
In order to assist you in understanding the substantive arguments of
1 Peter in the past, we have added a map of Asia Minor (Modern Day
Turkey) which corresponds roughly to the ancient Roman imperial territory
of Asia Minor. We also have added a Timeline as an appendix to the book
to assist you in understanding and integrating the historical information for
understanding the rhetorical historical situation of 1 Peter.
Although the internet provides easy access to the explanation of terms
and historical figures, we have added a glossary or list of Key Terms at the
end of the book that seeks to enable a better understanding of this Guide to
1 Peter. I hope readers will find the glossary helpful for critically explor-
ing not only the chapters of this book but also the letter called 1 Peter itself.
Please consult it as often as needed (words included in this glossary will be
in bold when they appear for the first time).
Finally, in order, to startle you into thinking about issues and questions
of interpretation and hermeneutical frameworks, I am using the asterisk (*).
The asterisk (*) seeks to startle you into thinking: ‘Why?’, ‘What does this
mean?’, ‘I need to think more about it’. The asterisk (*) functions as an
interruption and as a means of conscientization. It is unsettling and seeks to
compel you to question and rethink!
Last but not least, acknowledgments are due. Although the author’s name
is on the book, books are always products of collaboration and teamwork.
Hence, I want to thank all those whose work and care has greatly contrib-
uted to the completion of this small exploration of the meaning of the letter
called 1 Peter in the present and the past. Thanks go first of all to my col-
league and the editor of this series, Professor Tat-siong Benny Liew. His
feedback and work as the editor of the series was invaluable. I am grateful
to him for being always encouraging while patiently waiting for the manu-
script as well as for supervising the publication of it.
The edition of this text has greatly benefitted from the work of my
research assistant, Ms Kelsi Morrison-Atkins. She polished my style, stan-
dardized the bibliography, proofread the whole manuscript, and developed
the Key Terms as well as the Timeline.
 Acknowledgments ix

I also want to thank David Clines and Ailsa Parkin for shepherding the
book through the production process.
Finally, I want to thank the students in my courses on ‘How Do You
Read?’, ‘Introduction to N*T Interpretation’, ‘Diversity and New Testa-
ment Interpretation’ and ‘Feminist Biblical Interpretation’, especially Sonia
David and You Jeong Jeon (Rachel), for their critical questions, reflections
and arguments in their explorations of the content of this commentary, as
they sought clarifications and contributed to its conceptualization.
MAp of AsIA MInor (Modern dAY turkeY)

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RomanEmpire_117_recoloured.svg
 Introduction:
How Do You Approach 1 Peter?

The New*Testament writing called 1 Peter is probably not known to many

readers, as it is seldom read in the liturgy or preached on from the pulpit.
Potential readers are often not much interested in studying 1 Peter because
the letter is not considered to be a culturally influential and religiously
important biblical text. In contrast, 1 Peter has become an exciting field of
study in biblical scholarship in the last 30-40 years. The study of this short
letter is not only historically and the*logically rich but also methodolog-
ically innovative and challenging. Although this brief letter is not widely
read, it is a text with rich historical, cultural, and religious meanings. As
a reader of this Guide you may have come across the First Letter of Peter
when seeking references to suffering as a Christian calling or to elabora-
tions on the priesthood of all believers. Or you may have looked for a bib-
lical reference to wo/men’s clothing and jewelry or biblical teachings on
marriage. This epistle is especially interesting because it mentions marginal
persons such as resident aliens, house-slaves or wealthy married wo/men as
figures of the*-ethical concern. In the midst of the protests against police
violence against young black people, you may have asked: Does G*d really
want the suffering that the letter preaches by pointing to the sufferings of
Jesus Christ? Or, is G*d on the side of those protesting against such police
brutality? Is Jesus with them protesting in the streets?
The letter carries the name of the apostle Peter and is written to ‘resident
aliens’ who live in the Roman Province of Asia Minor. They are repre-
sented as a marginalized group that experiences harassment and suffering.
It is a cultural document written a long time ago, in the first century ce, and
in a culture and world that is quite different from our own. However, it is
at one and the same time a biblical book, and as such a part of Christiani-
ty’s sacred Scriptures. Reading this Guide to 1 Peter requires that one keeps
both of these areas, the cultural-social and the ethical-the*logical in mind.
It means understanding the letter as both a document of the first century and
as Scripture read by people today.
The Jewish feminist writer Asphodel Long has likened the Bible to:
a magnificent garden of brilliant plants, some flowering, some fruiting,
some in seed, some in bud, shaded by trees of age old, luxurious growth.
Yet in the very soil which gives it life the poison has been inserted… This
2 1 Peter

poison is that of misogyny, the hatred of women, half the human race (Long
1992: 195).

To see Scripture as such a beautiful garden which also contains poisonous

ivy requires that one identify and name this poison and place on all biblical
texts the label ‘Caution! Could be dangerous to your health and survival!’ A
critical feminist interpretation for wellbeing seeks to ‘flag’ such texts.
To avoid the dangerous aspects of Scripture, one needs to conceptualize
the Bible as an open-ended prototype rather than as a congealed archetype
that has to be repeated unchanged and solidified in every generation. Such
a conceptualization does not understand 1 Peter as an immutable archetype
but as an historical prototype of Jewish or Christian community and life.
Through such a critical reading of the letter, one seeks to identify the nour-
ishing bread of divine wisdom inscribed in it that enables us today to strug-
gle against violence and injustice.
We will begin our journey with the letter and its rich understandings by
exploring the work of interpretation or reading that one engages in when
trying to comprehend such a writing. Moreover, we will attempt to assess
the power relations inscribed in the letter and ask whether its symbolic uni-
verse advocates a world of justice and love that seeks to equalize unequal
power relations or whether it ‘naturalizes’, or the*logically legitimizes,
power relations of domination and subordination as the word and will of
G*d. While the body of this Guide wrestles with how to read 1 Peter in its
socio-religious contexts, in this introduction we will start our journey of
interpretation by exploring the strategies of reading and the assumptions we
make when interpreting a biblical text such as 1 Peter.

Ways of Reading: Theories of Language

To understand 1 Peter in a critical-constructive way requires a different
understanding of language and text. Students of semiotics have pointed to
two very different understandings of language, which they have dubbed ‘the
model of transmission’ and ‘the rhetorical-performative model’. Hence, it
might be helpful to explore them briefly here. A literalist understanding of
1 Peter works with a transmission model of language and text that involves
the translation, or ‘encoding’, of an idea (suffering) into a signal (text) by a
sender (Peter), as well as the transmission of this signal to recipients (his-
torical biblical readers and readers of today), and the decoding of the signal
into a message (religious dogma, history, ethics, etc.) by the receivers. This
‘transmission’ or ‘conduit’ model of reading for the most part determines
our understanding of communication. Language functions like a conduit
that transfers thought literally from one person to another. Authoritative dis-
courses such as those in and about biblical texts, including 1 Peter, assume
that utterances and their meanings are fixed once and for all as they come
 Introduction 3

into contact with new voices and new situations. Instead of functioning as
a generator of new meaning, therefore, a religiously authoritative text such
as 1 Peter demands our respectful exploration, careful decoding, and hard
work in order to understand its meaning.
In contrast to the understanding of the univocal function of language and
text, a second theoretical model, the rhetorical-performative model of text,
conceives of language and text not as a conduit but as dialogic and argu-
mentative. Language is not a passive link in transmitting some constant
information or univocal message between sender and receiver or speaker
and hearer but language functions to generate new meanings. In this second
understanding of language and text, the Bible can be viewed as a performa-
tive ‘utterance’ which not only inscribes the voices that produce it but also
the voices to which it is addressed; not only the voice of the author(s) but
also that of the audience.
In the formulation of an utterance, a voice responds in some way to pre-
vious utterances and anticipates the responses of other, succeeding ones.
When it is understood, an utterance comes into contact with the ‘response’
of those who hear it. Thus, understanding 1 Peter (and all biblical texts)
using the rhetorical-performative model of language and text rather than
the semiotic conduit model allows readers to acknowledge new meanings
created by the multiplicity and heterogeneity of biblical voices and their
‘unheard responses’, both ancient and contemporary, produced in biblical
interpretation. This Guide seeks to assist readers in reading 1 Peter as such
a performative utterance.
However, I do not want to suggest that there is only one way of reading
or teaching the ‘correct’, single meaning of the text or to persuade readers to
accept my interpretation of the letter as the only correct one. Rather, I invite
you to listen for and imagine your own ‘counter words’ and those of read-
ers/hearers in first-century Asia Minor.

Ways of Reading: Interpretive Paradigms

Our interpretation of biblical texts such as 1 Peter, however, is not only
determined by our understanding of language but also by the paradigms of
reading and interpretation which we have been taught and, consciously or
not, bring to our readings of 1 Peter. Thomas Kuhn’s categories of ‘scien-
tific paradigm’ and ‘heuristic model’ have provided a theoretical framework
(Kuhn 1962) for comprehending theoretical and practical shifts in the self-
understanding of biblical studies.
A paradigm expresses ‘the shared commitment by the members of a sci-
entific community to a particular form of scientific practice’ (Belsey 2010:
522) and is characterized by conceptual coherence and common intellec-
tual interests. It articulates a common ethos and constitutes a community
4 1 Peter

of scholars formed by its institutions and systems of knowledge. At the

same time, a paradigm restricts the work of scholars by ‘blinding scholars
to potentially important problems that are literally invisible to their normal
science’ (Macey 2001: 290). A paradigm thus can be envisioned as an intel-
lectual and social space and scholarly home.
Over the years I have discussed, outlined, and renamed in Democratiz-
ing Biblical Studies (2009: 51-84), Bread not Stone (1984: 23-42) and The
Power of the Word (2007b: 239-66) the following four paradigms of read-
ing and interpretation:
1. the scriptural-the*logical paradigm
2. the critical-scientific paradigm
3. the cultural-hermeneutic paradigm, and
4. the emancipatory-rhetorical paradigm
Such disciplinary paradigms constitute different ways of reading and con-
structing the*logical, historical, cultural, and literary interpretations of
1 Peter. These models invite a critical evaluation of the text and transforma-
tion of the reading process in order to seek out its vision of a more just and
loving religious and political world.

The Scriptural-The*logical Paradigm

The first paradigm is the scriptural-the*logical paradigm. For centuries,
this was the dominant paradigm of Christian and Jewish biblical interpreta-
tion and reading. It understands the biblical record as sacred Scripture and
explores what it means to say that, as Scripture, the Bible is the revealed,
authoritative Word of G*d. Under ‘the*logical interpretation’, Douglas
Knight lists the following approaches focused on the authority of the Bible:
canonical criticism, apocalypticism, evangelical biblical interpretation,
Hebrew Bible and New Testament inner-biblical interpretation, inspiration
of the Bible, orthodox biblical interpretation, biblical the*logy and Hebrew
Bible and New*Testament the*logy (Knight 2004: 209-74). This paradigm
of biblical interpretation is at home not simply in biblical communities of
faith but also in institutional religions and in the academy. Like the second
academic paradigm, which has been practiced by a class of elite educated
gentlemen, it was and is the domain of learned clergymen. Until the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, wo/men and other marginal people had been
explicitly excluded, by both law and custom, from this paradigm as well as
from the subsequent scientific-modern paradigm.
The ancient and medieval Christian method of interpretation sought to
establish a fourfold sense of Scripture: It would engage in a literal (his-
torical), a tropological (moral), an allegorical, and an anagogical (future-
oriented) reading of 1 Peter. Jewish hermeneutics developed a similar but
distinctive method of interpretation that was called PaRDeS (Paradise):
 Introduction 5

Peshat seeks for the plain sense of the text, Remez means the implied or
allegorical sense, Derush involves legal and narrative exegesis—comparing
terms from different places—and Sod is the mystical sense of a text. Begin-
ning with humanism and the time of the Protestant Reformation, this open-
ended, dynamic but doctrinally-controlled mode of medieval interpretation
changed. The Reformation taught, on the one hand, that Scripture can be
understood by everyone and, on the other, that ‘Scripture alone’ (sola scrip-
tura) is self-interpreting and that it alone is the foundation of faith.
The commentary series Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible
is a modern Protestant example of the scriptural-the*logical paradigm. It
advertises that the series offers ‘a fresh and invigorating approach’ that
builds on a wide range of sources from biblical studies and the Christian
tradition (see belief.wjkbooks.com). Noted scholars concentrate less on tra-
ditional historical and literary angles in favor of a the*logically focused
commentary that considers the contemporary relevance of Scripture texts.
The commentary on 1 Peter in this series, written by the*logian and church
historian Catherine Gunsalus Gonzáles, focuses on the guidance the letter
gives to the young church as it faced a variety of issues, both internal to
the church’s life and external in relation to its social and political culture.
It helps us ‘to focus on the essential character of the church’ as well as the
importance of congregations in the church’s life and raises basic issues of
authority, how Christians should live, and how diverse views should be con-
sidered. It clearly offers a dogmatic lens, which comes to the fore in Gunsa-
lus Gonzáles’ conclusion of her introduction:
A final word: for many Christians the doctrine of the Trinity is a strange
item of Christian thought that has little relevance to the Christian life. In
studying this letter, make note of how the relationship of God the Father,
the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is described or how the various
persons are understood to affect the life of the congregation and the Chris-
tian (Gunsalus Gonzáles 2010: 11).

The Critical-Scientific Paradigm

The second, critical-scientific paradigm has until recently been the dom-
inant paradigm of reading, and in many introductions to the N*T still is
the main approach to writing commentaries. Hence, it is likely that if you
attended ‘Sunday School’ or its equivalent that you have been trained in this
form of reading and interpretation without realizing its theoretical frame-
work and presuppositions. The spirit of this paradigm is best expressed in
the following lengthy quote of M. Eugene Boring:
First Peter was not written to us. The first principle of authentic bibli-
cal interpretation is to acknowledge that nothing in the Bible was writ-
ten directly to us, and that we are bound seriously to misunderstand it if
we read our own situation and ideologies into it. We are neither residents
6 1 Peter

of Cappadocia (1.1), nor subject to the emperor (2.13), nor does our social
situation include slavery and the patriarchal family (2.18-20; 3.1-7), nor
do we anticipate the soon coming of the Lord (4.7). In order to hear what
1 Peter might say to us we need to hear it within its context… To under-
stand such a text (rather than simply use it for our own purposes), it is nec-
essary to come within hearing distance of its own historical setting (Boring
1999: 19).

While I appreciate Boring’s insistence on a historical reading defend-

ing against a dogmatic the*logical reading, I can not forget the reaction of
an African American student who was outraged by his statement that ‘our
social situation [does not] include slavery and the patriarchal family (2.18-
20; 3.1-7)’. This assumption is not only false, she argued, but it also prohib-
its any inquiry as to the function of the text in today’s culture and prevents
any ethical evaluation. Critical introductions to 1 Peter are usually situated
in this second paradigm of reading, pretending to be able to abstract them-
selves from their socio-cultural-political situation. They usually begin with
a discussion of authorship and date, of the historical recipients and their
location, point to the problem of pseudonymity, and the letter’s the*logical
tradition. All these questions have received quite different answers which
are all hypothetical and controversial.
The dating of the letter is still debated. Those scholars who assume that
it is written by the apostle Peter, who was one of the original disciples of
Jesus, date the letter in the time of the Neronic persecution in the mid-
60s ce. Such a historical establishment of Petrine authorship as genuine is
the*logically important because it allows us to know not only the authentic
voice of a companion of Jesus but also avoid the problem of pseudonymity,
which in modern times is judged harshly as offense against copyright and
carries with it the contemporary notion of intellectual property fraud.
Those scholars who doubt the apostle Peter’s authorship date the letter in
the 90s of the first century or the beginning of the second (see Timeline) and
argue that we have no evidence that the emperor Nero’s persecution spilled
over into the Roman Provinces. The situation portrayed in 1 Peter seems
better to fit the situation in Asia Minor under the reign of the emperor Trajan
(98–117 ce) and his appointed governor, Pliny the Younger. The situation
of persecutions seems to correspond to that described in a letter of Pliny to
the emperor Trajan inquiring as to how to deal with those accused of being
Christianoi (Messianists).
Rejecting the apostle Peter’s authorship of the letter and dating the letter
to the end of the first and the beginning of the second century ce, these
scholars point out, is also supported by the very good Greek of the letter
which hardly could have been written by the Galilean fisherman Peter. In
order to defend Petrine authorship, other scholars point out that Silvanus
is credited with writing and disseminating the letter (5.12). In this view,
 Introduction 7

Silvanus, as Peter’s secretary, edited Peter’s dictation and transformed it

into the letter’s excellent Greek. The affinity of the letter to the Pauline let-
ters is therefore due to the skillful grafting of the letter by Silvanus/Silas
who, according to the tradition of Acts 15.22, was a companion of Paul.
To the contrary, other scholars argue that the association of the letter with
Silvanus speaks for a later date and an author associated with the Pauline
and Post-Pauline tradition, especially since the letter has aspects in common
with the so-called ‘household code’ tradition. A later date is also confirmed
by the greetings from ‘her’ (a woman or an ekklēsia [‘assembly’]) ‘who
dwells in Babylon’ (5.13). As in the book Revelation, Babylon seems to be
a codename for the Roman Empire after the destruction of Jerusalem by
Titus (70 ce, see Timeline), which echoed the Babylonian Empire’s destruc-
tion of the holy city Jerusalem in 587 bce. However, as far as I know, schol-
ars have not discussed the language and date of 1 Peter in conjunction with
the Third Jewish Revolt in the provinces.
While my discussion of the authorship and date of the letter in this intro-
duction and my commentary in the subsequent chapters is based on the later
dating and pseudonymous authorship of 1 Peter, readers may want to keep
in mind this discussion on authorship and dating of the letter when reading
my interpretation in other chapters. In any case, I hope to have indicated
with this short debate on authorship and dating that no ‘scientific’ certainty
about historical provenance, dating, and authorship of the letter is to be had.
Rather, the results of such attempts cannot be ‘proven’ once and for all but
must be discussed as arguments that are engendered by certain assumptions,
theoretical frameworks, and historical information which are culturally and
politically conditioned.

Literary-Cultural Paradigm
This result on dating positions my discussion already for the third, literary-
cultural paradigm of reading and interpretation which underscores the
rhetorical character of knowledge and acknowledges the symbolic, multi-
dimensional power of biblical texts. It either ascribes personified status to
the text in order to construe it as a dialogue partner or it sees the text as a
multicolored tapestry of meaning. This third cultural-hermeneutical para-
digm likens the reading of the Bible to the reading of the ‘great books’ or
classics of Western culture, whose greatness does not consist in their accu-
racy as records of facts, but depends chiefly on their symbolic power to
transfigure human experience and symbolic systems of meaning.
When reading 1 Peter in terms of the literary-cultural paradigm, one is
not so much concerned, for instance, to investigate the christological teach-
ings of 1 Peter or to establish the ‘historical fact’ that the apostle Peter
wrote the letter. Rather, one seeks to understand the epistle’s literary argu-
ment and cultural location. One does not assume that the text represents a
8 1 Peter

given divine revelation or a window to historical reality. One also does not
understand 1 Peter as a historical source text—as data and evidence—but
sees the letter as a perspectival discourse constructing a range of symbolic
meanings.
Since alternative interpretations of 1 Peter’s symbolic world engender
competing meanings, they should not be reduced to one single, definitive
meaning. Therefore competing interpretations of 1 Peter are not simply
either right or wrong. Rather, they constitute different ways of reading and
constructing the historical and religious meanings of the letter. This is the
case because texts have a surplus of meaning that can never be fully mined.
Hence, in order to assess different interpretations of 1 Peter, one has to ask:
• Does the interpretation demonstrate a careful reading of the text
from the perspective of genre, theme, character, narrative point of
view, structure, imagery, and style?
• Does the interpretation engage in literary analysis and cultural
interpretation for understanding 1 Peter? Is it concerned with the
integration of form and content? Does it pay attention to the rela-
tionship between thematic content and socio-historical context?
• Does the interpretation discuss how 1 Peter fits into larger social,
historical, cultural, and aesthetic traditions?
• Does the interpretation of 1 Peter effectively compare themes,
issues, and artistic treatments across texts and across cultural tra-
ditions?
• Does a commentary on 1 Peter demonstrate knowledge of theories
and approaches to critical interpretation?
One of the most influential debates in 1 Peter studies has been the debate
between David L. Balch (1981) and John H. Elliott (1981) on the cultural
context and its influence on the argumentative strategy of the letter. Balch
reads the strategy of the letter in terms of acculturation or assimilation of a
minority culture living in a dominant culture, which is different from their
own. The letter counsels adaptation and conformity to this culture for the
sake of survival. Elliott, in contrast, argues that nothing in the letter speaks
for social assimilation but rather seeks to foster internal social cohesion of
the church consisting of aliens and strangers in the Asian-Roman society in
which they lived. For these immigrants the church becomes a ‘home’ and a
place of belonging that enables them to avoid assimilation.
Warren Carter (2004) in turn argues that this counsel to conformity pres-
ents a strategy of survival in a situation where the readers of the letter have
very little power. David Horrell seeks to assess this debate on cultural
assimilation and conformity as survival strategy on the one hand and dis-
tinctiveness and resistance on the other, and argues that the author(s) seek(s)
to articulate a path between conformity and resistance to Asian culture and
 Introduction 9

Roman imperial power (Horrell 2008: 77-86). However, this debate does
not recognize that Elliott’s reading does not present an alternative to that of
Balch because as ‘church as a home for the homeless’, the letter argues that
the Christian community should be patterned after the dominant imperial
household and culture. This ethical-cultural-political question is the central
question of the fourth paradigm of interpretation.

Emancipatory-Rhetorical Paradigm:
Hearing the Silenced into Speech (Morton 1985)
Whether you are a faithful Bible reader or a reader who appreciates his-
torical information or values 1 Peter as a cultural treasure, the fourth,
emancipatory-rhetorical, paradigm invites you to become a feminist decol-
onizing reader who listens for the ‘counter-words’ in the text. Since my
reading method is ‘feminist decolonizing’, it becomes necessary to explain
how I understand the hotly debated ‘f-word’, feminist, which might have
already provoked a negative reaction in your mind. Since the early 1970s, I
have developed a critical feminist hermeneutics of liberation in theoretical-
methodological terms. Such a critical feminist theory and hermeneutic of
liberation seeks to articulate a systemic analysis of the intersecting struc-
tures of oppression that focuses not only on the liberation of wo/men but
also maintains that a constructive emancipatory theory and hermeneutic
must be articulated from the perspective and standpoint of those wo/men
who struggle for survival and justice on the bottom of the kyriarchal pyra-
mid of domination and subordination, oppression and exploitation.
The rhetoric of our textual sources and their scholarly interpretations is
not just androcentric, that is, male centered, but kyriocentric, that is, elite
male centered. Hence, andro-kyriocentric texts must be read against their
andro-kyriocentric grain. Biblical texts as they are read by individuals or
heard in the liturgy of the church perpetuate the elite male bias and exclu-
siveness of Western culture and language. Without question biblical lan-
guage is androcentric, but is it deliberately exclusive of wo/men?
For instance, 1 Peter does not use the Greek word ekklēsia, which is usu-
ally translated as church, for its community of readers but rather the Greek
word adelphōtēs, which means ‘brotherhood’. Does this mean that wo/men
were not members of these communities? Obviously not, since wo/men are
explicitly addressed in 3.1-7. Or to give another example: When readers are
asked where wo/men are mentioned in the text, they instantly point to 1 Peter
3 but not to 1 Peter 2. Does this mean that only male house slaves (oiketēs) but
no wo/men slaves belonged to the community? This is also not very likely!
Hence, the grammatically andro-kyriocentric text of 1 Peter must be read
against the grain, since such andro-kyriocentric texts eradicate the pres-
ence of wo/men. When texts like 1 Peter mention wo/men, these references
10 1 Peter

must be read like the tip of an iceberg, indicating how much has been lost
to historical remembrance and religious-cultural consciousness. Hence, it
is important not to overlook the andro-kyriocentric character of the lan-
guage of biblical texts in general and that of 1 Peter in particular, since
such a neglect of andro-kyriocentric language leads to grave historical and
the*logical misreadings and cultural-religious prejudice.
Andro-kyriocentric texts are parts of an overall puzzle and design that
must be fitted together in creative, critical interpretation. It is crucial, there-
fore, that we challenge the blueprints of andro-kyriocentric design and
assume instead a feminist lens of reading, one that allows us to place wo/
men as well as men into the center of attention. Such a feminist critical
method could be likened to the work of a detective insofar as it does not
rely solely on historical ‘facts’ nor invents its evidence, but is engaged in
an imaginative reconstruction of cultural-religious life. Or to use the meta-
phor provided by the poet Adrienne Rich: in order to wrest meaning from
androcentric texts and history we have to ‘mine’ ‘the earth-deposits of our
history’ in order to ‘bring the essential vein to light’, to find the ‘bottle
amber perfect’, ‘the tonic for living on this earth, the winters of this cli-
mate’ (Rich 1978: 60-67). Such a feminist hermeneutical method and pro-
cess for entering an old text such as 1 Peter from a new critical direction is
not just a chapter in cultural historical-religious reading but an act of femi-
nist transformation. Such a transformation depends, however, on a critical
re-appropriation of classic texts.
Women, looking to the most prestigious texts of the Western tradition,
confront misogyny, idealization, objectification, silence. The absence of
female consciousness from that tradition challenges a feminist interpreta-
tion to look beyond and through the texts. The absence anchors one term
of a double meaning. The silences, all the more difficult to restore because
of the circuitous interpretation they call for, offer clues to the willed sup-
pression of women. But to translate silence into meaning requires a criti-
cal distance from the tradition as well as an immersion in it (Fox-Genovese
1979/80: 10; emphasis added).

Yet a feminist critical analytic focus on wo/men alone will not suffice.
With its methodological framing, the topical, thematic approach to the anal-
ysis of ‘woman in the Bible’ has already adopted a theoretical approach and
an analytical perspective that marginalizes wo/men, since only wo/men but
not men become the objects of critical inquiry and the*logical discussion.
What is therefore necessary is not just a feminist analysis of biblical texts
but also a metacritique of the andro-kyriocentric frameworks adopted by
biblical scholars without any critical reflection on their systemic presuppo-
sitions and implications.
The systemic andro-kyriocentrism of Western culture is evident in the
fact that nobody questions whether men have been historical subjects and
 Introduction 11

revelatory agents in religion. The role of wo/men, and not that of men,
becomes problematic because maleness is the norm, while femaleness con-
stitutes a deviation from this norm. Whenever we speak of ‘man’ as the
scientific and historical subject, we mean the male. For the Western under-
standing and linguistic expression of reality, elite male existence is the stan-
dard of human existence. According to Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Humanity is
male and man defines woman not in herself but relative to him. She is not
regarded as autonomous being. He is the subject, the absolute; she is the
other’ (de Beauvoir 1953: 10).
In and through language, our societal and scientific structures define wo/
men as derivative and secondary to men. This androcentric definition of
being human has determined (and still does) not only the scholarly per-
ception of men but also those of wo/men. In such an andro-kyriocentric
worldview wo/men must remain historically marginal. The androcentric
scholarly paradigm can thematize the role of wo/men as a societal, his-
torical, philosophical and the*logical problem but cannot question its own
horizon, which relegates the ‘woman question’ to the periphery of schol-
arly concerns, a trivial issue not worthy of serious attention. The historical-
the*logical marginality of wo/men is therefore generated not only by the
original biblical sources but also in and through the andro-kyriocentric
interpretations of scholarship.

Creating a Radical Democratic Space of Interpretation

As we have seen, there are different ways to approach a text, book, or
another form of knowledge transmission. The following four models are
hegemonic models of reading and knowledge acquisition. These four
malestream modes of learning, I suggest, must be complemented and
replaced by a feminist radical democratic model of interpretation, since
feminist biblical inquiry has as its goal not primarily to produce special-
ists of antiquity but to enable citizens in society and religion to actively
participate in self-determining decision-making processes of learning
how to interpret Scripture texts.

The Banking Model of Reading

The first approach or model of learning and acquiring knowledge is the tra-
ditional transmission, factual ‘accumulation’ and ‘absorption’ model. In this
communicative pedagogical model, authors/teachers are the experts who
collect and deposit all the available knowledge and facts in the pages of
their book or lecture on 1 Peter. Readers/students are not valued as partner-
voices but are supposed to absorb the knowledge of the expert by accepting
and internalizing it through memorization. Readers of 1 Peter ‘store’ this
knowledge intellectually or spiritually for use whenever they need it. The
12 1 Peter

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has dubbed this model of reading the ‘bank-
ing’ model because it treats knowledge like monetary funds (2008). The
author/teacher owns the assets and deposits knowledge. Readers/students
are passive receptacles of authorial knowledge. Knowledge can be owned,
sold or stored as capital.
The author/teacher of a commentary on 1 Peter is the authority that guar-
antees the value of the knowledge that readers/students receive and bank
in their memory. Examinations make sure that readers and students can
accurately repeat the knowledge stored in textbooks or lecture notes. Study
plans and curricular requirements vouchsafe that all the knowledge that is
deemed essential and necessary is transmitted and memorized. If you are
using this book as a textbook that contains all that you need to know about
1 Peter, then you probably are ready to take notes and to make sure that you
cover all the main topics in order to be prepared for your next test or paper.
That is, you engage in the banking model. You also will expect time-charts
of the first century, maps of Asia Minor or a glossary to be provided.

The Master-Apprentice Model of Reading

The second model is the master-apprentice model. In this model of learn-
ing/reading, the author/teacher is the expert on 1 Peter whose interpretation
serves as a model for his/her readers/students. This model is widespread
in graduate courses and seminars and you may have picked up this book
because you trust the expertise of the author. Students/readers will expect,
for instance, that authors/teachers not just present the theoretical outline of
issues, but that they also ‘apply’ interpretive methods and theories when
analyzing and interpreting a text such as 1 Peter. They believe that they will
learn the skills of interpretation by imitating the ‘master’.
In this model of reading, students/readers do not focus so much on the
content of a text such as 1 Peter, as is the case in the first model. Rather,
they are interested in the technologies of exegesis and explanation. These
methods are understood like rules and norms which if followed guarantee
that they will find the true meaning of a biblical text such as 1 Peter. Stu-
dents/readers believe that the truth can be nailed down. If one knows the
right methods and is trained to use them cleanly and skillfully, then one
can know the historical-cultural situation of the communities in Asia Minor
to whom the letter is written. The author/teacher is the ‘master’ or expert
who controls the methods and knows the solutions to debated questions in
1 Peter research. If you are working in this mode of learning/reading, then
you will expect that this Guide to 1 Peter teaches you how to engage in fem-
inist interpretation of 1 Peter in an expert way so that the true historical, lit-
erary , the*logical or feminist meaning of the text is established. You will be
trained in adversarial debate in order to establish the correct, scientific inter-
pretation of a historical text such as 1 Peter.
 Introduction 13

The Consumer Model of Reading

The third reading approach is best dubbed as the ‘consumer’ or ‘smor-
gasbord’ approach. In this model, readers/students pick and choose what
they think is useful. They buy books or subscribe to courses as they would
buy cars or clothing, either for utility or entertainment. At Harvard Divin-
ity School, for instance, we start every semester with a ‘shopping period’
during which students move from class to class as readers move from shelf
to shelf in bookstores in order to select the most interesting, the easiest or
the most palatable fare.
Authors/teachers must not only act as experts or masters but also as
salespersons who are skilled in advertising their wares. Just as the semes-
ter begins with a shopping period, so it ends with students filling out
(consumer) evaluations detailing how well the teacher/author performed,
whether the reading material was adequate, or whether the demands were
too high. Books as consumer products are judged on how much they have
sold or how long they have been on the New York Times bestseller list.
If you are operating in this mode you might have purchased this book
because for one reason or another you find it useful to know something
about 1 Peter or you are curious as to how a feminist reads 1 Peter. A major
disadvantage 1 Peter has in a consumer market model is that the letter is less
known and not considered to be a central and important biblical writing.

The Therapeutic Model of Reading

The fourth reading approach or learning model is the therapeutic model.
In this edifying model, books or courses are selected and evaluated as
to whether they make you ‘feel good’ or inspire you spiritually. Books,
courses or workshops should not be too demanding but should satisfy the
needs of their readers/consumers. Especially religious books or events are
often judged by whether they are spiritually edifying or aesthetically pleas-
ing. The passages of 1 Peter are frequently used in spiritual exhortation and
in motivation to accept suffering. Hence, books about all kinds and forms
of spirituality abound.
According to the demands of this model, guides to biblical readings,
as this one, must address individuals and gratify their spiritual wants
and longings. They are to give security and certainty in an ever-changing
world and alienating society. Books and courses on how to pray and medi-
tate with the Bible are much preferred over those that seek to foster a crit-
ical engagement with it. 1 Peter becomes an oracle for spiritual guidance
that helps its readers to accept and submit to the demands of everyday life.
If you are interested in this book because you want to satisfy your emo-
tional and spiritual needs you may be disappointed in it, because it criti-
cally interrogates 1 Peter rather than seeks to persuade you to accept the
the*logy of the letter.
14 1 Peter

A Feminist Emancipatory, Radically

Democratic Approach to Interpretation
All four mainstream reading and learning approaches can also be analyzed
in terms of gender. In the first two paradigms of reading, knowledge produc-
tion is coded in culturally masculine terms insofar as they stress mastery,
expertise and control of the text. Both reading paradigms are at home in the
malestream academy and church that until very recently have excluded wo/
men from authoritative knowledge production. These first two paradigms
of reading not only construct the author/master in masculine terms but also
construe readers/students in culturally feminine terms.
In contrast, the last two paradigms of reading, the consumer and thera-
peutic models, are coded in feminine terms. They construe agency in a cul-
turally feminine code that privatizes and commodifies knowledge in general
and biblical-the*logical knowledge in particular. They construct readers/
students as consumers or patients who purchase religious knowledge for
their own private use, enjoyment and edification. However, none of these
approaches engenders a critical liberating reading experience. While we all
have engaged in these four reading approaches at one or another time, in
this book I want to invite you to move to a different model of reading/learn-
ing that is able to integrate the positive aspects of all four of these models
without falling victim to their self-alienating and distorting powers.
Instead of seeking to give the power of interpretation to so-called ‘non-
expert’ readers, authors/scholars often deny them the tools for investigat-
ing the ideologies, discourses, and pieties that shape their self-identity and
determine their lives. Instead of empowering non-expert readers as critical
thinkers, the media in general and biblical commentaries in particular often
contribute to their self-alienation and adaptation to the values and mores of
hegemonic kyriarchal societies and religions. A critical feminist emanci-
patory approach is not so much interested in helping readers to internalize
traditional biblical teachings of and about 1 Peter and malestream scien-
tific historical or cultural knowledge about the letter as in fostering critical
thinking on it. Its basic assumption is that knowledge is publicly available
to all who can deliberate and that everyone has something to contribute to
knowledge about 1 Peter if one is willing to work and wrestle with the letter.
Thus, feminist liberationist biblical study seeks to foster the critical ex-
amination not only of biblical texts such as 1 Peter but also of one’s own
presuppositions, traditions and social locations. It searches for recognition
of bias and prejudice, and seeks to replace them with critical arguments
that appeal to both reason and the emotions. It wants to foster self-scrutiny
and the ability to think what it would be like to be in the shoes of some-
one different from oneself and to see the world from the point of view of
another who is both like and unlike oneself. It requires one to make sure
 Introduction 15

that books—even biblical texts such as 1 Peter—and authors/teachers do

not become unquestioned ‘authorities’.
A radical democratic model of reading 1 Peter engages in critical ques-
tioning and debate in order to be able to arrive at a deliberative judgment
about the values inscribed in the letter. It is about choice and deliberation
and the power to take charge of one’s own interpretation, rather than about
control, dependence and passive reception. Its style of reasoning is not
combative-competitive but deliberative, engaging in conversations about
values and beliefs with authors and co-readers that are most important to
us rather than retreating into distant objectivism, dogmatism or relativism
that avoids engagement with differences and uncertainties. In the model of
reading advocated in this Guide, reading and studying 1 Peter should be
problem-oriented rather than positivistic or dogmatic, perspectival rather
than relativistic, and contextual-collaborative, recognizing that our own
perspectives and knowledge are limited by our social-religious location
and that differences in interpretation enrich our thought and life. Truth and
meaning are not a given fact or hidden revelation but are achieved in criti-
cal practices of questioning and deliberation.
Page duBois has warned that the traditional modes of inquiry share in a
mode of reasoning that is competitive and combative. Its preferred mode of
ascertaining truth is adversarial debate and the honing of arguments that can
withstand the most acerbic assault (duBois 1991: 113). In contrast, a radi-
cal egalitarian feminist model of reading seeks to foster a style of learning/
reading that does not undermine democratic thinking. Instead, it seeks to
support and strengthen democratic modes of reasoning by recognizing the
importance of experience, plural voices, emotions and values in the reading
process. With Alicia Suskin Ostriker, who identifies herself as ‘critic and
poet, as Jew, woman, and (dare I say) human being’ (Suskin Ostriker 1993:
30), I also argue for a critical re-visionist reading of 1 Peter that no longer
posits a simple adversarial relationship between male text and female read-
ers but rather points out that wo/men’s re-imaginings of biblical texts such
as 1 Peter are both forbidden and invited by the very text and tradition wo/
men are challenging. In Suskin Ostriker’s view, such a revisionist read-
ing consists of ‘three sometimes overlapping forms: a hermeneutics of sus-
picion, a hermeneutics of desire, and a hermeneutics of indeterminacy’
(Suskin Ostriker 1993: 165). She reasons that a hermeneutics of desire,
which she characterizes as ‘you see what you need to see’, has always been
practiced by traditional biblical exegesis and maintains that a hermeneutics
of indeterminacy which fosters plural readings will be most significant for
the future. According to Suskin Ostriker:
Human civilization has a stake in plural readings. We’ve seen this at least
since the eighteenth century when the notion of religious tolerance was
invented to keep the Christian sects from killing each other. The notion of
16 1 Peter

racial tolerance came later… Most people need ‘right’ answers, just as they
need ‘superior’ races… At this particular moment it happens to be femi-
nists and other socially marginal types who are battling for cultural plural-
ism. Still, this is an activity we’re undertaking on behalf of humanity, all of
whom would be the happier, I believe, were they to give up their addiction
to final solutions (Suskin Ostriker 1993: 122-23).

A Public Democratic Space of Interpretation

Hence, it is necessary to take biblical reading out of the private, spiritual
realm of the individual solitary reader and constitute a forum, a public
space where the ekklēsia, the radical democratic assembly, can debate and
adjudicate the public meanings of the Scriptures. While Christian bibli-
cal interpretation tends to be individualistic and solitary, traditional Jewish
interpretation as practiced by feminists provides a radical democratic model
for biblical interpretation. According to rabbinic understanding, study and
interpretation of Scripture lead to the redemption of the world because they
bring G*d’s presence into it. Hence, investigating, arguing and interpreting
are sacred activities.
In order to reflect on their experience after the destruction of Jerusalem
and the temple as well as to construct a system of meaning, the rabbis used
the Bible as a language. Some believed that the Torah was written in black
fire on white fire and that the white spaces around the black letters hold
meanings that still must be discovered. As Naomi Hyman points out, this
belief provides a space for feminist interpretation. She states,
Jews of today write Midrash for the same reasons our ancestors did: It is our
prayer, our plea and our affirmation. It is the way we insist that our voices
be heard while at the same time giving honor to a tradition that has sus-
tained us even as it pushed us aside. We write because we want our children
to have stories that are both Jewish and feminist. We write because in the
writing, we find places for ourselves in the white spaces between the black
letters (Hyman 1998: xviii).

We usually think of reading and interpretation as a passive reception and

an individualistic act of self-contemplation rather than as a way of com-
munication and communal identification. Traditional Jewish Torah study,
called Havruta, requires a social context. Torah/Bible reading is not, as in
the modern tradition, something individualistic and private. Torah speaks
only to groups of people who together ‘turn the text again and again’ in
order to discover not only ever new meanings in their own historical con-
texts but also what it means to live ‘the good life’ and to walk in the way of
wisdom. 1 Peter’s meaning must be questioned, debated, adjudicated and
reformulated again and again.
 Introduction 17

Reading 1 Peter in a Radical Democratic Forum

Hence, I suggest that you work with this Guide to 1 Peter in a group or
forum that constitutes a feminist radical democratic public space of criti-
cal debate, creative imagination and substantive conversation. Such critical
group discussions should have two focal points: your own social-religious
location and interests, and the text of 1 Peter and its possible meanings.
The goal of such debates and exploration is not to ascertain the true, single
meaning of a passage in 1 Peter as a given ‘fact’ but to render problematic
both texts and interpretive perspectives, in order to adjudicate how much
texts and interpretations foster values and mindsets of domination or men-
talities and visions of liberation.
Therefore, I recommend that you team up with a study partner, set aside
a regular time for study, choose a text, and identify the perspective with
which to look at the text of 1 Peter. It is important that each of you has a
copy of the text. Take turns reading it aloud, and discuss what you have
noticed or the questions you want to ask, and remember, there are no right
or wrong answers. Such a feminist study approach of conscientization
needs to be distinguished from wo/men’s consciousness-raising groups.
In such wo/men’s groups, the individual and her experience stand in the
center of attention. In order not to undermine her self-confidence, no critical
questions interrogating her experience are allowed. Not critique and debate
but affirmation and solidarity are the goals of such groups. In comparison,
Latin American groups of conscientization are not focused just on individ-
ual affirmation but much more on critically exploring systemic oppression
and the paths to liberation.
A radical democratic forum is also different from traditional Bible-study
groups, which often have as their goal the inculcation and acceptance of
biblical texts and traditions. Insofar as they start from the assumption that
1 Peter is the revealed word of G*d, they begin with a hermeneutics of empa-
thy and obedience rather than with a hermeneutics of suspicion and criti-
cal debate. Such groups are also different from academic study groups that
focus on biblical texts and use discussions and questions in order to incul-
cate malestream scientific methods and attitudes of reading. For the sake of
objectivity, academic study groups often prohibit any critical reflection on
experience and social location of the biblical interpreter or on the contem-
porary significance and impact of biblical texts such as 1 Peter.
The first task, then, before you continue reading this Guide is to initi-
ate such a partnership and group-forum for critical debate and the*-ethical
assessment. If you are already working in a group, you might want to dis-
cuss whether your assembly constitutes such an ekklēsia, or assembly of
critical debate and creative vision. If you are working in a class that does
not require group work, get together with some of your classmates and form
18 1 Peter

such a group. If you are a professor, try to develop a group-centered syl-

labus focused not only on questions of biblical specialization but also on
generating a critical dialogical exploration of the issues at stake in the inter-
pretation of 1 Peter. In so doing, you may attempt to foster a democratic cit-
izen consciousness and action for changing structures of domination and
violence.
If you are an individual reader you may want to call up some of your
friends or neighbors to form a study partnership. Or you might want to get
on the internet and initiate a ‘virtual’ feminist study-team or a discussion
group for forming such a radical egalitarian forum for interpreting 1 Peter.
If you are not able to do any of this, make sure that you constitute such a
virtual forum in your own imagination and stage a running argument and
continuing conversation between the different voices and perspectives that
populate your mind. One-dimensional thinking must be replaced by a rad-
ical democratic form of thinking that cultivates different perspectives and
creative imaginations.
Essential for the constitution of such a radical democratic egalitarian
forum is the presence of true differences in social location, religious con-
fession, political outlook and feminist persuasion. Although such a critical
articulation of differences makes group work often difficult and full of ten-
sion, it is crucial for the success of radical democratic feminist practices to
articulate emancipatory knowledges. Such radical democratic approaches
question the dominant mode of reasoning and knowledge production in the
Eurocentric malestream paradigm of knowledge that separates reason from
feelings and emotions in order to produce detached impartial knowledge.
Contrary to this paradigm of knowledge production, a feminist decoloniz-
ing reading approach enables us to read 1 Peter critically and ethically. It
builds on traditional notions of introduction but is not limited by them.
 Chapter 1

Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter

To give you a comprehensive introduction for reading 1 Peter, I will engage

in a critical rhetorical analysis. Such an analysis attempts to read this letter
as a ‘worldly’ text, understood in the sense of Edward Said who states,
Texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and even when they
appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human
life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and
interpreted (Said 1983: 4).

To read 1 Peter as a ‘worldly’ text means to read the letter as a text that
is part of the world and symbolic universe of its own time as well as our
own, and to do so by carefully analyzing it as a communicative argument.
In a rhetorical model, world is understood not only as a reservoir of signs
and of meaning (as in a semiotic model) but also as a field of power and of
action. By carefully analyzing the rhetoric of the text, we are able to hear
the author(s)’s arguments, but not those of the audience. In order to be able
to hear the voices of the audience and to understand the whole communica-
tion, we must read ‘against the grain’ of the text’s rhetoric.

1 Peter and Its Readers

Discourse theory and reader‑response criticism, combined with the insight
into the rhetorical character of texts, represents a contemporary revival of
ancient rhetoric. In the introduction to her anthology of reader-response
criticism, Jane Tompkins points out that reader-response criticism’s view of
language as a form of action and power is similar to that of the Greek rhet-
oricians. She also argues that by relocating meaning first in the reader’s self
and then in the interpretive strategies that constitute it, reader-response crit-
ics ‘assert that meaning is a consequence of being in a particular situation in
the world’ (Tompkins 1980: xxv).
The net result of this epistemological revolution is to politicize literature
and literary criticism again. When discourse is responsible for reality and
not merely a reflection of it, then ‘whose discourse prevails makes all the
difference’ (Tompkins 1980: xxv). Since we no longer have direct access to
20 1 Peter

the actual historical persons and situations by which a text is shaped and to
which it is addressed, it is important to carefully trace the rhetoric of a text.
For marking the distinction between textual and actual sender-recipient/
message-argument/symbolic-social world/rhetorical problem-situation, I
prefer to use ‘inscribed’ rather than ‘intended’ or ‘implied’ author/reader, in
order to indicate the textual character of the author/reader.
How then can one utilize rhetorical criticism for reading a historical
text in such a way that one moves from the ‘world of the text’ of 1 Peter
to the inscribed possible worlds of the communities addressed? In order
to make this move, I argue, the rhetorical critic must distinguish between
at least three levels of communication: the historical argumentative situa-
tion, the implied or inscribed rhetorical situation, and the rhetorical situa-
tion of contemporary interpretations, which again can be either actualized
or textualized. We can no longer read the letter of ‘Peter’ in isolation but are
compelled to read it within the framework of the canonical collection and
reception that constitutes its present context. This is true not just for read-
ers in divinity schools but also for students in religious studies because the
canon establishes not just a the*logical but also a literary context.
Hence, I propose that a critical rhetorical analysis of 1 Peter must move
through at least four stages: It begins by identifying the rhetorical interests,
interpretive models, and social locations of contemporary interpretation;
then it moves in a second step to delineating the rhetorical arrangement,
interests, and modifications introduced by the author(s) in order to elucidate
and establish, in a third step, the rhetorical situation of the letter. In a fourth
step it seeks to reconstruct the common historical situation and symbolic
universe of the writer/speaker and the recipients/audience.
True, such a rhetorical reconstruction of the social‑historical situation
and symbolic universe of this N*T letter is still narrative‑laden and can
only be constituted as a ‘sub‑text’ of 1 Peter’s text. Yet this ‘sub‑text’ is
not simply the story of the sender. It is, rather, the story of the audience to
which the letter’s rhetoric is to be understood as an active response (Jame-
son 1982: 68-91). Therefore, it becomes necessary to assess critically
1 Peter’s the*logical rhetoric in terms of its function for early Christian
self‑understanding and community. The nature of rhetoric as political dis-
course necessitates critical assessment and the*logical evaluation. In what
follows, therefore, I would like to combine a critical analysis of the rhetori-
cal arguments of 1 Peter with such a reader-response analysis.
In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth distinguishes between the actual
author/reader and the implied author/reader (1983). The implied author is
not the real author, but rather the image or picture that you as reader will
construct gradually in the process of reading the work. The actual reader is
involved in capturing and developing the picture of the inscribed author
and inscribed reader, but in so doing the reader assumes the role dictated
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 21

by the author. In other words, in the process of reading 1 Peter, we as read-

ers follow the directives of the implied author (who is not identical with the
‘real’ author) as to how to understand the addressed communities in Asia
Minor.
That readers follow the directives of the implied author to understand
the implied readers as ‘audience’ of the letter who are in need of correction
becomes obvious when one considers that almost all interpreters assume
that, like contemporary readers, the historical recipients of the letter were
Christians. In short, reader‑response criticism distinguishes between the
actual author/reader and the implied author/reader, a distinction which that
can help us elucidate 1 Peter’s rhetorical intention as it is constructed in the
act of reading/interpretation today (reception hermeneutics). The implied
author and reader encompass the contemporary interpreter who constructs
the inscribed author and reader in the process of reading.
Since many things are presupposed, left out or unexplained in a speech/
letter, the audience must ‘supply’ the missing information in line with the
rhetorical directives of the speaker/writer in the process of listening/read-
ing. Historical-critical scholars seek to ‘supply’ such information generally
in terms of the history of religions, including Judaism, while preachers and
Bible‑readers usually do so in terms of contemporary values, life and psy-
chology. Hence, it is important at this point to discuss the terms and criteria
used when reading this text.

Cultural-Historical Context
Scholarship on 1 Peter tends to ‘supply’ such information about the addressed
communities either with reference to the symbolic universe of contempo-
rary Judaism, of pagan religions (especially the mystery cults), philosophi-
cal schools, Hellenistic Judaism or developing ‘Gnosticism’. The studies
of the social setting or ‘social world’ of ‘Petrine Christianity’, in turn, do
not utilize religious, doctrinal models of interpretation, but supply the miss-
ing information in terms of ‘social data’ gleaned from the N*T letter col-
lection, Acts, the Gospels and non-Christian ancient sources. This so-called
‘data’ is then organized in terms of sociological or anthropological models,
especially that of ‘honor and shame’.
As diverse as the interpretations of 1 Peter and their implications for the
understanding of the communities in Asia Minor are, they almost always
follow the author(s)’s rhetorical strategy without questioning or evaluating
it. A cursory look at scholarship on 1 Peter indicates that it tends to assume
the author(s) to be rhetorically skillful, able to reach the goal of persuad-
ing the letter’s audience throughout the centuries that its view of the world
is right and those of the audience need to be corrected. The difference in
interpretation of the letter is more a difference in degree than a difference
22 1 Peter

in interpretational model. The resulting interpretation therefore depends on

which directions encoded in the letter exegetes choose to amplify histori-
cally and the*logically.
Moreover, insofar as Christian New*Testament scholars read 1 Peter
as a ‘canonical, inspired text’, we often uncritically accept the implied
author(s)’s claims to apostolic authority as historically valid and effec-
tive. However, we must ask whether the interpretation of 1 Peter would
have developed different interpretive models if, for example, 1 Peter was
believed to be written by a Valentinian gnostic or a Jewish rabbi appeal-
ing to a Christian audience. In other words, we need to ask: Does 1 Peter’s
power of persuasion rest on its assumed canonical authority? Did it have
the same effect in a historical situation in which such canonical authority
cannot be presupposed? Although interpreters of 1 Peter seek to read the
letter as a historical-cultural document, we inevitably read it also as a part
of the canon of the New*Testament.

Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter

The rhetorical arrangement or disposition of the addressed communities in
Asia Minor not only establishes the rhetorical strategies the letter employs
for persuading the communities in Asia Minor to act according to its instruc-
tions, but also indicates the intended or inscribed audience of the letter.
Since the first level of communication—the historical level of author(s),
audience and world of 1 Peter—is only accessible to us in and through the
text, I begin by sketching a critical rhetorical analysis of the text with its
inscribed argument, author(s), reader/hearer and world.

Sender and Recipients

Most critical exegetes agree that the letter is pseudonymous and was writ-
ten at the end of the first century ce, long after the apostle Peter’s execution.
The letter claims to be authored by the fisherman-apostle Simon/Peter from
Galilee, but this is not likely the case, because the letter is written in pol-
ished Greek and evidences a high level of rhetorical competence. Hence, the
letter is probably a pseudonymous communication that rhetorically claims
the authority and tradition of the apostle for its content. (Pseudonymity was
widely used in antiquity and did not carry the negative meaning of plagia-
rism we associate with it.)
To assure its authority, the letter’s rhetoric also appeals to the author-
ity of Paul insofar as it is cast in terms of the Pauline letter form and
claims that both Silvanus and Mark, who are known associates of Paul,
are involved in sending the letter. Hence, some scholars have surmised
that the letter is written by a group or school that was concerned with
keeping Petrine and Pauline traditions alive. In any case, 1 Peter is clearly
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 23

authored and sent from the center of the Roman Empire and claims to be
a document of colonized persons who came as migrants from Palestine to
live in Rome.
1 Peter is not a writing concerned with inner-church polemics or ortho-
dox beliefs, but as a circular letter it is a rhetorical communication between
those who live in the metropolitan center of imperial Rome which is
the*logically camouflaged as Babylon, and those who live in Asia Minor
as colonial subjects. The inscribed geographical location and socio-political
world of the recipients is that of Asia Minor. It is debated whether the place
names given in the salutation (greeting) refer simply to geographical areas
or whether they more likely refer to Roman provinces. In any case, Asia
Minor had been colonized for centuries and had absorbed Hellenistic lan-
guage and culture as well as Roman imperial commerce and religion. This
communication sent from the imperial center presents itself as an authori-
tative letter of advice and admonition to good conduct and subordination in
the colonial public of the provinces.
As a communication from the metropolitan center, the circular letter
is cast in what had become the traditional and authoritative Pauline letter
form. Like the genuine Pauline letters, it elaborates the letter opening (1.1-
2), which in its typical Hellenistic form consists in the simple salutation
X sends greetings to Y. It enlarges the traditional greeting by qualifying
the sender as ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’, and by characterizing the recipients
not in communal-democratic terms as ekklēsia (assembly) but in political-
individual group terms as ‘transients’ or ‘migrants’ who have been ‘elect[ed]’
through ‘the foreknowledge of G*d, the Father’, the ‘sanctification of the
Spirit for obedience’, and the ‘sprinkling of the blood of Christ’. The letter
also uses an elaborate, uniquely Pauline form of greeting (‘may grace and
peace be with you in abundance’).
As was customary in Hellenistic letters, the greeting is followed by a
Thanksgiving (1.3-12), which, as in Pauline literature, is also more elabo-
rate than the traditional Hellenistic form. In classical-rhetorical terms, the
‘Thanksgiving’ functions as a unit of praise (encomium). It is expressed in
1 Peter in a very long and complicated sentence that does not so much teach
as celebrate and confess. G*d’s mighty acts on behalf of the letters’ recip-
ients are praised as saving acts in the past, characterized as a time of faith
in Jesus Christ and hope in the experience of Christians in the present, and
finally as G*d’s mighty acts in the eschatological future. Even the proph-
ets recognize the grace given to the recipients and even the angels seek to
understand the salvation/imperial wellbeing (sōtēria) given to them (1.10-
12). Like the genuine Pauline letters, 1 Peter ends with a farewell address
in 5.12-14 that summarizes the purpose of the letter as ‘to encourage’ the
readers, ‘to testify to the true grace of G*d’, and to admonish them to ‘Stand
fast in it!’ It mentions those who send greetings (‘the elect one in Babylon’,
24 1 Peter

‘my son Mark’, and Silvanus the transcriber or the deliverer of the letter),
and ends with the admonition to great each other with ‘the kiss of love’ and
wishes all of them peace (5.14).
It is debated, however, whether a woman is mentioned among the send-
ers. The third person or figure mentioned in 5.13 is that of the ‘co-elect
one in Babylon’ (en Babylōni syneklektē—a feminine form) which can be
understood as referring to a communal representation of the Jewish ‘Chris-
tian’ community in Rome, to the Roman church, or to a well-known wo/
man leader in Rome. Just as exegetes construe the expression ‘elect lady
and sister’ (eklektē kyria kai adelphē) in 2 John 1 and 13 as not referring
to an individual wo/man, so also commentators of 1 Peter insist that the
expression ‘co-elect in Babylon’ does not refer to an actual well-known
wo/man leader in Rome but that it is a reference to the Roman church or
to a figurative representation of this church. If exegetes read 5.13 as refer-
ring to an actual wo/man, they have tended to understand 5.13 as referring
to Peter’s wife.
Judith Applegate has carefully scrutinized the pro and con arguments for
understanding 1 Pet. 5.13 as referring to a wo/man leader in Rome (1992).
She points out that while scholars claim that it is ‘natural’ not to think of
a particular wo/man leader, three out of five letter greetings to and from
churches refer to an actual wo/man (1 Cor. 16.19; Col. 4.15; Rom. 16.6).
Moreover, the expression ‘elect’ is never used in conjunction with the word
ekklēsia but is used only with reference to individuals (cf. Rom. 16.13).
Hence, Applegate concludes that the recipients must have known the wo/
man leader who was mentioned among those who send greetings. If this
is the case, then 1 Peter, like the Neo-Aristotelian tractates on ‘house-
hold’ management (oikonomia), appealed to the authority of a well-known
wo/man leader for legitimating its message of subordination. By not men-
tioning the name of the early Christian wo/man leader, this appeal remains
general enough so that one could not argue against it.
Moreover, it is not clear whether wo/men are included among the ad-
dresses since the letter uses masculine generic or gender-specific terms,
both grammatically (eklektoi) and in terms of content (adelphoi), to char-
acterize the recipients. If kyriocentric (lord, slave-master, father, husband,
male-centered) language is used here in the generic, inclusive sense, then
one can assume that wo/men in general and slave-wo/men in particular
were included among the addressees. The reference to well-to-do wives in
3.1-6 supports such a grammatically generic reading because it indicates
that ‘ladies’ were definitely part of the community. However, one could
also argue for a gender specific understanding. Insofar as the behavior of
slaves and wives is mentioned as a special case, the rest of the letter could
be addressed to freeborn male citizens only, depending on how one under-
stands the community’s self-understanding of ‘brotherhood’.
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 25

Temple or Household?
If ‘House of G*d’ (oikos tou theou) in 4.17 is understood as household
rather than as temple, then the ‘brotherhood’ is conceived at least by the
author(s) as the household of G*d, whose head (paterfamilias) is G*d
the father who is also the father of Jesus Christ (1.2-3) and whose mem-
bers are ‘obedient children’ (1.14). The members of the ‘brotherhood’ have
been ‘set free (ransomed like slaves)’ from ‘the traditions of their fathers’
(1.18) and are invoking now ‘the father who judges all people impartially’
(1.17). Although they are like ‘newborn infants longing for the pure spiri-
tual mother-milk’, no mother of the family is mentioned.
The recipients are addressed as ‘beloved’ (2.11; 4.12). They are char-
acterized as those who love G*d whom they have not seen (1.8) but who
cares for them (5.7). They are told to greet each other with the ‘kiss of
love’. They are admonished to have ‘genuine mutual love and to love one
another deeply’ (1.22). In 3.8, which concludes the ‘subordination’ section,
five adjectives characterize the love-ethos of the ‘brotherhood’ or of the
‘house of G*d’: unity of spirit, mutual sympathy, brotherly (and sisterly?)
love for each other, compassionate kind feelings toward one another, and
humble mindedness.
Those who are ‘beloved’ should become ‘zealots of doing good’, and
above all maintain constant love for one another because ‘love covers a
multitude of sins’ (4.8). Such love is expressed in hospitality, good stew-
ardship ‘of the manifold grace of G*d’, service with all one’s gifts (cha-
rismata), and speaking the very words of G*d (4.9-11). The addressees are
to break the vicious circle of violence and ‘not return evil for evil’ (3.9)
but replace slandering and reviling with blessing, ‘for they were called to
receive a blessing’, an expression at home in the language world of Judaism
that is underscored by a lengthy quote adapted from Ps. 34.12-16.
A different ‘honor code’ determines the ‘brotherhood’ community, inso-
far as it distinguishes ‘honorable’ behavior toward everyone and toward the
emperor from ‘brotherly love’ which is required in the ‘brotherhood’. How-
ever, the dominant kyriocentric elite male ethos seems to prevail, insofar as
the community is called ‘brotherhood’ although we know that wo/men were
members of the community. The designation of the community as ‘broth-
erhood’ could be a conventional reference borrowed from the nomencla-
ture of social collegia and religious associations, could imply a masculine
the*logical self-understanding, or could refer to the community either as a
patriarchal family or as an egalitarian siblinghood. If the recipients under-
stood their community as adelphotēs in the generic sense as ‘siblinghood’
of ‘sisters and brothers’ who are equally called, holy and elect, rather than
as kyriarchal male-only family, then one can grasp that it is the author(s)
who seek(s) to reshape the self-understanding of the communities in Asia
Minor in terms of the patriarchal household or familia.
26 1 Peter

The characterization of the recipients is ambiguous in two other ways.

First, it is not clear whether their characterization as transients or migrants
(parepidēmoi) and as non-citizens or resident aliens (paroikoi) is political
and establishes commonality between the sender(s) and recipients as colo-
nial subjects or whether it is purely religious asserting that the ‘father-
land’ of the recipients is in heaven. Second, it is not clear whether the
recipients, like Peter, are Jews with a messianic bent—‘Christianoi’, as
they are labeled by outsiders—or whether they are Gentile converts. The
first interpretation is suggested by the rich Jewish language of the docu-
ment and was prevalent until around the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, whereas most modern exegetes hold the second. Without question,
1 Peter’s inscribed symbolic universe is that of Israel, which is expressed
and modulated in the language of the Hellenistic Jewish Bible, the Sep-
tuagint (lxx).

Outline of the Overall Argument of 1 Peter

The argumentative structure of 1 Peter has been delineated differently by
different scholars, and I will do so here in terms of the letter’s arguments.

1.1-12: Greetings and Introduction

The recipients are introduced as paroikoi. This word can be understood in
political-legal terms to designate non-citizens or as expressing their reli-
gious identity of belonging to another world while being aliens in this
world. Because words are not univocal but multivalent, which meaning
might be intended can only be decided with reference to an overall interpre-
tive framework and method.

1.13–2.10: First Argument: People of G*d

The first line of argument articulates the recipients’ ‘high’ status as the
people of G*d, ‘house (oikos) of the Spirit’ and ‘royal priesthood’ (1.15–
2.10) alluding to Jewish democratic understandings in the language of the
Hebrew Scriptures.

2.11–3.12: Second Argument: Empire and Household

The second line of argument spells out the ‘good’ behavior demanded espe-
cially from the subordinate members of the household (oikos). It utilizes the
socio-political form of the colonial oikos-discourse, which is usually called
by exegetes ‘Household Code’. The argument in 1 Peter, however, does not
begin by addressing behavior in the household but by prescribing behav-
ior toward the authorities of the Empire. Such emphasis on suffering is also
found in the opening and the conclusion of the letter (1.6-10; 5.1, 9). It is
also developed in the following sections.
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 27

3.13–4.11: Third Argument: Suffering and Doing Good

The third line of argument articulates the necessity of suffering (pathēmata)
and explains what ‘doing good’ means for the ‘stewards’ (oikonomoi) of
G*d’s manifold grace who are publicly put down, harassed and defamed as
Christianoi—that is, as Messianists (3.13–4.11). The section which spans
3.13-22 begins with a rhetorical question: ‘Who will harm you if you are
eager to do what is good?’ It tells the recipients not to be intimidated, but to
keep a good conscience. Finally, vv. 18-22 speaks of Christ’s suffering (cf.
also 4.1), resurrection, vindication and exaltation.

4.12–5.11: Conclusion: Summary and Amplification

These three argumentative moves are summed up and amplified in 4.12–
5.11, which continues to tell the readers to expect difficulties as ‘Christians’
and to undergo ‘honorable suffering’ because the end is in view. 1 Peter
4.12-19 refers to the ‘fiery ordeal’ and tells the audience to rejoice because
they will be blessed when G*d’s glory is revealed if they now share in
Christ’s suffering. If they suffer in the name of Christ, the Spirit of G*d is
upon them. To suffer as a Christian (a Messianist) should not be considered
a disgrace. The section ends with the statement that the judgment of G*d
begins with the house of G*d.
These admonitions are followed by an address to elder and younger
members of the community that spells out the right order of the household
of G*d and is reinforced with the vivid description of the adversary, the dis-
order creating diabolos (‘slanderer’ or ‘calumniator’) who is compared to a
roaring lion seeking to devour everyone (5.1-9). The whole summation ends
with a doxology to ‘the G*d of all grace’ (5.10-11).

5.12-14: Greetings from Babylon-Rome

These greetings characterize the senders and their socio-political location.

The Overall Argument of 1 Peter

In short, the argument of 1 Peter moves from an elaboration of the theo-
retically high but socio-politically precarious status of the recipients to the
central part of the letter which addresses the problem of how to behave
in a politically correct manner (‘doing good’), especially if one is a sub-
ordinate member of ‘the household’. The rhetorical strategy then shifts
to a more general argument addressing all the intended recipients about
‘good’ behavior in public and the ‘honorable sufferings’ to be expected.
Finally, it climaxes with admonitions regarding the exercise of leadership
in the ‘household (oikos) of G*d’. Thus, central to the rhetoric of the letter
is the image of the household. Its inscribed argument engages the hege-
monic socio-political and cultural discourses about household management
28 1 Peter

(peri oikonomias) and about politics (peri politeias) which were inextrica-
bly intertwined in Greco-Roman political theory.

Reconstructing the Rhetorical Situation

The inscribed lofty titles of ancient Israel as the elect people of G*d and
the exalted rhetoric and self-understanding of those living in the diaspora
contrasts greatly with the inscribed situation of their harassment and suf-
fering. This contradiction indicates the rhetorical situation and problem the
author(s) seek(s) to address. As a rhetorical text, 1 Peter, like other rhetor-
ical communications, is engendered by a rhetorical situation to which the
letter must be at least a partially ‘fitting’ response if it should be effective.
Moreover, as a particular discourse, 1 Peter, like any other rhetorical dis-
course, is engendered by a specific situation and an exigence that invites
utterance. However, only when rhetoric endows certain events and circum-
stances with meaning do they become salient as a rhetorical situation. Dis-
courses may describe particular occurrences but they actually give us more
information about the strategies of the speaker/author(s) than about the
actual situation. Nevertheless, the inscribed rhetorical situation must have
some commonality with the actual situation of the audience if the author(s)’s
arguments should have persuasive power. Hence, it is important to investi-
gate the ways in which malestream exegetes define the rhetorical situation
and strategy of the author(s). In so doing, we must ask whether the ‘meta-
ideologizing’ of some of the major contemporary interpretations of 1 Peter
strengthens the colonizing rhetoric of the text by privileging its kyriarchal
elements and by reading its egalitarian-decolonizing-dissident conscious-
ness in terms of hegemonic consciousness that naturalizes kyriarchal power
relations as ‘G*d’s will’.
The author(s)’s rhetoric characterizes and constructs the rhetorical situ-
ation in terms of three rhetorical strategies that are valorized differently by
different interpreters: (1) the strategy of suffering, (2) the strategy of elec-
tion and honor and (3) the strategy of subordination. These rhetorical strat-
egies are not discrete parallel topical areas but work together dialectically
to construct the rhetorical situation to which the letter can be understood as
a ‘fitting’ response. Main differences in the interpretation of the letter and
its function result from the fact that exegetes tend to centralize one strategy
and privilege it over the others.
Scholars almost universally agree that the problem confronted by the rhet-
oric of 1 Peter is that of suffering. In addition, virtually all recent interpreters
agree that 1 Peter does not refer to an Empire-wide persecution of Christians
but rather describes the situation of the recipients as harassment, social ostra-
cism and slander of Christians on a local level. There is also agreement that
the recipients are threatened with suffering because they are Christians.
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 29

A close reading of the letter’s rhetoric can show that the opening and the
conclusion of the letter refer in an almost formulaic way to the suffering
of Christ and the Christians. For instance, 1.10-11 refers to the sufferings
and subsequent glory of Christ, 5.1 calls Peter a ‘witness to the sufferings
of Christ’, 1.6 stresses that the recipients can rejoice in their imperishable
eschatological inheritance even if now—‘for a little while’—they have had
‘to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of [their] faith…is tested by
fire’, and 5.9 refers to their knowledge that ‘the “brotherhood” in the whole
world is experiencing the same kind of suffering’.

Christ’s Paradigmatic Suffering

Within the letter, one can isolate three clusters of ‘suffering’ that refer to
the Messiah’s (Christ’s) suffering as paradigmatic for the recipients of the
letter. In 2.18-25 the house slaves who suffer unjustly (v. 19) are referred
to Christ’s example of suffering but not to his ministry and message. The
section 3.13-22 begins with the rhetorical question, ‘Who will harm you if
you are eager to do what is good?’ It tells the recipients not to be intimi-
dated but to keep a good conscience ‘so that those who abuse you for your
good conduct as Christians (in Christ) may be put to shame’, and then in
vv. 18-22 speaks of Christ’s suffering (cf. also 4.1), resurrection, vindica-
tion and exaltation.
Furthermore, 4.12-19 refers to the ‘fiery ordeal’ and tell the audience to
rejoice because they will be blessed when Christ’s glory is revealed if they
now share in his suffering. If they suffer in the name of Christ, the Spirit
of G*d is upon them. To suffer as a ‘Christian’ should not be considered
a disgrace. The section ends with the statement that the judgment of G*d
begins with the household of G*d, asks what will become of those who are
ungodly and sinners, and concludes ‘Therefore, let those who suffer accord-
ing to G*d’s will entrust themselves to a faithful creator while continuing to
do good’. Suffering and ‘doing good’, suffering and being called a ‘Chris-
tian’, are intrinsically and eschatologically intertwined just as they are in
the example of Christ/Messiah.

The Strategy of Election and Honor

The author(s)’s rhetoric of honor, praise and glory on the one hand and of
slander, shame and disgrace on the other has engendered several books and
numerous articles that offer a reading of 1 Peter in terms of the anthropo-
logical, ‘honor and shame’ rhetoric of Mediterranean culture. For instance,
Barth L. Campbell has analyzed the rhetoric of honor and shame and its
function in the overall rhetoric of the letter (1998). According to Campbell,
this rhetoric of honor and shame is summed up in 2.12: ‘Conduct yourself
honorably among the Gentiles, so that though they malign you as evildo-
ers, they may see your honorable deeds, and glorify G*d when he comes
30 1 Peter

to judge’ (nrsv). While Elliott previously reconstructed the meaning of the

letter in terms of sectarian cohesiveness, more recently he has also read the
‘gospel according to Peter’ in the key of ‘honor and shame’ (1994).
According to this anthropological theory, ancient Mediterranean cul-
ture was structured by the binary dualism of ‘honor and shame’. Such an
interpretive grid, however, is conceptualized in kyriocentric terms whereby
maleness is associated with honor and femaleness with shame. Moreover,
this dualistic theory of cultural anthropology is intertwined with antiquarian
historical studies’ insistence that the past is totally different from the pres-
ent. In biblical studies’ appropriation of this cultural theory of ‘honor and
shame’, the present is represented as contemporary American culture (which
is understood in the singular!). Furthermore, the Mediterranean cultures
of antiquity are said to have been group cultures, in which males embody
the honor of the group while females embody the family’s shame. These
cultures are conflicting in nature, hierarchical and oriented toward status,
honor, praise and recognition. Contemporary American culture in turn is
construed as an individualistic ‘guilt’ culture, which is labeled an equal
opportunity culture because of its egalitarian, democratic, non-hierarchical
ethos. Thereby, biblical antiquity is either ‘orientalized’ and reified as the
totally ‘other’ of modern American culture or it is romanticized—especially
by the political Right—as the time when the world was still in order, the
family was patriarchal, and society honored the ancestral kyriarchal cus-
toms and social hierarchies.
Reading 1 Peter with the lens of the honor-shame construct, Elliott under-
stands the attack on Christians as a ‘classic example of public shaming
designed to demean and discredit the believers in the court of public opin-
ion with the ultimate aim of forcing their conformity to prevailing norms
and values’ (Elliott 1994: 170). In response, 1 Peter does not recommend
they ‘return insult with insult’ but rather turns social disgrace into grace by
calling for engagement in honorable conduct.
The cultural ethos of ‘honor-shame’, the*logically rationalized as the
essential criterion for honorable conduct, is no longer public opinion but
the ‘will of G*d’. Christ becomes the chief paradigm for and facilitator of
such honorable conduct. Honorable conduct has a ‘missionary’ effect, espe-
cially in the case of wives and the whole community insofar as it persuades
the Gentiles to cease their shaming of Christians and instead give honor to
G*d. Finally, suffering itself is understood in a positive light: it is a divine
test that, if passed, leads to eschatological honor and glory.
Steven Richard Bechtler has focused on suffering, community and
Christology in 1 Peter in terms of the ‘honor-shame’ culture in which
the letter was written, and concludes that the problem of suffering in
1 Peter is the threat to the honor of the community. According to him,
the addressees of 1 Peter were attacked, verbally abused and accused of
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 31

wrongdoing because of their conversion. Such attacks and harassment

constituted a threat to their honor and posed a serious problem for their
self-identity in a society in which ‘one’s place was determined by one’s
socially conferred honor’ (Bechtler 1998: 207). Hence, the letter seeks to
provide a legitimation of their symbolic universe that is able to satisfacto-
rily address the problem of their suffering and social disgrace. The letter
accomplishes this by constituting the Christian community as an alter-
native social entity and symbolic universe in which honor is differently
understood and allocated.
G*d, and not society, is the ultimate source of honor. Just as G*d has
restored the honor of Christ, who has suffered disgrace, so G*d will bestow
honor on Christ’s followers in the very near future and does so now through
the spirit. According to this the*logical rhetorical universe, the slanderous
accusations of the Christians’ opponents will result in a loss of honor not
for them but for those who dishonor them now. Although Bechtler realizes
that ‘most of what has been said…concerning honor and shame in Mediter-
ranean societies actually applies predominantly to adult males’, he does not
ask if scholars ‘masculinize’, or, better, ‘kyriarchalize’ (since the honor and
shame of elite propertied males is at stake), the symbolic universe inscribed
in the letter by interpreting 1 Peter in the key of honor-shame.

The Rhetoric of Subordination or of Being ‘Subjects’

The injunction to subordination is used five times in 1 Peter. Four times it
addresses a group of people: everyone in 2.13, household slaves in 2.18,
wives in 3.1, and younger people or neophytes in 5.1-5. Only once is it used
in a descriptive praise statement in 3.22, which states that angels, author-
ities and powers were made subject to Jesus Christ who ‘has gone into
heaven and is at the right hand of G*d’. This last statement makes it clear
that hypotassein (‘to subordinate’) expresses a relation of ruling and power.
Apocalyptic and cosmic language meta-mythologizes the kyriarchal order
of the Empire. Jesus Christ is Lord (kyrios) who is the ‘right hand’ of G*d,
the Almighty. Whereas church ministry is later understood in analogy to
Christ’s power of ruling, 1 Peter admonishes the elders of the community
not to lord (katakyrieuontes) it over those in their charge.

The Core of the Letter

In a classical-rhetorical analysis the section 2.11–3.12 ‘emerges as the core
of the letter’ (Campbell 1998: 231) and could be titled: Become Colonial
Subjects/Subalterns. Since the subaltern behavior of household slaves and
wives towards the imperial authorities is the topos or theme of the cen-
tral argumentatio, scholars note that the author(s) first combine(s) and
advocate(s) here the imperial ethos spelled out in the discourses peri polit-
eias (‘on the political order’, 2.13) and peri oikonomias (‘on household
32 1 Peter

science’, 2.18–3.7), then fund(s) it with reference to the example of the suf-
fering Christ and the matriarch Sarah, and finally moralize(s) such colonial
submission as righteousness and as ‘doing good’ (3.8-12).
The whole section is introduced with an appeal to ‘honorable conduct’
addressed to the ‘non-citizens and transients’ who are hailed as ‘beloved’
(agapētoi). At this point, it becomes obvious that the sender(s) the*logize(s)
and moralize(s) the dominant kyriarchal ethos of Roman imperialism and
request(s) that the subordinates realize and live it in their practices of sub-
ordination. The rationale and motivation given is missionary—they should
conduct themselves ‘honorably’ so that the Gentiles glorify G*d on the day
of ‘visitation’ (episcopēs).
The command to abstain from human desires (sarkikōn epithymiōn) that
endanger their lives (psychē) is elaborated and elucidated in 2.11-17 with
the admonition to subject themselves to the emperor as the supreme one and
to the governors who are sent by him (i.e. to the imperial administration),
so that these figures of authority recognize them as doing what is right, hon-
orable or good. The the*logical justification given here is that such submis-
sion, understood as ‘doing the honorable’ is ‘the will of G*d’. Here, the elite
masculine ethos of ‘honorableness’ has become ‘Christianized’. The overall
rhetorical strategy of the letter is summed up in 2.17: ‘Honor everyone, love
the “brotherhood”, fear G*d, honor the emperor!’
Unlike in 2.13, the injunction to the house-slaves is not stated in an
imperative but in a circumstantial participle grammatical form, also used
in 3.7-9, and indicates that the whole section continues the imperatives of
2.11 and 13. Slave wo/men’s ‘doing good’ consists in their subjecting them-
selves even to harsh and unjust masters so that if unjustly beaten and suf-
fering, ‘if that is G*d’s will’, they do so for the purpose of ‘doing right’.
Christ’s innocent suffering is then elaborated as an example for such honor-
able behavior in suffering.
In a similar fashion, freeborn wo/men are told to subject themselves
to their husbands, even to those who are not believers. The goal here is
the conversion of the husbands that will be brought about not by their
‘preaching’ to them but by their proper ‘lady-like’ conduct of purity and
subordination exemplified by the matriarch Sarah, the prime example for
female converts to Judaism. Finally, the ‘brotherhood’ is not only to be
governed by mutual love and support but also by subordination. In 5.5
the ‘younger’ members of the ‘brotherhood’, who are either younger in
age or converts, are told to subject themselves to the older, the presby-
ters. Although the presbyters are admonished at the same time not to
exercise kyriarchal leadership, this injunction still indicates that the
inscribed argument seeks to fashion the order of the community as one
of subordination.
 1.   Rhetorical Analysis of 1 Peter 33

Conclusion
In sum, the Roman colonial cultural rhetoric of subjection advocates the
submission of the subaltern migrants and non-citizens in Asia Minor and
specifies as problem cases the unjust suffering of household slave wo/men
and the marriage-relationship between Christian wo/men and Gentile hus-
bands. Contemporary exegetes are generally embarrassed by this rhetoric
of subjection, which feminist biblical scholars have indicted. Hence, they
seek to eliminate or mitigate the problem for modern hearers/readers by
translating hypotassein (‘subordinate’) with ‘accept the authority’, ‘defer
to’, ‘show respect for’, ‘recognize the proper social order’, or ‘participate
in’, ‘be involved with’, ‘be committed to’ (Senior 1980: 430). Although
such an apologetic translation is primarily concerned with ‘wo/men’ and
‘liberal’ readers/hearers, at the same time it conceals the elite male char-
acter of hypotassein and its colonizing function, which in 1 Peter has
become ‘the*logized’. This indicates how much translation is also always
interpretation.
 Chapter 2

Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible

Although a plethora of metaphors and titles portray the recipients of 1 Peter

in terms of the covenant people of Israel, the letter never mentions Israel
directly, but describes the ‘Christian’ community as the ‘new Israel’. Israel
and Judaism are not yet seen as the ‘other’ of the emerging Christian commu-
nities, but as their constitutive identity. This is programmatically expressed,
for instance, in 1 Pet. 1.15-16: ‘As the One who called you is holy, even you
yourself must become holy in every respect of your lives, because Scripture
says, “You shall be holy because I am holy”’. Those who have been born
anew are elect and holy, which, according to Lev. 20.7, 25, means that they
are set apart from all other peoples. The communities of 1 Peter are best seen
as counterparts to Gentile society.
This Jewish self-identity of the ‘brotherhood’ comes especially to the
fore in 2.4-10, where the author(s) use(s) a plethora of traditional images to
characterize the elect and holy ones as the covenant people of G*d (Exod.
19.6). This section is steeped in the language of the Scriptures and the tradi-
tions of Israel and Judaism. It not only echoes previously introduced themes,
but also integrates older traditions similar to those found in Qumran, rab-
binic Judaism and the Pauline letters. The following images characterize the
dignity and lofty status of the recipients in terms of the traditional attributes
of Israel: They are ‘living stones’, being ‘built into a temple of the Spirit’
or a ‘spiritual house’ (2.5). They are a holy and royal priesthood, a chosen
race, a holy nation, G*d’s very own people who have been summoned to
tell forth the great deeds of the one who has called them from darkness to
light, an image that could allude to conversion (2.9). They who were once a
non-people are now the people of G*d, who have been graced with mercy.
If, however, we read the text of the letter with the dualistic ‘Christian-
ity/Judaism’ lens, we cannot but read it in a supersessionist and co-opting,
colonizing fashion which appropriates and arrogates the honorific titles and
identity descriptions of Judaism to Christianity, of the synagogue to the
church. It is no longer the Jewish people but the Christian communities that
are the people of G*d. Such an appropriating reading has become the stan-
dard reading today because we read 1 Peter as a revealed text of Christian
Scriptures. Such reading of 1 Peter as a ‘Christian and not Jewish’ Scripture,
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 35

however, is bound to inculcate Christian election and superiority over and

against Judaism.
In the following, I would like to explore with you whether there is an-
other way to read this text so that 1 Peter becomes truly Scripture—a lib-
erating word of G*d. I will first explore the pitfalls of a supersessionist
self-colonizing reading. Then I will ask: Did the first recipients of the letter
understand themselves as ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’, or as both? I will then
look at the tension that may exist between the author(s)’s and the audience’s
understanding of the identity-forming name Christianos (‘Messianist’),
which is mentioned in 4.16. Finally, I will explore this tension by looking
at the Balch-Elliott debate and the attempted reinterpretation of the Messi-
anic self-understanding of the communities in Asia Minor by these authors.

Supersessionist Reading of 1 Peter

Most professional and general readers read the text of 1 Peter as Christians,
and even if the reader is not Christian, s/he likely reads it as a Christian
text since it is part of the Christian N*T. Such reading, however, has been
rightly criticized as a supersessionist appropriation of 1 Peter. The word
‘supersessionism’ comes from the Latin verb sedeo, sedere, sedi, sessum,
‘to sit’, plus super, ‘upon’. It thus signifies one thing being replaced or sup-
planted by another. According to David Novak, a supersessionist reading
understands the N*T either as an addition to or as a replacement of the old
covenant—that is, the religion of the Torah and Jewish Pharisaic tradition
(2004). When one reads 1 Pet. 2.4-10 as a Christian rather than as a Jewish
text, such a Christian reading understands the recipients as the new people
of G*d. All honorific titles are understood in such a reading as Christian and
no longer Jewish.
Christianity is thus understood as a replacement of Judaism or as a com-
plement (Old Testament complemented by the New*Testament) by which
Christianity supersedes Judaism. Betsy Bauman-Martin argues that
supersessionism itself might be better understood from a postcolonial
viewpoint as a strategy that posits an “other” to better delineate one’s own
group, plunders the resources of a marginalized group to delineate the self
in relation to the colonial power and leaves that other group in a position of
no value or status (Bauman-Martin 2007: 149f).

Bauman-Martin not only argues that general readers and scholars read
1 Peter in a supersessionist fashion and thereby in a colonizing way, but
also asserts that the text itself is supersessionist and therefore colonialist.
Rather than attempting to show that 1 Peter does not define itself over and
against Judaism, Bauman-Martin argues that the letter is itself supersessionist
because of its Christology. She thus concludes:
36 1 Peter

Having determined that 1 Peter contains supersessionist elements, it is

helpful to see supersessionism as well as Jewish-Christian relations as part
of a wider context—as components within the power configurations of the
Greco-Roman world. The attitude of the author of 1 Peter toward Judaism
is determined in part by a stance against the Roman Empire. In its effort
for legitimacy or even to achieve a more effective form of resistance and to
set itself up as a true community, Christians had to both affirm the Hebrew
Scriptures and to deny their applicability to the Jews themselves (Bauman-
Martin 2007: 156).

In short, Bauman-Martin argues that 1 Peter adopted Jewish language

as a postcolonial argument to defend the Christian communities over and
against ‘the coercive identity politics of Roman imperial power…by met-
aphorizing, decontextualizing and displacing’ Jewish identity (Bauman-
Martin 2007: 161). Thus, to Bauman-Martin, the author(s)’s cooptation
of the Jewish tradition begins with the appropriation of the metaphor of
the Jewish diaspora, a move that claims diasporic status for the Christian
community (Bauman-Martin 2007: 164). Closely related to this coopta-
tion of the diaspora metaphor are the designations ‘strangers’ and ‘aliens’.
The author(s) of 1 Peter thereby ‘takes the identification of alien from its
original owners’, sets ‘his communities up as the valued alien groups’, and
seeks ‘to resist imperial definition of alien as bad’ (Bauman-Martin 2007:
167). Although the letter expresses a simultaneously Jewish and Chris-
tian hybrid identity, Bauman-Martin argues that this identity ‘so stabi-
lizes that it becomes non-hybrid, completely Christian’ (Bauman-Martin
2007: 168).
According to Bauman-Martin, the author(s) appropriate(s) key Jewish
concepts, including ‘the royal priesthood’ (2.5-9)—a concept which is,
according to her, inherently hierarchical and undemocratic—the Suffering
Servant (2.21-25), Passover and liberation (1.19), the use of the Septuagint,
the understanding of home as the land of Israel, covenant promises, refer-
ences to the prophets (1.10-12) and, perhaps the most aggressive, the use of
the term ‘Gentile’ to refer to anyone who did not believe that Jesus was the
Messiah, including, or especially, Jews (1 Pet. 2.12, 4.2-4). These appro-
priations are in line with those of colonial and imperial powers which also
seek ‘to rewrite the past of the oppressed—distorting it and destroying it,
and often inserting themselves into it, all as a means of establishing supe-
riority and legitimating their own identities, much as the author of 1 Peter
does with Judaism’ (Bauman-Martin 2007: 170).
Thus, Bauman-Martin reads the letter’s supersessionism as an imitation
of imperialist domination because it appropriates the Scriptures and identity
markers of Judaism without reference to ‘real Jews’. Read in and through
the lens of postcolonial theory, the letter of 1 Peter becomes a document
of imperialism that eliminates clear elements of ancient Jewish religion
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 37

by claiming them as Christian. While I completely agree with Bauman-

Martin that such a supersessionist reading permeates scholarship on 1 Peter,
I would argue that a decolonizing reading of 1 Peter must critically analyze
the presuppositions of its interpretations in order to be able to focus on the
colonizing elements of the text.
Bauman-Martin only glances briefly at the political subordination sec-
tion of 1 Pet. 2.11–4.11, as she focuses on the first part of the letter. Taking a
different approach, I have focused primarily on the central part of the letter
in my own decolonizing reading of 1 Peter because it admonishes the audi-
ence to submit to the colonizing powers of its society, the Roman Empire
(Schüssler Fiorenza 2007a). How then is one to adjudicate such different
‘postcolonial’ ‘decolonizing’ readings?

Is 1 Peter Jewish or Christian? The Wrong Question to Ask

Bauman-Martin can only maintain that the letter itself is supersessionist
by rejecting Daniel Boyarin’s argument that we cannot speak about Juda-
ism and Christianity as two distinct opposing religions until the fourth or
fifth century. Until then, there are no sets of features that clearly define
‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’ in such a way that the two categories do not over-
lap. This proposal, carefully developed in Boyarin’s Border Lines (2004)
and succinctly argued in The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish
Christ (2012) is revolutionary insofar as it opens up the possibility of a non-
supersessionist, non-colonizing reading of the N*T in general and 1 Peter in
particular. To the contrary, Baumann-Martin argues that all
first-century texts indicate clear understandings that to be Jewish was to be
distinct in a number of ways and the Christian writers defined their groups
in contradistinction. Indeed the problem with some of Boyarin’s points are
that if one takes his conclusions seriously, there is no such thing as super-
sessionism as long as one of the parties claims a share in the texts or con-
cepts, regardless of how they view the other participants (Bauman-Martin
2007: 153 n. 32).

This is not quite correct, if one looks carefully at Boyarin’s proposal that
the writings of the N*T should be read as ‘Christian’ Jewish writings. Boya-
rin convincingly argues that the notion of the ‘parting of the ways’, which
was supposed to have taken place after a period of fluidity at the end of the
first or the beginning of the second century, took place much later. He points
out that the fluidity and diversity of Judaism did not end with the destruc-
tion of the temple or the so-called Council of Yavneh (c. 90 ce)—a Talmu-
dic legend patterned after the famous imperial Councils of Nicaea (325 ce)
or Constantinople (381 ce). These ecumenical councils, which were called
by the emperor, functioned to establish ‘a Christianity that was completely
separated from Judaism. At least from a juridical standpoint, then Judaism
38 1 Peter

and Christianity became completely separate religions only in the fourth

century’ (Boyarin 2012: 12-13).
To illustrate his point, Boyarin translates and quotes a letter of Jerome
(347–420 ce), a Christian scholar, to his colleague Augustine of Hippo
(354–430 ce):
In our own days there exists a sect among the Jews throughout all the Syna-
gogues of the East, which is called the sect of Minei, and is even now con-
demned by the Pharisees. The adherents to this sect are known commonly
as Nazarenes; they believe in Christ the Son of God, born of the Virgin
Mary; and they say that He who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose
again, is the Same as the one in whom we believe. But while they desire to
be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other (cited in
Boyarin 2012: 16).

The parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity was completed by

Roman imperial power to serve imperial colonial interests. As a result, one
could no longer be both Jewish and Christian. The canonical consolidation
of the Christian Scriptures took place at this same time. Every Christian
reading of the Bible is now necessarily supersessionist if we do not ques-
tion such a colonizing reading.
If we should be able to read N*T texts such as 1 Peter as fundamentally
Jewish texts, Boyarin argues, we must give up the understanding that ‘reli-
gions are fixed sets of convictions with well defined boundaries’, which
does not allow for the possibility that one could at once be both a Jew and a
Christian (Boyarin 2012: 8). He suggests, therefore, that we speak of ‘Chris-
tian Jews and non-Christian Jews’ prior to the fourth or fifth century ce. If
one accepts Boyarin’s proposal to read 1 Peter as a ‘Christian’ Jewish writ-
ing, one must, however, still defend against supersessionism because the
scholarship on 1 Peter documents that Christian scholars and general read-
ers alike continue to read the letter in a supersessionist fashion, since the
word ‘Christian’ continues to be understood in ‘difference to’ or ‘over and
against’ what is Jewish. This continuing misunderstanding was expressed
by a puzzled student in my class:
When you say that 1 Peter should be understood as a Jewish text, it was
not quite clear to me whether you were referring to all in the Jewish tradi-
tion or only to those who accepted Jesus as their Messiah. If the first is the
case, how would you interpret 1 Peter 1.2, which characterizes the readers
as those ‘who have been chosen and destined by God, the Father and sanc-
tified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with
his blood’?

Hence, in order to make clear that 1 Peter should be read as a Jewish writ-
ing, one must change the nomenclature. Although I had argued that 1 Peter
does not define the identity of its audience over and against Jews/Juda-
ism and that the letter can be read as a Jewish letter addressed to a Jewish
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 39

audience, the student still read it in Christian terms. I wonder whether Boya-
rin’s suggested nomenclature ‘Christian Jews’ and ‘non-Christian Jews’ still
allows for the misunderstanding of supersessionism, because it still privi-
leges ‘Christian’ or ‘non-Christian’ as defining terms for Jews.
Since Boyarin stresses that the coming of a Messiah had been imagined
in Jewish Scriptures long before the time of early ‘Christian Judaism’, I
suggest that we speak instead of ‘Jewish Messianism’ rather than of ‘Chris-
tian Judaism’ or ‘Messianic Judaism’ if we want to overcome the Judaism/
Christianity dichotomy and the Christian cooptation of the term ‘Messi-
anic Judaism’. The Septuagint (lxx) renders all thirty-nine instances of the
Hebrew word for the ‘anointed one’, Mašíaḥ, as Christos, an expression
which the N*T writers seem to take up since we find Greek transliteration of
Messias only twice in the N*T (Jn 1.41; 4.25). In 1 Pet. 4.16 (see also Acts
11.26 and 26.28) the term Christianos is used to characterize the recipients
of the letter either as ‘Jewish Messianists’ or as ‘Christians’, if we assume
the latter title has already congealed into a fixed group appellation and title.
According to David Horrell, most scholars agree that the designation
Christianos originated with outsiders (Horrell 2007: 362). However, it is
more difficult to determine whether the term was coined as a popular label,
as many suggest, or was formulated by Roman authorities, as Erik Peter-
son has argued. Horrell follows Peterson’s lead, assuming the popular claim
that the term was first used in Antioch is correct, and agrees that it may
have been coined by members of the Roman administration. According to
Peterson, the word probably originated in Latin-speaking circles and for the
‘first’ time in Acts 11.26 refers ‘to an official or juridical designation rather
than to informal naming’ (Peterson 1959: 67-69). Thus the language seems
to convey ‘a legal or juristic sense, as in legal documents where it indicates
something is now being recorded that will henceforth have force’ (Peterson
1959: 68). Finally, in many non-Christian first-century sources, the names
‘Christ’ and ‘Christian’ seem to be associated with public disorder.

Is 1 Peter a Jewish Proselyte Discourse?

When reading the first argument of 1 Peter in 1.13–2.10 as transferring
the honorific titles of Israel expressed in this section to the Christian com-
munity, scholars engage in a supersessionist interpretation that is deter-
mined by the dualistic ‘Christian church/Judaism’ opposition. But they
may protest against such a judgment since, for instance, 1.18 speaks against
such a Jewish understanding of the communities addressed. The author(s)
declare(s) there that the recipients ‘were ransomed from the futile ways
inherited from your ancestors’; moreover, they were ransomed not with
perishable silver and gold currency but with the ‘precious blood of Christ,
like that of a lamb without defect or blemish’.
40 1 Peter

This text seems to clearly refer to their conversion from Judaism to Chris-
tianity, as my student pointed out. Thus, Christians, and no longer Jews,
are seen as ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exod. 19.6). Such a
reading co-opts the identity claims of the Jewish people for the Christian
church. To abandon such a supersessionist reading, we need to be able to
read 1 Peter in such a different way that we do not re-inscribe the dualis-
tic ‘Jewish/Christian’ opposition, which subsumes ‘Jew’ under ‘Christian’.
Moreover, the letter of 1 Peter does not contain this dualism but rather con-
structs a ‘Jew/Gentile’ opposition (2.12). In line with this inscribed dualism
of the author(s), we must translate the nomenclature Christos/Christianos
not as ‘Christ/Christian’, but as ‘Messias/Messianists’.
The supersessionist understanding of 1 Pet. 1.18 has been challenged
by scholars who point out that the rhetoric of 1 Peter uses language simi-
lar to that which was used in Jewish discourses on proselytes. If this is the
case, then the expressions ‘blood’ and ‘lamb’ in 1 Pet. 1.19 may refer to the
proselyte offering that was needed for acceptance into Judaism. However,
Christian scholars who point to the proselyte offering nevertheless insist that
1 Peter was not written to actual proselytes but uses this Jewish language to
refer to becoming Christian. I would argue to the contrary, and assert instead
that we need to read 1 Peter as a Jewish text. If we do not want to continue
our colonizing supersessionist reading of the letter, we have to understand
1 Pet. 1.18f not just as metaphorical language but as referring to actual pros-
elytes who have abandoned the religion and customs of their pagan ancestors
and joined the Jewish communities in Asia Minor.
This scholarly debate as to whether to understand the letter’s language as
the*logical-metaphorical or as social-descriptive language has focused on
the terms paroikos (‘stranger/sojourner’) and parepidēmos (‘resident alien’)
which are used to describe the recipients in 2.11. John H. Elliott argues
that the recipients did not become strangers and resident aliens because
they became Christians but rather they were strangers and resident aliens
because they were social outcasts. He asserts:
1 Peter was directed to actual strangers and resident aliens who had become
Christian. Their new religious affiliation was not the cause of their position
in society though it did add to their difficulties in relating to their neigh-
bors. It is precisely this combination of factors which best explains the dis-
illusionment which the members felt. Attempting to improve their social
lot through membership in the community which the Christian movement
offered, they experienced instead only further aggravation. Now they were
demeaned not only as social strangers and aliens but for being ‘Christ-
lackeys’ as well (Elliott 1981: 131f).

Such a social-political understanding of the terms ‘strangers and aliens’

squares well with a diaspora Jewish proselyte understanding if one reads
the text in a Jewish messianic key. Already considered to be social strangers
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 41

and resident aliens, the proselytes become even more politically suspect as
Christianoi (‘Messianists’) by joining the Jewish messianic communities
of Asia Minor. If becoming a Jewish proselyte meant joining messianic
communities, they were by definition seen as anti-Roman troublemak-
ers, as ‘a further social aggravation’. This interpretation is supported by
the lxx use of the terms ‘stranger’. Seland has shown that in the lxx,
the Hebrew term for stranger (ger) is translated either as paroikos or as
proselytēs, ‘indicating that the translators did not always differentiate
between paroikos and proselytēs’ (Seland 2005: 54). Seland concludes
that the words paroikos and parepidēmos are clearly proselyte related
terms. He argues that Philo’s work which ‘describes a proselyte as some-
one who has left a belief in many gods and run to the truth, honoring one
God and Father of all’ depicts Abraham as ‘a model proselyte on the basis
of his status as a paroikos in the Scriptures’ (Seland 2005: 56, 59). Seland
quotes Philo, who states that Abraham is
the standard of nobility for all proselytes…who abandoning the ignobil-
ity of strange laws and monstrous customs which assigned divine honours
to stock and stones and soulless things in general, have come to settle in a
better land, in a commonwealth full of true life and vitality, with truth as its
director and president (Virt. 2.19).

Alongside Abraham, Philo praises Tamar as the paradigmatic proselyte

while 1 Peter exalts the submission of Sarah as a prime example for pros-
elyte wo/men. Tamar (Genesis 38) passed from profound darkness to light,
deserting to the ‘camp of piety at the risk of her life caring little for its pres-
ervation’ (Philo, Virt. 221-22), whereas 1 Peter declares Sarah as an ideal
example of wifely obedience because of her subordination to Abraham as
her Lord.
If we understand this first argumentative section of the letter as addressed
to Jewish Messianists (Christianoi) who were resident aliens and prose-
lytes of low social standing, then we can understand the letter’s introductory
first line of argument in 1.13–2.10 as not only indicating the ‘democratic
commonwealth’ of the addressed and their self-understanding as the royal,
priestly people of G*d but we may also glimpse the rhetorical situation that
triggered the writing of the letter itself. In a supersessionist reading, Jewish
scholar Claudia Setzer sums up the ways in which the communities’ high
the*logical self-understanding as the people of G*d is expressed in 2.4-10,
stating,
In ch. 2 the author marshals verses from the Septuagint much as rabbinic
literature uses biblical verses as proof texts. The aim is clear: Christians
assume the identity of Israel, the people of God, through faith in Jesus. In
becoming Israel, these Christians may suffer as the Exodus people, and like
Israel, they will be rescued. What has happened to the Jews, the former
Israel, the author does not say. So thorough is the church’s identification
42 1 Peter

with biblical Israel that non-Christians are now called ‘Gentiles’ (2.12), and
the hostile world is the diaspora (Setzer 2011: 439).

If however, with Boyarin, one does not assume that the ‘parting of the
ways’ of Judaism and Christianity has already happened at the time of the
writing of 1 Peter but instead presupposes a ‘Christian’ Judaism (i.e. Jewish
Messianism), then one is compelled to read the text in a political fashion as
the contrast between G*d’s people, who are called Christianoi/Jewish Mes-
sianists, and the surrounding Gentile society in the provinces of the Roman
Empire. As Setzer observes, the rhetoric of 2.1-10 is similar to that of rab-
binic literature, expressed in the language of the Septuagint, speaking of
Israel as the Exodus people and proclaiming their calling as a royal priest-
hood over and against the Gentile world. Nothing, therefore, prevents us
from understanding the text as speaking about Jewish people who believe
in the Messiah Jesus and who understand themselves as proclaiming the
mighty acts of G*d who has called them ‘out of darkness into G*d’s mar-
velous light’.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Philo Judaeus, also called
Philo of Alexandria (c. 15–10 bce to 45–50 ce), was the most prominent
representative of Hellenistic Judaism. His writings thus provide the clear-
est view of the development of Judaism in the diaspora (see http://www.bri-
tannic.com/EBchecked/topic/456612/Philo-Judaeus). Although Philo lived
much earlier, he shares with the audience of 1 Peter a location in the dias-
pora and a common text, the Torah. While we do not know the hermeneutics
of the letter writer(s) of 1 Peter, I suggest we can try to destabilize a Chris-
tian supersessionist reading through such an imaginative exercise in a dia-
sporic Philonic reading. For instance, in an ‘exercise of interpretation and
hermeneutics’ Seland asks how ‘a Jewish reader who is well versed in Phi-
lo’s works’ and located in ‘the symbolic universe represented by the works
of Philo’—a hypothetical, ideal Jewish reader—would interpret 1 Pet. 2.5
and 9 which speak of the ‘common priesthood’, the ‘priesthood of Israel’ or
the ‘priesthood of the Jewish people’ (Seland 2005: 79-115).
Seland’s constructed Philonic interpreter would likely read the key terms
in 1 Pet. 2.5 and 9 in the following way: the verb ‘building up’ (oikodomeis-
the) would be understood by such a reader as an indicative and not imperative
since, for Jewish readers, the Jewish nation was an oikos (‘house’) of G*d
and the ‘common priesthood’ was something given to all. The holy people
of Israel enacted in their Passover celebrations, prayers and sacrifices their
‘common priesthood’. Furthermore, a Philonic Jewish reader also would
have understood oikos (‘house’) not simply as household but as temple.
Exodus 19.6 is translated in the lxx as basileion hierateuma (‘kingdom of
priests’) and ethnos hagion (‘a holy nation’). When Philo refers to this text,
he places ‘and’ between the two nouns—basileion kai hierateuma—and
understands this ‘kingdom of priests’ as the royal dwelling of G*d where
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 43

the whole world is understood as a temple. The task of this royal priest-
hood, then, is to offer spiritual sacrifices and to proclaim the great deeds of
G*d in their worship. Its special location is the Passover celebration where,
as ‘commanded by the Law, the whole nation acts as priest… Hence, each
individual is a priest if he or she follows the Law, and together as a nation
are for the world what the priest is for the state’ (Seland 2005: 106).
According to 1 Pet. 2.5, the task of the communities is to ‘bring spir-
itual sacrifices’. However, it is important not to understand such a state-
ment as ‘spiritualizing’ in distinction to a literal reading of offering actual
sacrifices. Scholars have argued that Christianity has spiritualized its rela-
tions to the Jewish cult. In this view, ‘spiritual’ is understood as something
immaterial in contrast to the material bloodiness of sacrifices. Moreover,
they have distinguished between a ‘naïve’ and a ‘critically reflected’ spiri-
tualization. In such an anti-Jewish interpretation, the more naïve spiritual-
ization is found in the Hebrew Bible, the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal
writings as well as in the N*T, whereas the critically reflected spiritualizing
reading is ascribed to the philosophical works of the Stoa and Philo. How-
ever, such a thesis has been widely criticized by other biblical and Philonic
scholars, but is nevertheless still prevalent in popular writings. Yet, pneu-
matikos (‘spiritual’) does not indicate the spiritual in contrast to the real,
but rather refers to pneuma (‘Spirit’). Thus, the adjective pneumatikos qual-
ifies the terms ‘house’ and ‘sacrifice’ as gifts of the Spirit but does not imply
a ‘spiritualization’ of worship. It does not mean a spiritualization of cultic
institutions but rather the transferal of cultic institutional language to the
communities of 1 Peter.
Philo distinguishes among different material sacrifices and includes expo-
sitions of their symbolic and moral meanings that is ‘the mystical character
which symbols convey’. Such interpretations ‘should not be called ‘spir-
itualizing’; they are not given as substitutions for other more literal under-
standings but they represent actualizations of the meanings of the sacrifices’.
According to Philo ‘words in their plain sense are symbols of things latent
and obscured’ (Spec. 1.200; cf. 2.287). In short, Philo’s allegorical interpre-
tation retains the literal, material cult of Jerusalem but ‘elaborates on it in
order to reveal the depth of God’s truth therein’ (Seland 2005: 111).

The Author(s)’s Colonizing Re-interpretation of ‘Christianos’

According to Seland, Philonic readers would probably have had difficul-
ties understanding 1 Peter’s multiple references to a Jesus Messiah (Seland
2005: 93) and the letter’s descriptions of him in sacrificial terms (1.2-3, 11,
19; 2.21; 3.18; 4.1,13; 5.1). This observation raises two questions: Does
1 Pet. 2.4-10 preserve an independent tradition that expresses the under-
standings of the communities? Moreover, does 1 Peter add the emphasis on
44 1 Peter

the suffering Jesus Messiah and if so, why? I will answer the latter question
before shifting my focus to the former.
Let me just point out that the author(s)’s emphasis on the suffering Jesus
Messiah does not force us to resort to a supersessionist interpretation.
Daniel Boyarin has also sought to trace the ‘Jewish history of the “super-
natural” Redeemer’ in The Jewish Gospels. Here, he challenges the ‘near
classic statement of the absolute difference of Jewish from Christian ideas
of the Messiah’ and argues convincingly that the notion of the humiliated
and suffering Messiah was not alien to Judaism (see Boyarin 2012: 127-56).
Hence, there is a shared understanding of a suffering Messiah. Thus, we
can approach the question not as one of Christianity’s difference to Judaism
but as one that is also important for 1 Peter’s understanding of Jesus as the
Jewish suffering Messiah.
The colonizing move of 1 Peter is then not the denial of its Jewish charac-
ter by emphasizing the suffering Jesus Messiah, I argue, but a colonizing of
the self-understanding of the ‘Christian’ community. It is widely accepted
that 1 Peter incorporates traditional material not only from the Hebrew
Bible but also from early Christian writings. 1 Peter 2.4-10 is widely seen
as a well-composed unit that possibly existed before the writing of the letter
and draws on tradition, although one can no longer make clear distinctions
between source and redaction. Whereas older scholarship saw this textual
unit as part of the baptismal tradition or liturgy, more recent scholarship
does not identify it as such but rather understands it as part of the tradition
taken up by the letter.
The rhetorical stress on the ‘babyhood’ of the community (in 2.1-3) and
on the suffering Jesus Messiah is intended to persuade the recipients to
understand themselves not as the house of the Spirit, the royal messianic
house of G*d (the temple) and themselves as the people of G*d who exer-
cise their priestly functions among the nations, but instead to see themselves
as the kyriarchal household of G*d. The letter admonishes them to adapt to
their colonial society and suffer like Jesus Messiah rather than emphasize
their messianic self-understanding as the holy people of G*d. This self-
understanding of the community is expressed in 1 Pet. 2.10 and modified in
the following chapter:
Once you were not a people,
But now you are G*d’s people,
Once you had not received mercy,
But now you have received mercy (1 Pet. 2.10).

Hence, 1 Pet. 2.12, which follows 2.10, admonishes the proselytes who
have joined the Messianic community of G*d’s people: ‘Conduct your-
selves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, although they malign you
as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify G*d when he
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 45

comes to judge’ (nrsv). Such ‘honorable’ conduct demands their subordi-

nation to the kyriarchal colonizing powers of the Roman Empire against
which movements of Jewish Messianism fought to defend their indepen-
dent royal priestly peoplehood.

Overall Scholarly Debate

How then is my feminist decolonizing interpretation of 1 Peter to be situ-
ated in terms of the overall scholarly debate on the function of 1 Peter in its
rhetorical socio-political situation? To situate it, I will follow the discussion
outlined by David Horrell In his Guide to 1 Peter (Horrell 2008: 77-96) in
order to contextualize the interpretation of 1 Peter that I have proposed here.
The scholarly debate on 1 Peter has focused on two works which were
published more than 30 years ago: Let Wives be Submissive by David L.
Balch (1981) and A Home for the Homeless by John H. Elliott (1981), but
has practically taken no notice of In Memory of Her (1983) which was also
part of the emerging ‘new kind of research going on in biblical studies’
(Clark Wire 1984: 209)—that is, research which seeks to reconstruct the
‘social world’ of early Christianity. Both works focus on oikos, which can
be translated either as ‘house/home’ or as ‘(well-organized) household’.
The key interpretive category for Elliott is ‘home’, whereas Balch
stresses ‘household’ and uses as his critical lens the domestic code which
was part of political philosophy. According to Balch, the author(s)’s strat-
egy is to lessen the hostilities and antagonisms Christians experience and to
entreat them to greater conformity to imperial society (Balch 1981). Elliott,
in turn, sees the letter as fostering the internal cohesion of the community
and as articulating a distinct Christian identity—a home for the socially
homeless—in order to enable them to resist societal pressures to conform
to their society (Elliott 1981). Whereas Balch advocates conformity and
acculturation, Elliott stresses uniqueness and distinctiveness to resist such
assimilation. In essence, both works argue for 1 Peter’s recipients to adapt
to the kyriarchal imperial ethos of their societies but stress different sides
of the same coin. They do so by focusing on different accents of the text
and thus on the inscribed voice of the author(s).
Horrell’s review of this debate concludes:
As the Balch-Elliott debate shows, along with a good deal of other work
on the letter, scholarship has tended to emphasize one aspect or the other—
either the tendency to assimilate and accommodate to the world, or the
desire to strengthen the distinctive life and character of the Church (Hor-
rell 2008: 92).

Horrell points to this either/or focus on different topics, texts and rhe-
torical emphases to show that ‘some of the material in 1 Peter fits both of
46 1 Peter

their perspectives’. In contrast, he proposes a different focus on ‘the ways in

which the socially weak exercise forms of resistance to the powerful’ (Hor-
rell 2008: 95). Building on James Scott’s argument in Domination and the
Arts of Resistance (1990) and on postcolonial work, especially that of Homi
Bhabha, he argues:
There is a stress on the ambivalent and complex relationship between col-
onizer and colonized, and between conformity and resistance. Again, this
can help us to avoid a too simple distinction between seeing texts like
1 Peter as either resistant to empire or conformist (Horrell 2008: 94).

Horrell suggests that the name Christian, which was coined by the rep-
resentatives of the colonizer, imperial Rome, and originated as a ‘hostile
outsider label’, is one good example of this either/or. While coined by out-
siders, this label was claimed by insiders, ‘the members of the Christian
movement in Asia Minor, as a designation of who they are’ (Horrell 2008:
94). Still, this statement disguises the fact that this stance was formulated by
the author(s) of 1 Peter to persuade them that they as Messianists/Christians
should only be known ‘for doing good’—that is, being ‘willing to be good
and obedient citizens as far as possible but drawing a clear line of resis-
tance’ (Horrell 2008: 94). This clear line of resistance alongside a generally
obedient and conformist stance is drawn with the name ‘Christian’ which is
not to be denied, whatever the pressures to abandon it. Orders to renounce
the name and to worship the Roman gods are to be resisted.
Horrell seeks to show that drawing this line had become Christian prac-
tice toward the end of the second century with the example of the Acts of the
Scillitan Martyrs (180 ce):
The proconsul, Saturninus, urges the Christians to swear by the genius
of the emperor that, by his (divine) spirit, that which represents the self-
identity of each male person. They reply: ‘We have none other whom we
worship (timeamus) but our Lord God who is in heaven… Honour (hon-
orem) to Caesar as Caesar, but worship (timorem) only to God [Act.Scil.
8-9].

Thus, Horrell seeks to have his cake and eat it at one and the same time
when he claims that 1 Peter is posing postcolonial resistance to the Empire
while at the same time advocating adaptation to imperial kyriarchal society.
In the process, however, he empties the designation Christianos of all mes-
sianic connotations and solidifies a supersessionist reading of the text. In so
doing he not only depoliticizes the rhetoric of the letter but also reads it over
and against Judaism. It is the church who is now ‘the people of G*d’. In the
process, the presence and voices of the recipients have been lost. The voice
of the author(s) has become absolute.
In her review of the works of Balch and Elliott which have initiated and
dominated this scholarly debate, Antoinette Wire expressed the hope for
 2.   Making our Jewish Ancestors Audible 47

an effective re-orientation of the questions scholars asked when reading

1 Peter:
Rhetorical Analysis [is] searching the text for what Elliott calls the ‘strat-
egy’ of the writer, and through that finding the situation—among all situ-
ations history and social theory might suggest—in which this particular
strategy makes sense. And it may turn out then that the situation so recon-
structed is not only the key to hearing the author, but gives us something
of a counterweight to the writer’s strategy, in that the intended readers are
discovered to have had patterns of life, confessions and strategies of their
own (Clark Wire: 1984: 210).

While the Balch-Elliott debate has greatly enriched our understanding of the
rhetoric of the author(s), it has not made audible the voices of the intended
readers. In the process, it has erased the Jewish voice of both and solidified
an unreflected supersessionist Christian reading of the text. Hence, in the
next chapter, I will try to hear the voices of the intended recipients of the
letter in and through the voice of the author(s) and I will try to hear them as
Jewish voices.
 Chapter 3

Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated

Conceptualizing the argumentative strategies of slave-, freeborn-, and

Jewish-Messianists or Christian-Jews as well as the possibility of their
resistant consciousness requires reading 1 Peter ‘against the grain’ of its
colonizing kyriarchal argumentative strategies. If, as Barth Campbell’s
classical-rhetorical analysis has shown (Campbell 1998), the center of
1 Peter’s argument is the discourse of hypotassein (i.e. of subjection or
subordination), then a critical emancipatory interpretation must first of
all attempt, in Nelle Morton’s words, to ‘hear into speech’ the submerged
arguments of those whom 1 Peter’s subordination discourse seeks to sub-
ject (Morton 1985). Such a critical feminist approach that focuses on
the submerged knowledges inscribed in the letter runs counter to male­
stream interpretation that insists on valorizing the author(s)’s subordina-
tion rhetoric.

Scholarship and the Subordination of Wo/men

Because of feminist work, most recent scholarship on 1 Peter is aware of
the problematic ethical-political meaning and socio-historical effects of
1 Peter’s subordination discourse in contemporary society and religious
communities. Commentators tend to focus less on the hermeneutical prob-
lem posed by the Jewish language of the letter, the injunction to political
subjection, or the use of the example of Christ to motivate slaves to suffer
than on the demand for the subordination of wo/men. In response to femi-
nist interpretation, exegetes feel compelled to write a special hermeneutical
excursus (Elliott 2000) or to articulate special hermeneutical rules for read-
ing these texts today (Boring 1999: 104-113).
The rhetoric of how these texts must be read is itself instructive. Over
and against those who critically deconstruct the rhetoric of 1 Peter, other
scholars insist that ‘we must explore the Bible in its cultural context with
an openness to the way that the good news of the past may continue to ani-
mate the good news in the present’ (Elliott 2000: 599; emphasis added). At
stake in this scholarly rhetoric is the legitimization of kyriarchal relations
of domination as ‘good deeds’ and a problematic ‘Christian’ self-definition.
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 49

To illustrate my point: In a blistering attack on my interpretation of 1

Peter in In Memory of Her, John Elliott acknowledges that my reading of
1 Peter is quite different from his own. However such a contrasting of our
two readings of 1 Peter is rather unequal since Elliott’s tome is 956 pages,
whereas I wrote barely five pages on 1 Peter in In Memory of Her and these
few pages are part of an overall discussion of the early Christian mission-
ary movement and the household code discourse in post-Pauline literature.
Most telling, however, is that Elliott’s emotional rhetoric feels compelled
to misconstrue my argument for interpreting the letter from the perspective
of those against whom the inscribed author(s) argue(s). He introduces my
argument with the claim that it is made on ‘the basis of a fanciful recon-
struction of the Jesus movement’ in which I supposedly imagine that ‘Jesus
overthrew the patriarchal structures of his society’ and inaugurated ‘a
golden egalitarian age’. This ‘fantastic premise which it must be said, lacks
any support whatsoever in the social data (as even acknowledged by femi-
nists [e.g. Heine)]’ (Elliott 2000: 596; emphasis added). This leads Elliott
to assert that such a ‘fanciful’ reconstruction determines my interpretation
without acknowledging that it is his reading that produces ‘this fantastic
premise’. Such a premise and proposal would indeed be fanciful and fan-
tastic, if his claim were correct that I have articulated it.
Quoting it out of context, Elliott misrepresents my interpretation of the
letter when he claims that the relapse of 1 Peter into patriarchal thinking
was, in my view, prompted by a concern ‘to avoid persecution and suf-
fering and to “lessen tensions” between the Christian community and its
neighbors’ (Elliott 2000: 597). Using ‘relapse into patriarchy’ as a criterion,
I supposedly then judge all later positions on wo/men in the N*T in terms
of such an erroneous standard. He then goes on to claim that I ‘completely
misconstrue the aim of the letter’, which according to him is ‘to affirm the
holiness and distinctiveness’ of the community and ‘to urge holy noncon-
formity with Gentile modes of thought and life’ (Elliott 2000: 597; empha-
sis added). At this point Elliott seems to have forgotten that he himself has
argued that it was the author(s) and not the community who ‘transposed’
the cultural honor-shame discourse into ‘a theological key’. By collapsing
author(s) and recipients into one and the same he overlooks that a rhetor-
ical process requires at least two voices. The reason for his ‘put down’ of
my position appears to be a rhetorical struggle for the allegiance of wo/men
readers, as the following statement indicates:
This sadly erroneous and arbitrary interpretation of 1 Peter must be men-
tioned not simply because it is an egregious example of ideologically
driven exegesis but because this study, which on the whole has much posi-
tive to commend it, has had pronounced influence on subsequent feminist
commentary on 1 Peter, leading to a misreading and undeserved depreci-
ation of this pastoral letter in general (Elliott 2000: 597; emphasis added).
50 1 Peter

Scholarly Identification with the Assumed Male Author(s)’s Perspective

If I single out for discussion Elliott’s emotion-laden remarks and miscon-
strual of my position as an example of such an author-focused rhetoric, I do
so not in order to defend my own interpretation of 1 Peter as the only correct
one. Rather, I discuss Elliott’s attack as an example of how the kyriarchal
elite male discourse of ‘honor and shame’ is at work not only in the rhetoric
of 1 Peter but also in contemporary scholarship when it is confronted with
dissident methodological voices.
Since according to the construct of the Mediterranean honor-code,
shame is qualified as ‘feminine’ and honor as ‘masculine’, it is important
to observe how such masculine ‘shaming’ works today in defense of aca-
demic status on the one hand and apostolic authority on the other in order
to understand the silencing function of this type of argument in the past.
Such an historical analogy allows one to see what is at stake in the exclu-
sive focus on the author(s)’s rhetoric, when the author(s)’s attempt to trans-
pose the hegemonic cultural ethos of submission into a ‘theological key’ is
taken up through scholarly argument and rationalized as divine revelation
or historical data.
It is also not surprising that almost all scholarly introductions to and
commentaries on 1 Peter identify with the author(s) and hence elaborate the
text’s perspective, but rarely ask why 1 Peter argues as it does, what kind
of tenets and practices it assumes, or what lens it reflects in its address to
the communities. Although literary criticism has declared the ‘death of the
author’, 1 Peter scholarship still privileges the author(s)’s perspective as a
kind of historical informant. Rather than reading the author(s)’s voice as one
side of the argument and attempting to analyze the other voices inscribed in
the text with whom the author(s) argue(s) or whom the author(s) attempt(s)
to persuade, scholars reify the author(s)’s vision as historical reality. I pro-
pose instead that it is necessary to ‘read against the grain’ of the text in order
to understand the full argument and rhetorical situation of 1 Peter.

Reading against the Grain

In contrast to a colonizing interpretation of 1 Peter that re-inscribes the
kyriarchal values of the Empire and legitimizes the author(s)’s kyriarchal
practices with reference to the constructs of ancient culture, sociological
theories, and the*logical or Christological interpretations, a critical decol-
onizing analysis of the letter seeks to ‘read against the kyriarchal grain’
of its language in order to deconstruct the inscribed colonialist imperial
ethos. It seeks to re-valorize the emancipatory values and visions that are
also inscribed in the letter’s rhetoric. To ‘read against the kyriarchal grain’
of the text in this way challenges us not to accept at face value the rhetoric
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 51

of the author(s) of 1 Peter and its scholarly elaborations but to stand back
from it and analyze it critically, as well as to adopt a position that is not
automatically on the author(s)’s side.
‘Reading against the grain’ compels us to look for and try ‘to hear into
speech’ the silenced voices, experiences and histories of the recipients to
whom 1 Peter is addressed that are omitted or suppressed by the author(s).
It means to search for the gaps and fissures in the text rather than to focus
just on what is forcefully argued by the author(s) and scholarly interpreters
of the text. ‘To read against the grain’ involves questioning the kyriarchal
norms and values that have informed the arguments inscribed in the letter
and its interpretations, which are presented as authoritative on grounds of
critical scholarship or canonical authority. To ‘read against the grain’ is
to insist that the biases, attempts at persuasion, and possibly even well-
intended manipulations inscribed in the text be acknowledged so that the
values and visions of the author(s) or interpreter(s) are exposed.
In and through a critical reading of the author(s)’s text, ‘reading against
the grain’ invites us to hear more fully the voices and perspectives of those
who are silenced within and by the text. It does so in order to open up
the understanding of the letter in terms of a radical democratic equality of
the people of G*d, male and female, slave and free, Jew, Greek, Anato-
lian and Roman and many more who are understood in 1 Peter as a ‘royal
priesthood’ called to proclaim the mighty liberating acts of G*d, who has
called them from darkness to light, from being non-citizens and strangers to
becoming G*d’s very own people.

Situating 1 Peter’s Argument in an Early Christian Context

As I point out in the beginning of this Guide, feminist literary critics have
argued that readers do not engage texts ‘in and of themselves’. Rather, inso-
far as we have been taught how to read, we activate reading paradigms
(Kolodny 1980: 10). Reading paradigms determine the selection of meth-
ods and provide the interpretive frameworks and theoretical perspectives of
reading. They organize the practice of reading insofar as they relate texts,
readers and contexts to one another in specific ways. Both professional and
nonprofessional readers draw on the ‘frame of meaning’ (Giddens 1976:
64) and the contextualization provided by the symbolic-religious construc-
tions of social-cultural worlds of the texts they read, which they usually
share. Hence, scholars as well as readers need to become conscious of and
explicate their own reading frameworks, lenses or ‘eyeglasses’ with which
they approach biblical texts. Hence, I have affirmed throughout this book
that my own ‘lens’ is that of a critical feminist hermeneutic and rhetoric of
liberation. Such a feminist perspective is radically egalitarian in the orig-
inal sense of the word, if one understands radical as ‘complete, thorough,
52 1 Peter

without compromise, totally, from the ground up’ and equality not as same-
ness but as difference, equal standing, rights and access.
Still, such a critical decolonizing interpretation is often rejected as a
modern democratic construct that is ahistorical and does not fit Greco-
Roman imperial society and culture. However, such an argument over-
looks that the ‘honor and shame’ culture which supposedly determines the
cultural-societal context of the N*T in general and that of 1 Peter in partic-
ular is also a modern theoretical construct that is energized by the contrast
between ancient societies and modern democratic American society. Rather
than assuming an ‘either accept one and reject the other’ theory, I suggest
that we work with both cultural societal constructs—‘democratic equality’
and ‘honor-shame’—since both are modern scholarly constructs. Further-
more, both have been articulated as scientific theories in today’s culture and
are then used as analytic tools and hermeneutical frameworks for interpret-
ing ancient texts such as 1 Peter.
I have argued in my work that the rhetoric of our textual sources and
their scholarly interpretations is not only androcentric but also kyriocen-
tric. Hence, kyriocentric ‘honor-shame’ texts such as 1 Peter must be read
against their kyriarchal grain if one wishes to rediscover the arguments of
the recipients in and through an analysis of a writing, since rhetoric always
presupposes not only the voice of the speaker/writer/author(s) but always
also the voices and arguments of those whom the author(s) want(s) to per-
suade. Moreover, grammatically androcentric texts which use the mascu-
line form as generic must be read against the grain, since such androcentric
textual references to wo/men eradicate the presence of women and, like the
tip of an iceberg, indicate what has been lost to historical consciousness.

Reading against the Grain: Its N*T Context

In order to be able to read 1 Peter ‘against the grain’ of the author(s)’s argu-
ment and to reconstruct the possible counter-voices of the recipients, one
needs to contextualize the writing in terms of other early Christian sources
or traditions which the recipients might have known. I will discuss two N*T
texts whose traditions may have been known to the recipients and may have
informed their self-understanding and arguments. The first one is the pre-
Pauline baptismal formula of Gal. 3.28 and the second one is the Pente-
cost promise in Acts 2.17-18; both egalitarian traditions which might have
shaped the recipients’ self-understandings.

Galatians 3.28
Much scholarly work has tried to establish the meaning of Gal. 3.28, a very
influential text throughout Christian history and still today. To begin, schol-
ars must adjudicate how to translate the baptismal formula:
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 53

For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many
of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no
longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you
belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the
promise’ (Gal 3.26-29 nrsv).

In order to understand this text, one must carefully analyze the language
used and ask whether the expressions ‘Jew/Greek’ and ‘slave/free’ connote
only men/males, or whether they include wo/men so that they express that
wo/men as a matter of course belong to these groups of people. However,
if the first and second pair include both men and women, then the ques-
tion arises as to how the third pair ‘male and female’ is to be understood.
For, as Krister Stendahl has pointed out, it would be redundant to add the
expression ‘men and women’ to the other two pairs, if slaves, freepersons,
Jews and Greeks are understood as connoting both genders. If that is the
case, then it becomes understandable why the third pair of this baptismal
formula is missing in 1 Cor. 12.13 and Col. 3.11 (Stendahl 1996). Stendahl
suggested that the text refers to Gen. 1.27 and refers to marriage. However,
one can also read it as saying in Christ there is no longer gender. Just as
the kyriarchal structures of culture and those of slavery so also kyriarchal
gender structures are no longer existing ‘in Christ’.
After having settled on the translation of the text, one needs to explore
it in its social-historical context, which is also a reconstruction. In a careful
analysis of the extant materials on circumcision, Judith Lieu has pointed out
that no clear ritualization and the*logical understanding of wo/men’s con-
version to Judaism existed in the first century (Lieu 1994). However, at the
turn from the first to the second century, a clarification of the status of pros-
elytes and an explication of the understanding and rite of conversion seems
to have occurred. Shaye Cohen has argued, for instance, that one of the fac-
tors in developing a structured ritual may have been the needs of wo/men
converts (Cohen 1985, 1989, 1990). Hence, one may assume that this dis-
cussion was already developing in the first century.
Accordingly, Lieu reads the exchange between Justin Martyr, the
‘Christian’, and Trypho, ‘the Jew’, as a part of this ongoing debate about
wo/men proselytes. Justin cites Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah and Job as
having failed to observe them, and then adds, ‘I might also cite Sarah, the
wife of Abraham, Rebecca, the wife of Isaac, Rachel, the wife of Jacob and
Leah, and all the other such women up to the Mother of Moses, the faith-
ful servant, who observed none of these—do you think they will be saved?’
(Dial. 46.3). Interestingly, this argument lists the foremothers in terms of
their family status as wives and mothers. If, as in Greco-Roman religion,
a tradition existed in Judaism that defined the membership of wo/men in
terms of their affiliation as wives and mothers, then the declaration in Gal.
3.28c could be understood as standing over and against this tradition.
54 1 Peter

Earlier in the debate, Justin seeks to refute Trypho’s argument that cir-
cumcision was already enjoined upon Abraham by making reference to the
biblical wo/men. Justin argues that wo/men are part of the people of G*d,
and that they predate the giving of the commandment of circumcision to
Abraham and his sons, but are excluded from circumcision by their very
nature of not having a penis. Justin states,
Furthermore, that the female sex is unable to receive fleshly circumcision
demonstrates that this circumcision was given as a sign and not as a work
of righteousness. For God made women equally able to observe all that is
right and virtuous. We see that in physical form male and female have been
made differently, but we are confident that neither is righteous or unrigh-
teous on this basis but only on the basis of piety and righteousness (Dial.
23.5).

This argument fits with the tenor of the pre-Pauline baptismal formula
found in Gal. 3.28. It also underscores that Paul’s argument in the letter to
the Galatians is contrary to it. While in the interpretation of Gal. 3.28 the
meaning of ‘male and female’ is controverted, this is one aspect of the bap-
tismal formula to which the married freeborn wo/men could have appealed
in 1 Peter, whereas the first pair ‘Jew or Greek’ could have shaped the self-
understanding of the whole community. Slave wo/men, in turn, could have
challenged the division between free masters and enslaved servants in the
community.

Acts 2.17-18
To give another example, ‘reading against the grain’ is extremely important
for understanding not only the silenced voices of 1 Peter but also those of
the book of Acts which has shaped Christian historical self-understanding.
Shelly Matthews concludes her Guide to the Acts of the Apostles in this
series with an analysis of the citation of the prophet Joel interpreting the
events of Pentecost. She does so in order to show how the author’s narrative
of the Pentecost is constructed as
an argument made by Luke in the midst of a contest and struggle over the
meaning of spirit possession in the early community of Jesus believers.
Through it, Luke makes a rhetorical assertion concerning the manner by
which believers in Jesus became empowered by the Holy Spirit to preach
the gospel and the meaning that should be ascribed to that event (Matthews
2013: 73).

Matthews identifies seven rhetorical strategies which the author used

in order to ‘tame the tongues of fire’—that is, both to acknowledge the
manifestations of the Spirit in the Christian communities and at one and
the same time to contain the Spirit through his orderly narrative. The first
strategy is to give an orderly account of the Spirit’s descent, because many
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 55

Jesus followers in the past and the present claimed to be possessed by

divine Spirit and ‘experienced the Spirit as an indiscriminate force, one
that was no respecter of persons’ empowering men and women, slaves and
freeborn people from different nations and parts of the world (Matthews
2013: 75).
The author of Acts’ second strategy seeks to fix the time and space of
the Spirit’s coming in Jerusalem on a Jewish feast day, Pentecost, which
was associated with the covenant at Sinai and foretold by Jesus (Acts 1.4),
whereas the third strategy is to privilege the male apostles as recipients of
the Spirit. Only the twelve male apostles and Mary, the mother of Jesus, are
named members of the approximately 120 persons who are said to consti-
tute the earliest community in Jerusalem (Acts 1.12-15). Fourthly, the Spirit
appears in a public male space. While wo/men are mentioned in the begin-
ning as members of the group of believers (Acts 1.14), none of them were
qualified to be elected in order to replace Judas in the leading circle of the
apostles.
Making the unintelligible glossolalia plain was the fifth strategy of con-
tainment. ‘Rather than depicting the speech as unintelligible, Luke depicts it
as a form of prophecy that is perfectly clear…and comes closer to the realm
of public oratory than ecstatic worship’ (Matthews 2013: 78). The final two
strategies seek to give an authoritative explanation to the miracle by letting
Peter as the leader give a definite account of the fulfillment of Scripture. The
quotation from the prophet Joel is proof that Scripture has been fulfilled, but
the prophet’s egalitarian character is not elaborated. Rather, Joel is used as a
springboard to a missionary sermon.
Since Luke could have chosen a myriad of other passages from the
Hebrew Scriptures to explain the event of Pentecost, it is significant, accord-
ing to Matthews, that he uses the text of the prophet Joel. It is therefore rea-
sonable to conjecture that this text was central to the self-understanding
of the people to whom he wrote and expressed their experience and con-
victions to be Spirit-empowered people. The text’s egalitarian inclusive
meaning (‘your sons and daughters shall prophesy, …indeed on my male
and my female slaves in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they
shall prophesy’, Acts 2.16-18) can be understood as having shaped the self-
understanding and identity of the audience not only of this passage but also
of the whole of Acts.
One can assume that this Joel tradition was known to not only the readers
of Acts but also those of 1 Peter, since it transmits a longstanding tradition.
Hence, the author of Acts had to work hard to correct it. Taking this quote
from Joel as starting point for reading against the androcentric kyriarchal
grain, Shelly Matthews interprets the whole of Acts ‘against its grain’. In
the next section, I will attempt such a ‘reading against the grain’ of 1 Peter
in order to make the counter-voices of the text audible again. Such a close
56 1 Peter

reading is not a fanciful reconstruction but seeks rather to hear these voices
in and through the voice of the author, reading both the author and audience
in their socio-historical symbolic universe.

Making the Voices of the Subordinated Audible

Whether one assumes identity and sameness or constructs differences and
tensions between the recipients’ and the sender(s)’s rhetoric decisively deter-
mines one’s overall scholarly interpretation of 1 Peter. For instance, when
commentators see a seamless unity between the first, second and third chain
of rhetorical arguments, then they understand the first section to function as
a captatio benevolentiae (‘winning of good will’) that seeks to secure the
sympathy or support of the recipients for doing what the author(s) tell(s)
them to. Because in and through their conversion the recipients of 1 Peter
have been given the titles and prerogatives of the people of Israel, they
should now behave like Christ who suffered innocently. As G*d’s people
who live in the midst of Gentiles, they should ‘do good’ rather than commit
acts against the dominant cultural and political ethos. They should love the
‘brotherhood’ as much as possible because this is the ‘will of G*d’. In turn
the recipients may have insisted, I suggest, on a different self-understanding
and practice as is appropriate to the covenant people of G*d.
In short, what draws Elliott’s ire is my insistence that the strategy of
the author(s) is kyriarchal insofar as it uses the captatio benevolentiae to
the*logically rationalize and justify the ethos of subjection over and against
the different ethos subscribed to by ‘Messianist’ recipients, well-to-do
wives, the whole community vis-à-vis the imperium, and slave wo/men. It
is the focus on this ‘different ethos’ of the recipients that is at issue in the
contest between a critical feminist emancipatory reading and a colonizing
scholarly interpretation of the rhetoric and the rhetorical-historical situation
of the letter.
As has been argued in previous chapters, commentators agree that the
historical context of the letter is one in which the Christianoi as Messian-
ist Jews were seen as seditious and as a threat to colonial religious, cultural
and political Roman imperial ‘customs’. The independent conversion of
slave wo/men, freeborn ladies and younger people—when the master of the
house did not convert—already constituted an offence against the ‘ances-
tral’ laws and customs. According to these traditions, the pater familias—
like the emperor who was called the supreme Father of the Empire (pater
patriae)—had absolute power over his subordinates in the household and
determined the religion of its members. Hence, it was generally accepted
as a matter of good civil order that slave wo/men, freeborn wo/men and all
other members of the household practiced the religion of the master and
lord of the house.
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 57

As noted in the previous chapter, most 1 Peter scholars since the 1980s
have argued that the letter writer(s) are concerned with ‘honor and shame’,
construe the meaning of the expression ‘house of G*d’ not as temple but
as ‘household’, and advocate submission as well as the hegemonic ethos
of ‘doing good’. In this way, the recipients will not be attacked as wrong-
doers. Hence, they surmise that 1 Peter advocates limited accommodation to
the kyriarchal order of the house and state for missionary purposes as long
as such acculturation does not interfere with their confession of ‘Christian’
calling. If one reads the title Christos as meaning ‘Messiah’, one might be
able to argue that the author(s) understand(s) the function of ‘Christian’
calling as preserving messianic self-identity and praxis. However, such an
interpretation does not square with the author(s)’s rhetoric of submission to
the authorities and institutions of the Empire.
Reading ‘against the grain’, one can see a tension or conflict between
the first and the subsequent rhetorical argumentation, and can then under-
stand the second and third string of arguments as a corrective rhetorical
response to this tension. In so doing, one can see that the ethos and self-
understanding of the holy people of G*d stands in tension with the ethos of
submission and the socio-cultural hegemonic ethos of ‘honor and shame’.
Such a ‘reading against the grain’ and rhetorical analysis understands the
rhetorical tension between the first and the following segments of argumen-
tation as provoking a rhetorical debate in the community about what the
‘will of G*d’ demands. To ‘hear this debate into speech’, we have to ‘read
against the grain’.

Debating the ‘Will of G*d’

For instance, slave wo/men could have argued that it was ‘G*d’s will’ to be
treated justly as holy members of G*d’s elect people rather than to suffer
patiently the sexual abuse and crass mistreatment at the hands of their mas-
ters. They might have argued that resisting the sexual abuse of their mas-
ters will be harshly punished and not seen as ‘doing good’ but as neglecting
their duty to their master. Hence, it was imperative for them to be ransomed
by the community since their masters treated them as sexual objects. Fur-
thermore, freeborn, well-to-do wives could have argued that it was their
Christian calling to proclaim the ‘good news’ to their Gentile husbands. If
their husbands prohibited their Christian practice and they were not able to
convert them to the lifestyle of the elect people of G*d, it was the ‘will of
G*d’ to separate from them by divorcing them. They could have bolstered
their argument with reference to Paul, who supported wo/men’s ‘marriage
free’ state. Freeborn wo/men married to Christian husbands could have
argued that they are not to be treated as inferior, ‘weaker vessel’ but as
members of a royal priesthood and co-heirs of the gracious gift of life in
58 1 Peter

the messianic community. If treated badly, married wo/men of considerable

means (‘ladies’) could have left their husbands on religious grounds and
divorced them. As Jewish proselytes, they could have pointed to their fore-
mother Sarah, whose course of action G*d commanded Abraham to obey in
Gen. 21.12 (Clark Kroeger 2004).
All of the members of the community could have argued that the cove-
nant of G*d commanded that they separate from Gentile society and resist
Roman imperial culture because their ‘low class’ status as non-citizens and
migrants had been changed in and through their conversion. They were now
bound together in love and respect and formed a royal priesthood and holy
nation, a temple of the Spirit. In consequence, they could not possibly pay
obeisance to the emperor, his governors, and other cultural institutional
authorities. Thus, like the community of Qumran or Philo’s Therapeutae,
they advocated a separatist stance which would not completely avoid but
perhaps reduce harassment and suffering, since they would not have to mix
daily with their Gentile neighbors.
This alternative separatist strategy was made possible by a messianic
consciousness that was in tension with that of the colonial society and cul-
ture of Asia Minor. As I have suggested in In Memory of Her, such a con-
sciousness, which might have been shared by the recipients of 1 Peter comes
to the fore in a pre-Pauline fragment preserved in 2 Cor. 6.14–7.1 (Schüssler
Fiorenza 1983: 193-94):
Do not get misyoked (or mismatched) with unbelievers!
For what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness
Or what community has light with darkness?
Or what common lot a believer with an unbeliever?
What agreement is there between G*d’s temple and idols?
For we are the temple of the living G*d; as G*d has said:
“I will dwell in them and walk among them;
And I will be their G*d
And they shall be my people.
Therefore come out of their midst and separate
Says the Kyrios.
And touch nothing unclean.
Then I will receive you,
And I will be a father to you,
And you shall be my sons and daughters,
Says the Kyrios who holds all power.
Since we have these promises, beloved,
Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of the flesh and spirit.

Making holiness perfect in the fear of G*d

The affinities between this text and 1 Peter are striking. In 1 Peter, the self-
understanding of the ‘siblinghood’ who was once a non-people is expressed
with traditional language and images: spiritual house or temple, priests
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 59

offering spiritual sacrifices, elect, holy, ‘defilement of the flesh’ and fear of
G*d. Those who were once a non-people are called in political-cultic lan-
guage ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, the people of G*d
who proclaim the saving deeds and mighty power of G*d’ (2.9). They are
a ‘brotherhood’ with G*d as their ‘father’, they are ‘beloved’, and ‘called
from darkness into light’. Therefore they might have believed that they
were to separate from the Gentiles/Romans, practice Kashrut, trust in
G*d’s promises, form a different society from that of the Gentiles/Romans,
and live a sanctified life as ‘non-citizens’ and ‘transients’ in hope of experi-
encing soon the messianic day of liberation and glory.
If one does not translate the first imperative of the pre-Pauline text
transmitted in 2 Corinthians as ‘mismatch’ or ‘cross-breeding’, but with
‘mis-yoke’ or with ‘unevenly yoked together’, the anti-colonial political
overtones of such an oppositional the*logical consciousness come to the
fore. Since the metaphor of the yoke usually refers to burdens imposed by
foreign oppressors (Isa. 9.4, 10.27, 14.25; Jer. 27.8, 11-12; Gen. 27.40; 1
Kgs 12.4), the community might have understood itself in opposition to
Roman imperial rule. The most striking adaptation of scriptural texts is the
alteration of the promise given to King David in 2 Sam. 7.14: ‘I will be a
father to him and he shall be a son to me’. In 1 Peter, G*d’s promise of ‘son-
ship’ is changed to include the ‘sons and daughters’. The daughters as well
as the sons are members of G*d’s elect people and royal priesthood.
Scholars have argued that the oppositional consciousness expressed here
in the language of Scripture cannot be of Jewish provenance. However, noth-
ing speaks against a Jewish origin of this pre-Pauline tradition that seems
also to inform the the*logical universe of the recipients of 1 Peter. Rather,
it seems to fit well into the the*logy of the (Hellenistic) Jewish (Christian)
missionary movement. The members of this movement conceived of them-
selves as a new creation through Christ’s (i.e. Messiah’s) resurrection and as
the eschatological people gifted with the presence of divine wisdom. Both
daughters and sons, both young and old, both male and female slaves are
graced with the gifts of the Spirit and have received prophetic endowment
(cf. Acts 2.17-18). They are children of G*d, the holy people, the temple-
community among whom the Spirit dwells.
In sum, the recipients of 1 Peter share with the sender(s) a common social
situation (i.e. Roman colonialism) and a common the*logical universe and
consciousness that consists of an ‘elevated’ religious self-understanding.
However, they seem to have disagreed with each other on how to relate this
elevated communal self-understanding to their colonial social-political sit-
uation. The author(s) advise(s) ‘limited adaptation’ in a difficult situation
of harassment and suffering, insofar as he counsels opposition only in reli-
gious but not in socio-political terms. Some of the recipients in turn seem to
have affirmed both their status as non-citizen and transients under Roman
60 1 Peter

colonialism and as the elect people of G*d in the diaspora, but might have
advocated separation from their dominant culture and society.
Withdrawal from oppressive societal structures whenever possible, they
might have argued, would reduce conflict and suffering because it would
minimize contact with unbelievers. Slave wo/men would have practiced
this communal ethos of separation by running away from unjust masters
and mistresses, whereas freeborn married wo/men may have left their Gen-
tile husbands if they could not convert them. Both actions would have
caused problems with the wider society and with the ‘master/patron class’
within the community itself. If the whole community consisted primarily of
proselytes who were now a part of the Jewish messianic opposition against
Roman cultural and religious imperialism, they would have been suspected
as Christianoi (i.e. revolutionary Messianists), who were a threat to the
dominant imperial society.
This situation of suspicion would have been aggravated if the ‘broth-
erhood’ continued to honor run-away slave wo/men or divorced wives as
members in their midst. Hence, on religious and socio-political grounds,
the recipients might have been interested in reducing contact with Gentile
neighbors as much as possible. This seems to have been the concrete rhe-
torical problem and situation which the author(s) of 1 Peter sought to over-
come by transposing the dominant cultural rhetoric of ‘honor and shame’,
subjection and domination into a the*logical key. As E.A. Judge suggests,
it is likely that the rhetoric of 1 Peter, which demands the subjection to the
kyriarchal authorities of all members of the community—slave wo/men,
freeborn wo/men and younger members—expresses the interests of the
‘owner and patron class’ in the community who felt that their prerogatives
were undermined (Judge 1960: 60, 71). Sent from the metropolis by Jewish
colonials living in the heart of the Roman Empire, 1 Peter advocates these
interests over and against an alternative separatist strategy that seeks to pro-
tect the counter-kyriarchal practices of those doubly marginalized and jeop-
ardized by the hegemonic colonial ethos.

Conclusion
I want to conclude by paraphrasing a student’s reaction after reading this
chapter. She explains what such a ‘reading against the grain’ taught her:
Reading this chapter I learnt how to reconstruct the meaning of a bibli-
cal text by bringing the hidden voice of the inscribed audience to the fore.
It was like making the previous two-dimensional picture in[to] a three-
dimensional one. Through practicing ‘reading against the grain’ I was
able to better understand the argument than merely following the author’s
statements. I also learnt that I should be aware of the assumptions I am
making while reading or listening to another person’s argument. Finally, by
 3.   Reconstructing the Arguments of the Subordinated 61

‘reading against the grain’ and listening for the audience’s voice I learnt to
see the situation of the socio-religious context as very real, wrestling with
arguments that are going on still today.

I have attempted to show in this chapter how ‘reading against the grain’
of 1 Peter as a rhetorical text makes the submerged and silenced voices, the
egalitarian Spirit and self-understanding of the first-century intended read-
ers audible again. We can rediscover their faith and ethos in and through
the reading of canonical texts such as 1 Peter by reading against the kyri-
archal grain of the author(s)’s rhetoric, be it ‘Luke’ or ‘Peter’. The history
of early Christian beginnings needs to be rewritten in and through reread-
ing the rhetoric of biblical texts in which are inscribed the arguments of not
only the authors but also the readers. We can do so by ‘listening into speech’
the silenced voices of the recipients of 1 Peter.
 Chapter 4

Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today

In the previous chapters, I focused on a historical-rhetorical analysis of

1 Peter and underscored the inscriptions not only of imperial kyriarchal
power and alternative visions but also of the recipients’ self-understanding
as Jewish messianic people of G*d. To that end, I have focused on the dis-
courses of election and of subordination and submission to the kyrios—the
emperor, the slave master, the husband, the freeborn, propertied, elite male.
Those who are asked to submit (the whole community of resident aliens,
slave wo/men and elite wives) are told that they must do so in order to
avoid the impression that they are subversive of the kyriarchal order of the
Roman Empire. They must accept suffering so that they will be accused
only of being Christians, of belonging to the messianic community, and not
of undermining the kyriarchal order of empire and household. As my anal-
ysis of scholarship has sought to demonstrate, a hermeneutic of apprecia-
tion and consent will justify the kyriarchal rhetoric of 1 Peter in cultural or
the*logical-religious terms instead of critically investigating it in order to
dislodge its inscriptions of empire.
My rhetorical reading of 1 Peter in the previous chapters emphasized
how to read the text from the perspective of the historical author(s) and
audience. I stressed the importance of ‘reading against the grain’ in order
to deconstruct the text’s persuasive power and to rediscover the submerged
voices and beliefs of those whom 1 Peter seeks to persuade. In this chapter,
I will explicitly reflect on the hermeneutical moves I have made. I will also
suggest further questions for decolonizing the consciousness of readers who
are shaped by the inscriptions of empire in and through the process of read-
ing/hearing this scriptural text. With Wayne Booth, I will especially ask the
ethical question that must accompany all rhetorical analysis: What does the
text do to those who submit to its kyriarchal world of vision?

The Kyriarchal Ethos of Household and Empire

1 Peter is part of a series of texts in the N*T which demand submission to
the kyrios. These texts, classified as ‘household codes’—a label derived
from Lutheran teaching on social status and roles (Ständelehre)—are
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 63

primarily concerned with three sets of relationships: wife and husband,

slave and master, son/children and father. The central interest of these texts
consists in bolstering the authority of the kyrios, or the pater familias (the
father of the extended household), by demanding submission and obedience
from the familia (the extended family, from which our notion of the ‘family’
is derived), including wives, slaves, children, and all of the less powerful
members of the community.
Familia did not refer to the ‘nuclear family’ in the Roman Empire, but
instead encompassed all those who were under the authority of the paterfa-
milias (‘father of the household’): the mater familias (‘mother of the house-
hold’), children, relatives and slaves. Related to the familia (‘extended
family’) was the domus (‘house’ in Latin), or the oikos (‘household’ in
Greek). The domus included all those affiliated with the household, not only
the members of the extended familia but also clients, day-workers and even
visitors. Much more expansive than contemporary notions of ‘family’, the
Roman household was thus an economic production center, a central site of
education and training in trade and craft skills, the guarantor of social ser-
vices, and the locus of religious life (Barclay 1997).
Politically, the household functioned as the microcosm of the Empire and
the ‘nursery’ of the state. As Cicero so succinctly states:
The first bond of union is that between husband and wife; the next that
between parents and children; then we find one domus with everything in
common. And this is the foundation of civil government, the nursery (semi-
narium), as it were of the state (De officiis 17.54).

The emperor was called ‘pater patrum’ (‘the father of all fathers’) and the
pater patriae (‘the father of the fatherland’). Thus, the emperor was the ulti-
mate father and lord (kyrios) par excellence. According to Greco-Roman
political ideology, a male citizen’s authority rested in his dominance over
his extended household. Likewise, within this kyriarchal ideology the order
of subjection/subordination in the Empire was mirrored in the order of sub-
mission in the kyriarchal household.
This pattern of domination and subjection does not always include
all of the four social status groups outlined above—freeborn well-to-do
fathers and mothers of the extended family, freeborn children and rela-
tives, slave wo/men, paid workers. Occasionally, when members of the
kyriarchal household are addressed in other ‘household code’ texts such
as in Colossians and Ephesians, only some of the subordinate groups
are mentioned. Most importantly, the ‘household code’ text in 1 Peter
includes an imperial code text which demands obedience to the political
powers of the Roman Empire and is used to inculcate the ethos of submis-
sion for the household as well as the Christian community understood as
‘household of G*d’.
64 1 Peter

The injunction to submission found in 1 Peter occurs already in the authen-

tic Pauline letters, for example in Romans 13 and 1 Corinthians 14 (Briggs
Kittredge 1998). It therefore cannot be attributed solely to what exegetes call
‘early Catholicism’. While this pattern of submission functions differently
in various early Christian documents and social-ecclesial-historical contexts,
this imperial conception and ethos of the submission of the family, state and
church in terms of the kyriarchal household seems to be characteristic of the
pattern. Since this pattern of submission is ingrained also in Western culture
and Christian ethos, we need to deconstruct it not only by critically reading
the texts of Scripture but also by paying attention to how we have internalized
such an ethos contrary to democratic religious self-understandings. Hence, it
is important that we deconstruct such internalized scriptural kyriarchal texts
if we should not continue their oppressive impact.
To question this kyriarchal order and to destabilize the kyriarchal house-
hold was a threat to the order of the state. Furthermore, those male citizens
who could not control their households risked endangering the stability of the
state. Hence, the emperor, like any other elite male, had to project and main-
tain a firm patriarchal image and to appear in full control of his household
in order to show that he was to be trusted as the ruler of the Empire. Price
observes, ‘The stability of the imperial rule was perceived to lie in the trans-
mission of power within the imperial family and, in consequence, consider-
able importance was attached to the whole imperial house’ (Price 1984: 162).
In short, the N*T teaching on ‘male headship and female subordination’
reflects this oikos-ideal of empire that calls for submission and subjection
of members of the household, officers of the Empire, citizens, vassals and
provinces. It does not just affect elite married men and wo/men and their
relationships, but it also calls for submission and subordination of all the
subjects of the Roman Empire: freeborn men and wo/men, slave wo/men
and men, clients, resident aliens. However, it must be borne in mind that
the so-called ‘household-code’ texts are not descriptive but prescriptive.
Thus, 1 Peter’s rhetoric of subjection is best understood as a rhetorical
response to the egalitarian ethos of ekklēsia (the democratic assembly)
which met in houses (oikoi) and was based around notions of equality and
mutual wellbeing (Lassen 1997). When reading texts of subordination as
Scripture or as significant cultural texts, we internalize their ethos of dom-
ination and submission either as ‘word of G*d’ or as important cultural
heritage. Hence, it is important that we detoxify the heritage of 1 Peter in
and through a critical ‘reading against the grain’.

The Decolonizing Dance of Interpretation

In light of 1 Peter’s scriptural rhetoric of submission to the Empire as the
ultimate kyriarchal household, we must question the prevalent hermeneutics
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 65

of appreciation of and consent to such scriptural texts. In contrast to a

hermeneutics of consent, we need to engage in a critical hermeneutic and
the spiraling steps (dance) of decolonizing interpretation. In so doing, we
may engender a critical process of detoxification and conscientization. For
this reason, we should not approach the text with a historical or the*logical
hermeneutics of acceptance but rather need to instigate a critical feminist
hermeneutical process of decolonizing 1 Peter’s texts of subordination and
their the*logical rhetoric which has been inscribed in public discourses and
in the experience, memory and imagination of contemporary readers.
The hermeneutical method of consciousness-detoxification or consci-
entization (Freire 2008)—which I have developed in Bread not Stone,
fine-tuned in But She Said and practiced in Wisdom Ways (Schüssler Fio-
renza 1984, 1992, 2001)—seeks to lift into critical reflection the cultural
and religious values and reading frameworks which readers internal-
ize in and through hearing and reading of biblical texts. At the same time,
such a method creates a critical space for transforming wo/men’s self-
understanding, self-perception and self-alienation. By analyzing scriptural
texts’ power of persuasion, it seeks to engender biblical interpretation as a
critical decolonizing practice against all forms of domination.
Such a hermeneutical process of decolonizing reading, cultural-political
consciousness-raising and religious imagining can never be finished once
and for all. Rather, it must be repeated again and again because every new
reading of such internalized imperial inscriptions tends to work ‘hand in
glove’ with cultural-religious ‘common sense’ assumptions. By decon-
structing the rhetoric and politics of imperial inequality and subordina-
tion inscribed in biblical texts and reinforced through the reading of such
texts as religious Scriptures or cultural classics, we are able to detoxify our
minds and move towards ever-fresh articulations of radical democratic reli-
gious possibilities and emancipatory practices.
Whether one thinks of the interpretive process as detoxifying or decolo-
nizing, as emancipative technique or conscientizing strategy, seven herme-
neutical moves are, in my judgment, crucial: the hermeneutics of experience,
of domination, of suspicion, of evaluation, of imagination, of remembrance
and of transformation. These interpretive moves can also be understood as
hermeneutical lenses. Their interpretive practices are not to be construed
simply as successive independent methodological steps of inquiry. Rather,
they are best understood as intersecting interpretive moves and movements
and as detoxifying hermeneutical methods. These moves, or steps, interact
with each other simultaneously in the process of deconstructing the inscrip-
tions of kyriarchy in particular biblical or cultural texts in today’s context
of the globalization of inequality and poverty.
While the classic ‘hermeneutical circle’ tends to be closed, a critical
feminist hermeneutics moves in never-ending circling spirals. A critical
66 1 Peter

feminist emancipatory interpretation of cultural and religious texts such as

1 Peter must be repeated differently in different situations and from differ-
ent perspectives. It is exciting because different meanings emerge in every
new reading of texts such as 1 Peter. Such a detoxifying and decolonizing
process of biblical interpretation has a ‘doubled’ reference point: our con-
temporary present and the biblical past.

‘Dancing’ with 1 Peter

The seven hermeneutical strategies, or ‘set of technologies’, for a criti-
cal decolonizing reading of 1 Peter in the context of empire are guided by
‘democratics’. Chela Sandoval’s ‘methodology of the oppressed’, proposes
a set of technologies for decolonizing the social [and religious] imagina-
tion. These technologies…are all guided by democratics, the practitioners’
commitment to the equal distribution of power. They are technologies that
seek to fashion the ‘dissident consciousness’ of revolutionary, mobile, and
global coalitions of citizen-activists who are allied through the apparatus of
emancipation (Sandoval 2000: 183).

If the tendency of texts and the ideologies inscribed in them is to ‘natu-

ralize’ structures of domination by eliminating their socio-historical lineage
from consciousness, then it is important in a process of conscientization to
lift into awareness that such constructions of kyriarchal difference and ide-
ologies of domination are historical and not normative. In the following, I
will indicate but cannot comprehensively develop such a decolonizing pro-
cess of reading.

Hermeneutics of Experience
A hermeneutics of experience begins not simply with individualized and
privatized experience. Rather, it starts with a critical reflection on how expe-
rience with a text such as 1 Peter is shaped by the socio-political location of
the interpreter. What I see depends on where I stand! Hence, a hermeneutics
of experience critically renders problematic not only the social-religious
and intellectual locations of contemporary interpreters but also those of bib-
lical texts. This reading lens thus works in relation to global struggles for
survival and wellbeing.
A hermeneutics of experience approaches a text such as 1 Peter by
reflecting on readers’ experiences in relation to this text. With respect to
the experiences inscribed in 1 Peter and those of reading/hearing this text,
readers may ask: What kind of experiences does 1 Peter evoke? Does the
experience inscribed in 1 Peter ‘resonate’ with our own experiences? What
kinds of emotions and sentiments are engendered by the text? Whose expe-
rience stands in the center and whose experience is ruled out, silenced or
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 67

marginalized? Are the arguments of the letter to inculcate such subordina-

tion familiar or are they alien to us? Which statements make us angry and
encourage us to struggle against injustice? Is 1 Peter preached or empha-
sized at certain occasions? How does its rhetoric of submission reinforce
‘feminine’-submissive behavior today? How does the text re-inscribe prej-
udices of race and class which we have experienced? Are the statements of
submission appealing to our imagination and why? Which statements have,
in our experience, perpetrated the continued violence of empire?
In short, a hermeneutics of experience compels us to look at our own
experiences and reactions as we read 1 Peter. For example, post-biblical
feminists engage in a purely deconstructive reading of such a scriptural text
as 1 Peter because their experiences with religion and the Bible have been
oppressive and self-alienating. Jewish or Christian identified feminists, in
turn, have sought to develop both a critical reading and an appreciation of
the Bible because their experiences of biblical reading have not just been
negative but have also inspired their self-affirmation and struggles for lib-
eration. Or, to give another example: While it is assumed that the oppres-
sive social system of overt slavery supposedly no longer exists today, covert
slavery in and through growing devastating poverty and ever-increasing and
lucrative international sex-trade is often not recognized. Nevertheless, mil-
lions of wo/men and children are forced or duped into it. Many will feel
guilty and fear the wrath of G*d because of their ‘sinfulness’ at having been
exposed to such exploitation and sexual abuse.
Christian wo/men who have been socialized into a literalist understand-
ing of the Bible as the word of G*d might interpret 1 Peter as telling them
that they should accept abuse, suffering and beatings from their husbands
or partners as the will of G*d. When they experience domestic violence
and abuse, they often blame themselves and accept it as their fault. When
preaching this text, clergy people often still underscore that wo/men should
suffer just as Christ has suffered.
As we read 1 Peter, these and similar questions seek to identify and name
both our experiences and how they connect with the experiences inscribed
in the text of 1 Peter itself. Hence, it is important that a decolonizing read-
ing help us to get in touch with such experiences of being silenced, of being
asked to accept second-class citizenship, suffering and abuse, and to reflect
critically on them in terms of a hermeneutics of domination.

Hermeneutics of Domination
A hermeneutics of domination investigates how the rhetoric of 1 Peter
inscribes the ethos and structures of empire and how contemporary inter-
pretations continue to re-inscribe them. How are the experiences of wo/
men mentioned in 1 Peter textualized not only in terms of gender but also
68 1 Peter

in terms of race, class, ethnicity and religion? Such a hermeneutics not only
asks for the experiences of contemporary wo/men with a particular text
such as 1 Peter and its interpretations but also reflects on how our social,
cultural and religious location(s) shape(s) our experience with and our reac-
tions to a particular biblical text such as 1 Peter.
To that end, it engages the critical analytics of domination (kyriarchy),
which I have discussed throughout this Guide. As I have noted previously,
what kind of systemic analysis we adopt will crucially determine our inter-
pretation and internalization of 1 Peter. In the previous chapters, we have
explored the historical and literary-cultural inscriptions of the ethos of kyri-
archy in 1 Peter. In this chapter, I want to emphasize that this needs to be
done not only on the literary-textual and historical level but also on the con-
temporary level of interpretation, since every ‘faithful’ reading internalizes
the letter’s kyriarchal ethos in the process of ‘making sense’ of it. It does
so because much interpretation resonates with the contemporary systems
of domination and subordination. It is not accidental that the anti-feminist
Christian Right has made the family, sexuality, and diminishing the citizen
rights of wo/men and LGBTIQA people the central cornerstone of its polit-
ical rhetoric. The Bible is invoked because it teaches the divinely ordained
subordination of wo/men and the creational differences between the sexes
as well as the abomination of homosexuality. Since the rhetoric of submis-
sion in 1 Peter is rooted in the rhetoric of the imperial household, Right-
wing biblical political rhetoric is often effective among faithful wo/men; it
seems to defend American kyriarchal family and society structures in the
name of biblical Christianity.
A hermeneutics of kyriarchal domination makes it possible for us to crit-
ically reflect on how relations of domination operate to delimit the range of
democratic options that we as individual readers can choose in constructing
our unique identities as individuals. It also makes it possible for us to exam-
ine how we access and engage with cultural knowledges such as the Bible.
It helps us to explore how these different expressions of self- and group-
identity are at work in the process of interpreting a text such as 1 Peter. It
also inspires us to seek within biblical texts for possibilities to transform our
identities over and against such socially defined categories of domination.
For instance, we will read 1 Peter differently depending on whether
we engage a Thomistic, Aristotelian, Freudian, capitalist, anarchist, post-
colonial, womanist, queer, gender or critical feminist systemic analysis
of domination. A feminist liberationist approach prioritizes wo/men’s
struggles against multiplicative structures of oppression as hermeneutical
frames and spaces from where to read. A systemic analysis of the socio-
cultural and political-religious structures of domination seeks to identify
not only contemporary situations of domination but also those inscribed
in biblical texts.
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 69

With the help of such a critical feminist analytic and hermeneutic of dom-
ination, we first explore and articulate our own social location and partici-
pation in kyriarchal power relations. In so doing, we become conscious of
how our experiences of reading 1 Peter are constructed by kyriarchal rela-
tions of domination and how they then work to construct our self-identity in
terms of the intersecting structures of gender, race, class, religion or nation-
alism that define our social location. However, social location must not be
mistaken for an identity category but rather is to be understood as a category
that articulates our differential embeddedness in systems of domination.
Engaging this detoxifying reading strategy, one would ask questions on
the level of text such as: Which Roman imperial socio-political and reli-
gious values does the rhetoric of 1 Peter articulate? Does its call to ‘suffer as
Christ has suffered’ and to subordination as the foremother Sarah has done
reflect imperial values that reinforce domination and exploitation? Does this
rhetoric have the same meaning for all members of the community or does
its meaning depend on the social location of those to whom it is addressed?
The hermeneutical strategy of domination explores these historical-
the*logical questions in the interest of contemporary meaning-making and
thus asks: Into what kind of practices of empire and identity slots of domi-
nation and subordination are we socialized today? Are we using the kind of
lenses we are taught in school and university to read the rhetoric of 1 Peter?
How is our reading of 1 Peter shaped by kyriarchal socializations, privi-
leges and prejudices that inscribe systemic racism, heterosexism, class dis-
crimination and nationalism? How does this text function as ideological
legitimization of the ethos of subordination? How do both legitimizations
of kyriarchal domination—the Christological legitimization of suffering
and the ethical appeal to subordination—inculcate and legitimate collab-
oration in globalized oppression today? In short, a hermeneutics of domi-
nation asks us to think critically about the ongoing life and function of the
text of 1 Peter as both oppressive and liberating in our contemporary soci-
ety and world.

Hermeneutics of Suspicion
As biblical readers, we are often taught to approach the Bible with a herme-
neutics of respect, acceptance, consent and obedience. Instead of cultivating
a hermeneutics of appreciation and consent, I have argued, a critical femi-
nist interpretation for liberation needs to engage in a hermeneutics of suspi-
cion that places on all biblical texts the label ‘Caution, could be dangerous
to your health and survival!’ Texts such as Lev. 20.13 (‘If a man lies with
a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination;
they shall be put to death’), Tit. 1.12 (‘It was one of them, their very own
prophet who said: “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons”.
70 1 Peter

That testimony is true…’) or 1 Peter’s characterization of wives as ‘weaker

vessels’ (3.7) cannot be approached with a hermeneutics of empathy, appre-
ciation and consent but must instead be approached with a hermeneutics of
suspicion.
The primary task of a hermeneutics of suspicion is to disentangle the
ideological functions of kyriarchal text and commentary. Yet, such a her-
meneutical process must not be misunderstood as peeling away layers of
debris in order to recover a pre-given, essentialist ontological reality. Kyri-
archal language does not cover up but rather constructs reality in terms
of exclusion and domination and then mystifies its own constructions by
naturalizing them. Hence, a hermeneutics of suspicion is concerned with
the distorted ways in which not only wo/men’s but all subordinated peo-
ple’s actual presences and practices are constructed and represented in and
through grammatically kyriocentric language and media.
For that reason, a hermeneutics of suspicion must problematize kyriocen-
tric language on both the level of text (e.g. ‘brotherhood’ in 1 Peter) and on
the level of contemporary meaning-making, because such language makes
marginalized wo/men doubly invisible. For instance, affirmative-action job
advertisements will invite ‘African Americans, Native Americans, Asian
Americans, and women to apply’, as if African Americans, Native Ameri-
cans, Asian Americans are only men and not also wo/men. To a larger extent
than we are often aware, how one understands androcentric language deter-
mines also one’s understanding of early Christianity and of our world today.
Since readers align themselves with the dominant voice represented by
the andro-kyriocentric text, a hermeneutics of suspicion critically analyzes
dominant strategies of meaning-making. In addition, it draws out and makes
manifest masculine/feminine, superior/inferior, we/others roles and values
inscribed in the text. Moreover, it engages in a conscious articulation of the
ideological strategies of a text such as 1 Peter and makes apparent the text’s
interaction and resonance with our experiences and cultural value-systems.
Finally, it seeks to determine and circumscribe the rhetorical situation and
context in which the letter was formulated and in which it operates today.
For example, studies on ‘Woman in the Bible’ often understand only
1 Peter’s admonitions for wives as speaking about wo/men because they
take the androcentric text at face value. For this reason, they overlook that
the admonitions to household slaves are also addressed to wo/men. Thus in
a ‘normal’ reading of the text that is not aware of andro-kyriocentric lan-
guage but unconsciously ‘naturalizes’ grammatical gender, slave wo/men
are erased from historical and contemporary consciousness. Or, to give
another example that I have discussed already, 1 Peter names the community
with the grammatically masculine term ‘brotherhood’, although the admo-
nition of freeborn wives indicates that wo/men were active members of the
community. In short, a hermeneutics of suspicion not only scrutinizes the
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 71

language of the text but also lays open the inscribed kyriarchal the*logical
tendencies and those that are re-inscribed by contemporary interpretations.
In 1 Peter, a hermeneutics of suspicion opens up to critical scrutiny the
Christological legitimization of suffering in the admonition to slave wo/
men or points to the scriptural legitimization of the subordination of free-
born wives, even to unbelieving husbands.

Hermeneutics of Evaluation
A hermeneutics of evaluation presupposes and completes a hermeneutics
of suspicion. It is necessary because texts such as 1 Peter always make
meaning in context and thus they have a multiplicity of meanings. For this
reason, this hermeneutical strategy seeks to name and assess the inscriptions
of empire in 1 Peter and its traditions as well in contemporary discourses in
terms of a feminist liberationist scale of values. Just as a hermeneutics of
suspicion, so also a hermeneutics of critical evaluation is difficult to prac-
tice for readers who have been socialized into a hermeneutics of trust and/
or obedience towards scriptural texts such as 1 Peter.
Such a hermeneutics of evaluation does not take the kyriocentric N*T
text such as 1 Peter and its claim to divine authority at face value but rather
scrutinizes it as to its ideological functions in the interest of domination.
Emotionally, it might be difficult to engage in such a hermeneutics of eval-
uation either because we have internalized biblical authority as unques-
tionable or our experiences with the Bible have been positive and edifying
because we were not aware of its texts of violence. Hence, we need to work
through our emotions, anxieties and fears and to ask what stake we have in
upholding a hermeneutics of appreciation and consent before we can fruit-
fully engage in a hermeneutics of critical evaluation of 1 Peter.
Accordingly, a hermeneutics of evaluation borrows from the previous
steps and seeks to adjudicate the oppressive tendencies as well as the lib-
eratory possibilities inscribed in a biblical text such as 1 Peter, its function
in contemporary struggles for liberation, and its ‘resonance’ with wo/men’s
experiences of equality today. It accomplishes this not once and for all
but must be repeated again and again in a variety of social locations and
situations.
A hermeneutics of evaluation has thus a double reference point. The first
is cultural-ideological. Language and texts such as 1 Peter are not self-
enclosed systems of signs but have performative power—either they legit-
imize or challenge power structures, serve to ‘naturalize’ or to interrupt
hegemonic world-views, or inculcate dominant or emancipatory values.
For instance, Sheila Redmond points out that the biblical values of suffer-
ing, forgiveness, purity, need for redemption and obedience to authority
figures—which I would add are also inscribed in 1 Peter—prevent recovery
72 1 Peter

from child sexual abuse and continue to dis-empower victims (Redmond

1989). If such values which prevent recovery are espoused by a biblical
text such as 1 Peter, they must be named and made conscious as kyriar-
chal values that perpetuate suffering and abuse. Consequently, they must be
judged for their possibly debilitating effects in particular situations where
such abuse exists or is remembered. The key question of a hermeneutics of
evaluation is: What does a text such as 1 Peter do to those who submit to its
world of vision and values?
The second reference point for a hermeneutics of evaluation is religious-
the*logical. In a Christian context, biblical texts such as 1 Peter are under-
stood and proclaimed as the Word of G*d. Canonization compels us to
make sense out of such scriptural texts in such a way that we accept, consent
and submit to them. This hermeneutics of submission and consent under-
stands canonical authority as kyriarchal authority that requires subordina-
tion. Such an understanding of canonical authority in terms of the the*logy
of kyriarchal identity fosters exclusion and vilification of the other.
To the contrary, a hermeneutics of evaluation does not categorize bib-
lical texts such as 1 Peter in a dualistic fashion either as oppressive or as
emancipatory. Rather, it seeks to adjudicate again and again how biblical
texts such as 1 Peter function in particular situations. Its socio-cultural cri-
terion or standard of evaluation is the wellbeing of every wo/man (which
includes the principle of human rights as wo/men’s rights), which must be
established and reasoned out in terms of a systemic analysis of kyriarchal
domination. For the*logical reasons, a hermeneutics of evaluation for proc-
lamation insists that biblical religions must cease to preach kyriarchal texts
such as 1 Peter as the ‘word of G*d’, since by doing so we continue to pro-
claim G*d as legitimating kyriarchal oppression. Instead, it argues, biblical
religions must adopt the socio-cultural criterion of evaluation and search for
visions of wellbeing in biblical texts such as 1 Peter that proclaim the divine
as a power for justice and wellbeing.
In order to adjudicate the ethical implications and impact of 1 Peter’s
rhetoric of subordination and its effects in the past and in the present, we
must establish a critical scale of values and visions. Since such values are
always context- and theory-dependent, they cannot be fixed once and for all
but must be discussed and debated in each new situation. Therefore, bibli-
cal interpretation is not able to do its work of detoxification without simul-
taneously engaging a critical feminist the*logy and ethics.
The academic disciplinary divisions between biblical studies, the*logy,
ethics, hermeneutics and ritual break down in the face of emancipative prac-
tices of evaluation. Moreover, a hermeneutics of evaluation presupposes the
vision of a world and church different from that of empire and searches for
it in texts like 1 Peter. We may not yet experience the realization of such
a different world of wellbeing, but it lives in our dreams and hopes that
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 73

inspire us to continue the struggles for the wellbeing of all without excep-
tion. Consequently, we need not just detoxifying practices of interpretation
but also constructive practices that can envision alternatives to empire and
domination.

Hermeneutics of Imagination
A hermeneutics of imagination searches for such egalitarian visions and
seeks to ‘dream’ a different world of justice and wellbeing. The space of
the imagination is that of freedom, a space in which boundaries are crossed,
possibilities are explored, and time becomes relativized. What we cannot
imagine, we will not have. As Toni Morrison so forcefully states in her
novel, Beloved:
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She
did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or
its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was
the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not
have it (Morrison 1987: 88).

The space of imagination is a space of memory and possibility where

situations can be re-experienced and desires re-embodied. Because of our
imaginative abilities, we can put ourselves into another person’s position,
relate to their feelings, and participate in their deliberations and struggles.
Because of the imagination, we are able to conceive of change, of how sit-
uations can be altered.
Historical imagination, like all other types of imagination, is absolutely
necessary for any knowledge of biblical texts and worlds, as I hope to have
shown in this Guide to 1 Peter. A hermeneutics of imagination thus enables
us to fill in the gaps and silences of the text. Reader-response critics point
out that we ‘make meaning’ in the process of reading by imaginatively fill-
ing in the gaps, fissures and breaks in the text with reference to our expe-
rience and knowledge as we have done in the previous chapters. Jewish
hermeneutics, for instance, has imagined that the Shekhinah (the divine
presence) dwells in the blank white spaces between the black letters. In the
process of story telling or role-playing, our imagination seeks to make pres-
ent the Chokmah/Sophia/Sapientia (divine wisdom) in the ‘blank spaces’
between the slave wo/men in the community addressed by 1 Peter and our
own lives. Retelling biblical stories such as that of Sarah and Hagar and re-
imagining biblical characters in creative imagination and play is a catalytic
process that liberates us from the false images that we have made.
Such envisioning of an alternative reality is only possible if we have
at least some experiences of it. Wo/men who have experienced the Bible
only as oppressive and discriminatory but not also as promoting justice and
74 1 Peter

equality cannot imagine its grace. This insight also applies to the level of
text. If we do not discover visions of equality and wellbeing inscribed in
biblical texts, we cannot imagine early Christian life and world differently.
To ask whether visions of justice, equality, dignity, love, community and
wellbeing that are also inscribed in biblical texts such as 1 Peter, one does
not need to show that the text is liberating, or to explain away or to deny
its inscriptions of empire and domination. Rather one is enabled to explore
whether 1 Peter, either its author(s) or its audience(s), also advocates an
alternative to the oppressive powers of empire.
Feminist interpretation might be able to imagine a world different from
the imperial world advocated by 1 Peter if it would focus on those state-
ments and visions in 1 Peter that express a self-identity different from that
of empire. Slave wo/men and freeborn wives who were told ‘you are a
chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, G*d’s own people, in order
that you may proclaim the mighty acts of G*d who called you out of dark-
ness into G*d’s marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you
are G*d’s people’ (2.9-10) would have heard this message differently than
elite propertied men, since kyriarchal culture told them that they were non-
persons. Slave wo/men who understood themselves as a ‘royal priesthood’
and ‘chosen race’ might have claimed their new self-identity and argued
that their conversion abolished their slave status. Freeborn wo/men in turn
might have insisted on ‘proclaiming’ in the community the great deeds of
the One who had called them. They, therefore, might have objected to living
with husbands who did not heed the call. Thus, a hermeneutics of imagina-
tion results in a different historical memory and leads to a different histori-
cal reconstruction and self-identity.

Hermeneutics of Re-membering
A hermeneutics of re-membering uses the tools of historiography to recon-
struct the struggles of slave wo/men and freeborn wo/men against kyriarchal
domination and the violence of empire inscribed in early ‘Christian’ literature
in general and 1 Peter in particular. It re-conceptualizes and rewrites early
‘Christian’ history as decolonizing history and memory. It does so not from
the perspective of the historical ‘winners’ but from the perspective of those
who struggled against the dehumanization and violence of empire. By plac-
ing freeborn wo/men, slave wo/men, migrant wo/men, sex workers and many
others in the center of 1 Peter’s attention, our image of early ‘Christianity’ as
well as that of ourselves, of church and of the world today is changed.
As I have argued in previous chapters, such a hermeneutics of re-
membering our Jewish ancestors utilizes constructive methods of re-
visioning insofar as it seeks not only for historical retrieval but also for a
religious reconstitution of the world. It seeks these things in and through
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 75

a recovery of the forgotten past both of wo/men’s victimization and of

our struggles for survival and wellbeing. With postmodern thinkers,
such a hermeneutics is fully conscious of the rhetoricity of its own re-
constructions but nevertheless insists that such work of historical remem-
brance is necessary in support of wo/men’s struggles for survival and
transformation today. If it is a sign of oppression when a people do not
have a written history, then feminists and other subaltern scholars cannot
afford to eschew such rhetorical and historical re-constructive work.
Such a feminist decolonizing historiography seeks to replace the kyrio-
centric models of world construction inscribed in 1 Peter with a radical
egalitarian model of re-membering also potentially inscribed in 1 Peter.
History writing can be likened to making a quilt, fitting all the bits and
pieces of information into a new design and model. Thereby, we can open
up the possibilities of wo/men’s historical presence and awaken our capac-
ities to envision alternatives to the kyriarchal past and contemporary
struggles. This requires, as I have argued throughout this book, new her-
meneutical assumptions that can correct the kyriarchal determination of
our historical sources.
• To begin, we cannot take grammatically androcentric language
and terms, such as ‘brotherhood’, at face value but must assume
that wo/men were present and active in history until proven other-
wise. In order to displace the kyriocentric dynamic of the biblical
text in its literary and historical contexts, we need to read the text
against its androcentric grain. For instance, since the grammati-
cal form of ‘slave’ is masculine, it is usually assumed that 1 Peter
speaks only of slave men. Hence, we must read the kyriocentric
text of 1 Peter in an inclusive fashion unless it is explicitly stated
that slave wo/men were not present in the community.
• Texts and injunctions such as 1 Pet. 3.1-6, which seek to censure
or limit wo/men’s behavior, must be read as prescriptive rather
than as descriptive of reality. If wo/men are forbidden a cer-
tain activity, we can safely assume that they might actually have
engaged in it to the point that it became threatening to the kyriar-
chal order of the Empire or of the ‘brotherhood’.
• Texts and information as elaborated in 1 Peter must be contextu-
alized not only in their variegated cultural and religious environ-
ments but also in terms of the kyriarchal structures of domination.
They need to be reconstructed not only in terms of the dominant
ethos of the Roman Empire but also in terms of the ethos of alter-
native social movements for change such as slave revolts, Jewish
messianic movements or the early ‘Christian’ movements.
76 1 Peter

Thus, by reading the text of 1 Peter against the grain, we are able to
re-contextualize androcentric texts and kyriarchal sources within a socio-
political-religious model of reconstruction, as used in this Guide to 1 Peter,
that aims at making the subordinated and marginalized ‘others’ visible, and
their repressed arguments and silences ‘audible’ again. Hence, the ‘chasm’
that historical positivism has constructed between contemporary readers and
the text of 1 Peter can be overcome if we seek to recover wo/men’s religious
history and the memory of their victimization, struggle and accomplish-
ments as heritage for today. To remember is to assert the historical pres-
ence of wo/men in the communities of Asia Minor addressed by 1 Peter, and
to claim historical religious agency of slaves and servants. Such historical
remembrance recaptures early Christian history that is inscribed in 1 Peter
as tradition of struggle, survival and vision. This practice reclaims Jewish
and ‘Christian’ historical and religious heritage as wo/men’s heritage.

Hermeneutics of Transformation
A hermeneutics of transformation is at work in all the preceding herme-
neutical moves and works as the driving force and power in a decoloniz-
ing process of interpreting 1 Peter. It compels us to read the inscriptions of
empire and domination in 1 Peter in order to change kyriarchal conscious-
ness and knowledge today. To that end, it explores avenues and possibilities
for changing and transforming relations of domination and subordination
inscribed in texts such as 1 Peter, Christian traditions and everyday life.
Such work stands first of all accountable to those wo/men who have strug-
gled at the bottom of the kyriarchal pyramid of discriminations and domi-
nations in the past and do so today. Such a hermeneutics of transformation
seeks to articulate 1 Peter studies as a site of social, political and religious
struggle and transformation.
When seeking future visions and transformations of kyriarchal globaliza-
tion we can only extrapolate from our present experience which is always
already determined by past experiences. Hence, we must critically analyze
the past and the present, biblical and cultural texts such as 1 Peter, as well
as our society and institutions in which they are valued and studied in order
to be able to articulate creative visions and transcending imaginations for
a new humanity, global ecology and religious community. Yet, only if we
remain committed to work for a different, more just future will our imag-
ination and our struggles be able to transform the past and present limita-
tions of our vision and ability to read 1 Peter differently. To deconstruct and
re-imagine biblical visions such as those inscribed in 1 Peter is to reclaim
the biblical power of social, cultural and religious transformation. Biblical
texts such as 1 Peter have the power to evoke potent emotions and imag-
inative responses and thereby create a sense of community necessary to
 4.   Exploring the Meaning of 1 Peter for Today 77

sustain contemporary visions and struggles for a different society, church

and world. I hope this Guide has engendered a reading and study of 1 Peter
and its scholarly interpretations that is transformative and inspiring new
knowledges, commitments and visions.
 Instead of a Conclusion

We have come to the end of our journey of reading 1 Peter together. In this
volume, you have encountered a critical rhetorical decolonizing method and
hermeneutical process of the letter’s interpretation. I have suggested that
such a method is best understood as a process of detoxifying the inscriptions
of empire in Scriptures such as 1 Peter, cultural classics, or our own inter-
nalizations. A detoxifying process of interpretation challenges us to become
ethically sophisticated readers by reflecting on our own socio-political loca-
tions and functions in global situations and structures of empire.
At the same time, such a detoxifying reading empowers us to struggle for
a more just and radical-democratic society and religion. Such an interpre-
tive process is not restricted to Christian canonical texts but can be, and has
been, used successfully by scholars of other religious traditions and Scrip-
tures. Moreover, it is not restricted to the scholar as expert reader. Rather,
it calls all of us to become critical resisting readers and transformative and
engaged biblical interpreters. This process of ideological detoxification has
been successfully used in graduate education, in parish discussions, in col-
lege classes, and in work with illiterate wo/men and I hope has impacted
also you, the reader.
This is how the first reader of this commentary, Ms. Kelsi Morrison-
Atkins, a doctoral student in New Testament and Early Christianity at
Harvard Divinity School and my research assistant, sums up her reading
journey through the chapters of this book:
In this Guide to 1 Peter, I was struck in no small measure by the ways in
which Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza utilizes a traditional introductory text
to critique the very genre and expectations of the commentary itself. While
this was not my first engagement with 1 Peter, this brief book has not only
changed the way I read this particular letter, but has forced me to be more
self-reflexive in my engagement with all Scripture texts and the scholarly
discourses surrounding them.
In the ‘Introduction’, we do not begin with a list of names, dates, and
a narrative of masculine imperial conquest, but rather with an extended
exploration of practices of reading and engaging with texts in the first place.
To begin, Schüssler Fiorenza highlights the dual reference point of all read-
ings of ancient texts—the ancient context in which it was produced and
circulated as well as our own socio-historical and political world(s). Fur-
thermore, she notes that flagging ‘dangerous texts’ is central to a feminist
 Instead of a Conclusion 79

decolonizing reading that does not take the inscribed authority of the text
at face value, but works to read ‘against the grain’ of its rhetoric in order
to discover the submerged and silenced voices of wo/men. To this end, the
‘Introduction’ asks the reader to look closely at the ways in which lead-
ing men’s historical agency is taken for granted while that of wo/men is
ignored or sidelined due to the andro-kyriocentric character of language in
general and of 1 Peter in particular.
This ‘Introduction’ was surprising and jarring to me in a number of
ways. Although I have been exposed to feminist biblical interpretation
for years at various levels of education and religious praxis, I still came to
this ‘Introduction’ expecting ‘facts’ and ‘data’ about the writing, distribu-
tion and reception of 1 Peter. Expecting to learn about the text, my focus
was instead shifted back upon my own practices of reading and pedagogi-
cal training. Instead of laying out the ‘correct’ translation and reading of
1 Peter, this ‘Introduction’ equipped me with many of the tools to do so
myself, with my own socio-historical and political context(s) in mind.
The rhetorical analysis of 1 Peter in Chapter 1 provides the reader with
some of the conventional ‘data’ about 1 Peter, but with a twist—the focus
of this analysis is not on the author(s) as authoritative, but on the writing
of 1 Peter as a rhetorical act of communication that involves both author(s)
and audience (inscribed and ‘actual’). In this chapter, Schüssler Fiorenza
engages in a meta-critique of the scholarship, which all too often takes for
granted the success of the author(s) in persuading his audience. As opposed
to this reading strategy, which naturalizes the kyriarchal power relations
inscribed in the author(s)’s rhetoric, she shifts the focus to the wo/men and
their possible counter-arguments. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
this chapter begins to chip away at centuries of supersessionist readings of
1 Peter by highlighting the ways in which Judaism and its symbolic uni-
verse lie at the very heart of this letter and its persuasive power.
Chapters 2 and 3 make explicit and audible both the letter’s constitutive
Jewishness and the voices of the subordinated who have been subsumed
under centuries of interpretation focused exclusively on the authority of the
author(s). These chapters turn traditional reading strategies upside-down,
asking us to read 1 Peter through the lens of Jewish Messianism in a way
that supplants the prevailing Christo-centric readings of the letter. Whereas
in Chapter 2 we meet our Jewish ancestors as the recipients of the letter,
in Chapter 3 we are asked to think beyond the author(s)’s rhetoric to the
possible alternative and resistant responses of the subordinated who are
asked to submit to kyriarchal authority. Embedded within this chapter is yet
another critique of the scholarship on 1 Peter, whose identification with the
author(s) further marginalizes the voices of all wo/men, especially slave
wo/men, and their possible counter-arguments inscribed within the text.
What struck me most about these central chapters was the emphasis on
the power of language to reveal and to conceal. Both in her rhetorical anal-
ysis of the letter and her critiques of the scholarship on 1 Peter, Schüssler
Fiorenza underscores that how we read ‘generic’, andro-kyriocentric lan-
guage matters much in the interpretation of the letter and whose voices
we are able to hear. Furthermore, I was surprised to find that, even in
my own feminist, decolonizing readings, I have been inadvertently—yet
80 1 Peter

unreflectedly—assuming that the language and symbolic universe of the

letter was Christo-centric and supersessionist in its own terms. Like her
student mentioned in Chapter 3, I had so often overlaid Christian themes
upon the letter of 1 Peter, without considering the parallels with proselyte
discourses in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, my reading ‘lenses’ were shifted
from a Christian to a Jewish Messianist reading of 1 Peter, and in so doing
a whole new set of interpretive possibilities opened up in my reading.
Finally, in Chapter 4, Schüssler Fiorenza makes a rare move in the world
of scholarly commentaries on Scriptures—she elaborates her own herme-
neutical moves and opens up space for transformative readings in the pres-
ent. Whereas one might expect in a feminist commentary on 1 Peter to see
a special excurses given to ‘Women in 1 Peter’, she makes a surprising and
convincing critique of this move—emphasizing that a reading only of those
moments in which wo/men are explicitly mentioned does not account for
the voices and presence of those wo/men whose silencing continues in our
failure to ‘read against the grain’ and to practice a hermeneutics of suspi-
cion. By reading 1 Peter’s arguments about wo/men as prescriptive rather
than descriptive and using the hermeneutical ‘steps’ laid out here, I began
to see alternative possibilities for a space in which readers and hearers did
not take the author(s)’s words at face value, but who likely behaved differ-
ently or responded in opposition to his attempts at disciplining and control-
ling their behavior.
As should be clear, I came to this Guide to 1 Peter with a certain set
of expectations that I have been trained to take to so many introductory
texts—a clear set of ‘facts’, a bird’s eye view of the scholarship, and per-
haps also a ‘new’ translation of the letter. This Guide paradoxically met and
foiled these expectations. While the reader gleans historical context for the
letter in this Guide, she is also asked to recognize that ‘facts’ are themselves
interpretations and can be constructed differently based on the aspects one
chooses to emphasize. While Schüssler Fiorenza made me aware of and
well-versed in the scholarly debates surrounding the letter, she also posed
a critique to the very methods and presuppositions which shape scholarly
discourses and have the potential to naturalize relations of power inscribed
within the text. While she offers up a more complex and nuanced set of
vocabulary for interpreting key terms in the letter, Schüssler Fiorenza also
proposes critical insights into the very difficulties of language itself in a
way that changes not only how we read 1 Peter and its symbolic universe,
but also how we engage with all texts that are potentially ‘dangerous’ for
wo/men.
In reading through this Guide, I found my own methods and invest-
ments critically and productively challenged. What relationships of power
am I naturalizing and authorizing in the reading strategies I deploy? How
might I read these texts otherwise, in order to get at the historical agency
of wo/men—Jewish wo/men, slave wo/men and many more—who are sub-
sumed beneath the author(s)’s assumed authority? Put briefly, this Guide
to 1 Peter is more than a guide to 1 Peter—it is a politically engaged and
potentially transformative introduction to reading not just 1 Peter, but all
texts, otherwise.
 Instead of a Conclusion 81

I hope this summary of Morrison-Atkins’ reading experience will help

readers to name and sustain their own reading of 1 Peter. For in and through
such a critical rhetorical process of interpretation and deliberation, bibli-
cal texts such as 1 Peter can become sites of struggle and conscientization.
Patricia Hill Collins has dubbed such a praxis of change and transforma-
tion ‘visionary pragmatism’ (Hill Collins 1998). Feminist visionary prag-
matism points to an alternative vision of the world but does not prescribe a
fixed goal and end-point for which it then claims universal truth. In such a
process of imaginative pragmatism, one never arrives but always struggles
on the way.
This process reveals how current actions are part of a larger, meaningful
struggle. It demonstrates that ethical and truthful visions of self-affirmation
and community cannot be separated from the struggles for survival and
transformation. One takes a stand in these intellectual struggles by con-
structing new knowledge and new interpretations that search religious and
cultural texts for visions of wellbeing in the struggles against exploitation.
While vision can be conjured up in the historical imagination, pragmatic
action requires that one remain responsive to the injustices of everyday life.
If religion and biblical interpretation are worth anything, they must inspire
such visionary pragmatism in everyday struggles for global justice and the
wellbeing of all of creation.
In the context of the exploitation and domination of today’s global
empire, I argue, cultural, political and religious progressives must reject the
the*logical, scriptural claims of 1 Peter through the imperial pattern of sub-
mission, and one must do so because of the oppressive effects they have on
the life of wo/men. A feminist scriptural hermeneutics that has as its canon
the liberation of all wo/men from oppressive structures and kyriarchal insti-
tutions seeks to name and resist the imperial values inscribed in 1 Peter. A
feminist decolonizing critical interpretive practice of reading 1 Peter that
is committed to the emancipatory struggles of wo/men around the globe
insists that the ethos and praxis of coequality in community has the power
to transform the kyriarchal inscriptions of empire in such a way that the
interpretation of the letter will contribute to a radical democratic egalitar-
ian future of wellbeing for all of creation. I hope you will continue the jour-
ney and the struggle.
 Key Terms

Kelsi Morrison-Atkins

Androcentric/Androcentrism: Male-centered/male-centeredness. From

the Greek ‘aner’. Used to describe a cultural, ideological and linguistic
system in which the ‘male’ functions as the norm against which wo/men
are viewed as secondary, deviant and derivative. As a system of language,
androcentrism functions as the ‘generic’ form (i.e. congressmen, postmen,
mankind) which eradicates the presence of wo/men from the historical
record. In androcentric language systems, wo/men must adjudicate whether
or not they are being addressed or referenced in a given context.

Archetype: An archetype refers to an original model meant to be repro-

duced exactly in every iteration. An archetype is thus an ideal form that
becomes the establishing principle for an unchanging and timeless pattern.
An archetypal understanding of Scripture claims that interpretation can
reproduce the true, unalterable, and inerrant meaning of the text that has
been revealed and must be maintained unchanged in all times and places.

Argumentatio: Latin term referring to a rhetorical argumentation or proof.

Asia Minor: Also called ‘Anatolia’, this geographical peninsula comprises

modern-day Turkey. After being conquered by Alexander the Great in 334
bce, Asia Minor underwent a period of Hellenization. In 133 bce, after cen-
turies of Hellenistic rule, Asia Minor became part of the Roman Repub-
lic. Located at the crossroads between Asia and Europe, Asia Minor was an
important ‘contact zone’ where members of diverse cultures were brought
together to exchange ideas and engage in trade. The provinces listed in
1 Peter include Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. The prov-
inces of Lydia, Lycia, Caria, Mysia, Phrygia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, Paphlago-
nia, and Cilicia are not mentioned in the letter.

bce: Before the Common Era. Refers to ancient periods before Jesus is
said to have been born (replacing bc or ‘Before Christ’). This abbreviation
replaces the bc/ad dating system which connotes a Christian, supersession-
ist bias.
 Key Terms 83

Captatio benevolentiae: Latin, ‘winning of goodwill’. This rhetorical strat-

egy seeks to garner the approval and consent of the audience at the begin-
ning of the oration.

ce: Common Era. Refers to the time period after the assumed birth of Jesus.
This abbreviation replaces ad (Anno Domini), which presumes the domi-
nance of Christianity.

Chokmah [Hebrew], Sophia [Greek] Sapientia [Latin]: ‘Divine wisdom’.

Often personified as female.

Cicero: 106 bce–46 bce. A famous Latin philosopher, politician and rhet-
orician.

Collegia: In Ancient Rome, collegia were social communal organizations

with legal status. Organizations such as trade guilds, clubs or religious
groups served a variety of social functions and were often politically sus-
pect under the Empire.

Discourse: In general, refers to the verbal exchange of ideas and the process
of engaging in communication. According to French philosopher Michel
Foucault, discourse marks the relationship between knowledge and power,
whereby individuals are shaped and disciplined by language and practices
that are themselves shaped by ever-shifting discursive formations.

Ekklēsia: Often translated from the Greek as ‘church’, it refers to the

decision-making democratic assembly of freeborn citizens. Since ‘free cit-
izens’ has referred throughout Western history to elite freeborn propertied
men, it is necessary to quality ekklēsia with ‘wo/men’ (hence ekklēsia of
wo/men) in order to subvert this kyriocentric bias.

Encomium: A rhetorical composition expressing high praise for someone

or something.

Exigence: The term comes from the Latin word for ‘demand’. In rhetoric,
an issue, problem or situation that causes or prompts someone to write or
speak.

Feminism/Feminist: Feminism is a political movement and body of theory

focused on the equal social, political, religious and economic rights of all
wo/men. Feminism is aimed at dismantling all structures of oppression,
exploitation, dehumanization and domination worldwide. In short, ‘the rad-
ical notion that wo/men are people’.
84 1 Peter

G*d: Because ‘God’—Greek Theos and Latin Deus—is a masculine term

taken to mark a masculine figure and ‘Goddess’ (thea/dea) invokes a
notion of essentialized gender, the asterisk in the writing of G*d is meant to
signify the ungendered nature of the divine. Furthermore, writing G*d with
an asterisk highlights the inherent difficulties of using human language to
speak about the divine and thus underscores G*d’s ineffability.

Genre: Refers to a literary category of composition, with groups of compo-

sitions sharing the same form, features, style and/or subject matter.

Hellenism/Hellenistic: The process by which Greek (Hellenic) culture was

imposed upon and considered dominant over the eastern half of the Medi-
terranean world.

Hermeneutics: From the Greek, hermeneuein, meaning ‘to interpret, trans-

late, exegete or explain a text’. The term refers to both theories and prac-
tices of interpretation.

Honor–shame: A modern theoretical and sociological model used to ana-

lyze cultures in the ancient Mediterranean whereby dominance is asserted
by invoking a sense of shame and submission in others. In this system,
‘honor’ is coded as a masculine, whereas ‘shame’ is represented as feminine.

Household Codes: Haustafeln in German. A term coined by scholars for

clusters of texts such as those in Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Peter, 1 Tim-
othy and Titus which promote the continued submission of oppressed
groups, such as slaves and wo/men to their masters and husbands. Com-
monly, Household Codes seem to emphasize three major relationships of
domination—master/slave, husband/wife, parent/child. Actually, these are
not three separate and independent relationships, but rather a threefold rela-
tion of the male head of household, the paterfamilias, to those under his
control.

Inscribed author/reader: In rhetorical analysis, a means of marking the

distinction between the textual and actual author and reader. The inscribed
author/reader is not synonymous with the flesh-and-blood author/reader,
but is rather the image of the author/reader that is constructed through the
process of engaging with a text.

Justin Martyr: c. 100–165 ce. Justin Martyr was one of the earliest Chris-
tian apologists (writers who attempted to defend Christianity over against
Greco-Roman culture. Other famous early apologists include Tatian, Clem-
ent of Alexandria and Tertullian). Although many of his works have been
 Key Terms 85

lost to us, two of his apologies and one dialogue are extant. In his Dialogue
with Trypho, Justin Martyr engages with the likely fictional Jewish charac-
ter, Trypho (see below), in order to argue that Christians are the true heirs of
Judaism and to convince Trypho to convert to Christianity.

Kashrut: Jewish dietary laws. Food fit for consumption is referred to as

‘kosher’.

Kyriarchal/Kyriarchy: A neologism coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fio-

renza to replace the notion of patriarchy. Kyriarchy comes from the Greek
kyrios (‘lord’) and archein (‘to rule or dominate’). Kyriarchy is best theo-
rized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social
structures of superordination and subordination, ruling and oppression.

Kyriocentric language: Biblical and Western language systems naturalize

the dominance of the kyrios or ‘lord’, while simultaneously obscuring that
not all men have power and eliminating marginalized groups from the his-
torical and linguistic record. See also ‘Androcentric/Androcentrism’.

Kyrios: The Greek word for ‘lord’. It refers to the emperor, slave-master,
husband, elite, freeborn, educated, propertied male who exercised decision-
making power over the household, community and state.

Messianism/Messianists (Jewish): Although the term ‘messiah’ has been co-

opted by Christianity to refer exclusively to Jesus Christ, Jewish Messian-
ism refers to people who awaited the coming leader and savior (Meshiach)
of Israel appointed by G*d. In antiquity, and throughout Jewish history, there
were many figures thought to be the Messiah, including, for instance, Jesus of
Nazareth and Simon Bar Kohkba, leader of the Third Jewish Uprising in 132–
135 ce. Today, the term has been co-opted by evangelical Christians who call
themselves ‘Jews for Jesus’ or ‘Messianic Jews’. Such cooptation is another
form of supersessionism.

Metacritique: According to Jürgen Habermas in the Preface to Knowledge

and Human Interests, a metacritique is a radical critique of knowledge and
is only possible as a social theory.

Neronic Persecution: In 64 ce, Nero blames and executes Christians for

the ‘Great Fire’ in Rome. Reference to this persecution can be found in the
Roman historian Tacitus’ Annals.

New*Testament/N*T: Because the ‘New Testament’ presupposes a claim

to Christian authority and the*logical superiority over the ‘Old Testament’,
86 1 Peter

this writing seeks to make conscious the ethical and the*logical problem
connected with the names ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’.

Paradigm: An authoritative model, example or pattern meant to be imi-

tated or copied.

Paterfamilias: Latin term meaning ‘the father of the extended household’

(kyrios in Greek), who demanded the subordination of not only his wife and
children, but also slaves, relatives, business associates, and even guests in
the home. The rule of the paterfamilias over his household was often con-
ceived as the microcosm of a well-run state.

Philo of Alexandria: Also referred to as Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic Jewish

philosopher who lived from 25 bce to 50 ce in Roman Egypt. In his allegor-
ical writing, Philo worked to bring together Greek and Jewish philosophy.

Prototype: Refers to a preliminary model that becomes a malleable basis

for future models. Prototypes are often experimental and not binding, and
can be continually reformulated as needed. Conceiving of the Bible as a
prototype means recognizing that meaning changes over time and in differ-
ent socio-political and geographical contexts. Thus, the notions of Chris-
tian faith and community put forth in the texts not only allow, but actually
necessitate transformation of meaning and praxis.

Pseudepigraphy/Pseudonymity: Refers to the attribution of a text to some-

one other than the actual writer. For instance, 1 Peter is attributed to the dis-
ciple Peter and is written in a Pauline style. This attribution was common
in the ancient world, and was meant to bear rhetorically the authority of the
individual by whom the work is said to have been written. In the ancient
world, writing in the voice of another was thus not an equivalent to modern-
day ‘copyright infringement’ or ‘intellectual property’ violation. It can refer
also to the practice of writing under an assumed name to protect one’s iden-
tity for political or legal reasons.

Qumran: Located near the Dead Sea and the Judean Desert, Qumran is the
site of the excavation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Archaeologists and schol-
ars postulate that a community of Essenes (a separatist Jewish community
devoted to ascetic practices) populated this site from approximately the
second century bce to 68 ce.

Rabbinic Judaism: Since the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70

ce, rabbinic Judaism has been the mainstream form of Judaism. Accord-
ing to rabbinic Judaism, Moses received both the written and oral Torah on
 Key Terms 87

Mount Sinai. The first major work of rabbinic Judaism is the ‘Mishnah’ (‘to
study or review’), the first collection of the Jewish Oral Torah.

Reader-response criticism: A form of literary theory which focuses on the

reader and her experience with a text. In this way, literary theory is repoliti-
cized as the focus shifts from the author/content to the socio-politically sit-
uated reader.

Rhetorical Criticism: Not to be misunderstood as referring to stylistic

ornamentation, ‘mere’ persuasion, or manipulation through the use of lan-
guage. Rhetoric/rhetorical criticism assumes that all acts of communica-
tion seek to either judge, persuade or celebrate, and do so through certain
linguistic-symbolic strategies and/or audience construction and formation.
Rhetorical criticism acknowledges as well that all interpretations are histor-
ically, socially and politically situated.

Roman Empire: The period of Roman rule and conquest after the Roman
Republic, beginning with the rule of the emperor Augustus in 27 bce to
that of Romulus Augustulus in 476 ce. At the apex of its power, the Roman
Empire spanned from the Persian Gulf through Northern Africa and into
modern-day Germany and Britain.

Semiology/Semiotics: Semiology/semiotics refers to the philosophical study

of meaning-making, focusing in particular on issues of signs, symbols, and
the relationship between the verbal sign and that which it signifies.

Septuagint (lxx): The body of Jewish Scriptures, translated into Koine

Greek. This translation was completed as early as the second century bce,
and is quoted in several New*Testament writings.

Shekhinah: From the Hebrew for ‘dwelling’ or ‘settling’. It refers to the

personified divine presence or dwelling of G*d.

Stoa: Refers to the Athenian site where the philosopher Zeno (of Citium,
c. 334–263 bce) associated with and educated his followers. It is from this
architectural landmark that the name ‘Stoicism’ is derived for the philosoph-
ical school Zeno founded. Taking a deterministic perspective on human life,
the Stoics valued equanimity and felt that emotions were destructive and
should be overcome through human will.

Supersessionism/Supersessionist: Supersessionism refers to the commonly

held, if often unacknowledged, notion that Christian Scriptures, doctrine and
the*logy replace or supplant Jewish Scriptures. Such supersessionism comes
88 1 Peter

to the fore in the nomenclature ‘Old Testament/New Testament’. To alert

readers to this problem, scholars use First and Second Testament or, as in this
volume, Hebrew Bible/New*Testament (N*T).

Talmud/Talmudic: From the Hebrew for ‘instruction’ or ‘study’. It refers

to the authoritative writings of Judaism, consisting of the Mishnah (legal
tradition) and Gemara (learned commentary on this tradition). Two versions
of the Talmud exist: the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud (finalized 350–
400 ce) and the Babylonian Talmud (finalized late fifth century ce). Both
include earlier traditions.

The*logical/The*logy: Because the Greek word theos (‘God’) from which

we derive the term ‘theology’ is grammatically masculine and shifting to
the feminist ‘thealogy’ would only reinscribe essentialized gender, Elisa-
beth Schüssler Fiorenza uses the asterisk (*) in order to problematize all
gendered language about the divine.

Therapeutae: According to the writing of Philo, the Therapeutae were a

late-Second Temple Hellenistic separatist sect of Judaism in Alexandria that
focused on philosophy and contemplative living. Women were members of
this community, and there were no slaves or servants. Rather, they served
one another as they deemed the ownership of slaves ‘against nature’. Inter-
estingly, paragraph 70 of De vita contemplativa states that ‘nature has cre-
ated all alike—free’. A collective noun is used to refer to people generally
instead of the more common anthropoi or andres.

Third Jewish Revolt: Also referred to as the Bar Kokhba Revolt. From
132–135 ce, Jews revolted under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba, con-
sidered by many to be the Messiah. After two years of success, the revolt
was finally put down by the Romans and all Jews were banished from
Jerusalem.

Topos: In classical rhetoric, it refers to the places or sources of informa-

tion used in argumentation. These topoi function as categories which aid in
the organization of ideas and the delineation of relationships among various
ideas presented by the speaker/writer.

Trypho: Justin Martyr’s Jewish counterpart in Dialogue with Trypho (see

Justin Martyr, above). Trypho likely did not exist, but is a constructed figure
meant to aid in the persuasive force of Justin Martyr’s apologetic rhetoric.

Wo/men: A term introduced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to under-

score that woman is not to be used as an essentialist, but as a socio-political
 Key Terms 89

category. Wo/men are fragmented and differentiated along lines of race,

class, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, age, and many more identity cate-
gories. Furthermore, this term includes subordinated men, and is meant to
provide an alternative to andro- or kyrio-centric, generic language that erad-
icates the presence of women.
 Timeline

Kelsi Morrison-Atkins

334 bce Alexander the Great conquers Asia Minor. Period of

Hellenization begins.
133 bce Asia Minor bequeathed to Roman Empire by last
Attalid king. Beginning of steady colonization of
Asia Minor.
63 bce Romans conquer Jerusalem; Judea becomes part of
Roman sphere of influence.
37–4 bce Rule of Herod the Great.
4 bce Herod the Great dies. His kingdom is split into three
parts (Archelaus, Philip, and Herod Antipas).
6 ce Roman Procurators begin to rule Jerusalem.
c. 26–36 ce Pontius Pilate is procurator of Jerusalem.
c. 6 bce–30 ce Life and career of Jesus.
c. 30 ce Jesus executed by the Roman authorities in
Jerusalem.
37–41 ce Rule of Emperor Gaius Caligula, who attempts to pro-
fane the Temple by placing his image inside. Outbreak
of violence is narrowly avoided.
41–44 ce Rule of King Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great.
c. 50–58 ce Letters and travels of Paul (1 Thessalonians, Galatians,
Philippians, Romans, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians).
54–68 ce Rule of Emperor Nero. In 64 ce, Nero blames Chris-
tians for Great Fire in Rome.
66 ce Outbreak of riots in Judea lead to war against the
Romans.
68 ce Romans destroy Qumran settlement.
 Timeline 91

70 ce Romans destroy Jerusalem Temple.

73 or 74 ce Masada falls to the Romans.
c. 70 ce Gospel of Mark.
c. 70–80 ce Colossians and Ephesians.
80s ce Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
80s ce Acts.
c. 80–100 ce 2 Thessalonians, Hebrews, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus,
1 Peter, 2 Peter, Jude.
81–96 ce Rule of Emperor Domitian.
c. 80–90 ce The beginnings of rabbinic activity at Yavneh (Jamnia).
c. 90–100 ce Gospel of John.
c. 95–110 Letters of John (1 John, 2 John, 3 John).
c. 95–110 The Book of Revelation (Apocalypse).
c. 96 ce Epistle to the Corinthians by Clement of Rome.
c. 100 ce Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.
98–117 ce Rule of Emperor Trajan.
c. 107–117 Letters of Ignatius. Martyrdom of Ignatius.
c. 100–165 ce Justin Martyr. The apologetic text, Dialogue with
Trypho.
112 ce Pliny’s (governor of Pontus and Bithynia) letter to the
emperor Trajan.
115–117 ce Revolt of Jews in Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrene
against the Romans.
132–135 ce Revolt of Bar Kokhba (Kosiba) in Judea (also
referred to as the Third Jewish Revolt against
Roman occupation).
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 Index of Authors

Applegate, Judith  24 Knight, Douglas A.  4

Augustine  38 Kolodny, Annette  51
Kuhn, Thomas  3
Balch, David L.  8-9, 35, 45-47
Barclay, John M.G.  63 Lassen, Eva-Marie  64
Bauman-Martin, Betsy  35-37 Lieu, Judith  53
Bechtler, Steven Richard  30-31 Long, Asphodel  1-2
Besley, Andrew  3 Luke  54-55
Bhabha, Homi  46
Booth, Wayne  20, 62 Macey, David  4
Boring, M. Eugene  5-6, 48 Mark  22, 24
Boyarin, Daniel  37-39, 42, 44 Matthews, Shelly  54-55
Briggs Kittredge, Cynthia  64 Morrison, Toni  73
Morrison-Atkins, Kelsi  78-80
Campbell, Barth L.  29, 31, 48 Morton, Nelle  9, 48
Carter, Warren  8
Cicero  63, 83 Novak, David  35
Clark Kroeger, Catherine  58
Clark Wire, Antoinette  45-47 Paul  7, 22-23, 34, 52, 54, 57, 64
Cohen, Shaye  53 Peter  6-7, 22, 55, 61, 86
Peterson, Erik  39
de Beauvoir, Simone  11 Philo  41-43, 58, 86
duBois, Page  15 Price, S.R.F.  64

Elliott, John H.  8-9, 30, 35, 40, 45-50, 56 Redmond, Sheila  71-72

Rich, Adrienne  10
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth  10
Freire, Paulo  12, 65 Said, Edward  19
Sandoval, Chela  66
Giddens, Anthony  51 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth  4, 37, 49,
Gunsalus González, Catherine  5 58, 65, 78-80, 88
Scott, James  46
Hill Collins, Patricia  81 Seland, Torrey  41-43
Horrell, David  8-9, 9, 45-46 Senior, Donald P.  33
Hyman, Naomi  16 Setzer, Claudia  41-42
Silvanus  6-7, 22, 24
Jameson, Frederic R.  20 Stendahl, Krister  53
Jerome  38 Suskin Ostriker, Alicia  15-16
Joel  54-55
Judge, E.A.  60 Tompkins, Jane P.  19
Justin Martyr  53-54, 84-85