Michael J. Kok, Tax Collector to Gospel Writer: Patristic Traditions about the Evangelist Matthew (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023), 53-54.
Although it is signed by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,” Peter may not have had an advanced education in literacy and rhetoric to pull off the the composition of 1 Peter. The expression “I wrote” (egrapsa) “through” (dia) Silvanus does not mean that Silvanus was Peter’s secretary. This idiomatic phrase presents Silvanus as the mail-carrier who delivered the letter to its recipients in the provinces of the Anatolian Peninsula in Asia Minor. If Peter was one of the victims of Nero’s pogrom against Christians in Rome, he was no longer alive when 1 Peter was composed in the last quarter of the first century. “Babylon” may be a cipher for Rome and may hint at the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. It hearkens back to the national tragedy in the Hebrew Bible when the first temple was destroyed at the hands of the Babylonian Empire during a siege on Jerusalem in 587 BCE. The application of the identifying marker “Christian” to the implied audience of 1 Peter, making out their collective identity in distinction from other Jewish and non-Jewish social identities, may be a late development as well.
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