Introduction

A Farewell Letter

The Church has received this second letter, like the first, as the Apostle Peter’s own—written, on its own testimony, as he sensed his death drawing near, and meant to fix in his readers’ memory the teaching they had already received from him, so that after his departure they would have something to hold to. Its authorship has been debated since antiquity, largely on grounds of style; Theophylact shows no awareness of the question and reads the letter throughout as Peter’s own testament, and that is how his commentary treats it here. Where the first epistle addressed believers under the pressure of external hostility, this shorter, more urgent letter turns inward, toward a danger the community was generating on its own: false teachers rising up within the church itself, denying the reality of Christ’s promised return and using that denial to excuse a life of unrestrained appetite.

Guarding Against False Teachers

The letter’s central chapter is a sustained warning, drawing heavily on the same material Jude uses independently: the fallen angels, the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, all cited as precedents for a God who both judges the wicked and rescues the righteous out of trial. Against teachers who mock the promise of Christ’s coming—“where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were”—Peter answers that a single day is with the Lord as a thousand years, that the delay is patience toward sinners rather than the world’s abandonment, and that the day will come nonetheless, sudden as a thief, with the created order itself dissolved and renewed. Theophylact follows this argument closely, treating the scoffers’ complaint as a permanent temptation for any generation whose expectation outlasts its patience, not merely a problem confined to the apostolic age.

Partakers of the Divine Nature

Before any of this, though, the letter opens with one of the boldest single statements in the New Testament: that God’s divine power has granted believers “exceedingly great and precious promises,” so that through them they might become “partakers of the divine nature,” having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Theophylact does not soften the claim into metaphor. He reads it as the ground of the whole Christian life that follows—the foundation on which Peter then builds his call to add virtue to faith, knowledge to virtue, and so on up through the list of graces to love—and he explains it through the mystery of the incarnation itself: it is because the Lord took up the first fruits of human nature into himself and sanctified it that believers, joined to him, come to share in what is his by nature and theirs only by gift. “If the first-fruits are holy,” Theophylact writes, “so also is the lump.” This is the seed of what later ages would call theosis, the deification of the human person through grace, and Theophylact treats it not as a poetic flourish but as the doctrinal hinge on which the letter’s entire moral exhortation turns: growth in virtue is not self-improvement pursued for its own sake but the outworking, in a life, of a nature already given a share in God.

How to Read This Commentary

A short letter, written under the shadow of an apostle’s approaching death, asks to be read with that urgency in view. Theophylact keeps the letter’s two halves in constant conversation with each other: the doctrine of the opening chapter is not detached theology but the very reason the moral warnings that follow carry such weight, since a nature already made a partaker of God’s own has everything to lose by surrendering to the teachers Peter condemns. Read as Theophylact reads it, the letter’s trajectory—from the height of divine promise, through the danger of corruption from within, to the certainty of a coming judgment and a renewed creation—is less a miscellany of concerns than a single arc, drawn by an apostle intent on leaving his last word to the churches in the right order.