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    Conflict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective
    Conflict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective
    Conflict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Conflict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective

    By John H. Elliott

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    About this ebook

    The Christian theological tradition provides an embarrassment of riches: from Scripture to modern scholarship, we are blessed with a vast and complex theological inheritance. And yet this feast of traditional riches is too frequently inaccessible to the general reader.

    The Cascade Companions series addresses the challenge by publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. They aim to introduce nonspecialist readers to that vital storehouse of authors, documents, themes, histories, arguments, and movements that comprise this heritage with brief yet compelling volumes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateJun 1, 2007
    ISBN9781621890348
    Conflict, Community, and Honor: 1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective
    Author

    John H. Elliott

    John H. Elliott is Professor Emeritus of New Testament at the University of San Francisco. Among his numerous publications are A Home for the Homeless, The Elect and Holy, What Is Social-Scientific Criticism? and 1 Peter (Anchor Bible).

    Read more from John H. Elliott

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      Book preview

      Conflict, Community, and Honor - John H. Elliott

      Conflict, Community, and Honor

      1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective 

      John H. Elliott

      CASCADE Books - Eugene, Oregon

      CONFLICT, COMMUNITY, AND HONOR

      1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective

      Cascade Companions

      Copyright © 2007 Wipf & Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

      ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-234-8

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Elliott, John Hall

      Conflict, community, and honor : 1 Peter in social-scientific perspective / John H. Elliott.

      Cascade Companions

      xii + 94 p.; 20 cm.

      ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-234-8

      1. Bible. N.T. Peter, 1st—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. N.T. Peter, 1st—Social scientific criticism. 3. Honor. 4. Shame. I. Title. II. Series.

      BS2795.2 E43 2007

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      To

      The Context Group

      Dear friends, colleagues, and pioneers

      Preface

      Two studies are brought together here. Both involve expansions on my first book on 1 Peter, The Elect and the Holy (1966), putting that tradition-and-redaction analysis of 1 Peter 2:4–10 into a larger literary, social, and cultural framework.

      The opening essay is an overview of the social situation and rhetorical strategy of 1 Peter. It was originally composed in Rome in 1978 while I was teaching at the Pontifical Biblical Institute as annual Visiting Professor of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. It was written simultaneously with a larger work on 1 Peter, A Home for the Homeless, that eventually appeared in 1981. The briefer study was published in Franciscan Biblical Booklets (1979), a series introducing writings and topics of the Bible to the general reader. The fact that it bore a nihil obstat and imprimatur of Roman Catholic authorities while written by a Lutheran made me the envy among my fratelli Romani at the Collegio S. Roberto Bellarmino. If Santo Roberto was possibly rotating in his grave over the Lutheran residing among the Company of Jesus, my Jesuit hosts in Rome showed me nothing but warm and brotherly hospitality. The rector of the Bib at the time, Rev. Prof. Dr. Carlo Martini, now the retired archbishop of Milan, was especially supportive of my research on 1 Peter, encouraging me, in fact, to share it with His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, who also had a special fondness for 1 Peter.

      Summarizing distinctive features of the writing’s composition, content and practical goal, it aims at showing how this pastoral letter of consolation and encouragement was a powerful response to the alienated situation of its intended recipients. In 1979 the study was among the first to identify the household as a locus, basis, and focus of the Jesus movement and as a chief symbol of communal identity. The portrayal of the believing community as the household or family of God offering a home for the homeless is one of 1 Peter’s most evocative features.

      The method employed in the 1979 booklet and its larger sibling, A Home for the Homeless, I first called sociological exegesis and then, more accurately, social-scientific criticism. This modification is reflected in the title of the edited volume, Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament and Its Social World (1986) and the subtitle of the second edition of Home in 1990. What is Social-Scientific Criticism? (1993) describes the method in detail.

      The second essay of the present volume, written almost twenty years later, demonstrates how the conceptuality of 1 Peter and its moral discourse was shaped by and invoked key pivotal values of ancient Mediterranean culture, namely honor and shame. Its introductory story of a poignant scene of the end of the American Civil War shows that these values flourished far beyond the ancient world and motivate behavior still even in modern time. In the calculus of 1 Peter, a hostile society’s attempt to slander and demean the followers of Jesus Christ and shame them as Christ-lackeys is countered by the assurance that God consistently transforms disgrace into grace and shame into honor.

      Chapters one and two present both earlier essays with minor modifications. The original version of the first essay contained no footnotes. Footnotes in the original version of the second have been reduced to make it more reader-friendly to the general reader. In the current volume I have replaced the terms Christian, Christianity and Jewish, Judaism with language that is more historically and socially accurate in regard to the New Testament period in general. Christian remains when 1 Peter 4:16 is in focus. Replacement terms include Jesus movement (interchangeable with Christ movement, messianic movement), messianic community (interchangeable with believing community), Jesus followers (interchangeable with Christ followers, believers); Israel, House of Israel, Israelites.

      ¹

      Since 1979, I have published various studies on 1 Peter treating aspects of the moral discourse, tradition and redaction, and social setting and rhetorical strategy of the letter. Some are listed in the bibliography. My commentary on 1 Peter in the Anchor Bible series (2000) incorporated this prior research in one comprehensive interpretation. It also lists all publications on 1 Peter through 1998.

      ²

      My hope is that this present volume convinces readers of this new century of the continuing value of reading the Bible in its original social-cultural context, and that it succeeds in displaying 1 Peter’s distinctive and eloquent proclamation of good news.

      I dedicate this volume to my friends and colleagues of The Context Group, the most creative team of biblical scholars with whom I have ever worked and worshipped.

      The Feast of the Resurrection 2007

      1. For the rationale for such modification of nomenclature and its supporting evidence see Elliott, Jesus the Israelite.

      2. Elliott. I Peter, 155–227.

      1

      Estrangement

      and Community

      Introduction: From Past to Present

      From the days of its first reception through twenty centuries of Christian history, the First Epistle of Peter (1 Peter) has been cherished in the church as a moving expression of Christian hope and joy in the face of adversity, and of faith in the God who sets the solitary in families. Already at the turn of the first century CE, Clement of Rome and the bishop Polycarp of Smyrna were inspired by its words. In the following centuries it was received universally by Christians in the east and the west as an indisputable canonical norm of the church’s teaching, practice, and faith. When in the sixteenth century Martin Luther’s translation of the sacred Scriptures into the vernacular was to usher in a new age of biblical meditation and study, it was 1 Peter, along with Paul’s Letter to the Romans and the Gospel of John, that Luther singled out as the true kernel and marrow of all the sacred books. For here you find depicted in masterly fashion how faith in Christ overcomes sin, death, and hell, and gives life, righteousness and salvation (Prefaces to the New Testament, 1522). Especially in times of national calamity, social upheaval, and personal tragedy—those acute moments of alienation, estrangement, and disorientation—countless Christians have found comfort and consolation in these words once addressed to society’s strangers and aliens.

      The estimation of 1 Peter in modern biblical research might seem to belie the significance which the letter has held in the mind and hearts of the faithful. Attention to the Gospels and the writings of Paul has tended to dominate the scholarly scene. The issues which preoccupied modern biblical theologians—such as the quest for the historical Jesus, the history and forms of the biblical traditions, and the great contribution

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