Part 15 (subpart 3 of x): JRP’s Analysis of the Relevant Petrine Texts
Before we get to JPH’s analysis and rebuttals against his Mormon opponent’s appeal to 1 Peter, I think it would be best for me to establish my interpretation of the texts so we’ll have a basis for comparison later.
Repeating the opening context so readers won’t have to scan back up several pages for it:
Peter has been encouraging his Christian readers to live righteously even if they suffer for it, including the famous verse about being always ready to give a defense {apologian} to every one requesting from us an account about the hope in us with meekness and fear. The meekness and fear apparently apply to our attitude in defending the account of our hope, and is by context intended to imply good behavior on our part such that those who talk as though we are evildoers will be ashamed of having done so. For it is better (3:17), if God so wills it, for us to suffer for doing good than for doing evil.
Thus the context leads into verse 18 where Christ is presented as the example we should follow, Who also suffered for doing good rather than for doing evil:
Verse 18a: “Since [logically] Christ also previously actively suffered concerning sins…”
Christ also suffered thanks to sinners despite being innocent, although He didn’t just accidentally or inadvertently suffer against His will: He intentionally accepted the suffering. This is a bit of a paradox, since suffering necessarily involves reacting to something stimulating the reaction. But Christ knew it was going to happen, and acted in cooperation with what happened in various ways. Why?
Verse 18b: “…the Fair One [or the Just One] authoritatively for the sake of unfair ones [or unjust ones]…”
Christ cooperated with the suffering inflicted upon Him by unjust people, not only “over” them (in authoritative supremacy), but for their sake. By commending Christ to us as our example for patiently suffering unfair treatment from sinners, we’re logically expected to do so with the same intention in mind as Christ: for the sake of the unjust ones.
But there is to be no mere us-the-righteous vs. them-the-sinners! For we ourselves were also sinners (as Peter certainly affirms in context, including later in related statements) for whom Christ died authoritatively and intentionally. So Peter continues,
Verse 18c: “[Christ authoritatively died for the sake of unjust ones]… so that He (Christ) may be leading you/us (emphatically) to the God…”
We ought to be actively cooperating with unfair suffering for the same reason, so that those who unfairly cause us to suffer will be led to God, just as we were. We aren’t cooperating with Christ if we divorce such suffering (even though it is unfairly inflicted) from that intention and goal. This fits very well with the contexts preceding verse 18, too.
Verse 18d: “…He (Christ) being certainly caused to die in flesh (or to the flesh), yet being caused to live in spirit (or to the spirit)…”
A typical death and resurrection motif/statement, but as verse 19 will indicate being “caused to live in spirit” this time means something more like “yet was still alive in spirit”.
Verse 19 (which continues the previous sentence from verse 18): “…in which, being gone, He (Christ) also proclaims (or heralds or announces to the spirits in jail…”
“In which” connects directly by grammar to “spirit”, so in spirit not in flesh Christ is making a proclamation or an announcement of something to someone. And the proclamation or herald is made in parallel with some other proclamation by Christ (He “also” proclaims). And this proclamation occurs subsequent or consequent to Christ being gone from somewhere.
So Peter isn’t referring to something the pre-incarnate Christ did in the past, but to something Christ did after leaving somewhere relative to Peter: “being gone” implies being gone from ‘here’. And it’s something Christ did while alive in the spirit but not alive in the flesh. So it’s something Christ did after death but before the resurrection (which Peter affirms elsewhere).
To whom? To spirits in {phulak(i)ê}, in jail or in a place watched by guards.
This term is only used two ways anywhere else in the NT, where although relatively uncommon it appears a dozen times or so. It either means a time of night during which a guard stands watch, or it means a place of imprisonment or captivity guarded by someone technically hostile or in power over the one being restrained. (It refers to a birdcage once in Rev 18:2, but even then the imagery is applied as analogy for rebel or evil or despised things: “[Babylon the great, now fallen, has become] the dwelling place of demons and jail of every unclean spirit and cage of every unclean and hateful bird!”)
Any time the term doesn’t mean a watch of the night (or shepherds maintaining a protective guard over sheep at night in the Nativity), it always without fail means punitive imprisonment everywhere else in the NT, whether the imprisonment is regarded as fair or unfair.
So unless context here in 1 Peter indicates otherwise (which it does not), then the term should be interpreted similarly here: Jesus has gone in spirit to a jail of spirits to make a proclamation for some reason.
The next question would be what kind of spirits? Are they spirits which were unfairly imprisoned (perhaps like Christians or like Christ?–the term in the NT often refers to Christians, Christ or John the Baptist.) Or spirits which were justly imprisoned?
Verse 20a: “[Christ proclaims or announces something to spirits in jail]… to ones being stubborn once upon a time, a time when He (God or Christ, or both if Christ is God of course) patiently waited, the longsuffering of God…”
So the spirits in jail were ones that had been stubborn to God’s long-suffering at some time in the past. “Longsuffering” is a term in both the NT and the OT which always(?!) everywhere else refers to God’s intention to save sinners from sin and His unwillingness to punish them if possible. (A Calvinist might disagree with that term usage, but an Arminian would not; and even Calvs in my acquaintance realize the term almost always with perhaps only a couple of exceptions refers positively to God’s intention to save sinners! Indeed last year I had one Calvinist apologist admit the term was used everywhere else except the portion under debate–not 1 Peter–to reflect God’s intention and attitude for salvation! And he was wary as a result about having to claim it meant nothing to do with salvation where we were discussing!)
At this point it really doesn’t matter in principle how long ago that was; what matters is what Christ’s intention was to proclaim whatever He did. Which hasn’t been directly mentioned yet, although Peter has tacitly expressed it by context earlier (more on that soon). But Peter goes on to explain who these spirits were:
Verse 20b: “[the time when the spirits were stubborn and God was longsuffering patiently with them]… in Noah-days, (while) the ark being constructed…”
The grammar is a bit glitchy here by English (and maybe Greek) standards, but Peter means the spirits were being stubborn back in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.
So we’re talking narratively about the first rebel humans, or about incarnated rebel spirits, or both. Jewish typology generally regards the Flood (and so any scary large body of water) as being the prison of rebel demons, and Peter elsewhere certainly holds to the concept of human sinners being put in the prison of rebel angels. These could be presented as an example of how far Jesus goes to proclaim something to rebel spirits in jail: not just recent ones, but as far back as human history goes. And maybe including rebel angels.
Verse 20c: “…in which (ark) few – this is eight souls – were rescued-through, through water…”
At the time the ark saved only eight persons–and they were hardly sinless! Noah’s family were, by the double way of indicating “through”, catapulted to safety through the violent water that killed the other people (humans and incarnated rebel angels alike).
Note that it doesn’t matter overmuch how historical any of that was; the principle is what counts, and Peter is about to use it as a typological illustration anyway. But it’s a very unexpected typological illustration: Peter starts talking about how the water, not the ark but the water that killed the impenitent sinners, represents the same baptism by which we are saved into Christ!
And it’s definitely the water: the “to which” Peter says baptism is an “antitype” is a singular neuter direct article, so it ought to be referring back to another neuter singular noun or pronoun (or to another neuter singular direct article standing as a pronoun the way this one does. In Greek “the” often means “this” or “that” or “that which” or “the one” or “those” depending on its grammatic form.) The immediately preceding noun, “water”, is a singular neuter (even though it’s in genitive instead of dative form, but that makes no difference here as the reason for referring to it changes correspondingly). But “ark” (along with its connected verb, not incidentally) is singular female, not singular neuter! Nor is there another singular neutral topic nearby, before or afterward, to which “to which” could refer.
It’s possible that this is a grammatic error on Peter’s part; but even if “the ark” was being referred to, it could only stand for an object (a burial tomb?) being baptized by water. The water is still the baptizing subject, and the water is also the means by which (in the story) God kills the rebel humans and angels–to at least one set of whom Christ is now proclaiming something to them in their jail.
But proclaiming what?
Peter doesn’t specifically outright say, which has led to understandable confusion and differences of interpretation. But the local contexts before and after this verse all talk about one thing: salvation of sinners by God. That’s how Peter got into this statement in the first place, encouraging Christians to be kind and unresentful to pagans unjustly making Christians suffer despite being innocent of crimes, so that they can be led to God the way Christ led us to God suffering for us when we were unjust. The comparison is a “greater includes the lesser” type: if Christ voluntarily and even authoritatively suffers to death on a cross to save those unjustly condemning Him, among whom we must include ourselves, we ought to be willing to put up with any amount of social injustice against us, too, for the sake of the people who currently are what we used to be. In fact we can use what happens to us unjustly as an opportunity to give an answer in good conscience for the reason of our hope to those who are currently unjust so that they may be ashamed they have accused us of being doers of evil.
That was how Peter got into discussing Christ going in spirit after being put unjustly to death in the flesh, to spirits in jail who were justly slain and put there by God for being unjust but whom God patiently wanted to save from their sins.
And now, having talked about that, Peter says in 3:21 that the water that killed those sinners is a figure for the water that baptizes us and saves us. The most important way to think of that water, whether the water of the Flood or of our baptism, is not to focus primarily on the putting away of the filth of the flesh (although in somewhat related ways the water did that to the ancient human and angelic rebels just as it does for us), but rather we should present that water–the water of the Flood being a type of the water of our baptism–as somehow being part of “the answer of a good conscience toward God”. This phrase echoes what Peter said back in verses 15 and 16: how we answer those who unjustly accuse us of evil, in explaining the reason of the hope in us, involves us having humility and fear and a good conscience. But this answer of a good conscience must have something to do with connecting the water that slew and imprisoned justly punished rebel humans and angels, to the water that saves us in baptism. It also has to be connected to our salvation being accomplished through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (verse 21), which is itself connected (by application of a typical reference) to Jesus dying in the flesh yet being alive in the spirit.
In all this surrounding context, the only concept that makes thematic and narrative sense would be for Jesus to be preaching the gospel to the dead ones as spirits in jail, with an intention that even though they were slain justly in the flesh they may live to God eventually in the spirit: basically so that sooner or later they will be resurrected with Christ into the “eonian life” that Christ always had and which He shares with those who loyally follow Him.
This would of course require that any rebel angels and authorities and powers who aren’t yet loyal to Him shall be someday made subject to Him–including the ones who had incarnated themselves in human prehistory and were slain by God as rebels along with ancient human rebels. But then Peter appends the brief hymn-kerygma about Christ the resurrected One “Who is in the right-hand of the God, being gone into heaven, of Whom angels and authorities and powers are being subjected to Him!” (verse 3:22)
If Christ suffers over us in the flesh for the sake of our salvation, we should take up arms in the same mind and with the same intention as Christ toward the unjust. (4:1a) Peter goes on to talk about how we in Christ already suffer and have suffered in the flesh to cease from sin, putting away our former pagan misbehaviors that we previously indulged in. But Peter was also just recently talking about another group of unjust people who have suffered in the flesh for their unjust behaviors and attitudes. The same goal, from God’s perspective, must apply. Does that mean impenitence will be passed by? No, it wasn’t passed by for those dead ones, and won’t be passed by for currently impenitent people still alive in the flesh; and Christ is entirely ready to judge both the living ones and the dead oens! And so we come to 4:6:
Verse 4:6: “For into this, also for dead ones, a gospel is brought…”
“The dead ones” is in dative form, so it probably means “regarding dead ones” or “for dead ones” not “to dead ones” in a vector action sense. But {eis touto} is an accusative “in” so it does mean “into this” in a vector action sense. (The initial “for” in English is a post-positive {gar}, the placement of which settles some other grammatic issues here, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
But there are some much stranger grammatic issues. Why is “evangelized” a singular third-person verb? Like “he is” or “she is” or “it is” evangelized? Grammatically it couldn’t refer to “the dead ones”: they’re plural. Yet it’s also obvious that the evangel applies to “the dead ones” somehow (“that they may be being etc.”, which we’ll get to soon). So what is being evangelized?!
The root word for this term involves a gospel (a good message) being announced to someone. So the singular form of the verb is commonly regarded as applying to the gospel itself, not to whoever is being evangelized. However, there are examples such as Matt 11:5 which show that the term shifts into the plural when plural objects (“poor-ones” in this example) are the receivers of the gospel. (When the verb is in a middle voice the tense matches who is bringing the gospel.)
So since this verb is in passive singular, who or what is having the gospel brought to it/him/her? (The third person singular of this verb can work with any gender or neuter.)
“This” from “into this” is the nearest single noun or pronoun; but then that raises a new puzzle: what is “this” referring to? It’s a singular neutral pronoun; but there aren’t any single neutral nouns or pronouns nearby!
For this reason, translators have tended to supply a reasonable guess as to what “for in(to) this” means: “for this reason”! That does make contextual sense: since everyone shall give an account to Christ who is ready to judge the living and the dead, for this reason the gospel is announced or preached to the dead ones. But this interpretation runs into the grammatic problem that the verb ought to be plural if “the dead ones” are the object of the gospel.
And yet, the gospel is being brought for the salvation of the dead ones:
4:6b: “…so that they may be being judged, certainly according to (or down from) persons in flesh, yet may be living according to (or down from) God in spirit.”
“They” can only mean “the dead ones” here. And the gospel is being brought to something so that these dead ones may not only be judged in their flesh as a result of something men have done, but also so that the dead ones may be living in spirit as a result of something God has done.
And these dead ones are to be contrasted somehow with “living” ones" whom Christ is also ready to judge. Yet they are also to be contrasted somehow in the sense that the gospel is brought also to these dead ones not only to the living ones. We can be 100% sure the general conjunction {kai} not only means “also” here but that the also applies to “the dead ones” not to “In this”: because the {gar}, which in grammatic logic starts the whole clause (as our English “For” starts the clause), but which always runs after the initial word or phrase of the sentence or clause, comes after {eis touto}, but not after {kai}. If the {kai} was meant to apply grammatically to {eis touto} (as some translations put it “For this reason also” or “Also for this reason”), it would be included in that phrase somewhere, at the beginning or the end (so as not to split the prepositional phrase {eis touto}). In other words, the opening phrase would have read {kai eis touto gar} or {eis touto kai gar}, not what it does read {eis touto gar kai}.
If “living ones” from verse 5 means people already “living according to God in spirit”, then the gospel has already been brought to them and they have accepted it (even if Christ is still judging them according to their deeds). So the gospel is brought even to those dead ones whose judgment shall certainly come or has come in the flesh, not for any hopeless purpose but so the dead ones may also be living.
Yet while a reference to judging the living and the dead may involve God (and/or Christ, or God as Christ) judging the deeds of the saved and the unsaved, typically the phrase refers to the judgment of those who are living on earth at the coming of YHWH and also those who have died and so are resurrected to judgment: OT and NT prophetic reports of this coming judgment indicate that those being alive at the time of judgment are not all in God’s good favor but may well be judged and punished as rebels!
Peter’s phraseology is very similar to that of Paul’s in 1 Cor 5:3-5, where Paul judges the Stepmom-Sleeping Guy (as I like to call him) to whole-ruination of the flesh, handing him over to Satan thereby, so that the SSG’s spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus to come.
When this is combined with an argument from back in 1 Peter 3, on its own exegetical merits, that Christ went in spirit to the jail of spirits rightly slain in flesh and imprisoned for their rebellions, to proclaim something to them with a bearing on their salvation, the probability rises exponentially to a virtual certainty that Peter is talking about the gospel being preached to dead ones in spirit jail here, too. A conclusion strengthened by Peter immediately going on to declare:
4:7a, “Now the completion of all-things has come near.”
The spirits who are still rebelling are not completed yet; they are not yet truly submitted to the Son and in the Son to the Father. But Peter, as quote above 3:22, definitely expects this to happen by the power and authority of Christ.
(Notably, the term for “draw near”, literally “is at hand” (or more literally in choking or grasping range!), is one of the base-roots for eu-angelion! It is also the word often applied to “the kingdom of God” (or in GosMatt to “the kingdom of the heavens” where he is using an Aramaic euphamism for God).)
But none of this solves the riddle yet of what (singularly) is being evangelized in verse 4:6!–nor why it would be put as though the gospel is being proclaimed in or into whatever-this-is.
Looking back through the preceding context, the first singular neuter noun or pronoun is {h(i)ô} back at the beginning of verse 4:4. In one way that doesn’t help much, because that’s simply part of another introductory prepositional phrase, {en h(i)ô} “in which”! But that does suggest a connecting chain of ideas. If we can figure out what “in which” applies to, that would be strong evidence of the same thing also applying to “in(to) this” in verse 6.
4:4 has sometimes been translated “Because of this” or “for this reason” or “this is why”. That translation works well enough: it would refer back to the fact that Peter’s audience (whether Jew or Gentile) used to go do the wanton things the other Gentiles do, thus the pagans now think it strange that the Christians don’t run with them into the same puddles of excess anymore. But such a translation wouldn’t help solve the mystery.
Another older way of translating the term has been something like “wherein” (as the KJV puts it). That’s a little more literal, and so a little more particular, but generally the interpretation of the translation (so to speak) amounts to the same thing as before.
But for testing what the pronoun there (or a direct article “the” being used as a pronoun rather) might be specifically referring to, we may look back farther again. It doesn’t refer to any or all of that colorful list of lusty sins immediately prior, because none of those terms are neuter singular, and the list is itself never described by a term. Unless that term would be “the will of the nations” perhaps, but that seems more of a general thing that leads to such a list as a result.
Yet behold!–“the will” {to thelêma} happens to be singular neuter! And in fact, the only other singular neuter noun preceding this nearby refers to “the will of the God”!
Now, the will of the God hardly needs evangelization. But the will of the nations sure does!
It also fits the intermediate reference to a singular neuter something, too: it is because of the corrupted will of the pagans/nations/Gentiles that such people not only think it strange that Christians (and righteous Jews, one may suppose) don’t run into the same puddles as before, but that such people would also come up with slanders to explain such new behavior rather than being impressed by it!
So just as it is because of the corrupted will of fallen mankind that some such people will insist on inventing infamous falsehoods about those who are seeking to willingly cooperate with the will of God, the corrupted will is what is being evangelized so that even dead people who are certainly to be judged in the flesh (thanks in significant part to results of evil deeds passed down by other persons) may also come to live in the spirit despite having been already judged.
As I had previously argued, if 4:6 is properly translated “for this reason”, this would be no evidence against 4:6 referring to dead people (even those slain in judgment for their crimes) as well as living people being evangelized with serious hope of their salvation. But even if 4:6 is properly interpreted to refer instead to the corrupted will being evangelized, this does not weigh against post-mortem evangelization either. If anything it might weigh at least a little more strongly in favor of it, since when the singular corrupted will (“the will of the nations”) is evangelized for the salvation of plural persons (“also regarding the dead ones”), this would imply total evangelization of all people, those who are alive and those already dead and (in regard to the flesh) already judged–even if, logically and properly, there is more judgment for them on the way so long as they continue in impenitence.
Next up: a local context against this analysis?
