Introduction

Over the past two thousands years of Christianity the epistle known as 2 Peter has come under progressively higher levels of suspicion. Initially, Church Fathers such as Origen mentioned that there were some doubts about it, but fully accepted it as genuine. In the Reformation, it was treated with more suspicion – Luther accepted it, Calvin questioned it, and Erasimus rejected it.¹  Today, the majority of scholarship rejects the work as authentic, at best considering it the faithful work of a pseudepigrapher² and at worst an outright forgery.

This paper will attempt to evaluate the various questions surrounding 2 Peter’s authorship and determine if those questions arouse enough suspicion to disallow 2 Peter from the canon.³ This paper will consider three areas: (1) the epistle’s attestation in the early church, (2) the internal evidence for and against Petrine authorship, and (3) its relationship to other New Testament writings, notably 1 Peter and Jude.