2 Peter setting & dates

The Setting of 2 Peter

Second Peter, like the first, appears to be written from Rome, the imperial capital, near the end of Peter’s life in the mid-to-late 60s AD. Peter writes as a man conscious that his death is imminent, the fulfillment of Jesus’ own prediction about how he would die (John 21:18-19), and the letter has the solemn tone of a farewell, a final legacy to be remembered after he is gone. It presents itself as a “second letter” to the same readers, likely the believers scattered across the provinces of Asia Minor whom he had addressed before.

Unlike a travel narrative, the “geography” of 2 Peter is chiefly the terrain of memory, threat, and hope. Peter looks back to a specific place and moment (“the holy mountain” of the transfiguration, where he, James, and John saw Christ’s majesty and heard the Father’s voice) as the eyewitness foundation of the gospel he proclaims. He surveys the landscape of God’s past judgments (the fallen angels, the flood that engulfed the ancient world, the fire that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah) as sure evidence that judgment will come again. And he lifts the reader’s eyes to the future horizon: the dissolution of “the heavens and earth that now exist” and the coming of “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” The map of 2 Peter thus stretches from a Roman prison, back to a mountain in Galilee, across the whole history of God’s dealings with the world, and forward to the day of the Lord and the new creation: orienting the church, wherever it lives, toward the certain return of Christ.

Timeline

• c. AD 30 - Peter witnesses the transfiguration of Christ, the eyewitness memory he recalls (Matthew 17).
• c. AD 62-64 - Peter writes 1 Peter to the suffering churches of Asia Minor.
• c. AD 64-67 - Peter writes 2 Peter as a farewell, knowing his death is near.
• c. AD 64-68 - Peter is martyred in Rome under Nero, as Jesus had foretold.