A letter to scattered congregations in northern Asia Minor, written in Greek good enough to be an obstacle to its own stated authorship, and addressed to exactly the region where the first surviving Roman document about Christians was written.
What the book is
1 Peter is a circular letter to congregations across five Roman provinces in Asia Minor, addressing people described as strangers and exiles. Its subject is how to behave under hostility: honourably, without retaliation, in a way that makes accusations implausible.
It contains a household code, instruction to elders, and a sustained argument that undeserved suffering follows a pattern set by Christ.
How it is put together
The letter alternates between statements about the readers’ status and instructions about conduct. Much of its language is drawn from the Greek Old Testament, often without introduction, and it uses the vocabulary of Israel — a chosen people, a royal priesthood — for a mixed gentile readership.
It closes with greetings from the church in Babylon and from Mark, and mentions Silvanus as the one through whom it was written.
The authorship and dating question
The letter names Peter. The main difficulty is the Greek, which is among the most polished in the New Testament, with a wide vocabulary and rhetorical construction, and which uses the Septuagint throughout. That is a demanding thing to attribute to a Galilean fisherman, and it is the argument most often made against the attribution.
The reference to Silvanus is the usual answer: an educated secretary given latitude could account for the style, and this was a normal practice. Against that, the letter’s use of the Greek Old Testament is not merely stylistic but structural.
Dating tracks the answer. If Peter is behind it, before about 65 CE. If it is pseudonymous, most place it between 70 and 95 CE, largely on the basis of the situation it describes — hostility that is social and legal but not yet systematic.
Babylon in the closing greeting is generally taken as a codeword for Rome, a usage attested in Jewish texts after 70 CE. If that reading is right, it is a small argument for a later date, since the codeword makes most sense once Rome had destroyed a temple as Babylon had.
Where the external record touches it
There is a genuinely useful external document here, and it is Roman. Pliny the Younger, governing Bithynia and Pontus — two of the five provinces this letter addresses — wrote to the emperor Trajan around 112 CE asking how to handle Christians, and Trajan replied. The exchange survives in Pliny’s published correspondence.
It describes people brought before a governor on accusation rather than by systematic search, tested by being required to sacrifice, and executed for obstinacy rather than for a specific crime. It reports that the movement had spread to villages and countryside, that some had abandoned it years before, and that they met before dawn and sang to Christ as to a god.
That is not confirmation of 1 Peter. It is a Roman administrative document, from the same provinces, describing the kind of situation the letter addresses — a generation or so later. It is the closest thing the New Testament epistles have to an external control, and it is worth reading precisely because it is unfriendly and bureaucratic.
Related: 2 Peter and the method note on the five source layers.