By most reckonings the latest book in the New Testament, and the one whose stated authorship is doubted most widely. It borrows most of a chapter from Jude and refers to Paul’s letters as though they were already scripture.
What the book is
2 Peter answers people who had concluded that nothing was going to happen — that the expected intervention had not come and was not coming. It attacks teachers it regards as immoral and dismissive, restates the expectation, and argues that delay is not abandonment.
It presents itself as a final testament, written in the knowledge that the author’s death is near.
How it is put together
Chapter 1 establishes the writer’s authority, appealing to having been present at the transfiguration. Chapter 2 is a sustained denunciation of false teachers. Chapter 3 addresses the delay directly, and includes the argument that with the Lord a day is as a thousand years.
Chapter 2 runs closely parallel to the letter of Jude, in places nearly word for word, in the same order. Most scholars conclude that 2 Peter used Jude, on the grounds that the borrowing smooths out Jude’s rougher edges — notably by removing Jude’s explicit citations of books outside the Hebrew canon.
The authorship and dating question
The doubts about 2 Peter are older than modern criticism. Eusebius, in the fourth century, records that it was disputed, and it entered the canon later and more hesitantly than any other New Testament book. Origen notes the doubt in the third century.
The modern arguments are cumulative and unusually strong. The Greek is elaborate and quite unlike 1 Peter. It depends on Jude. It refers to the fathers having fallen asleep, implying that the first generation has died. It refers to Paul’s letters as a known collection and groups them with the other scriptures, which presupposes a stage of collection and status that is hard to place in Peter’s lifetime.
The consensus, which includes most conservative critical scholars, places it in the early second century, roughly 100 to 150 CE. A minority defends the traditional attribution.
This site treats the near-consensus as what it is — the position with the evidence behind it — while recording that a canonical book being pseudonymous is a statement about authorship, not a judgement of its content.
Where the external record touches it
The relevant external evidence is the canon record itself, and it is unusually explicit: ancient Christian writers say in so many words that this book’s authorship was contested. That is a rare case where the tradition preserves its own doubt rather than suppressing it.
The manuscript record is comparatively late. The earliest substantial witness is the Bodmer papyrus P72, from the third or fourth century, where 2 Peter appears alongside 1 Peter and Jude in a composite codex.
Related: Jude, the source of much of chapter 2, and 1 Peter.