Second Letter of Peter

This is the Second Epistle of Peter in the Latin Vulgate, a first-century Christian letter attributed to the apostle Peter and addressed to believers in the early church. The letter opens by exhorting recipients to cultivate a chain of virtues — faith, knowledge, self-control, patience, piety, fraternal love, and charity — as the path to fruitful knowledge of Christ and secure entry into his eternal kingdom. A central section warns sharply against false teachers who introduce destructive sects, drawing on Old Testament precedents (the fallen angels, Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah) to argue that God judges the wicked while rescuing the righteous; these deceivers are condemned in vivid terms as waterless springs and are compared to a dog returning to its vomit. The letter's final chapter confronts mockers who dismiss the promised second coming by arguing that divine time operates differently from human time ("one day is as a thousand years"), that God's delay reflects patience rather than failure, and that the present heavens and earth are reserved for destruction by fire on the day of judgment. A notably distinctive claim is the expectation of a new heavens and new earth where justice dwells, and the letter explicitly endorses Paul's letters as authoritative scripture while acknowledging they contain things "difficult to understand." The overall argument is that doctrinal steadfastness and moral growth are the proper response to eschatological uncertainty.

Second Letter of Peter

Related pages View as graph →