Who?

 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, 

To God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance. (I Peter 1:1-2) 

Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13)

 

Peter was executed (crucified upside down, according to accounts) in 64 AD. Higher critics, who ignore what is actually said in the text, and what has been said by others living around that time, and who seek fame and power by attempting to prove everyone else wrong about Scripture suggest that it was written between 80 and 200 AD. Mostly, their complaint is about the caliber of the Greek language and thought processes clearly used in the letter.

Because he was a fisherman from Galilee, he couldn’t possibly be well-versed in Greek. Scripture even describes Peter and John as being uneducated and untrained men. So how could anyone think that Peter could write in excellent Greek or make a good Greek argument?

The first logical problem here is the assumption that the lack of education and training attributed to Peter in Acts was a general deficit on his part. Peter didn’t have a Ph.D. from one of the schools approved by the Pharisees or Sanhedrin. So, because you don’t have a Ph.D. in law or theology from Harvard, you can’t possibly learn to speak Spanish well or argue according to Spanish cultural norms?

At Pentecost, Peter and others were heard speaking in a large variety of languages, and no one seems to have declared their use of the languages deficient. If God could arrange for that, would it be impossible for Him to give Peter command of Greek?  Oh, but of course, miracles can’t happen, so everything described in the gospels. and books of Acts must be lies – so say the “scholars” whose careers have been built specifically in order to reject the text they are studying as having value. They have a definite dog in the fight, so it’s not surprising they try to change the rules of the right so that their dog stands a better chance of winning.

If God exists – and I have seen no good reason to reject that hypothesis – He’s able to teach Peter Greek. It’s also possible that as a businessman in an area in which Greek was spoken, he may have learned excellent Greek during his lifetime. He may have even been able to speak excellent Greek when he was walking with Jesus, but his native language was vernacular Aramaic. To the extent that most people in the US learn a foreign language, most of us learn “schoolbook” versions of the language, which is “excellent” because it is formally correct. That doesn’t mean when we speak English, we don’t use slang or poor grammar. Our knowledge of our own language is often less “proper” than our knowledge of a foreign language.

 It’s also possible that, like Paul, Peter worked with scribes who might have known the language better than he. That doesn’t mean God wasn’t in control.

The other reason I suspect people want to distance this text from the first century is because the Trinity is clearly described. The same scholars mentioned earlier want to reject the idea that God was taught as triune until later. I suspect this is done to build a case that Jesus was not seen as divine. Basically, just another in a long line of attempts to discredit Scripture. Those who use this argument are likely to claim they’re trying to be historically accurate, but they have a pretext and presuppositions. In other words, they have an agenda just as much as those who say that Jesus is the Son of God, and they are religious in their devotion to that agenda.

I’ll address the other two points of interest in this passage tomorrow.