Not all suffering, however, is cause for blessedness. This verse and the next offers a corrective and expands on an idea already mentioned in 2.20. Christians are to make sure that their suffering is not caused by foolish and sinful acts. Murderer and thief are self-explanatory. Criminal is literally “wrongdoer” and is the same word used in 2.12, 14 and 3.16 (compare the verb form in 3.17). Meddles in other people’s affairs translates a Greek word (allotriepiskopos) which is used nowhere else in the whole New Testament nor, in fact, in the whole of Greek literature before the second century A.D. Because of this, it is not easy to determine what the word really means, and translations vary in their understanding (for example, Revised Standard Version “mischief-maker”; New English Bible “one who infringes on the rights of others”; New American Bible “destroyer of another’s rights”; Jerusalem Bible “informer”; Moffatt “a revolutionary”; Phillips “a spy”). The Good News Translation translation is based on a fourth-century usage where the meaning is clearly “interfering with other people’s business,” and several translations reflect this understanding (for example, Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch “one who gets involved in the business of other people”; Biblia Dios Habla Hoy, Barclay “interfering with other people’s affairs”).
A shift from any of you (which may be regarded as a singular second person in form but actually plural in content) to he (third person singular) may be extremely difficult to duplicate in another language. A more common way of rendering this relationship may be “if you suffer, it must not be because you are murderers or thieves….” The causal relationship must sometimes be made even more specific, for example, “if you suffer, it must not be because you are guilty of being murderers or thieves….”
The anticipatory it, which refers to the following causal clause, cannot be reproduced in some languages, and therefore one may have to translate “if you suffer, you must not suffer because you are murderers or thieves.”
The series a murderer or a thief or a criminal causes certain complications because it might suggest that murderers and thieves were not also criminals. In the New English Bible the term translated in Good News Translation as criminal is rendered as “sorcery,” and the Greek term normally refers to persons who do what is bad with the implication of what is bad to others. It is of course also possible to translate the series a murderer or a thief or a criminal as “a murderer or a thief or some other kind of criminal.”
Or meddles in other people’s affairs is often expressed idiomatically, even as in English “to stick one’s nose into other people’s business,” but in some languages one may speak of “putting one’s spoon in someone else’s soup” or “looking on while another man counts his money.”
Quoted with permission from Arichea, Daniel C. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on The First Letter from Peter. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .