SIL Translator’s Notes on 2 Peter 2000 – Page 2

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:2

1:2

Grace and peace: This was a common greeting among Christians at that time (see also 1 Peter 1:2). It may be necessary for you to translate peace differently according to the context. Here peace means “peace in the heart.”

be multiplied to you: Peter was asking God to continue to give them grace and peace in increasing quantities.

knowledge: This is one of the major themes of the letter. Peter may have been thinking of false teachers who insisted that in order for God to save people, those people needed special secret knowledge. However Peter said that what people really need is to know God and Jesus Christ. See also 1:3, 1:5, 1:6, 1:8, 2:20, and 3:18.

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All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible. BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:14

2:14a

Their eyes are full of adultery: The literal meaning of the Greek is “eyes full of an adulteress.” This may mean:

(1) They are always looking for a woman who is willing to have sex with them, or

(2) They cannot look at any woman without wanting to have sex with her.

It is recommended that you follow the first interpretation (1).

2:14b

their desire for sin is never satisfied: They never get tired of sinning. Here is another way to translate this:

they never stop sinning (New International Version (2011 Revision))

2:14c

they seduce the unstable: Because of the wrong things they were teaching and the way they were behaving, these false teachers persuaded people who were not strong Christians to give up the true way Christ taught them to live and to follow them in the wrong way. Some other ways to translate “unstable people” are “people who are not sure about what they believe about Jesus,” or “people who quickly change their thinking,” or “people whose loyalty to Christ is weak.”

2:14d

accursed children: Literally the Greek says “children of a curse.” This is a way of saying they are people whom God has cursed. What Peter implied by these words is that these false teachers were extremely wicked, so wicked that God had cursed them. People usually think it is wrong to curse anyone. But this verse does not mean that God has done something wrong. It means that God has declared that these people will go to hell and he will punish them there because they have sinned against him. You must translate these words carefully. If in your language the word for cursing always means doing something evil, it would be better to say “God will punish them.”

2:14e

hearts trained in greed: The literal meaning of the Greek is “having been trained in greed.” The verb “to train” usually refers to a person training himself for a race. Here these false teachers trained themselves to become more and more greedy.

greed: This means “desiring too strongly to have more and more of something.”

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:13

1:13

I live in the tent of my body: The Greeks often referred to the body as a “tent,” which is the same as saying that the body is a temporary house for the soul. Here Peter meant simply “while I am still alive.” Unless your language has a similar way of talking about being alive, it will be better if you translate the meaning directly. For example:

as long as I am still alive (Good News Translation)

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 3:4

3:4

Peter said that the people who were scoffing would say that Christ still had not returned, even though he had promised to. They would say that, although he had said that there would be various signs and wonders immediately before he returned (see Mark 13:24–26), these had not happened. There had been no change, and the world was the same as it had always been since God created it. The scoffers would claim that this proved that Christ would not return at all.

3:4a

Where is the promise of His coming?: This is a rhetorical question which means: “He promised to come back, but he has not come.” Many languages use rhetorical questions like this to emphasize something negative that someone is saying, but even if you can use a rhetorical question in this way, you may need to change the form of the question. Good News Translation may be a helpful model: “He promised to come, didn’t he? Where is he?” If you translate it as a statement, and not as a question, you must use a vivid expression. Some suggestions are:

“He promised to return, but those were merely empty words!”
-or-
“When he promised to return, he was lying!”

The source of this promise is both in Old Testament prophecies (see 1:19) and in the words of Christ himself (see Matthew 24).

3:4b–c

This part of the verse tells the reason that the people who are scoffing will give when they say that Christ will not return. The Greek text shows the relationship by using the word gar, “for.” Berean Standard Bible and other versions leave the link implicit. In the Display line for 3:4b, there is an example of how to show the relationship between 3:4b and the previous sentence.

our fathers: Literally “the fathers.” In Greek, as in many other languages, the word “father” means not only a biological father, but can mean “an ancestor,” “respected leader who lived in the past,” “the originator of something,” and “a person older than the speaker.” Because Peter spoke here of “the fathers,” he was probably referring to a specific and respected group of people who lived before the scoffers and to whom they were referring. There are different opinions about which group Peter meant:

(1) the first generation of Christians,

(2) the generation that preceded the generation of which the scoffers were a part,

(3) the patriarchs and prophets,

(4) the ancestors of the human race.

Although elsewhere in the NT the word usually refers to the important leaders in the OT, in the present context Peter probably meant interpretation (1), the first generation of Christians.

Jesus himself seemed to have said that he would return in the lifetime of the first disciples (see Matthew 10:23; Mark 9:1; John 21:21–22); angels from God promised Jesus’ disciples that he would return (see Acts 1:11); and his disciples expected him to return while they were still alive. So when the first Christians began to die and Christ had still not returned, some people, like the people in this verse, started to doubt that he would come back at all.

fell asleep: This is a euphemism for “dying.” If you have a euphemism for “dying” in your language, you could use it here.

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:4

Paragraph 2:4–10a

Peter wrote this paragraph mainly to support what he said in 2:3b–c. He supported what he had said by telling three examples from the OT of how God punished wicked people and rescued people who obeyed him. These were examples with which the people to whom he wrote this letter would have been familiar.

In the Greek this whole paragraph is one long sentence, but it may be necessary for you to break it up. Read Good News Translation and notice how that version has broken the one sentence into several shorter sentences. Perhaps you should begin this paragraph with “See” or “You know that.” Think about whether that would help people who read your translation to understand that Peter was starting to prove a point here. You may even need to repeat the “See” or “You know that” each time Peter used a new example.

Although verses 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9 begin with “if” in the Berean Standard Bible, this is not because the events which Peter was talking about may not have happened. These events all did happen. This use of “if” in English (and Greek) was to prove a point, here what Peter said in verse 9. The Good News Translation shows one way to communicate this meaning without using the word “if” at all.

2:4

For: Peter was now going to say why God would certainly punish the false teachers. Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version consider the link between the previous paragraph and the one that starts here in 2:4 to be clear enough, so they do not include any explicit translation of “For.” If it is necessary to clearly state the link in your language, you could say something like:

I say that God is going to punish them because…

2:4a

God did not spare the angels: This means that he did not overlook their sin. Instead, he punished them.

angels: The first example from the OT that Peter wrote about is what happened to the wicked angels. Scholars do not know for certain which angels were being referred to. (Bible scholars are not certain who these angels were. Some think the angels are “the sons of God” that Genesis 6:1–4 mentions, who came down to earth and married human women. But other scholars strongly disagree. They say that the phrase “sons of God” in Genesis does not refer to angels at all but rather to the descendants of Adam’s son, Seth. (One of the reasons they say that Genesis 6 does not refer to angels is because Jesus said in Mark 12:25 that angels do not marry.))

2:4b

hell: The Jews and Greeks who lived at the time when Peter was writing his letter believed that there was a deep pit under the earth where God imprisoned wicked angels and humans in order to punish them.

2:4c

chains of darkness: There is a problem in the Greek text here. Some manuscripts have “chains (seirais) of gloom” while others have “pits (sirois) of gloom.” That is why Berean Standard Bible says “chains of darkness” while some translations say “gloomy dungeons.” But the meaning of the two possible Greek phrases is almost the same. They both mean that God has imprisoned the wicked angels.

darkness: This means “nearly dark.” The word describes what a place looks like when there is almost no light there.

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 3:15

3:15a

This verse expresses the same idea as in verse 9: The Lord was being patient and had delayed his return to give people the opportunity to repent so that he could save them instead of punishing them.

Lord: is ambiguous, and could refer to God or Christ. You should probably make the same decision here as you made for verses 9–10.

3:15b

Peter said that Paul wrote the same things about the Lord’s return in his letter to them. He called Paul “our beloved brother.” Some scholars think it means “our beloved fellow believer.” The NT often refers to fellow believers as “brothers.” If that is the correct interpretation, then “our” is inclusive. Other scholars think that Peter meant “our beloved fellow apostle.” If that is the correct interpretation, then “our” is exclusive.

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:3

Section 1:3–15

Peter taught about how people who believe in Christ should behave

Here is the basic message of this section: Christ has given Christians everything they need to live in a way that is good and that pleases him, so every Christian should try hard to become a strong and mature Christian. If they become that kind of Christian, it will be right and proper for God to allow them to enter heaven, Christ’s eternal kingdom.

Paragraph 1:3–4

In the Greek of these 2 verses, it is not clear to whom the 3rd person pronouns, “His,” “Him,” and “He,” refer. It is probable, however, that it is the same person throughout both verses. Both God and Christ are mentioned together in the previous verse, so that does not help us choose. Because of this, many translations (New International Version (2011 Revision), Revised Standard Version) leave the pronouns like the Greek, so that the person reading the letter must decide for himself. You may decide to do the same thing. However it may not be possible in your language to do this and therefore you must make a decision. Studying the 2 verses together, it does seem that some of what Peter says about this person, for example, that “he called us,” is normally used only of God himself (see 1 Corinthians 1:9). Therefore, if in your language, you need to make clear to whom these pronouns refer, it would be better to choose God, rather than Christ (see Good News Translation for one way of doing this). The Berean Standard Bible does this by capitalizing the first letter of these pronouns here. This is the interpretation these Notes will follow.

1:3a-b

Peter told the people to whom he wrote this letter that everything they needed to live as genuine Christians was available to them because they now knew God.

His divine power: This refers to the power which God has because he is God.

life and godliness: There are two ways to interpret this:

(1) These are two separate ideas, so the meaning is “spiritual (or eternal) life and godly behavior”. (Berean Standard Bible, New International Version (2011 Revision), The Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, Revised Standard Version)

(2) These are two related words, and one describes the other, so the meaning is “a truly godly life”. (Good News Translation, Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English)

It is recommended that you follow the first interpretation.

godliness: This means the good behavior of a person who has willingly chosen to live for God, and who wants to please him by doing everything in the way God wants him to.

1:3c

by His own glory and excellence: The Greek words here could mean one of two things:

(1) “by means of his own glory and goodness”. This means that God called us to be his people because of his own perfect and glorious character. This is the normal way of understanding the Greek. (Berean Standard Bible, New International Version (2011 Revision), New English Bible, The Jerusalem Bible)

(2) “to his own glory and goodness”. This means that God called us to share in his own glory and goodness. (Good News Translation, Revised Standard Version)

It is recommended that you follow the first interpretation.

glory: The word glory means many different things in the New Testament. Here it refers to God’s greatness, his glorious character.

excellence: This also refers to God’s character, to his moral goodness.

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SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:15

2:15

See the paragraph under the Paragraph heading for more about the story of Balaam.

loved the wages of wickedness: Balaam wanted so much to get the things that King Balak offered to pay him that he was willing to do wrong to get them.

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Source: SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2000

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:2

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:14

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:13

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 3:4

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:4

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 3:15

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 1:3

SIL Translator's Notes on 2 Peter 2:15

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