Greetings to Readers

1:1  The writer introduces himself in a brief and modest manner. The Gospels all agree on the prominence of Peter, a born leader, impulsive, yet burning with love and enthusiasm. It was to him that Jesus said both the toughest and the choicest things. Whatever Peter’s faults, a cold heart was not one of them. His warm pastoral concern for others glows in his letters.

Peter succinctly states his credentials by describing himself simply as an apostle, an accredited messenger, of Jesus Christ. It is never to teachers, or to prophets, or even to evangelists that the definitive phrase of Jesus Christ is applied in the New Testament, but only to apostles. The paramount office of apostle bestows a unique authority upon Peter to address his readers in the name and on behalf of t…