Conflict, Community, and Honor

1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective

John H. Elliott

CONFLICT, COMMUNITY, AND HONOR

1 Peter in Social-Scientific Perspective

Cascade Companions

Copyright © 2007 John H. Elliot. All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-234-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Elliott, John Hall

Conflict, community, and honor: 1 Peter in social-scientific perspective / John H. Elliott.

Cascade Companions

xii + 94 p.; 20 cm.

ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-234-8

1. Bible. N.T. Peter, 1st—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. N.T. Peter, 1st—Social scientific criticism. 3. Honor. 4. Shame. I. Title. II. Series.

BS2795.2 E43 2007

To

The Context Group

Dear friends, colleagues, and pioneers

Contents

Preface

1 Estrangement and Community

2 Disgraced yet Graced

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Preface

Two studies are brought together here. Both involve expansions on my first book on 1 Peter, The Elect and the Holy (1966), putting that tradition-and-redaction analysis of 1 Peter 2:4–10 into a larger literary, social, and cultural framework.

The opening essay is an overview of the social situation and rhetorical strategy of 1 Peter. It was originally composed in Rome in 1978 while I was teaching at the Pontifical Biblical Institute as annual Visiting Professor of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. It was written simultaneously with a larger work on 1 Peter, A Home for the Homeless, that eventually appeared in 1981. The briefer study was published in Franciscan Biblical Booklets (1979), a series introducing writings and topics of the Bible to the general reader. The fact that it bore a nihil obstat and imprimatur of Roman Catholic authorities while written by a Lutheran made me the envy among my fratelli Romani at the Collegio S. Roberto Bellarmino. If Santo Roberto was possibly rotating in his grave over the Lutheran residing among the Company of Jesus, my Jesuit hosts in Rome showed me nothing but warm and brotherly hospitality. The rector of the “Bib” at the time, Rev. Prof. Dr. Carlo Martini, now the retired archbishop of Milan, was especially supportive of my research on 1 Peter, encouraging me, in fact, to share it with His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, who also had a special fondness for 1 Peter.

Summarizing distinctive features of the writing’s composition, content and practical goal, it aims at showing how this pastoral letter of consolation and encouragement was a powerful response to the alienated situation of its intended recipients. In 1979 the study was among the first to identify the household as a locus, basis, and focus of the Jesus movement and as a chief symbol of communal identity. The portrayal of the believing community as the “household or family of God” offering a home for the homeless is ...