2 Peter setting & dates

The Setting of 2 Peter

Second Peter, like the first, appears to be written from Rome, the imperial capital, near the end of Peter’s life in the mid-to-late 60s AD. Peter writes as a man conscious that his death is imminent — the fulfillment of Jesus’ own prediction about how he would die (John 21:18-19) — and the letter has the solemn tone of a farewell, a final legacy to be remembered after he is gone. It presents itself as a “second letter” to the same readers, likely the believers scattered across the provinces of Asia Minor whom he had addressed before.

Unlike a travel narrative, the “geography” of 2 Peter is chiefly the terrain of memory, threat, and hope. Peter looks back to a specific place and moment — “the holy mountain” of the transfiguration, where he, James, and John saw Christ’s majesty and heard the Father’s voice — as the eyewitness foundation of the gospel he proclaims. He surveys the landscape of God’s past judgments — the fallen angels, the flood that engulfed the ancient world, the fire that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah — as sure evidence that judgment will come again. And he lifts the reader’s eyes to the future horizon: the dissolution of “the heavens and earth that now exist” and the coming of “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” The map of 2 Peter thus stretches from a Roman prison, back to a mountain in Galilee, across the whole history of God’s dealings with the world, and forward to the day of the Lord and the new creation — orienting the church, wherever it lives, toward the certain return of Christ.

Timeline

• c. AD 30 - Peter witnesses the transfiguration of Christ, the eyewitness memory he recalls (Matthew 17).
• c. AD 62-64 - Peter writes 1 Peter to the suffering churches of Asia Minor.
• c. AD 64-67 - Peter writes 2 Peter as a farewell, knowing his death is near.
• c. AD 64-68 - Peter is martyred in Rome under Nero, as Jesus had foretold.