The Authors Motive for Writing
15 ‘Peter’s’ concern, however, extends far beyond the brief span of life still left to him: he will make the effort (again his favourite verb spoudazein, as at 10a: cf. also 5a) to see that, even after his departure, his correspondents (here he seems to be envisaging the Church generally as well) may be able on all occasions to recall these things. In other words, he plans to leave behind him a permanent testimony to which they can refer; there is perhaps a hint that apostolic writings were not only treasured but read at services. For departure (exodos) as a dignified euphemism for death, cf. Lk. 9:31 (Jesus’s death, foreshadowed at the Transfiguration); Wis. 3:2; 7:6; Irenaeus, Haer. iii. 1. 1 (of the deaths of Peter and Paul). At first sight the cast of the sentence, with its future tense, seems to imply that he is promising a further work, and on the theory of Petrine authorship commentators have often identified this either as some document now lost or as Mark’s Gospel, which the ancient Church (e.g. Irenaeus, Haer. iii. 1. 1; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. ii. 15; iii. 39. 15) regarded as enshrining the Apostle’s teaching. Neither conjecture has any plausibility if we are satisfied that 2 Peter is pseudonymous. A serious objection in any case to the latter is that the language used here leads us to expect a work (a) composed by Peter himself, not a disciple, and (b) consisting of exhortation and doctrine (cf. recall these things), not gospel narrative; while the former overlooks the fact that the imagined setting is Peter’s fast approaching death. Almost certainly the reference is to the epistle itself. The tense is admittedly difficult, but the whole pericope 12–15 is clumsily and pretentiously composed, and in employing the future the writer is either looking forward to the sections he is about to draft or (more probably) placing himself in the position of his readers when they receive and study his tract. His remark is revealing in other respects, for it savours of an epoch when the living witness of the apostles is no longer operative and the Church feels the need of written texts stamped with their authority.
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