so much the more unquestionable, as they are borrowed from coincidences which must have been entirely natural and incidental, and not the result of any deliberate collusion.
This account of the second epistle is also taken from Hug and Michaelis, to whom,
with Lardner, reference may be made for the details of all the arguments for and
against its authenticity.
As to the place and time of writing this epistle, it seems quite
probable that it was written where the former one was, since there
is no account or hint whatever of any change in Peter's external
circumstances; and that it was written some months after it, is unquestionable,
since its whole tenor requires such a period to have
intervened, as would allow the first to reach them and be read by
them, and also for the apostle to learn in the course of time the
effects ultimately produced by it, and to hear of the rise of new
difficulties, requiring new apostolical interference and counsel.
The first seems to have been directed mainly to those who were
complete Jews, by birth or by proselytism, as appears from the
terms in which he repeatedly addresses them in it; but the sort
of errors complained of in this epistle seem to have been so exclusively
characteristic of Gentile converts, that it must have
been written more particularly with reference to difficulties in
that part of the religious communities of those regions. He condemns
and refutes certain heretics who rejected some of the fundamental
truths of the Mosaic law,—errors which no well-trained
Jew could ever be supposed to make, but which in motley assemblages
of different races, like the Christian churches, might
naturally enough arise among those Gentiles, who felt impatient
at the inferiority in which they seemed implicated by their ignorance
of the doctrines of the Jewish theology, in which their
circumcised brethren were so fully versed. It seems to have
been more especially aimed at the rising sect of the Gnostics, who
are known to have been heretical on some of the very points here
alluded to. Its great similarity, in some passages, to the epistle of
Jude, will make it the subject of allusion again in the life of that
apostle.
HIS DEATH.
Henceforth the writings of the New Testament are entirely silent as to the chief apostle. Not a hint is given of the few remaining actions of his life, nor of the mode, place, or time of his death; and all these concluding points have been left to be settled by conjecture, or by tradition as baseless. The only passage
