1 Peter 5:13

The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you The Greek MSS. (with the notable exception, however, of the Sinaitic), as the italics shew, have no noun corresponding to "church," and it is, at least, a question whether it ought to be inserted, and the same holds good of the pronoun "you." On the one hand there is the consent of many of the early Fathers in favour of the insertion (see next note) and, perhaps, the improbability that a salutation would be sent to the Asiatic Churches from any individual convert in the Church of Babylon. On the other there is the fact (1) that there is no parallel use of the adjective without the noun in this sense in any other passage of the New Testament; (2) that in 2 John 1:1, which presents the nearest parallel, it is almost certain that the "elect lady," or the "elect Kyria," or the "lady Eclecta" is a person and not a Church; and (3) that if a salutation was sent from "Marcus my son" to the Churches of Asia, there is nothing surprising in a like salutation being sent from another individual disciple. If we adopt, as on the whole, in spite of the weight due to the Sinaitic MS., seems preferable, the latter view, the question who the person was remains open to conjecture. It may have been St Peter's wife who was, as we learn from 1 Corinthians 9:5, the companion of his labours, and in this case there would be a special appropriateness in her sending her greeting in an Epistle which had dwelt so fully on the duties of the female members of the Church (chap. 1 Peter 3:1-6). It may have been some conspicuous member of the Church of Babylon otherwise unknown to us. The former view seems to have most in its favour.

The further question, what place is meant by Babylon, remains for discussion, and here also we have to note a wide diversity of opinion. On the one hand, Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, and Clement of Alexandria, as reported by Eusebius (Hist. ii. 15), take the words figuratively, as interpreted by the symbolism of the Apocalypse (Revelation 14:8; Revelation 18:2; Revelation 18:10), for Rome, and this view has naturally been taken by most Romish commentators, who find in this passage a proof, otherwise wanting, as far as the New Testament is concerned, of St Peter's connexion with that Church. Against this it has been urged chiefly, as might be expected, by Protestant interpreters, that there would be something unnatural in the use of a symbolic term belonging to an apocalyptic vision in the simple words of a salutation, and that it was not likely to be intelligible to those who read the Epistle unless they had previously become acquainted with the book in which the symbolism occurs. The order in which the names of the Asiatic provinces are given in chap. 1 Peter 1:1, from East to West, is, though not decisive, yet as far as it goes in favour of the Epistle having been written from the Euphrates rather than the Tiber. There was from the days of the Captivity a large Jewish population residing in the new Babylon which had risen on or near the ruins of the old (Joseph. Ant. xv. 2, § 2), and although there had been a massacre of many of these (Josephus, Ant. xviii. 9, gives the number as 50,000) in the reign of Claudius, and others had taken refuge first in Ctesiphon and afterwards in Neerda and Nisibis, there may well have been a remnant sufficiently numerous to call for St Peter's attention as the Apostle of the Circumcision. Another Babylon, it should be added, is named by Strabo (B. xvii.) as a military fortress in Egypt, which has been identified by some writers with the modern Cairo, but there are no adequate grounds for assuming that this is the city which St Peter refers to. There is, indeed, no evidence, such as there is in regard to the Euphrates Babylon, that there was either a Jewish population or a Christian Church there.

and so doth Marcus my son It is natural, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, to assume that the Marcus so named is identical with the "John whose surname was Mark," the son of the Mary to whose house St Peter went on his release from imprisonment (Acts 12:12), the cousin of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10), the companion of St Paul on his first missionary journey (Acts 13:5). On this assumption the term "son" might be used of him either as implying the spiritual parentage of conversion, or as the expression of an affection like that which St Paul cherished for Timotheus (1 Timothy 1:2) and Titus (Titus 1:4). His presence with St Peter at Babylon when this letter was written, as compared with Colossians 4:10 and 2 Timothy 4:11, indicates that having gone to Rome during St Paul's first imprisonment, he had then returned to Asia, and had made his way, probably with messages and copies of the later Pauline Epistles, to the Apostle of the Circumcision. When St Paul wrote shortly before his execution, he believed the disciple to be again in Asia. In the traditions of Ecclesiastical history he appears as the "interpreter" of St Peter, writing his Gospel to perpetuate the Apostle's oral teaching, and as the founder of the Church of Alexandria (Euseb. Hist. iii. 39, Jerome De Vir. Illust. c. 8). The view taken by some commentators that the Mark here mentioned was a "son" of the Apostle by natural parentage cannot, of course, be disproved, but it has absolutely nothing in its favour.