1 Peter 2:22

1 Peter 2:22. who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. Of all the apostles, Peter, with the single exception of John, had known the Christ of history most intimately, and had seen Him in the circumstances, both public and private, most certain to betray the sinfulness of common human nature, had such been latent in Him. Peter had felt, too, not less strongly than others, how the type of holiness which Christ taught conflicted with his own traditional Jewish notion of a holiness bound up with the rigid observance of Sabbath laws and ceremonial rules of life. But with what quiet strength of fixed conviction does he proclaim Christ's blamelessness! Nor can Peter's confession of that sinlessness, as he lingers over it in this section, be said to come behind either Paul's ‘who knew no sin' (2 Corinthians 5:21), or John's ‘in Him is no sin' (1 John 3:5). It is the affirmation of a freedom not only from open but also from hidden sin, a sinlessness not in deed only, but also in word, and indeed (as the ‘guile' implies, on which see also at 1 Peter 2:1) in thought. The language, as Bengel suggests, is peculiarly pertinent to the case of slaves with their strong temptations to practise deception. The choice of the verb ‘was found' or ‘was discovered' (see also on 1 Peter 1:7) is in harmony with the idea of a sinlessness which had stood the test of suspicious sifting and scrutiny. The statement is given, too, with the direct and positive force of simple historical tenses, which may imply (as Alford puts it) that in no instance did He ever do the wrong deed, or say the guileful word. All this, however, is in the form not of words of Peter's own, but of a reproduction (taken exactly from the LXX., only that ‘sin' appears here, while ‘iniquity' or ‘lawlessness' appears there) of the great prophetic picture of Jehovah's servant in Isaiah (Isaiah 53:9).