2 Peter 1:16

2 Peter 1:16. For we did not follow cunningly devised myths, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The change from the ‘I' which the writer has used through 2 Peter 1:12-15, to ‘we' here is to be noticed. He is to speak now not of his own personal resolutions and expectations, but of what he had preached in conjunction with other apostles and specially of one significant scene which he had witnessed in company with John and James. The ‘follow' is expressed by a strong compound verb which occurs in no other book of the New Testament, and indeed only twice again (chap. 2 Peter 2:2; 2 Peter 2:15). It is supposed by some to convey the idea of following a false lead. But it expresses rather the closeness of the following. The phrase rendered ‘fables' by the A. V. and R. V. is the term ‘myths' which is so familiar in the Classics. In the New Testament it occurs only here and in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy 1:4; 1Ti 4:7; 2 Timothy 4:4; Titus 1:14). The ‘myths' are defined (by the participle of a verb which is used here in the bad sense, but which has the good sense of making wise, in the only other New Testament passage where it occurs, viz. 2 Timothy 3:15) as ‘cunningly devised,' or cleverly elaborated, Wycliffe and the Rhemish give ‘unwise,' ‘unlearned,' which is an inadequate rendering. Cranmer gives ‘deceitful;' Tyndale and the Genevan ‘deceivable.' There has been much dispute as to the particular myths which are in view. Some have advocated the extraordinary opinion that they were Christian myths, legends like those which the apocryphal Gospels, and other curious products of early Christian literature, show to have become connected, within a comparatively brief period, with the history of Christ's birth and opening life. Others take them to have been fancies of the kind which afterwards took shape in the Gnostic speculations about wisdom and the aeons and emanations from Deity. Others identify them with the ordinary heathen myths, specially those about the descent of the gods to earth. Many regard them to be Jewish myths, such monstrous rabbinical embellishments of Old Testament history as appear in the apocryphal books. Probability lies, on the whole, on the side of this last view, particularly if the parallel statements in the Pastoral Epistles are found to suit best as warnings against the ‘common Judaizing tendency, and an unspiritual, Pharisaic study of the Old Testament, disputatious cleaving to the letter, and losing itself in useless hair-splittings and rabbinical fables' (Neander, Planting of Christianity, i. p. 342, Bohn). In this case we may the better understand, perhaps, why so much of the teaching of this Epistle and that of Jude turns upon the oldest portions of the Old Testament history. It may be that these, along with others outside the Old Testament itself, but dealing with Old Testament personages and events, were the subjects of the rabbinical, legendary embeilishments; that they were made use of by the false teachers to whom Peter refers; and that, as Canon Mason suggests, Jude and he, therefore, were ‘fighting these seducers with their own weapons.' Another question to which different answers are given is this What communication is alluded to in the statement, ‘we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ'? The term ‘coming,' which means literally ‘presence,' does not denote, as is supposed by some good interpreters, either Christ's earthly lift or His Nativity, Here, as in chap. 2 Peter 3:4; Matthew 24:3; Matthew 24:27; 1 Corinthians 15:23; 1 Corinthians 15:1 Thess. 3:19, etc., it expresses His Second Advent, His return in judgment. This teaching, therefore, on the ‘power' (or ‘fulness of the might of the glorified Lord') (Huther) and ‘advent' of Christ, is identified by some with that which is given by Peter himself in his former Epistle; and it is suggested then that the novel and mysterious declaration about ‘the spirits in prison' may have exposed Peter to misunderstandings which he wished to remove (so Plumptre). But as the writer uses the plural ‘we,' and obviously associates himself with others in what he proceeds here to say, it seems best to understand him to refer generally to what he and his comrades in the apostleship had proclaimed on the subject, whether by oral communication or by written. This teaching, however it may have reached the parties immediately addressed here, would be known to them to carry the weight of apostolic authority with it.

but were eye-witnesses of his majesty. This term for ‘eye-witness' is peculiar to the present passage. The cognate verb, too, is used in the New Testament only by Peter (1 Peter 2:12; 1 Peter 3:2; which see). They are the technical words in Classical Greek for the final stage of initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries. The noun may carry with it here the idea of privileged spectators, or eye-witnesses of something which was hidden from others. The other term, ‘majesty,' applied here to the glorious appearance of Christ in the Transfiguration, is found only twice again in the New Testament, viz. in Luke's account (Luke 9:43) of the amazement felt by the people at ‘the mighty power' (as it is there rendered) of God seen in the miracle which followed the Transfiguration; and in the same writer's description of the ‘magnificence' (as the same term is here translated) of Diana (Acts 19:27). In the original the whole sentence has a turn which may be represented thus ‘For it was not as having followed cleverly-contrived myths that we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but as having become eye-witnesses of His majesty.'