⚠ This is the most disputed book in the New Testament canon. The early church itself hesitated over it — Eusebius listed it among the “disputed” books, it was the last to be widely accepted, and its Greek, its overlap with Jude, its reference to Paul’s letters as “Scripture” (3:16), and its remark that “the fathers have fallen asleep” (3:4) lead most modern scholars to judge it written in Peter’s name by a later hand, perhaps around AD 100–130. It presents itself, deliberately, as Peter’s last testament. ⚠ The library sets the case out in the book intro and casts no vote; the notes read the chapter as it stands, a farewell charge to hold fast.

“SIMEON Peter.” Symeōn — the Hebraic form of Simon, not the usual Greek Simōn — and it appears in only one other place in the New Testament: on the lips of James at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:14). It is an old, Semitic, insider’s spelling of the apostle’s name, and “a slave and apostle” pairs the humble title with the high one, as at Titus 1:1.

⚠ “Our God and Saviour Jesus Christ.” One article governs both nouns in the Greek (tou theou hēmōn kai sōtēros), the Granville-Sharp construction that points to a single person — so the natural reading calls Jesus outright “our God and Saviour.” It is one of a small handful of New Testament texts (with Titus 2:13, which the library flagged) that name Christ as God in so many words, and here the grammar is clean, with no “Lord” to blunt it. KJV and NWT both, unusually, keep the single title here (“God and our Saviour Jesus Christ”), where at Titus 2:13 they divided it. “A faith of equal standing” (isotimos, a rare word) tells later believers their faith is worth exactly as much as the apostles’ own.

“His divine power has granted us all things for life and godliness.” The letter’s vocabulary is the most Hellenistic in the New Testament: theia dynamis (“divine power”), eusebeia (“godliness,” the Pastorals’ word too), and “glory and EXCELLENCE” (aretē) — aretē being the Greek word for virtue, the summit of the pagan moral ideal, here turned to name a quality of God who called them.

⚠ “Partakers of the DIVINE NATURE.” Theias koinōnoi physeōs — the boldest phrase of its kind in the New Testament, and the seed of the whole Eastern Christian doctrine of theosis, deification: that the goal of salvation is to share in God’s own life. ⚠ It has to be read with care, and the verse guards itself: the sharing is through the promises and issues in escaping corruption — it is participation in God’s incorruptible, holy life, not absorption into his being or a blurring of the line between creature and Creator. The Greek Fathers built a mountain of theology on these four words; the verse states them soberly, hedged fore and aft. KJV “partakers of the divine nature”; NIV “participate in the divine nature.”

⚠ A chain where each link grows from the one before. The Greek form is a sorites — a rhetorical ladder, common in moralists of the day — and Peter Christianises the Stoic virtue-list: faith → excellence → knowledge → self-control (enkrateia, a cardinal Greek virtue) → endurance → godliness → brotherly affection → love. It begins where the pagan lists never did, with faith, and it ends where they could not reach, with agapē. The point is motion: these are not a checklist but a stairway, each virtue “supplied in” the last.

“Blind, SHORTSIGHTED.” Myōpazōn — the root of English “myopic” — is a vivid touch: the person without these virtues is not merely blind but squinting, near-sighted, able to see only what is right in front of him and blind to the far country he was cleansed for. ⚠ And the charge is to make “your calling and election firm” — not to earn them but to confirm them, to make sure by the life what is already true by grace. KJV “cannot see afar off”; NIV “nearsighted and blind.”

“As long as I am in this TENT.” Skēnōma — a tent, a temporary shelter — is Peter’s word for his body, and it makes the same claim 1 Peter made of the readers: this life is a camping-out, not a home. He knows “the putting off of my tent is soon” — that he is about to die — “just as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me,” a plain allusion to the risen Christ’s word to Peter, “when you are old… another will carry you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18-19).

⚠ “After my DEPARTURE.” Exodos — literally “exodus,” a going-out — is a gentle, weighty word for death, and it is not a random one on Peter’s lips. ⚠ It is the very word Luke uses at the Transfiguration, where Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus of the exodos he was to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31) — and Peter, as the next paragraph insists, was there. The whole letter is cast as a testament: a reminder written to outlast the man, so that “at every time” after he is gone the readers can call it to memory.

⚠ The one witness to the Transfiguration outside the Gospels. Against teachers who dismiss the “coming” (parousia) of Christ as a fable, the writer stakes everything on having seen: “we did not follow cleverly devised MYTHS… but we were eyewitnesses (epoptai) of his majesty.” Epoptēs was a technical word for the highest grade of initiate in the mystery religions, the one admitted to see — and it is turned here against the mysteries: the real vision was on a mountain, of a real man transfigured. The scene is the Transfiguration (Matthew 17, Mark 9, Luke 9), and the quoted voice — “This is my Son, my beloved” — is the Father’s, the same word first heard at the baptism (Mark 1:11).

“The Majestic Glory… the holy mountain.” “The Majestic Glory” (megaloprepēs doxa) is a reverent Jewish way of saying “God” without saying the name, and “the holy mountain” makes the site of the Transfiguration a new Sinai. ⚠ This eyewitness claim is exactly what the authorship question turns on: either Peter is speaking, or a later writer is speaking as Peter, borrowing the apostle’s eyes — and the whole force of the passage depends on which. The library records the claim and the dispute together.

“A lamp shining in a murky place, until… the MORNING STAR rises.” The prophetic word is a lamp for the night; the dawn it waits for is Christ’s return. Phōsphoros — “light-bringer,” the planet Venus that rises just before the sun (the Latin for it is Lucifer) — is the last star before day; the image is of a people reading Scripture by lamplight until the true Light comes up. It is met from the other end at Revelation 2:28, where the risen Christ promises “the morning star.” KJV “the day star.”

⚠ “No prophecy of Scripture is of one’s own INTERPRETATION.” A famous and genuinely ambiguous sentence. Idias epilyseōs can mean the prophecy did not arise from the prophet’s own unravelling of things (a claim about its ORIGIN — the prophets did not make it up), or that Scripture is not for the reader’s private interpretation (a claim about its READING — the sense the Roman church has often pressed). ⚠ The next verse tips it toward origin: “no prophecy was ever borne by the will of man.” KJV “is of any private interpretation”; NIV “came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.”

“CARRIED ALONG by the Holy Spirit.” Pheromenoi — the word for a ship borne by the wind, sails full, moving where the wind takes it. The prophets “spoke from God” not as passive dictaphones but as men carried: their own voices, their own words, and yet driven by a wind not their own. It is the New Testament’s clearest single picture of how inspiration works, the companion to 2 Timothy 3:16’s “God-breathed.”