EXCELLENCE, virtue — THE great word of Greek moral philosophy, the summit of the pagan ideal: the quality that makes a thing excellent at what it is, a good knife's sharpness, a good man's worth, from Homer's battlefield prowess to Aristotle's settled goodness. ⚠ The New Testament almost never uses it — Paul reaches for it once, in the virtue-list of Philippians 4:8 — which makes its cluster in 2 Peter striking: God calls us 'by his own glory and aretē' (1:3), and then aretē is the first rung believers add to their faith (1:5). Peter takes the crown-word of Greek ethics and sets it inside a Christian ladder that begins with faith and ends with love — the pagan ideal enlisted, not enthroned. KJV 'virtue'; NIV 'goodness'; the older 'excellence' keeps the reach of the Greek. ⚠ And it is worth knowing how rare it is in Paul: arete occurs four times in the New Testament, three of them in Peter, and Philippians 4:8 is PAUL'S ONLY USE OF IT in everything he wrote. Writing to a Roman colony he assembles a list of virtues in the vocabulary of Greek civic ethics rather than his own — the same verse carries prosphiles and euphemos, each a New Testament hapax. → first discussed at 2 Peter 1:5