How You Learned Christ: Petrine Christological Transformation of Pauline Vocabulary

Abstract:How did late first-century Christians learn about the person and character of Jesus and attempt to imitate him? In many ways, their situation is not so different from the vast majority of mid-first-century Christ-followers who had never met Jesus or had regular access to anyone who had, including the large number who were evangelized or pastored by Paul of Tarsus. Paul had a solution to their problem: convinced that Christ lived in him, he advised them that, by imitating him (or, sometimes, his coworkers), they would imitate Christ. I propose that one moment of reception of this counsel is revealed in 1 Peter. Building on prior work that identifies this text as a late first-century pseudepigraphical work that exhibits dependence on a Pauline corpus, I argue that its author constructs much of his christological diction from Paul's self-description (and his description of his coworkers), a method of learning Christ that the author has learned from Paul himself.