~~~~~~~~~~courtesy of Don Johnson~~~~~~~~~
1 Peter 2-3
In my understanding, chapters and verses can be a great help and also a great hindrance, as they are a human invention and not in the original manuscripts.The VERY FIRST THING to do when trying to understand something is think teaching unit or pericope instead of verses, so “deversify” is a term to help remember this. When you think this way, the first thing is to identify the start and end of the pericope, in order to capture the entire teaching.
I believe the pericope starts with 1 Pet 2:13 and ends with 1 Pet 3:12. 1 Peter 3:13 starts a new thought and 1 Pet 2:12 ends a thought. The subject of this pericope is submission, so we should also think about this subject in other books of the Bible, for example Eph 5-6.
Now we have established the immediate pericope context for the verse and the subject context of submission to study elsewhere in the Bible.
We notice that everyone is to be submissive to government, then it discusses examples of servants, then Jesus in relation to a servants, then wives, then husbands , then everyone again.
There are 3 specific types of people mentioned and these 3 should make us think of Aristotle’s household codes, as these are 3 of the 6 mentioned by Aristotle. So the cultural context is Aristotle’s household codes, which we might have suspected as in Eph 5-6 on the same subject the match is 6 out of 6.
So now we have identified the teaching unit, it can help to print it out so it fits on 1 page if possible. We can expect similar discussion in Eph 5-6 and we might want to search for other verses about submission.
We might want to try to form a comprehensive teaching that includes all the relevant verses, to see how everything fits together and would not want to miss anything. I am sure you can see how one verse might help understand another, once they are all assembled together. But again, deversify, we want to make sure we do not take a verse out of its pericope context.
From the teaching unit we try to see the structure:
Everyone submit … 1 Pet 2:13-14
Servants submit … 1 Pet 2:18
Because Jesus (P.S. shows how Jesus submitted to us) 1 Pet 2:21-24
Likewise wives … 1 Pet 3:1
Likewise husbands … 1 Pet 3:7
And finally everyone .. 1 Pet 3:8.
