This article springs in part from a critical consideration of Professor sor F. L. Cross's I Peter, a Paschal Liturgy (London, 1954), and is an attempt, first, to define difficulties which seem to me to stand in the way of accepting his thesis, and then to offer an alternative suggestion. But first of all, I must express my gratitude to Dr Cross for the stimulus of his lecture and my admiration for the skill and brilliance with which he handles the material. My only hope is that my own attempts at a solution of the problem of I Peter are advanced with anything like as much modesty as his: for I have no doubt that they will need the more clemency.

The data with which we have to work are notoriously complicated. Stripping them down to the minimum, there are the following, which I present in two groups.

(A) (1) The writing declares itself to be from the Apostle Peter, from Babylon, to Christian communities in specified parts of Asia Minor.

(2) Eusebius classes it as among the writings which were never in any doubt.

On the other hand,

(3) demonstrable traces of its use apparently only date from Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 135); the Muratorian Canon omits it (though that may be due only to the corrupt nature of that document); and it was not in the canon of the Syriac-speaking Church in Mesopotamia as late as c. 350 – though this applies equally to James and I John, not to mention the smaller Catholic Epistles (see W. Bauer, Der Apostolos der Syrer (1903), pp. 40ff.).