What Does 1 Peter 3:14 Mean?

(14) **But and if ye suffer.**—The old-fashioned phrase would read more intelligibly thus: *Nay, if ye should even suffer.* So far are men’s attempts to “harm” us (by acts of malice to property or good name, &c.) from really injuring us, that even if it should come to be a matter of “suffering” we are to be congratulated. What he means by this “suffering,” which is so much more than being “harmed,” may be seen from 1Peter 2:21; 1Peter 3:17; 1Peter 4:1; 1Peter 4:15. He means the horrors of capital punishment. He does not speak of this as something that was already occurring, nor as though it were something immediately and certainly impending, but as a case well supposable. There had then as yet been no martyrdoms in Asia. The letter is therefore earlier in date than the Apocalypse (Revelation 2:13). It is a noticeable point that in all St. Paul’s Epistles the word “to suffer” occurs but seven times, and nowhere twice in the same Epistle; whereas it comes twelve times in this one short Letter of St. Peter. **For righteousness’** **sake.**—Like the “suffering wrongfully” of 1Peter 2:19. It is not *as* suffering that it is valuable. **Happy are ye.**—Quite the right word: yet the use of it obscures the obvious reference to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:10). The reference to it is all the clearer in the Greek from the significant way in which St. Peter leaves his sentence incomplete, merely giving the catchword of the beatitude. We might represent it to ourselves by putting “Blessed” in inverted commas, and a dash after it. He makes sure his readers will catch the allusion. There is no part of our Lord’s discourses which seems (from the traces in the earliest Christian literature) to have taken so rapid and firm a hold on the Christian conscience as the Sermon on the Mount. **Be not afraid of their terror.**—Here the translators might with advantage have kept the same word, and said (as in the original passage from which St. Peter is quoting, Isaiah 8:12), *Fear ye not their fear*—*i.e., *the thing which makes them fear; do not regard with dread the same object as they do. In the original, the persons whose fears Isaiah and the faithful Jews are not to fear are those who were in dread of Syria and Israel. Here the persons are not named; but, of course, according to this interpretation, “they” cannot be the enemies who try to harm the Christians, but, if any one, those of the Christians who, for fear of man, were beginning to abandon Christianity. The intention, however, is not to press this clause for its own sake, but to throw greater force upon the clause which begins the next verse. It argues carelessness about the passage in Isaiah to interpret, “Be not afraid of the fear which your foes strike into you.”