What Does 1 Peter 4:16 Mean?

(16) **Yet if any man suffer as a Christian**.—St. Peter purposely uses the name which was a name of derision among the heathens. It is not, as yet, one by which the believers would usually describe *themselves.* It only occurs twice besides in the New Testament—in Acts 11:26, where we are told of the invention of the nickname (see Note there), and in Acts 26:28, where Agrippa catches it up with the insolent scorn with which a brutal justice would have used the word “Methodist” a century ago. So contemptible was the name that, as M. Renan says (p. 37), “Well-bred people avoided pronouncing the name, or, when forced to do so, made a kind of apology.” Tacitus, for instance, says: “Those who were *vulgarly* known by the name of Christians.” In fact, it is quite an open question whether we ought not here (as well as in the two places of Acts above cited) to read the nickname in its barbarous form: *Chrestian.* The Sinaitic manuscript has that form, and the Vatican has the form *Chreistian*; and it is much harder to suppose that a scribe who commonly called himself a *Christian* would intentionally alter it into this strange form than to suppose that one who did not understand the irony of saying a *Chrestian* should have written the word with which he was so familiar. **Let him not be ashamed.**—Although the name sounds worse to the world than “murderer,” or “thief,” or “malefactor.” **On this behalf.**—This is a possible rendering, but it is more pointed to translate literally, *but let him glorify God in this name*—*i.e., *make even this name of ridicule the ground of an act of glory to God.