Retold, Not Quoted

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Peter, Second Epistle of,” “Jude, Epistle of,” “Pseudepigraphy,” “Parousia,” “Hell,” “Watchers.”
• Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments (IVP) — “Peter, Second Epistle of,” “Apocalyptic,” “Testaments,” “Canon.”
• NIDNTTE — ἐπίγνωσις, παρουσία, φύσις, γραφή, ταρταρόω.
• Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Beale & Carson, eds.) — the 2 Peter chapter, which is unusually short for a reason this page can now measure.

2 Peter itself has no offset. This was derived from the corpora rather than copied from a table.

Identical. There is no Hebrew column and no Septuagint column for a New Testament book, so the usual MT/LXX/ESV question does not arise at all — and the house rule is to say so rather than leave the reader guessing whether it was checked.

The offsets that do bite on this page belong to the texts 2 Peter is being measured against.

Practical consequence: a reader who takes a printed Septuagint and turns to Proverbs 26 looking for the dog will not find it, and a reader who turns to Psalm 90 will find the wrong psalm. Both numbers on this page are the CATSS numbers, with the English beside them.

2 Peter 2:4 does not say hell and it does not say γέεννα. It says God ταρταρώσας the angels — a verb built on Tartarus.

In Homer and Hesiod, Tartarus is the pit below Hades where the Titans were confined after their rebellion — bound, and kept, for judgement. 2 Peter puts rebel angels there and makes the place into something God did.

What is and is not being claimed. That the letter uses a Greek mythological term is a fact about its vocabulary. It is not a claim that the letter endorses Greek cosmology, and it is not a claim that anyone borrowed from anyone. Homer and Hesiod were not consulted for this page in any critical edition; the statement about the Titans is the standard summary and is labelled as such. The counts above were run on the files named in the footer.

2 Peter 2:4–8 runs three examples in chronological order, and the first of them is the one the Old Testament says least about.

Genesis 6:1–4 gives four verses to the sons of God and the daughters of men. 1 Enoch 6–21 gives sixteen chapters — the Watchers descend, they are bound, they are kept in darkness until the great day of judgement. Jude 6 uses the same picture, and Jude 14–15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 by name.

⚠️ 1 Enoch is not on this shelf, and no part of it was measured for this page. The Greek and Ethiopic of 1 Enoch are not among the 64 CATSS files or any other corpus held here, and that is unchanged by the 30 August 2026 corpus growth. The statement above about chapters 6–21 is a summary of the contents, not a measurement, and it is offered as background rather than as evidence. Nothing on this page claims that 2 Peter read 1 Enoch.

And note the house position on such texts: 1 Enoch and Jubilees are read on this shelf as historical witnesses to how Second-Temple Jews were reading Genesis, not as Scripture. What they show is the air the letter’s first readers were breathing.

1:13–15 says the writer is about to die and is leaving something behind so the readers can recall it after his departure. That is the opening move of a recognised ancient genre.

Jacob in Genesis 49, Moses in Deuteronomy 32–33, Joshua in Joshua 23–24, Paul at Miletus in Acts 20:17–35, and a whole Second-Temple library of Testaments all do the same three things: the speaker announces his death, he warns of what will come after him, and he charges the hearers to remember. 2 Peter does all three, in that order — 1:14, then 2:1 there will be false teachers among you, then 1:15 and 3:1–2.

Why this matters for the authorship question, in both directions. Some read the testament shape as evidence that the letter is a farewell composed in Peter’s name after his death, as the genre often was. Others read it as exactly what a man expecting to die would write. The genre is a real observation; it is not an argument, and the page does not use it as one.

Eight terms, seven joints, and the joint is the same five-syllable formula every time.

πίστις → ἀρετή → γνῶσις → ἐγκράτεια → ὑπομονή → εὐσέβεια → φιλαδελφία → ἀγάπη

Six of the seven joints are the identical phrase ἐν δὲ τῇ…, and in the …, picking up the word just used. That repetition is why the screen in stage 4 finds 1:5, 1:6 and 1:7 all reaching exactly three words against the Greek Old Testament — tie bands eleven, ten and ten — and all three landing on the same meaningless phrase — ἐν δὲ τῇ. A rhetorical device can look like a textual connection to a machine. It is not one.

The Greeks called this figure a sorites or a climax — a ladder in which each rung is the last word of the rung below. The first rung is faith and the top rung is love, and the letter says the ladder is what keeps a reader from being ἀργούς and ἄκαρπους — idle and unfruitful — in the knowledge of our Lord (1:8).

Every one of 2 Peter’s 61 verses was screened against every verse unit of the Greek Old Testament screened on this shelf — 30,348 units across 64 files, the shelf holding 30,637 and setting the 289 Odes units aside — and then the same screen was run on five neighbouring books as a control.

2 Peter is the only book in that list whose deepest contact with the Greek Old Testament is a formula. Here are all ten of its rows that reach four, with their bands, so the reader can check the claim rather than take it:

Not one of those is a quotation and the page does not present any of them as one. Two of them — 3:7 and 3:10 — have a tie band of one, which normally means look harder; look, and they are heavens and the earth and and the things in it. A tie band of one on a four-word run of common words is arithmetic, not allusion.

And the same letter reaches five into the Greek New Testament seven times. Screened against all 7,927 Greek New Testament verses with 2 Peter’s own 61 rows removed from the target: 61 rows reach two, 33 reach three, 13 reach four, 7 reach five, nothing reaches six. The letter’s verbal world is the New Testament, not the Greek Old Testament — even while its subject matter is the Old Testament for most of a chapter.

Of the seven rows that reach five against the Greek New Testament, four are formulae with bands of two to thirty-four. Three have a tie band of one. Those three are the page’s real results, and they go to three different books.

Three distinctive fives, three different letters, and Jude is one of the three. Not the source of all of them. Not most of them. One.

The counter-examples, printed here so the fives above are not read as more than they are. The other four rows that reach five: 1:8 and 1:16, both on τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ with a tie band of thirty-four; 1:14, band 2; and 1:17, band 5. A run of five with a band of thirty-four tells a reader precisely nothing about which verse it came from, and this page prints it beside the band of one so the difference is visible.

The overlap between 2 Peter 2 and Jude is the most discussed literary relationship in the New Testament. Measured as contiguous shared word-forms, it is far thinner than its reputation — and it is still real.

First the thinness. 2 Peter chapter 2 has 22 verses. Screened against all 25 verses of Jude:

Half of the chapter everyone calls a parallel shares no two consecutive words with any verse of Jude. The screen used here is the Greek-side convention with unigram fallback on, so a row reporting 1 shares at least one single word and no bigram. Whatever the relationship between these two letters is, it is not copying at the level of the sentence.

Now the reality of it. A control was run, because “thin” means nothing without a baseline. Philemon has exactly 25 verses, the same as Jude. All 61 rows of 2 Peter were screened against each in turn:

Ten rows reach three words into Jude and exactly one reaches three into Philemon. That one is 1:2, and it reaches four: χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη, the opening formula that twelve other New Testament verses carry, Philemon 1:3 among them. That gap is the relationship, and it is not an artefact of length. What the measurement will not do is say which letter was written first, and the shelf’s standing rule applies without exception here: direction of influence is never asserted. A run screen counts shared sequences. It has no way of knowing who wrote first.

2 Peter 1:17 reports the transfiguration voice. Against each Gospel report separately:

Tie band five, and the run stops at five in every case for the same reason: the five words are the part all six verses agree on, and every one of them frames those five words differently. Three read οὗτός ἐστιν, this is, in front. Two read σὺ εἶ, you are. One replaces beloved with chosen and drops to four. 2 Peter does a seventh thing: ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός μου οὗτός ἐστιν — the same five words, a second μου added, and the demonstrative moved to the end. Had 2 Peter framed it as Matthew 17:5 does, the run would have been seven.

Note also which verses the screen caught. Three of the five are the baptism, not the transfiguration — the screen cannot tell the two scenes apart, because the words 2 Peter shares are exactly the words the two scenes have in common. A reader can tell them apart; the machine cannot, and that is worth seeing plainly.

What follows from this and what does not. It follows that 1:17 is not a transcription of any Gospel text held here. It does not follow that the verse is early, or late, or independent, or dependent. A writer quoting from memory, a writer using a source none of us has, and a writer imitating a familiar scene all produce the same measurement. The number is reported; the inference is left where it belongs. Note too that the ESV gives 1:17 and Matthew 17:5 the same English words, so an English-only reader has no access to this difference at all.

This page used to end its headline with a confession: the claim that 2 Peter never reaches a five-word run was true of the corpus held, and the corpus held was not complete. It named the missing books that could break it. Those books arrived on 30 August 2026 and the screen was re-run against every one of them.

The headline survived, and it is now a much larger claim than it was. The Greek Old Testament on this shelf is now 64 CATSS files, 30,637 verse units held and 30,348 screened — a third more text than the 44 files (23,061 units) this page was built on. 2 Peter’s deepest contiguous run against it is still four. Not one of the twenty new files lifts a single row past four.

⚠️ ONE OF THE TWENTY WAS TAKEN BACK OUT OF THE SCREEN LATER THE SAME DAY, AND THE PAGE PRINTS THE HISTORY RATHER THAN THE NEW NUMBER ALONE. The Odes are the fourteen liturgical canticles bound after the Greek Psalter. They stay on disk. They are no longer inside what this shelf screens as ‘the Greek Old Testament’, for two independent reasons.

(1) Two of them are New Testament text. Ode 9 is Luke 1 — the Magnificat and the Benedictus — and Ode 13 is Luke 2, the Nunc Dimittis. Screened, Ode 9:48 matches Luke 1:48 at eighteen consecutive words. That is not a contact between two Testaments; it is Luke matching Luke under an Old Testament shelfmark, and a page could report such a hit as a Gospel’s deepest Old Testament contact while measuring its own text. This page’s whole finding is a claim about a ceiling — that 2 Peter never reaches five — so a phantom deep hit is precisely the kind of error that would have broken it, and the reader is owed the fact that the instrument can produce one. (2) Ten of them are second copies of passages already in the corpus — Ode 1 = Exodus 15, 2 = Deuteronomy 32, 3 = 1 Samuel 2, 4 = Habakkuk 3, 5 = Isaiah 26, 6 = Jonah 2, 7 and 8 = Daniel (Th) 3, 10 = Isaiah 5, 11 = Isaiah 38 — so a verse standing once appeared to stand twice, and any tie band touching a canticle was doubled for no textual reason.

HELD and SCREENED are therefore two different numbers, and this page uses whichever one a sentence means. The shelf holds 30,637 verse units in 64 files; a screen sees 30,348, the difference being exactly the 289 Odes units.

★ And on this page, nothing moved at all. Every one of 2 Peter’s 61 rows was re-screened against the 30,348-unit corpus. The distribution is identical — 26 rows reach two, 25 reach three, 10 reach four, none reaches five; all ten fours keep their partners and their bands; 1:9 is still 3 with a band of 1 at Exodus 30:10; 3:12 is still 3 with a band of 3; 1:4 is still 3 with a band of 3; 2:15 still tops out at three. Not one of 2 Peter’s deepest partners was ever a canticle, and the three negatives — θείας φύσεως κοινωνοί, ἐξέραμα and the three ταρταρ- nouns — are untouched, as any zero must be: taking text out of a corpus cannot create a hit. The only thing this correction changes on this page is the number the claim is made against, and that number is now smaller and cleaner.

What is still not held, and still matters. 1 Enoch is not on this shelf in any language and no part of it was measured — that gap is unchanged, and it is the largest one left for this letter. There is no critical apparatus for any text here, and no papyri. Joshua A is a partial file: CATSS carries only 15:21–19:45 of the A recension, so a Joshua negative is a negative on the B text plus that fragment.

No critical apparatus for the Greek New Testament. This matters at 3:10, where the manuscripts divide over whether the earth and its works will be found (εὑρεθήσεται, the SBLGNT reading printed above) or burned up (κατακαήσεται, behind the older English versions) — the page prints one reading and names the other and has weighed neither.

No 1 Enoch, in any language. No Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. No Qumran material. No patristic sources: Origen’s doubts, Eusebius’s classing of the letter among the disputed books, and Jerome’s note about its style are all named on this page from the standard summaries and none of them was read in the original. No Homer, no Hesiod — the Tartarus background is summarised, not sourced.

And a limit on the method itself, which is worth more than any of the above. A contiguous-run screen counts shared word forms in order. It cannot see paraphrase, it cannot see shared structure, and it cannot see an argument built out of an Old Testament story in the writer’s own words. 2 Peter 2:4–8 is exactly the kind of writing this screen is blind to — the substance is entirely Genesis and the vocabulary is entirely 2 Peter’s. The finding of this page is therefore narrow and should be read narrowly: the letter does not copy, which is not at all the same as saying the letter does not use.

The measurements on this page are compatible with more than one account of who wrote 2 Peter, and it would be easy and dishonest to lean them one way.

The five-word greeting shared with 1 Peter 1:2 and with no other New Testament verse can be read as one author’s habit or as a later writer’s deliberate signal. The transfiguration word order that matches no Gospel can be read as an eyewitness recalling freely or as a later writer reconstructing. The screen cannot choose between those, and neither will this page.

What can be said flatly is that the classic stylistic argument — that 2 Peter’s Greek is much more ornate than 1 Peter’s — was not tested here at all, because the instrument on this shelf measures shared sequences and not register, rhythm or syntax. A reader who wants that argument must go to the commentaries.

• Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary 50) — the standard technical treatment of the Jude relationship.
• Peter H. Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (Pillar NTC).
• Gene L. Green, Jude and 2 Peter (BECNT).
• Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude (New American Commentary) — argues the traditional authorship at length.
• J. Daryl Charles, Virtue amidst Vice — on the catalogue of 1:5–7.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer. They are named as the places to check this page against.

The thing that came out of the measurement was not what went into it. The expectation was a letter saturated with the Greek Old Testament, because 2 Peter 2 is nothing but Old Testament: the angels, the flood, Sodom, Lot, Balaam, the donkey, the dog and the sow. What the screen found is a letter that tells all of those stories and copies none of them. Not one five-word run in 30,348 verse units. Its neighbour 1 Peter, half again as long, reaches ten.

There is a way of knowing a text that shows up as quotation and a way of knowing a text that shows up as retelling, and this letter is the second kind. It does not put the Scriptures in quotation marks. It talks about them the way a man talks about things he remembers.

Which is what the letter says it is doing. Seven times in 61 verses it uses the vocabulary of reminding, and all seven fall in two short panels — 1:12–15 and 3:1–2. I intend always to remind you of these things, though you know them. … I think it right to stir you up by way of reminder. … This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved, in both of which I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder. A letter whose stated method is remembrance reads, under measurement, exactly like a letter written from memory.

And the last sentence gives back the first. Grace, knowledge, our Lord — 1:2 and 3:18, and nowhere else in the letter together. In between: a ladder of eight virtues, a mountain, a warning, a delay, and a promise that the day is not slow but patient.

This page closes a gap: 2 Peter had no study on this shelf at all. Its companion books — 1 Peter, Jude, and the Thessalonian letter that shares its thief in the night — are where the three distinctive five-word runs land, and where the next readings go.