Conversation. — A favourite word with St. Peter, occurring (substantive and verb) seven times in this Epistle, and thrice in the second — i.e., as often as in all the other New Testament writings put together. It means the visible conduct of the daily walk in life. This, as among Gentiles — i.e., heathen (the words are synonymous, though St. Paul generally says “those without” when he means heathen as opposed to Christian) — is to be “honest.” We have no word adequate to represent this charming adjective. It is rendered “good” immediately below and in John 10:11 (“the Good Shepherd”), “worthy” in James 2:7, “goodly” in Luke 21:5. But it is the ordinary Greek word for “beautiful,” and implies the attractiveness of the sight, the satisfaction afforded by an approach to ideal excellence.
That whereas. — The marginal version is more literal, and in sense perhaps preferable, “wherein.” It means that the very fact of the heathen having slandered them will make their testimony “in the day of visitation” all the more striking, as (by way of illustration) the doubts of St. Thomas tend to “the more confirmation of the faith.” So in Romans 2:1, “wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself;” or Hebrews 2:18 (lit.), “wherein He Himself hath suffered, being tempted.”
They speak against you as evildoers. — A significant phrase. St. Peter asserts distinctly that calumnies were really rife, about some particulars of the Christian morality, at the time that this letter was written. It is a mark of a late date, for at first the Christians had not attracted sufficient notice, as a body, to be talked of either in praise or blame. The heathen at first regarded them as merely a Jewish sect (Acts 18:15; Acts 25:18-20), and as such they received from the Roman Government a contemptuous toleration. The first state recognition of Christianity as a separate religion, with characteristics of its own, was the Persecution of Nero in the year 64. Now, it so happens that we have almost contemporary heathen documents which bring out the force of this passage. Suetonius, in his life of Nero (chap. 16), calls the Christians by the very name St. Peter uses, “the Christians, a kind of men of a new and malefic superstition.” Only about forty years later, we have Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan, written actually from the country in which St. Peter’s correspondents lived, and referring to some of the very persons (probably) who received the Epistle as having apostatised at the time of the persecution under Nero; in which letter Pliny asks whether it is the profession of being a Christian which is itself to be punished, or “the crimes which attach to that profession!” The Apologists of the second century are full of refutations of the lies current about the immorality of the Christian assemblies. The Christians were a secret society, and held their meetings before daylight; and the heathen, partly from natural suspicion, partly from consciousness of what passed in their own secret religious festivals, imagined all kinds of horrors in connection with our mysteries. From what transpired about the Lord’s Supper, they believed that the Christians used to kill children and drink their blood and eat their flesh. Here, however, the context points to a different scandal. They are warned against the fleshly lusts, in order that the heathen may find that the Christians’ great glory lies in the very point wherein they are slandered. “Evildoers,” therefore, must mean chiefly offences on that score. It is historically certain that such charges against Christian purity were extremely common. Even as late as the persecution under Maximin II., in the year 312, it was reported that these meetings before light were a school for the vilest of arts.
By your good works which they shall behold. — More literally, they may, in consequence of your beautiful works, being eye-witnesses thereof — The “good works” are not what are commonly so called — i.e., acts of benevolence, &c. Rather, their “works” are contrasted with the current report, and mean scarcely more than the “conversation” mentioned already. The present passage is, no doubt, a reminiscence of Matthew 5:16, where the word has the same force.
Glorify God in the day of visitation. — This “glorification” of God will be like that of Achan in the book of Joshua (Joshua 7:19), an acknowledgment how far they had been from the glorious truth. Some commentators understand the day of visitation to mean the day when the heathen themselves come really to look into the matter. This is possible; and it came true when Pliny tortured the Christian deaconesses and acquitted the poor fanatics, as he thought them, of all immoral practices. But from the ordinary use of the words, it would more naturally mean the day when God visits. And this will not mean only the great last day, but on whatever occasion God brings matters to a crisis. The visitation is a visitation of the Christians and the heathen alike, and it brings both grace and vengeance, according as men choose to receive it. (See Luke 19:44, and comp. Luke 1:78.)