Does 2 Peter 3:16 Really Endorse Paul? A Closer Look

Apologists have a favorite verse for settling whether Peter ever stood behind Paul. It is 2 Peter 3:16, a single line that seems to hand the first apostle's blessing to the letters of a man who never walked with Jesus. In the Jesus Way Podcast episode "The Only Verse That Endorses Paul Is A FORGERY," host Aaron Abke and guest David the Nazarene take that line apart. They examine its Greek on its own terms, argue that it is not the ringing endorsement it is sold as, and place the letter it belongs to well into the second century, a period in which the video's description notes no secular scholar believes Peter wrote the book. What emerges is less a verdict on Paul than a question about how early Christians decided which voices carried apostolic weight.

Why does one verse carry so much weight in the Paul debate?

Paul's authority was contested from the beginning. His letters make up a large share of the New Testament, yet the early church argued over how to read him, and the tensions show up within the New Testament itself. For a modern defender of Paul, the cleanest move is to find an apostle vouching for him in writing. If Peter, the most prominent of the twelve, called Paul's letters Scripture, the argument would be over.

That is why 2 Peter 3:16 gets cited so often. The verse refers to Paul and his letters, describes some of their content as hard to understand, and says the untaught and unstable distort them, as they do the other Scriptures. Read quickly, it looks like Peter placing Paul in the same category as Scripture. The video's central claim is that a quick read is exactly what the apologist is counting on.

What does the Greek actually say, and what does it not say?

The episode's method is to slow down and read the Greek rather than the English gloss a reader inherits from a single translation. Abke and David the Nazarene treat the wording of the passage as the evidence, and they argue that even granting the apologist's reading, the verse does not deliver the clean, unqualified endorsement it is credited with. A line that praises a writer's wisdom while noting that his hard sayings get twisted is praise with a warning inside it, and the video presses on that ambiguity.

For a reader who wants to test this, the practice is simple and worth doing regardless of where you land. Put the verse in an interlinear Greek-English text, mark every word that carries the weight of the claim, and ask whether "endorsement" is the only reasonable rendering of what the author is doing. Small grammatical decisions, such as what a clause modifies or who the "they" in a sentence refers to, can carry an entire doctrine.

Why do scholars date 2 Peter to the second century?

The argument that changes the verse's meaning is about when the letter was written. The description states that the video dates 2 Peter well into the second century, and the conversation returns to the question with some precision. At about 30:31, the hosts discuss the scholarly consensus that no one alive today thinks the apostle himself produced the letter. At around 60:03, the conversation places the writing at roughly the 140s.

The logic behind such a date is straightforward. If a letter presupposes a collection of Paul's letters already circulating and treated as authoritative, it cannot easily be the work of a man who died decades earlier. A later writer looking back at Paul's correspondence as a settled body of texts would sound exactly like this verse. The date does not prove forgery on its own, but it removes the easy assumption that the letter is a first-generation witness.

Where does Marcion fit into the story?

Around 63:16, the conversation turns to Marcion, the second-century teacher who is remembered for building a canon centered on Paul's letters and for rejecting the Hebrew Scriptures. Marcion's example matters here because it shows that by the middle of the second century, the question of which texts counted, and which apostolic names stood behind them, was a live and consequential fight. A letter that appears to bless Paul would have been useful to anyone trying to settle that fight.

This is the context in which the video's "forgery" framing becomes more than a provocative title. Writing in the name of a revered figure was a recognized literary practice in antiquity, and scholars use the term pseudepigrapha for works attributed to someone who did not write them. Whether 2 Peter belongs in that category is the question the episode is built to press, and it is the question a careful reader should keep separate from the rhetoric around it.

Who wrote 2 Peter, if not Peter?

The hosts push the authorship question directly. At around 69:54, Abke and his guest describe the author as a later figure rather than the fisherman from Galilee:

"But a later writer, a Gentile Greek ... of Greek scribal training to write a ..."

Aaron Abke, Jesus Way Podcast 067 (about 69:54)

The argument as presented is that the Greek style and the literary habits of the text point to someone trained in Greek letters, not a Galilean speaking to his own community. Whether a reader accepts the full case, the question of style is one of the most concrete tests scholars have, because the vocabulary and sentence structure of a text can reveal far more about its origins than its claimed author does.

Why does this matter for how Christians read their Bible today?

The stakes of this debate are not limited to one verse. If a doctrine of Paul's authority rests on a single line in a book whose authorship is disputed, then the line is carrying more weight than it can hold. Reading the verse closely, dating the letter honestly, and asking who stood behind the name on the cover are habits that serve any believer, whether they end up defending Paul or questioning him.

The episode is also a reminder that a dramatic title is a claim in its own right. "Forgery" is a strong word, and the strength of the argument will depend on the Greek evidence and the dating case, not on the title. Watch the full conversation with that in mind.

Where to go from here

Start with the full episode, Jesus Way Podcast 067, which runs about an hour and forty minutes and includes David the Nazarene's breakdown of the Greek. Read 2 Peter 3:15 and 3:16 in full, then compare them with the Pauline letters the episode discusses. Pull up an interlinear Greek text and trace the verse yourself before accepting either side's reading. The guest's own channel, @DavidTheNazarene, is the place to look for more of his work on the Greek and the textual history.