2 Peter 2 — Greek text and reception
Each card preserves the Greek reading and its textual and reception notes. This source provides a Greek study edition; Hebrew counterparts and Hebrew–Greek classifications are not supplied.
Chapter 2
False teachers, judgment, and deliverance
The rise of false teachers
Verse 2:1
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you. They will secretly bring in destructive factions, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Haireseis is rendered “factions,” with its destructive quality retained; the term can also denote teachings or schools. The purchase by the denied Master remains explicit. Reception [C06]: Calvin, on 2:1, uses the warning to prepare churches for internal false teaching and applies denial of the Master to licentious conduct.
Verse 2:2
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
And many will follow their debaucheries, and because of them the way of truth will be slandered.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Aselgeiai, debaucheries, is plural. The resulting slander falls on “the way of truth”; the sentence does not make that way itself false. Reception [C06]: Calvin, on 2:2, understands misconduct as giving outsiders occasion to malign Christian teaching. His displayed biblical wording differs from SBLGNT's debaucheries.
Verse 2:3
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
And in greed they will exploit you with fabricated words. Their judgment has not been idle from long ago, and their destruction does not sleep.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: The commercial force of exploiting and the personified inactivity denied of judgment and destruction remain. Reception [C06]: Calvin, on 2:3, interprets fabricated speech as calculated deception that makes believers objects of trade and shares in the deceivers' ruin.
Judgment and rescue in former times
Verse 2:4
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartarus and handed them over to chains of gloom, kept for judgment,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Tartarōsas explicitly evokes Tartarus; it is not flattened into the same term as Hades or Gehenna. G reads chains of gloom here. The conditional sentence continues through verse nine. Reception [C07]: Calvin, on 2:4, argues that angelic dignity does not exempt sinners from judgment; he cautions against inventing unreported details of their fall.
Verse 2:5
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, as one of eight, when He brought a flood upon a world of ungodly people,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: “As one of eight” renders the idiom “Noah eighth,” retaining the total without implying eight companions besides Noah. Reception [C07]: Calvin, on 2:5, stresses that the multitude did not escape judgment and presents Noah's proclamation as a call back to righteousness.
Verse 2:6
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
and reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, condemning them to overthrow, having made them an example of things to come for ungodly people,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: G's construction points to coming events for the ungodly. Both cities, their reduction to ashes, and their exemplary role remain. Reception [C07]: Calvin, on 2:6, treats the ruined cities as a continuing warning of divine judgment and explicitly compares Jude 7.
Text [G]: NA28 reads μελλόντων ἀσεβεῖν, with Tyndale House, TR and Byz (NA27 and SBLGNT ἀσεβέσιν); the rendering above follows SBLGNT, and NA28 would read "an example of those who are going to be ungodly".GC07
Verse 2:7
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
and rescued righteous Lot, who was distressed by the lawless people's conduct in debauchery—
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Dikaion explicitly calls Lot righteous. Kataponoumenon describes him as worn down or distressed by the lawless conduct around him. Reception [C07]: For Lot, Calvin's comment on 2:8 within 2:4–8 treats distress amid surrounding wrongdoing as righteous resistance; this is a scoped passage pointer, not a separate 2:7 exposition.
Verse 2:8
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
for by what he saw and heard, that righteous man, living among them, tormented his righteous soul day after day over their lawless deeds—
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Sight, hearing, residence among them, and repeated daily torment remain; the active verb is preserved with Lot as subject. Reception [C07]: Calvin, on 2:8, allows the sense that seeing and hearing evil tormented Lot and applies such grief against complacency about wrongdoing.
Verse 2:9
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: This supplies the conclusion to the extended “if” sentence. The present passive participle is rendered “under punishment,” while the future day of judgment remains distinct. Reception [C08]: Calvin, on 2:9, counsels patience when rescue and punishment are delayed. His future-oriented exposition of punishment is distinguished from the selected present participle.
Corruption and deceptive freedom
Verse 2:10
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
especially those who go after flesh in defiling desire and despise lordship. Reckless and self-willed, they do not tremble as they slander glorious beings,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: “Lordship” and “glorious beings” preserve the difficult abstract and personal language without naming a specific angelic hierarchy or earthly office. Reception [C08]: Calvin, on 2:10, identifies the despised dignities with magistrates. This is his interpretation; the reading text does not settle the disputed referent.
Verse 2:11
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
whereas angels, though greater in strength and power, do not bring a slanderous judgment against them.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: G does not include a phrase meaning “before the Lord” here. The pronoun “them” remains without replacing it by an asserted identification. Reception [C08]: Calvin, on 2:11, pictures holy angels restraining accusations against rulers out of respect for divinely appointed authority; this follows his particular reading of 2:10.
Text [G]: NA28 reads παρὰ κυρίῳ (NA27 παρὰ κυρίου; SBLGNT has neither); the rendering above follows SBLGNT, and NA28 would read "a slanderous judgment against them before the Lord".GC08
Verse 2:12
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
But these people, like irrational animals born as creatures of instinct for capture and destruction, slandering things they do not understand, will also be destroyed in their destruction,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: The recurring destruction wording is deliberately preserved. “Their” may connect the teachers' fate with the animals' destruction; its referent is not replaced by an explanatory noun. Reception [C09]: Calvin, on 2:12, connects the animal comparison with self-destructive conduct and understands corruption itself as leading to ruin.
Verse 2:13
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
suffering harm as the wages of wrongdoing. They consider indulgence in the daytime a pleasure. They are spots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while feasting with you,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: G's adikoumenoi is “suffering harm,” rather than a verb meaning receive. The related wrongdoing language creates a wordplay. G has deceptions, not love feasts. Reception [C09]: Calvin, on 2:13, condemns fixation on immediate pleasure and reads shared feasting as exposing the community to its guests' corruption.
Verse 2:14
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
having eyes full of an adulteress and unable to stop sinning, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed—children of a curse!
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: The singular adulteress image is retained instead of replacing it with an abstract noun. The eyes, souls, trained heart, and familial curse expression all remain. Reception [C09]: Calvin, on 2:14, develops the baiting image as deceptive hooks and urges rootedness in faith against flattering enticements.
Verse 2:15
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
Leaving the straight way, they wandered off, following the way of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Bosor follows the name in G, rather than being silently harmonized with another form of the father's name. Reception [C09]: Calvin's Balaam discussion within 2:12–16, beginning with the comparison to a venal tongue, applies the episode to corrupt teachers who sell their speech.
Verse 2:16
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
but received a rebuke for his own transgression: a speechless beast of burden spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: The paradox of the speechless animal speaking remains. “Beast of burden” translates the term directly, without replacing it by an explicitly named species absent from this verse. Reception [C09]: In the same Balaam discussion within 2:12–16, Calvin sees the animal becoming the prophet's teacher as a humiliating rebuke of resistance to God.
Verse 2:17
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
These people are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm, for whom the gloom of darkness has been kept.
Verse 2:18
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
For, uttering inflated words of emptiness, they entice through fleshly desires and debaucheries those who are barely escaping from people who live in error,
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: G has “barely escaping,” retaining the limited degree and present action. The appeal through bodily desires is explicitly stated. Reception [C10]: Calvin, on 2:18, compares seductive appeals to hidden hooks and criticizes eloquence used to disguise moral license; his displayed escape wording differs from SBLGNT.
Text [G]: NA28 reads ὄντως, really, with Tyndale House, TR and Byz (NA27 and SBLGNT ὀλίγως); the rendering above follows SBLGNT, and NA28 would read "those who are actually escaping".GC10
Verse 2:19
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whatever someone has been overcome, to this he has also been enslaved.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Douloi and dedoulōtai retain actual slavery language within the moral metaphor. The general principle makes defeat by a master the basis of bondage. Reception [C10]: Calvin, on 2:19, distinguishes release from sin's dominion for willing obedience from the false freedom promised by enslaved teachers.
Text [G]: NA28 has no καί before δεδούλωται (SBLGNT, with Tregelles, TR and Byz, reads καί); the rendering above follows SBLGNT, and NA28 would read "to this he has been enslaved".GC10
Verse 2:20
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
For if, after escaping the world's defilements through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, their last state has become worse than their first.
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: G has “the Lord and Savior,” without “our” here. The sequence of escape, renewed entanglement, and defeat remains. Reception [C11]: Calvin, on 2:20, treats renewed entanglement after knowing the gospel as aggravated ingratitude and urges careful progress in one's calling.
Verse 2:21
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment handed down to them.
Verse 2:22
Greek–English: Literal-Smooth (Saints Priority)
What the true proverb says has happened to them: “A dog has returned to its own vomit,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in mud.”
Textual & Reception Notes
Text [G]: Both animal images are retained. The second “returns” supplies the movement implicit in the compressed proverb; washing does not disappear from the comparison. Reception [C11, BUN]: Calvin, on 2:22, uses both proverbs to locate relapse in those who return, not in the gospel. Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress I (§§173, 376), explicitly reuses them for Pliable's retreat and for conviction without a changed mind.