On the whole, the words employed in 2 Peter seem indecisive with regard to the authorship. There is sufficient variation to allow us to believe that it was written or not written by the apostle. One of the most remarkable words in 2 Peter is that employed in i. 16 for an "eye-witness." It is a word used in the Greek heathen mysteries, and some critics think that such a word would not have been used by an orthodox writer until an age when the Church had learnt to borrow Greek religious terms from the Gnostic heretics. It is a sufficient proof of the weakness of this argument that the Greek verb derived from this noun is found in 1 Pet. ii. 12. It is, however, fair to say that the style of 2 Peter is less simple and less closely connected with the Old Testament than that of 1 Peter. More serious objections are (1) the lack of external evidence in the writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries; (2) the internal evidence that the Epistle is based upon Jude, and perhaps on the Apocalypse of Peter. {248} Eusebius is evidently in doubt about it. He says, "We have not indeed received it by tradition to be in the Canon, yet as it appeared useful to many, it was studiously read with the other Scriptures." [1] It is not mentioned by Irenaeus, nor is it in the list given in the _Muratorian Fragment_. But it seems to have been commented on by Clement of Alexandria, though it is not quoted in his extant works. Origen does mention it in his original Greek works, but in a manner which shows that it was disputed in his time. In Rufinus' Latin translation of Origen there are several quotations from 2 Peter, but against this fact it is sometimes urged that Rufinus emended Origen, and that we cannot be absolutely certain that these quotations are genuine. The Epistle seems to have been known to Origen's great contemporary Hippolytus (_Refut._ ix. 7; x. 20 and elsewhere). There are, moreover, passages in still earlier writers which are perhaps based on 2 Peter. These are in Clement of Rome, A.D. 95, Justin Martyr, A.D. 152, and the document which is wrongly called the Second Epistle of Clement, and is really a Roman homily of about A.D. 140. The evidence of these passages is not positive, but if even one of them is quoted from 2 Peter, it becomes quite impossible to assign 2 Peter to A.D. 150-170, which is the date most favoured by those who deny its authenticity. Nor is the omission of any mention of it in Irenaeus and the _Muratorian Fragment_ a very destructive fact. The _Muratorian Fragment_ is only a fragment, and does not mention 1 Peter, and there is no passage in Irenaeus quoted from James. Yet it is certain that those two Epistles belong to the apostolic age. The fact is that such a very large amount of the literature of the 2nd century has been destroyed, that it is always precarious to argue from omissions in the books which are still extant. Therefore, although the evidence of