The verse is the hinge between the christological paragraph of 3:18-22 and the ethical section that runs to 4:6. οὖν looks back to 3:18 — ‘Christ also suffered once for sins … put to death in flesh (σαρκί), made alive in spirit’ — and the same dative σαρκί is repeated twice here, so the connection is lexical and not merely logical.

Three things carry the weight:

1. A military metaphor. ὁπλίσασθε is the only occurrence of ὁπλίζω in the NT: soldiers taking up arms. The weapon is a ἔννοια — a settled intention, a mind made up. Peter is not asking for an emotion but for a decision held under pressure.
2. The genitive absolute is the ground, the imperative the demand. Christ’s suffering is not a model to admire but the reason the readers can be told to arm themselves.
3. A maxim that resists tidy reading. ‘The one who has suffered in flesh has ceased from sin’ is the hardest clause in the chapter. Who is ‘the one who has suffered’ — Christ, or the believer? And in what sense is sin over? The apparatus below sets out the options without collapsing them; the text is stated as a proverb and the reader is meant to feel its edge.

Genre: epistolary paraenesis. Register: compressed, imperatival, slightly gnomic in the ὅτι clause.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn H. Elliott, 1 Peter: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000)

οὖν is inferential and, per project policy on epistolary connectives, is always rendered. The inference runs from 3:18-22, not merely from 3:22. The repeated σαρκί confirms this: 3:18 θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκί, ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι supplies the vocabulary that 4:1 twice reuses and that 4:6 (σαρκί / πνεύματι) closes.

The fronting of Χριστοῦ before οὖν is worth noting: the postpositive particle is displaced to second position by a genitive that Peter wants first. The Greek order therefore reads ‘Christ, then, having suffered…’, and English should keep Christ at the head of the sentence.

A genitive absolute: a participle with its own subject, grammatically detached from the main clause. The construction is adverbial and unmarked as to relation — causal, temporal, and concessive readings are all formally available (BDF §417-24).

Here the causal-inferential sense is fixed not by the participle but by οὖν and by the answering καὶ ὑμεῖς: the logic is ‘Christ did X; you also do Y.’ Per the project’s standing policy on unmarked adverbial participles (ὑπάρχων, Phil 2:6; ὤν, Gal 4:1), the literal tier keeps the bare participle (‘having suffered’) and the causal ‘since’ is confined to the smooth tier.

The aorist παθόντος is complexive: the passion viewed as one completed event, not a process. Note that Peter says Christ suffered, not that he died, even though 3:18 had θανατωθείς — the shared verb πάσχω is what makes the analogy with the readers work, since they suffer but are not (yet) killed.

Proposed — pending reviewKaren H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005)

Anarthrous dative, twice in this verse. Two questions: what case-function, and what does σάρξ denote?

Function. Not instrumental (‘by means of flesh’) and not locative in a crude sense. It is a dative of respect or sphere — the domain with reference to which the suffering occurred. The parallel σαρκί / πνεύματι pairs at 3:18 and 4:6 are the controlling evidence: they contrast two spheres or modes of existence, not two instruments.

Sense. σάρξ here is not the Pauline ethical σάρξ (the self in rebellion) but human bodily existence as the arena of mortality and vulnerability. This is consistent with the standing corpus policy: one English gloss flesh across all registers, with the contextual sense carried in the note rather than in the rendering. Substituting ‘body’ would import σῶμα, a word 1 Peter does not use here; substituting ‘physically’ would abstract a concrete noun into an adverb and destroy the σαρκί/πνεύματι architecture of the chapter.

English supplies the article (‘in the flesh’) as idiom requires; the Greek is anarthrous and qualitative.

καί here is adjunctive (‘also’), not connective, and attaches to the pronoun: you too, alongside Christ. Per standing policy adjunctive καί is always rendered.

ὑμεῖς is an expressed nominative with a finite verb — marked in Greek, since the verb ending already carries person. It is contrastive-correlative with Χριστοῦ: the sentence sets the two subjects against each other and then joins them. English carries this by ‘you also’ in the emphatic slot; adding further emphasis words would overtranslate.

Rare in the NT — only here and Heb 4:12 (‘discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart’). From ἐν + νοῦς: what is in the mind. In Hellenistic usage the range runs from ‘concept, notion’ (philosophical) through ‘insight’ to ‘intention, purpose, resolve.’ The LXX uses it in Proverbs for prudent thought (Prov 1:4; 2:11; 3:21; 4:1; 5:2; 8:12; 16:22 — regularly rendering מְזִמָּה, purposeful deliberation), and 1 Pet 1:13 has already set the readers’ minds in a posture of readiness (ἀναζωσάμενοι τὰς ὀσφύας τῆς διανοίας ὑμῶν).

The governing verb decides the sense. One does not arm oneself with a concept; one arms oneself with a resolve. The context is a community under social hostility (4:4, 12-16), and what is being demanded is a fixed determination to go the way Christ went.

τὴν αὐτήν — article + αὐτός in attributive position is the identity adjective (‘the same’), not the intensive (‘himself’). The same as what? As Christ’s own resolve in going to the cross. Nothing else in the clause supplies a referent.

Proposed — pending reviewEdwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998)

NT hapax. Denominative from ὅπλον, ‘weapon, implement.’ The middle ὁπλίζομαι is the standard Greek for a soldier equipping himself, and the LXX uses it precisely so (Num 31:5; 2 Chr 17:17; 1 Macc 4:7; 12:41; Jer 26:9 LXX). The accusative names what one arms oneself with.

So the metaphor is live (§8) and must stay in the English: the readers are told to take up a weapon, and the weapon is a mind made up. This belongs to a well-attested early-Christian military-ethical field (Rom 13:12 ὅπλα τοῦ φωτός; 2 Cor 6:7; 10:4; Eph 6:11-17; 1 Thess 5:8), and 1 Peter’s own martial-adjacent language (2:11 στρατεύονται; 5:8-9) makes the register natural here.

Aorist middle imperative: a single decisive act of equipping, not an ongoing state — matching the ἔννοια, which is a decision, not a mood. ‘Arm yourselves’ is exact; the middle is genuinely reflexive here and should not be flattened to a passive or to ‘be armed.’

Proposed — pending reviewHenry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)

ὅτι is causal: it grounds the imperative. The clause reads as a gnomic maxim, and its terseness is the difficulty.

The crux is the referent of the articular participle ὁ παθών. The article can be generalizing (‘anyone who has suffered’) or anaphoric (‘the one who suffered’ = Christ, just named). Greek does not decide, and the aorist participle here is identical in form to παθόντος above, which is deliberately Christ.

Proposed — pending reviewPaul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996)

παύω active is transitive (‘stop something’); the middle παύομαι is intransitive, ‘cease, leave off, have done with,’ and takes a genitive of separation — the standard construction, as here with ἁμαρτίας. Compare 1 Pet 3:10, quoting Ps 33:14 LXX: παυσάτω τὴν γλῶσσαν ἀπὸ κακοῦ.

The form πέπαυται is morphologically ambiguous between perfect middle and perfect passive. Middle (‘has ceased’) is the ordinary value for this verb and is almost certainly right; a passive (‘has been made to cease’) would need an agent the clause does not supply, though it would suit a divine-passive reading.

The perfect is the load-bearing feature: a completed act with a standing result. Not ‘stopped sinning at some point’ but ‘stands done with sin.’ English present perfect tracks this; a simple past would sever the result.

Note also that ἁμαρτίας is singular and anarthrous: sin as a power or sphere of dealing, not a tally of offenses.

Proposed — pending reviewJ. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 49 (Waco: Word, 1988)

Two places in the verse where the tradition moves:

1. ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν / ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν after παθόντος. A number of witnesses expand the genitive absolute to ‘Christ having suffered for us / for you in flesh’ — the addition is found in the majority of later Greek manuscripts and in several versions, and it splits between ἡμῶν and ὑμῶν where it occurs. The shorter reading, with no prepositional phrase, is supported by the earliest and best witnesses and is printed by NA28 without brackets. The variant is a transparent liturgical/doctrinal expansion drawn from 3:18 (ἔπαθεν … ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων); the very fact that scribes could not agree on the pronoun marks it as secondary. There is no exegetical loss: what the addition says, 3:18 says already.

2. σαρκί / ἐν σαρκί. Some witnesses supply the preposition in one or both occurrences, harmonizing to the ἐν σαρκί of v. 2. The bare dative is the harder and better-attested reading, and it is the form that matches 3:18.

Neither variant is doctrinally consequential, and neither is a case where the evidence is genuinely divided — but both are recorded here rather than silently resolved (§4).

Vulgate: Christo igitur passo in carne, et vos eadem cogitatione armamini, quia qui passus est in carne, desiit a peccatis. Three observations. (i) Jerome supplies in for the bare dative, unavoidable in Latin. (ii) cogitatione for ἔννοια leans toward ‘thought’ rather than ‘resolve’ — weaker than the Greek, and the source of the English tradition’s ‘mind.’ (iii) a peccatis pluralizes the singular ἁμαρτίας and converts the genitive of separation into a prepositional phrase, which nudges the sense toward ‘has left off sinful acts’ — the moralizing reading. The Latin therefore shows the direction of drift to be resisted.

Syriac Peshitta likewise renders with a verb of ceasing plus a preposition, and reads the participle generically.

The versions, in other words, uniformly resolve toward reading (b) above. That is reception, not evidence (§11), and does not settle the Greek.

The Greek commentators generally take ὁ παθών of the believer and read the maxim ascetically-baptismally. The line of thought is that voluntary acceptance of suffering is itself the death of sin’s power, since sin’s leverage on a person is the desire to avoid pain and preserve the flesh — a reading that fits Peter’s argument in v. 2 exactly, where the alternative to θέλημα θεοῦ is ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαι.

The christological reading (a) was never absent, since 3:18 stands so close, and the participatory reading (c) — the believer’s suffering as a sharing in Christ’s, cf. 4:13 κοινωνεῖτε τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασιν — is the one that best explains why Peter used the same verb for both parties in a single sentence.

What the patristic material contributes is not a resolution but a caution: no ancient reader took πέπαυται ἁμαρτίας as a claim to sinless perfection. The verse was read as being about the breaking of sin’s claim, which is precisely what the genitive of separation says.

Epistolary paraenesis with a gnomic tail. Peter’s Greek here is compressed to the point of hardness: a genitive absolute, an emphatic pronoun, an accusative object placed before its verb, an aorist imperative, and then a maxim of six words. No connectives soften it.

The smooth rendering therefore should not be smoothed much. English needs a subordinator for the genitive absolute and a supplied ‘the’ before ‘flesh,’ but the em-dashes and the short final clause preserve the shape. Elevating the register (as the KJV-descended tradition does with ‘forasmuch as’) or flattening it into explanatory prose (‘so you should also think the same way, because anyone who suffers physically is finished with sin’) both misrepresent the source — the first by adding ceremony, the second by removing the difficulty.