Verse 12 forbade one reaction to the fiery ordeal (μὴ ξενίζεσθε — do not be startled, as though something alien were happening). Verse 13 supplies the alternative, and it is not endurance but joy.

Three things carry the weight:

1. καθό measures rather than explains. Peter does not say because you suffer, rejoice; he says to the degree that you are sharing in Christ’s sufferings, rejoice. The joy is calibrated to the participation, not triggered by the pain.
2. κοινωνεῖτε … τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασιν puts the believers’ present affliction inside Christ’s own sufferings. Whether that is participation in the identical sufferings or a suffering of the same kind is the exegetical crux of the verse.
3. The verse is built on a joy-now / joy-then structure: present imperative χαίρετε answered by aorist subjunctive χαρῆτε with καί (‘also’). The present joy is not a substitute for the coming joy but its firstfruit, and the adjunctive καί says so.

The closing participle ἀγαλλιώμενοι raises the register from joy to exultation — a verb the LXX reserves for festal and eschatological gladness before God, already used at 1:6 and 1:8 in the same letter.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn H. Elliott, 1 Peter, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000)

ἀλλά is the strong adversative, clause-initial, answering the prohibition of v. 12 head-on. Per the standing policy it is rendered plainly ‘but’ and kept first in the English clause; the abruptness is the rhetorical point.

καθό (κατά + the neuter relative ὅ, written as one word) is rare in the NT — Rom 8:26; 2 Cor 8:12 (twice); 1 Pet 4:13 — and in every instance it measures. At 2 Cor 8:12 it is unmistakable: a gift is acceptable καθὸ ἐὰν ἔχῃ, according to what one has, not according to what one does not have. Proportion, not cause.

This matters. A causal rendering (‘because you share…’) makes the suffering itself the ground of the joy. A proportional rendering makes the extent of the participation the measure of it. Peter is not commending suffering; he is commending what the suffering places one inside.

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

κοινωνεῖτε takes a dative of the thing shared, which is the regular construction (Rom 15:27; 1 Tim 5:22; 2 John 11). The root is having-in-common, and the standing corpus decision on the κοινων- family is that the shared-stake sense governs and ‘help’ or ‘assist’ is excluded.

The tense is present indicative, not subjunctive: Peter states the sharing as a fact already underway, and καθό then measures it. Render durative — ‘you are sharing’ — rather than as a bare fact of status.

The near parallels are Pauline: κοινωνία τῶν παθημάτων αὐτοῦ (Phil 3:10), συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν (Rom 8:17), τὰ παθήματα τοῦ Χριστοῦ περισσεύει εἰς ἡμᾶς (2 Cor 1:5). All four texts hold the same shape: present participation in Christ’s sufferings, future participation in his glory. Peter is not borrowing from Paul so much as drawing on a shared early-Christian pattern.

The genitive τοῦ Χριστοῦ is possessive: the sufferings belong to Christ. What is contested is what possession means when other people are said to share them.

What all three share, and what the rendering must preserve, is the bare genitive. ‘Christ’s sufferings’ and ‘the sufferings of Christ’ both leave the question open; ‘sufferings like Christ’s’ and ‘suffering for Christ’ close it. Neither is written.

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

The aspectual pairing is deliberate and must survive in English.

χαίρετε — present imperative, durative: an ongoing practice of joy under sustained pressure. The greeting sense of χαίρετε (‘farewell’) is excluded here by the καθό clause governing it.

χαρῆτε — aorist subjunctive in a telic ἵνα clause, complexive: the whole of that future joy taken as one event, located at the ἀποκάλυψις.

The hinge is καί. It is adjunctive, attaching to the second joy: also rejoice then. Two consequences follow. First, the present joy is real joy, not a grim advance payment on a later one — otherwise there is nothing for the future joy to be added to. Second, the ἵνα is genuinely telic: present joy is not merely followed by future joy but ordered toward it.

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

ἀποκάλυψις is the noun of ἀπο-καλύπτω, the removal of a covering from what is already there. That is the point: the glory is not manufactured at the parousia but unveiled. It exists now, hidden.

The noun is a structural marker in 1 Peter — 1:7 (ἐν ἀποκαλύψει Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ), 1:13 (the same phrase), 4:13, and the cognate participle at 5:1 (τῆς μελλούσης ἀποκαλύπτεσθαι δόξης). The letter’s whole eschatology runs on the verb of uncovering rather than on verbs of arrival (παρουσία never occurs in 1 Peter).

ἐν τῇ ἀποκαλύψει is temporal-occasional: ‘at,’ not ‘by.’ αὐτοῦ refers to Christ, continuous with τοῦ Χριστοῦ earlier in the verse; the letter elsewhere speaks of the glory that will be revealed as his (5:1, 4).

‘Unveiling’ is preferred in the literal tier because it keeps the veil-image visible; ‘revelation’ is retained in liturgical register, where English usage has fixed it.

ἀγαλλιώμενοι is a present middle participle of a verb almost unknown outside the LXX and its dependents — a biblical-Greek coinage, probably from ἀγάλλομαι. In the LXX it is the festal shout, the psalmist’s exultation before God (Ps 15:9; 19:6; 31:11; 95:12 LXX), and in the NT it clusters in eschatological and doxological contexts (Luke 1:47; 10:21; Acts 2:26; Rev 19:7).

It is stronger than χαίρω and must be rendered so, or the participle collapses into redundancy. ‘Exult’ preserves the loudness and the outward direction; ‘be glad’ is too flat and duplicates χαίρω; ‘be overjoyed’ imports an intensity of feeling rather than an act of acclamation.

1 Peter has already paired the two verbs at 1:6 (ἐν ᾧ ἀγαλλιᾶσθε) and 1:8 (χαρᾷ ἀνεκλαλήτῳ καὶ δεδοξασμένῃ), so the collocation here is the letter’s own idiom, not a stray flourish.

Syntactically the participle is attendant circumstance modifying χαρῆτε — the manner of the future rejoicing, not a further command. Rendering it as a coordinate imperative (‘rejoice and exult’) would give it independent force it does not have. Some read it as an intensifying pleonasm on the Semitic model (cf. χαρᾷ χαίρει, John 3:29); the English ‘rejoice, exulting’ is compatible with both.

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

The verse is textually stable in the critical editions; NA28 prints it without an apparatus entry of consequence.

Minor witnesses show the expected directions of scribal ease: some read καθώς for the rarer καθό, assimilating to the far commoner conjunction and, in doing so, shifting proportion (‘to the degree that’) toward comparison (‘just as’). The harder and better-attested καθό stands. A handful of witnesses drop τοῦ before Χριστοῦ or transpose the articles; nothing exegetically follows.

No variant touches the joy-verbs or the participle.

The Fathers read this verse under the pressure of actual persecution, and their instinct is uniformly that the joy is not stoic composure but participation.

Polycarp, writing to the same general region a generation later, echoes the language of suffering with Christ and being raised with him — the pattern is already formulaic.

Oecumenius and the Greek catena tradition take καθό proportionally, and stress that Peter measures the joy by the fellowship rather than by the pain — a reading that anticipates the lexical point made above.

Augustine’s frequent use of the martyr-joy topos (the martyrs rejoice because they already share what will be unveiled) reflects the same two-stage structure Peter builds with χαίρετε … χαρῆτε.

The patristic consensus does not settle the contested genitive; the Latin communicatis Christi passionibus leaves it as open as the Greek does.

Vulgate: sed communicantes Christi passionibus gaudete, ut et in revelatione gloriae eius gaudeatis exultantes. Jerome renders καθό with a bare participle (communicantes), which loses the proportional measure entirely — the Latin reads causally or circumstantially. He preserves et (the adjunctive καί) and keeps exultantes participial, both correctly.

Peshitta: renders with the ‘participate/share’ root and keeps the two joy-verbs distinct, though Syriac joy-vocabulary does not map the χαίρω / ἀγαλλιάω distinction cleanly. The Syriac tradition, like the Latin, does not resolve the genitive.

Proposed — pending reviewBiblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. R. Weber and R. Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)