Peter has just told the scattered congregations to rejoice insofar as they share in Christ’s sufferings (v. 13). Verse 14 narrows the general suffering to one specific form — verbal abuse — and pronounces a beatitude over it.

Three things carry the verse:

1. The condition is real, not speculative. εἰ with the indicative assumes the case; these readers are being reviled, and Peter is not raising a hypothetical.
2. The beatitude is unadorned. μακάριοι stands alone, with no verb — the same clipped shape as the Matthean beatitudes, and almost certainly a deliberate echo of Matt 5:11-12 (“blessed are you when they revile you… rejoice and be glad”). Verses 13-14 reproduce the Matthean pair rejoice-and-be-glad / blessed-when-reviled in reverse order.
3. The ground is a presence, not a prospect. The reason for blessedness is not future compensation but the Spirit now resting on them. And the language of that resting is drawn from Isa 11:2 LXX, where the Spirit rests on the Messiah. What was said of the Christ is said of the reviled congregation.

The hardest question in the verse is not lexical but syntactic: what to do with the doubled neuter article before a single πνεῦμα. That, and a well-known Byzantine expansion at the end of the verse, are treated below.

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

ὀνειδίζω is verbal abuse — insult, reproach, taunting — not physical persecution. BDAG gives “find fault with, reproach, revile, heap insults upon.” The LXX uses it densely in the Psalms for the mockery of the righteous by their enemies (Ps 41:11; 43:17; 68:10 LXX), and Rom 15:3 quotes Ps 68:10 LXX of Christ: οἱ ὀνειδισμοὶ τῶν ὀνειδιζόντων σε ἐπέπεσαν ἐπʼ ἐμέ.

The crucial parallel is Matt 5:11: μακάριοί ἐστε ὅταν ὀνειδίσωσιν ὑμᾶς. Same verb, same beatitude, same cause.

The present passive matters. Peter is not describing a past episode or a feared future one; the reviling is in progress. Whatever the social mechanism behind 1 Peter — informal community hostility rather than imperial edict, on the reading most scholars now take — the abuse is verbal and continuous. The rendering must keep that: “are being reviled,” not “are insulted.”

Avoid “persecuted” (that imports διώκω, a different word with a wider range) and avoid softening to “criticized.”

εἰ + present indicative is a first-class condition: the protasis is assumed true for the sake of the argument. Per the standing glossary policy (set at Phil 2:1), this is not rendered “since” — the conditional form is Peter’s choice and the reader must be able to see it. But neither should English readers hear it as doubt about whether the abuse is happening.

“If you are being reviled” carries the right weight in English: the same construction one uses when the case is granted. Compare v. 16, εἰ δὲ ὡς Χριστιανός, where the parallel εἰ clearly assumes an actual situation.

Note also the chain of εἰ-clauses running through vv. 14, 16, 17, 18 — Peter builds this whole closing section on conditional pivots, and the connective structure is load-bearing (§10).

ἐν ὀνόματι with a verb of reviling is not the standard “in the name of” of commissioned action (ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι, Acts 3:6; 4:10). Here the ἐν is causal-ground: reproached because of, on account of, the name. Compare Mark 9:41 ἐν ὀνόματι ὅτι Χριστοῦ ἐστε, and the more transparent Matthean formulation ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ (Matt 5:11).

The noun is anarthrous but definite by idiom after a preposition (BDF §255); English supplies “the.”

Χριστοῦ is possessive: the name Christ bears, which his people are called by. This is not incidental — two verses later Peter names that name: Χριστιανός (v. 16), a label almost certainly applied first by outsiders. The abuse and the name are the same fact seen from two sides. Rendering ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ as “for the name of Christ” keeps the ground-sense while allowing the reader to feel the connection to v. 16 (ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τούτῳ).

A bare nominative plural adjective with no verb. Greek beatitudes characteristically omit the copula (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-22; Ps 1:1 LXX μακάριος ἀνήρ), and the omission is part of the form: the pronouncement lands as a declaration, not as a description with a tense.

English cannot leave it verbless. Per the standing policy on elided copulas (fixed at Phil 1:2 and the verbless doxologies), the supplied verb is bracketed in the literal tier: “[you are] blessed.” Smooth registers may render “blessed are you” or leave the exclamation bare (“— blessed!”), which is closest to the Greek’s abruptness.

μακάριος in the LXX renders אַשְׁרֵי, and its force is not subjective happiness but a divine verdict on a person’s standing. This is why “happy” is excluded as a rendering: it relocates the claim from God’s judgment to the sufferer’s feelings, and it makes the verse read as sentimental advice rather than as a pronouncement. “Blessed” is retained.

The ὅτι that follows is causal and supplies the ground, exactly as in the Matthean beatitudes (ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία). It is not the recitative ὅτι of confession-formulae.

This is the hardest clause in the verse. Word for word: the [—] of the glory and the [—] of God Spirit. Two neuter nominative articles, each governing a genitive phrase, both waiting for the noun πνεῦμα, which arrives only at the end.

The construction itself is ordinary enough (article + genitive, with the head noun supplied), but the doubling is not. Three readings are live:

1. One Spirit, doubly named. The second article is resumptive, and καί is epexegetical: “the Spirit of glory — that is, the Spirit of God.” This suits the singular verb ἀναπαύεται and the singular πνεῦμα.
2. Two genitives coordinated over one noun, effectively “the Spirit of glory and of God,” with the repeated article marking each genitive as a distinct qualifier rather than a distinct referent.
3. τὸ τῆς δόξης read as an independent substantive — “the [thing] of glory,” i.e. the glory itself — with πνεῦμα then attaching only to τὸ τοῦ θεοῦ: “the glory, even the Spirit of God, rests on you.” This is the reading behind some patristic handling and behind the medieval Latin quod est honoris, gloriae et virtutis Dei.

Translation policy. English cannot reproduce a doubled article over a delayed noun. The literal tier brackets the supplied noun at each article — “the [Spirit] of glory and the [Spirit] of God” — so the reader sees the construction. The smooth tier uses an appositional dash, which is neutral between readings 1 and 2 and does not exclude 3. What is excluded is “the Spirit of glory and of God,” which quietly adopts reading 2 and hides that Peter wrote two articles.

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

δόξα is the fixed LXX equivalent of כָּבוֹד, and in the tabernacle and temple narratives it names the visible, resting presence of YHWH (Exod 40:34-35; 1 Kgs 8:11; Ezek 43:4-5) — what later Jewish tradition calls the Shekinah, from the root שׁכן, “to dwell, settle.”

That background is what gives ἀναπαύεται its force here. The verb of settling and the noun of glory belong together in the Hebrew Bible’s temple vocabulary. Peter is telling a scattered, abused people that the presence which once filled the sanctuary is now settled on them — a claim of a piece with 1 Pet 2:5, where the same readers are οἶκος πνευματικός, a spiritual house.

The standing glossary gloss (“glory”) is retained without qualification. Do not render “glorious Spirit,” which converts the genitive into an adjective and destroys both the parallelism with τοῦ θεοῦ and the temple allusion.

ἀναπαύεται (present middle) means to come to rest and stay at rest — repose, not pause. BDAG: of the Spirit, “rest upon someone.”

The controlling background is Isa 11:2 LXX: καὶ ἀναπαύσεται ἐπʼ αὐτὸν πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ. Same verb, same preposition ἐπί, same subject πνεῦμα, same construction of divine repose upon a person — there the Messianic shoot from Jesse. Compare also Num 11:25-26 LXX (ἐπανεπαύσατο τὸ πνεῦμα ἐπʼ αὐτούς) and 4 Kgdms 2:15 (ἐπαναπέπαυται τὸ πνεῦμα Ἠλιοὺ ἐπὶ Ἐλισαιέ).

Two consequences:

• The allusion is Christological in transfer. What Isaiah says of the Messiah, Peter says of the reviled congregation. This is the same move as v. 13’s κοινωνεῖτε τοῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ παθήμασιν: sharing the sufferings, sharing the resting Spirit.
• The present tense is not incidental. It is a standing state, contemporaneous with the reviling. The blessedness is not deferred; the Spirit is on them while they are abused.

Render “rests upon” and keep the ἐπί. “Comes upon” imports a descent the verb does not name; “abides in” substitutes μένω ἐν and relocates the Spirit from over them to inside them, losing the Isaianic picture.

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

The critical text ends at ἀναπαύεται. A substantial body of later witnesses continues:

κατὰ μὲν αὐτοὺς βλασφημεῖται, κατὰ δὲ ὑμᾶς δοξάζεται (“on their part he is blasphemed, but on your part he is glorified”)

External evidence. The shorter text is read by 𝔓72, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and the Vulgate — the earliest and best witnesses across text-types. The addition appears in the later Byzantine majority and entered the Textus Receptus, and so stands in the KJV. A related variant adds καὶ δυνάμεως (“and of power”) after δόξης, likewise late.

Internal evidence. The longer reading is readily explained as a scribal comment that migrated into the text: it takes up βλασφημοῦντες from v. 4 and δοξαζέτω from v. 16 and builds an antithesis. There is no plausible mechanism for its accidental loss from the earliest manuscripts. The shorter reading is also the harder one — the abrupt ἀναπαύεται leaves the sentence with no counterweight, which is exactly the kind of thing scribes supply.

Verdict. The addition is secondary with a high degree of confidence. It is recorded here rather than resolved silently (§4), and it is not translated in the main text.

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

The Fathers read the verse in the same two-track way modern commentators do — as a beatitude on shared suffering and as a claim about indwelling glory.

Cyril of Jerusalem cites the resting of the Spirit alongside Isa 11:2 as evidence that the Spirit given to the faithful is the same Spirit that rested on Christ — precisely the transfer noted above. The Latin tradition, in the pseudo-Augustinian and Bedan commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, presses the gloria of the clause toward the temple-presence: the abused Christian is the dwelling of the glory.

What is worth registering for cultural relevance is that the patristic readers had no difficulty with the logic of the verse — that reproach is the mark of blessing — because they knew the social situation firsthand. The name Χριστιανός (v. 16) was, in Tacitus and Pliny, a term of contempt. Peter’s argument is that the contempt certifies the blessing rather than disproving it, and the second-century apologists take that up directly.

Proposed — pending reviewGerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament XI (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000)

Verses 12-19 are paraenesis with beatitudinal and prophetic material embedded. The register lifts here: the bare μακάριοι, the delayed πνεῦμα, and the Isaianic ἀναπαύεται all belong to elevated speech, not plain exhortation.

Per §7 and §10, the English must lift too. The dash in the smooth rendering, and the exclamatory “blessed!”, are attempts to reproduce the clipped, weighty quality of a pronouncement rather than flattening it into a subordinate clause (“you are blessed if you are insulted”), which reverses the emphasis and turns a declaration into a consolation.