Verse 14 has just pronounced a blessing on those reviled ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ. Verse 15 immediately fences it. The blessing attaches to a specific cause of suffering, and Peter will not let his readers assume that any hardship they undergo qualifies. γάρ is doing real work: it grounds the beatitude by excluding its counterfeit.

The structure is a four-item list under a single third-person imperative, with ὡς repeated before the last item — three recognizable offenses (murderer, thief, evildoer) and then a fourth term that no one can define with confidence. The first three are unremarkable; that is the point of them. They establish that the category is real crime, so that the fourth item lands inside it.

The fourth word, ἀλλοτριεπίσκοπος, is the crux of the verse and one of the harder lexical problems in the letter. It occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, nowhere in the Septuagint, and nowhere in surviving Greek literature before Peter in a form that would settle its sense. Every English rendering — ‘busybody’, ‘meddler’, ‘informer’, ‘embezzler’ — is a decision, and the honest apparatus flags it rather than resolving it.

One further note on the shift in grammatical person. Verses 12–14 address the congregation directly (ἀγαπητοί, μὴ ξενίζεσθε, ὑμῖν). At v. 15 Peter drops to the third person and to an indefinite τις, and stays there through v. 16 (μὴ αἰσχυνέσθω, δοξαζέτω). He is no longer exhorting the whole body; he is stating a ruling about a case.

Built onna28 · bdag

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

The negative stands first, before the postpositive γάρ can claim its normal second slot. This is regular Greek — μή with an imperative gravitates to the head of the clause, and γάρ takes the earliest position left to it — but the effect is that the prohibition hits before the connective, and before the reader learns who or what is in view.

γάρ must be rendered (§10). It is not a filler. It supplies the ground for v. 14’s beatitude by way of exclusion: blessed if reviled for the name — for the blessing does not extend to the man who suffers as a criminal. Some read it as looser and more transitional (‘now’), but the argumentative link to v. 14 is tight enough that the causal force should stand.

The genitive ὑμῶν is partitive and slightly uncomfortable: Peter entertains the possibility that a member of the congregation might be a murderer. He does not accuse; he rules. Softening this to a general ‘no one’ loses the fact that the ruling is addressed inward.

Built onbdf · na28

πασχέτω is a third-person present active imperative — a form English does not possess, requiring the ‘let him …’ periphrasis. Per the standing corpus policy (fixed at γνωσθήτω, Phil 4:5, and applied at 1 Pet 4:16, 19), the third person must not be converted into a second-person exhortation. ‘Do not let any of you suffer as a murderer’ is acceptable; ‘do not suffer as a murderer’ is not, because it erases the discourse shift from direct address (vv. 12–14) to impersonal ruling (vv. 15–16).

The present aspect is durative. Peter is not forbidding a single incident but a standing situation: no one is to be found in the position of suffering under such a description.

The verb is πάσχω, the spine of the letter (2:19–23; 3:14–18; 4:1, 15, 19; 5:10). Peter uses one word for Christ’s suffering and his readers’, and here for the criminal’s — which is precisely how the verse works. The suffering is the same word; the ὡς clause is what distinguishes the cases. English must therefore keep ‘suffer’ at every occurrence and not substitute ‘be punished’ here, which would resolve by lexical choice what Peter resolves by qualifier.

Built onbdag · bdf

ὡς here is characterizing, not comparative: it names the category under which the suffering is incurred, not something the suffering merely resembles. The same use governs v. 16 (ὡς Χριστιανός) and 4:11 (ὡς λόγια θεοῦ), and the two verses are built to answer each other — not as a murderer … but if as a Christian. Rendering ‘as if’ or ‘like’ converts a categorization into a simile and dissolves the antithesis.

The interesting feature is that ὡς is repeated before the fourth item and not before the second and third. Three readings are current:

• The repetition sets the fourth term apart as belonging to a different order — not a capital or criminal offense but a social one, so that the list runs ‘as a murderer or thief or evildoer, or [again] as a meddler’.
• κακοποιός closes the first group as its summary, and the second ὡς opens a fresh, separate category.
• The repetition is stylistic variation with no semantic load; Koine repeats particles freely.

The first two are hard to distinguish in practice and both suggest that the fourth item is felt to be of another kind. That in turn tells against readings of ἀλλοτριεπίσκοπος that make it a serious crime (embezzlement, informing) and mildly favors a social-nuisance sense — but it is a weak argument and cannot carry the lexical decision alone. The rendering marks the break with a dash and leaves the inference to the reader.

Built onbdf · bdag

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

φονεύς (murderer) and κλέπτης (thief) are unremarkable and need no defense. They are capital and property crime respectively — the plainest cases, chosen because no one will dispute that suffering incurred by them earns no blessing.

κακοποιός is the term that matters. It is a 1 Peter signature: the letter sets the ἀγαθοποι- family against the κακοποι- family across 2:12, 14, 15, 20; 3:6, 17; 4:15, 19. At 2:12 and 2:14 the word describes what outsiders wrongly call Christians and what the governor rightly punishes. Here Peter turns it inward: do not actually be one.

The corpus policy renders it ‘evildoer’ or ‘wrongdoer’, not ‘criminal’. ‘Criminal’ narrows a moral category to a legal one, and the list has already supplied the legal cases (murder, theft). The word is broader and functions as a summary head rather than a third specific charge — which is one reason the second ὡς may mark a genuine break after it.

Some have proposed that κακοποιός here carries the specific sense ‘sorcerer, malefic magician’, a documented usage in later Greek. The evidence is thin for the first century and the letter’s own internal usage (2:12, 14) is decisive against it: there κακοποιός is plainly the general slander-word for wrongdoing.

Built onbdag

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

A New Testament hapax, absent from the Septuagint, and effectively without secure pre-Christian attestation. The compound is transparent in its parts and opaque in its sense: ἀλλότριος (‘belonging to another’) + ἐπίσκοπος (‘overseer’, from ἐπι- + σκοπέω, ‘watch over’ — already fixed in this corpus as ‘overseer’, with ‘bishop’ excluded as anachronistic). Literally: one who oversees what is another’s.

That much is agreed. What the compound means is not.

The versional and patristic evidence shows the same uncertainty from the beginning. The Vulgate’s alienorum appetitor (‘one who reaches after what belongs to others’) leans toward (3)/(4); the Old Latin tradition varies. Greek commentators tend toward (1). None of this settles the question — it demonstrates that the word was already hard by the second century.

One further consideration worth naming and not pressing: because ἐπίσκοπος is a congregational office-word elsewhere in the New Testament (and in 1 Pet 5:2 the cognate verb ἐπισκοποῦντες describes elders’ work), a few have read the compound as ecclesiastical — one who exercises oversight in a flock not his own. It is an attractive echo, but the office sense of ἐπίσκοπος was not fixed enough in the first century to license it, and the verse’s company (murder, theft, wrongdoing) is against it. Recorded, not adopted.

Built onbdag · bdf

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

The verse is textually stable. NA28 prints no variation unit of substance, and the reading of the four-item list is uniform across the major witnesses.

Two minor items are worth recording. Some witnesses omit the second ὡς before ἀλλοτριεπίσκοπος, levelling the list to a single characterizing particle — which is the expected direction of scribal smoothing and confirms the doubled ὡς as original. And a handful of later witnesses show the spelling ἀλλοτριοεπίσκοπος (with the connecting vowel retained), which is orthographic and carries no weight.

The difficulty of the hapax did not generate substitution, which is itself a small piece of evidence: scribes who could not define the word nevertheless copied it.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The Greek commentators consistently take the verse as a warning against giving the persecutors a legitimate charge. The suffering that carries a blessing is suffering for the name; suffering for wrongdoing is simply the wages of wrongdoing, and the Christian who incurs it has no claim on v. 14.

On the hapax itself the tradition divides along the same lines as modern lexicography, with a general tendency to read it as interference in other people’s business — the Greek Fathers characteristically pairing it with the counsel to mind one’s own affairs (cf. 1 Thess 4:11, πράσσειν τὰ ἴδια). The Latin tradition’s alienorum appetitor pulls the other way, toward grasping at what belongs to others.

The pastoral use is uniform and worth registering, because it shapes how the verse functions in the chapter: the Fathers read vv. 15–16 as a pair, one ruling with two halves. Do not be the kind of person whose suffering discredits the name; if you suffer for the name, do not be ashamed of it (v. 16).

Proposed — pending reviewAndreas Merkt, ed., 1 Petrus, Novum Testamentum Patristicum 21/1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015)

Three lines converge here.

First, within 1 Peter: the verse belongs to a sustained argument that the cause of suffering determines its value (2:19–20 is the fullest statement — there is no credit in taking a beating for doing wrong). 4:15 restates 2:20 in negative form, and the κακοποιός / ἀγαθοποιΐα antithesis frames the paragraph from 4:15 to 4:19.

Second, the Jesus tradition: the beatitude of v. 14 draws on Matt 5:11–12, and v. 15 supplies the qualification that the beatitude’s ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ already implies.

Third, the Pauline parallel: Rom 13:3–4 makes the identical distinction with the identical vocabulary (τὸ κακὸν πρᾶσσε / ἀγαθοποίει), which suggests this was settled early-Christian teaching about the state rather than a Petrine innovation.