Verse 16 is the positive half of a two-part ruling that begins at v. 15. Peter has just excluded four kinds of suffering that carry no honor — murderer, thief, wrongdoer, and the disputed ἀλλοτριεπίσκοπος. Now he takes the one remaining case: suffering ὡς Χριστιανός. The Greek is extremely compressed. There is no verb in the protasis at all; the reader supplies πασχέτω from v. 15, and the whole weight of the sentence falls on the two third-person imperatives that follow.

The verse turns on a single reversal. αἰσχύνομαι in biblical Greek is not the modern feeling of embarrassment but public disgrace — the fate of the one whose confidence has been shown to be misplaced (Ps 24:2-3 LXX; Isa 28:16, cited at 1 Pet 2:6). Peter’s readers are being publicly shamed, and the state’s own vocabulary of disgrace is being applied to them. Peter does not deny that the treatment is disgraceful by the world’s reckoning; he forbids the verdict from landing. In its place he substitutes the exact opposite of shame in the ancient honor economy: δοξαζέτω — let him assign glory, and assign it to God.

Three items require care. First, Χριστιανός is a Latinate formation and almost certainly an outsider’s label, not a self-designation; Peter is taking a name coined by others and making it a ground of doxology. Second, whether the shame envisaged is a subjective feeling or a public standing determines the English rendering, and the LXX evidence points hard toward the latter. Third, ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τούτῳ is genuinely ambiguous in two directions at once: which name, and what force the preposition carries. The apparatus below leaves both open.

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

The protasis εἰ δὲ ὡς Χριστιανός has no verb. Greek freely elides a verb recoverable from the immediately preceding clause, and here the source is unmistakable: πασχέτω in v. 15 (μὴ γάρ τις ὑμῶν πασχέτω ὡς φονεὺς …). The condition is therefore ‘but if [he suffers] as a Christian.’ The literal tier keeps the gap visible with a bracketed supplement; nothing is supplied unbracketed.

The verse is bound to v. 15 by more than the missing verb. Note the structure:

• v. 15: μὴ … πασχέτω ὡς φονεύς ἢ κλέπτης ἢ κακοποιὸς ἢ ὡς ἀλλοτριεπίσκοπος
• v. 16: εἰ δὲ ὡς Χριστιανός …

The δέ is adversative, setting the honorable case against the four dishonorable ones. A second δέ then pivots inside v. 16 from the prohibition to the command (μὴ αἰσχυνέσθω, δοξαζέτω δέ). Both particles are rendered; per §10 connectives in argumentative material are load-bearing and never dropped.

The condition is first-class in form. This does not assert that the readers are in fact suffering as Christians — it entertains the case as real for the sake of the ruling, exactly as at 4:14 (εἰ ὀνειδίζεσθε). Rendering ‘since’ would close the space Peter leaves open, and the whole point of the pair 15–16 is that both cases remain live possibilities for which he legislates.

Both imperatives are third-person singular, agreeing with the τις of v. 15 rather than with the second-person plural address of vv. 12-14. English has no third-person imperative, so the ‘let him …’ periphrasis is unavoidable; but the impersonal, quasi-legal register produced by the third person should not be smoothed into a second-person exhortation (‘do not be ashamed’), which converts a ruling into an appeal.

Three NT occurrences: Acts 11:26 (χρηματίσαι … Χριστιανούς, at Antioch), Acts 26:28 (Agrippa: Χριστιανὸν ποιῆσαι), and here. In all three the term stands at a distance from the speaker’s own vocabulary — coined at Antioch, spoken by a Roman client-king, and here placed in the mouth of accusers.

The morphology is decisive for the register. The suffix ‑ιανός is a Greek transcription of the Latin adjectival ‑ianus, used to mark the adherents, partisans, or slaves of a named principal: Caesariani, Pompeiani, Herodiani (Ἡρῳδιανοί, Mark 3:6). That is administrative and popular Latin, not Semitic or Jewish idiom. A group naming itself from within would far more likely have used ἀδελφοί, ἅγιοι, μαθηταί, or οἱ τῆς ὁδοῦ — all of which the NT in fact attests. The formation therefore points to an outsider’s designation, probably originating with Gentile observers and readily usable in a legal or police context.

That matters here because the surrounding clauses are forensic in flavor: v. 15’s list reads like a charge sheet, and v. 16 concerns what happens when the charge is not murder or theft but simply being one of these. Tacitus (Ann. 15.44) reports precisely this — quos … vulgus Christianos appellabat — and Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan (Ep. 10.96) shows an interrogation in which the name itself is the question at issue. Whether such formal legal machinery existed at 1 Peter’s date is contested (see below), but the lexical point stands independently: the word is a label applied from outside.

Peter’s move is therefore to take the outsiders’ word and make it the ground of doxology. He neither disowns it nor apologizes for it. That is why the rendering must remain the plain transliteration ‘Christian’ and must not be expanded to ‘a follower of Christ’ or ‘a believer,’ which convert an imposed name back into an insider description and destroy the point.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn H. Elliott, 1 Peter: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000) · Tacitus, Annales 15.44, ed. C. D. Fisher, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906)

δοξαζέτω is the present active imperative, third singular. Two features carry weight.

First, aspect. The present marks sustained practice rather than a single decisive act (contrast an aorist imperative, which would frame it as one performance). The sufferer’s whole bearing under accusation is to be a glorifying of God, not a one-off declaration. The literal tier may mark this with a progressive; the smooth tier carries it by context.

Second, the semantics. δοξάζω in biblical Greek does not mean ‘make glorious’ but ‘acknowledge as glorious, ascribe glory to’ — the LXX equivalent of כָּבֵד in its honorific sense. It is the exact counterpart of αἰσχύνομαι in the honor economy: one assigns disgrace, the other assigns honor. This makes the verse’s structure a substitution rather than a mere sequence: the verdict of shame is refused and a verdict of glory is issued in its place, redirected from the sufferer’s own account to God’s.

The verb is thematic in this chapter. At 4:11 the purpose of all service is ἵνα ἐν πᾶσιν δοξάζηται ὁ θεός, closed by the doxology ᾧ ἐστιν ἡ δόξα. At 4:13 the goal is joy ἐν τῇ ἀποκαλύψει τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, and at 4:14 the Spirit resting on the sufferer is τὸ τῆς δόξης … πνεῦμα. Verse 16 therefore lands inside a chapter-long δόξα thread, and English must use one root throughout — ‘glory / glorify’ — so the thread is visible. ‘Praise God’ would break the link to δόξα in vv. 11, 13, 14; ‘honor God’ would break the link to the noun in this letter’s other occurrences.

Two questions, and both are live.

Which name? The demonstrative τούτῳ is anaphoric, pointing to something just said. The nearest candidate by far is Χριστιανός — the only name-word in the verse. On that reading, Peter closes the ring he opened: the label flung at them by outsiders becomes the very thing in which God is glorified. This is the most economical reading of the syntax and it makes the verse a tight, self-contained reversal.

But the letter’s own idiom pushes the other way. At 4:14 Peter has just written ἐν ὀνόματι Χριστοῦ, and the biblical formula ‘in the name’ regularly means the name of the Lord, not a group designation (Acts 4:12; 5:41; Phil 2:10). On that reading τούτῳ points back over Χριστιανός to the ὄνομα of v. 14, and the sense is: let him glorify God in that name of Christ under which he is being reviled.

What force does ἐν carry? Three constructions are grammatically available and none can be excluded:

• Spherical — glorify God within the sphere marked by this name, i.e. in his standing as one who bears it.
• Causal / ground — glorify God because of this name, on the basis of bearing it (comparable to the ground-sense of ἐπί + dat. after verbs of thanking, already fixed for this corpus).
• Instrumental — glorify God by means of this name, using it as the instrument of the doxology (i.e. by confessing it rather than denying it under interrogation).

English ‘in’ holds all three more hospitably than any alternative. ‘By’ commits to the instrumental; ‘because of’ commits to the causal; ‘as one who bears this name’ commits to the spherical and adds a clause Peter did not write. The rendering therefore retains ‘in this name’ in every tier and the alternatives are recorded here rather than resolved in the text.

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

The two verses form one ruling with two halves, and the parallelism is exact enough to be structural:

Peter is not asking whether the suffering hurts, nor whether it is legally justified. He is asking under what description it is undergone. The four terms of v. 15 name conduct that would make suffering shameful on anyone’s reckoning, pagan or Christian; Χριστιανός names a case where the suffering carries no such warrant. The ruling is therefore about the assignment of honor, not about the avoidance of pain.

This also explains the οὖν-less abruptness of the transition. Verse 16 does not draw a conclusion; it completes an alternative that v. 15 left dangling, which is exactly why the verb is elided rather than repeated. Editorial verse division here obscures a single sentence-movement, and the two verses should be read aloud as one.

Whether v. 16 presupposes formal Roman legal proceedings against Christians as such is one of the standing questions in the study of 1 Peter, and it bears on how much weight the rendering can carry.

The evidence for a formal charge: Pliny’s letter to Trajan (Ep. 10.96, early second century AD) describes interrogations in which the nomen ipsum is at issue and the accused are executed for persistence in it; Trajan’s reply establishes a procedure. Tacitus (Ann. 15.44) reports the Neronian executions and names the label. If 1 Peter is late enough, v. 16 could reflect exactly this situation, and ‘in this name’ would then have a courtroom edge: glorify God by the very name the magistrate demands you renounce.

The evidence against: the letter’s own descriptions of hostility are predominantly social rather than judicial — slander (2:12; 3:16; 4:4), reviling (4:14), being spoken against as evildoers. The verb ὀνειδίζεσθε at 4:14 is the language of insult, not indictment. The four items in v. 15 read as ordinary criminality, which suggests the contrast is between deserved and undeserved reputation, not between two categories of charge.

The rendering must not decide this. ‘Let him not be put to shame’ works under either scenario — public disgrace by neighbors and public disgrace by a court are the same category of event in the ancient honor economy. Nothing in the English should be tightened toward ‘on trial’ or loosened toward ‘criticized.’

Proposed — pending reviewKaren H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) · Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 10.96–97, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963)

The critical text is secure in substance. Two variants deserve mention, both concerning the last phrase.

ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τούτῳ (NA28/UBS5, with the earliest Alexandrian witnesses) against ἐν τῷ μέρει τούτῳ, ‘in this matter / on this score,’ read by the later Byzantine tradition. The Byzantine reading yields a much flatter sense — glorify God in this respect — and shows every sign of being a scribal easing of a difficulty: if τούτῳ was felt to point to Χριστιανός, then ‘name’ is awkward, since Χριστιανός is an appellation rather than a name in the biblical sense. Substituting μέρει removes the awkwardness. The intrinsic probability therefore runs with the harder reading, and the external evidence supports it decisively.

Spelling of the noun itself varies in the manuscripts across the three NT occurrences: Χριστιανός and Χρηστιανός, reflecting the well-attested itacistic confusion of ι and η in Koine and, in the second-century sources, a popular association with χρηστός (‘good, kind’). Tertullian notes that outsiders mispronounced the word in exactly this way. The variation is phonetic, not exegetical, and carries no weight for the rendering.

Vulgate: si autem ut Christianus, non erubescat, glorificet autem Deum in isto nomine. Two points. Jerome renders αἰσχυνέσθω with erubescat, ‘let him not blush’ — a decisively subjective, affective choice that adopts the feeling-reading and loses the forensic sense of the LXX substrate. This is one line along which the modern English ‘be ashamed’ descends, and per §11 it is reception, not evidence. Second, in isto nomine keeps the ambiguity of the Greek intact; the Latin decides neither the antecedent nor the force of the preposition.

Peshitta: renders with a term for shame that keeps the disgrace-sense closer to the Semitic root, and glosses the name in a way that leans toward the name of Christ rather than the appellation. The versional witness is thus divided on the very question the apparatus leaves open — which is itself useful data: the ambiguity is not a modern invention.

The Old Latin tradition shows some variation in the final phrase, consistent with the Greek μέρει/ὀνόματι split noted above.

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

The Fathers read v. 16 primarily as a charter for martyrdom’s honor, and their comments cluster on two points.

On the name: several writers note with satisfaction that the label given by outsiders has become a title of honor. Tertullian argues in the Apology that the accusers convict themselves by making the name itself the crime, since no crime is named alongside it — which is a fair reading of the logic of vv. 15-16. He also records the popular Chrestianus mispronunciation and turns it to advantage.

On the shame: the Greek commentators consistently take μὴ αἰσχυνέσθω as concerning the verdict rather than the emotion — the sufferer is not to accept the world’s assessment. This is the same instinct that governs the LXX-based reading above, and it is independent testimony that ancient readers heard the objective sense.

On δοξαζέτω: patristic exposition regularly connects v. 16 back to 4:11 and forward to 4:19, reading the whole chapter as an instruction on where glory is to be assigned under pressure. That is sound discourse analysis and supports keeping one English root across all the δόξα-family occurrences in the chapter.

Eusebius’ martyr-acts material (the Lyons account, the Polycarp narrative) shows the verse’s logic in practice: the confession Christianus sum is the doxological act, and the refusal of shame is public and verbal. Whether Peter already envisaged that setting is the contested question treated above; the patristic reception, however, is unambiguous and belongs here as reception (§9), not as lexical evidence.

Proposed — pending reviewTertullian, Apologeticum, ed. E. Dekkers, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954)