This is the closing command of the section that began at 4:12, and it is built entirely out of words the letter has already trained the reader to hear. ὥστε draws the conclusion from the judgment argument of vv. 17-18: if judgment begins at God’s household, and if even the righteous are saved only barely, then the right response of the suffering is not panic but deposit.

Four decisions carry the verse.

1. ὥστε καί — the adjunctive καί attaches to the participle, not to the sentence. Peter is not adding a new command; he is extending the preceding logic to a particular class: those also who suffer.
2. παρατιθέσθωσαν is banking and safekeeping vocabulary. The middle voice means depositing something with someone for one’s own benefit, with the depositor retaining title and the depositary bound to return it. This is the same verb Luke puts on Jesus’ lips at the cross (Luke 23:46), itself quoting Ps 30:6 LXX.
3. πιστῷ κτίστῃ is anarthrous, fronted, and startling. κτίστης is a NT hapax. Peter does not say Father, Judge, or Shepherd — all available to him — but Creator, and qualifies it with the adjective proper to a trustworthy depositary: πιστός, the one who will give the deposit back.
4. ἐν ἀγαθοποιΐᾳ closes the verse with a second hapax and refuses to let the entrusting be a merely interior act. The deposit is made in the course of continued good conduct.

The register is not consolatory but juridical-commercial: a legal deposit lodged with a solvent guarantor, made by people whose lives are being taken from them.

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

ὥστε with a finite verb is inferential — it draws a conclusion out of preceding argument rather than reporting a result (contrast ὥστε + infinitive). The standing corpus policy requires it be rendered and not dropped, since epistolary argument structure is load-bearing.

The scope question matters. ὥστε reaches back at least to vv. 17-18 (the judgment beginning at God’s house, the righteous barely saved), and arguably to the whole unit from v. 12. Either way, the inference runs: given how the judgment is ordered, here is what the suffering are to do.

καί is the harder call. Two readings:

• Adjunctive with οἱ πάσχοντες — “those also who suffer,” i.e. this class too, alongside whoever else the preceding verses had in view. This is the natural force of καί standing immediately before an articular participle, and it fits the corpus policy on adjunctive καί before substantival phrases.
• Continuative/emphatic with the whole clause — a colorless connective, effectively “and so.”

The first is preferred: the letter has just distinguished ἡμεῖς (v. 17) from τῶν ἀπειθούντων, and ὁ δίκαιος from ὁ ἀσεβής (v. 18), so a καί singling out a class within the argument is exactly what the context supplies. It must be rendered; dropping it removes the link Peter built.

The articular present participle marks a class, not an episode: those who are suffering as a standing description. πάσχω is the letter’s spine — 2:19, 20, 21, 23; 3:14, 17, 18; 4:1, 15, 19; 5:10 — and one English root must serve throughout.

Per the corpus entry, the bare verb can mean neutral “experience,” but 1 Peter’s usage is uniformly of undergoing hardship, and here vv. 15-16 have just specified the kind (suffering as a Χριστιανός, not as a criminal). Do not specify the mechanism (“be persecuted,” “be martyred”) — the letter does not, and the πύρωσις of v. 12 is left equally undefined.

The present aspect should be visible: these people are under it now, which is what makes the deposit-language urgent rather than theoretical.

κατά + accusative in the norm/standard sense already fixed in the corpus glossary. The phrase is a refrain in 1 Peter: 2:15 (οὕτως ἐστὶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ), 3:17 (εἰ θέλοι τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ), 4:2 (θελήματι θεοῦ), and here.

What κατά asserts is that the suffering falls within God’s will, not outside it — it is measured by that standard. What it does not assert is a mechanism. Rendering “because of God’s will” would make God the efficient cause of the persecution; rendering “as God wills it” tips toward decree.

The load-bearing word. παρατίθεμαι (middle) is standard Hellenistic vocabulary for lodging a deposit — money, valuables, documents, a person — with a trustee, and the papyri are full of it in exactly this sense. The middle voice is not stylistic: it marks the action as done in the depositor’s own interest, and the crucial legal feature of a παραθήκη is that title does not pass. The depositary holds; the depositor retains ownership and has a claim to recovery.

That is the theological force. These people are having their lives taken; the verb says their lives are not thereby lost but lodged, with a party bound to return them.

The verb’s other NT uses spread across the same domain: entrusting money or persons to a keeper (Luke 12:48), Paul and Barnabas commended to the Lord (Acts 14:23; 20:32), Timothy’s deposit of teaching (1 Tim 1:18; 2 Tim 2:2; cf. παραθήκη, 1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:12, 14).

Decisive intertext: Luke 23:46, πάτερ, εἰς χεῖράς σου παρατίθεμαι τὸ πνεῦμά μου — itself Ps 30:6 LXX (παραθήσομαι) with παρατίθεμαι substituted. Whether Peter is consciously echoing the passion tradition or drawing on the same psalm independently cannot be settled, but the letter’s habit of grounding the sufferer’s conduct in Christ’s (2:21-23; 3:18; 4:1, 13) makes the resonance more than accidental.

Rendering: keep the deposit sense. “Entrust” and “commit” both carry it in English. Avoid “give over” (loses the retained title), “yield up” (imports resignation), and “put in the care of” (drops the legal register).

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

κτίστης is a NT hapax. It is not, however, unusual Greek: the LXX and Hellenistic Jewish literature use it as a divine title (2 Kgdms 22:32 v.l.; Judith 9:12; 2 Macc 1:24; 7:23; 4 Macc 5:25; 11:5; Sir 24:8 has the cognate verb of Wisdom’s creation), and in secular usage it names the founder of a city — a resonance not to be pressed but worth noting for a letter addressed to resident aliens (1:1; 2:11).

The title choice is deliberate and, on the face of it, odd. Peter had πατήρ (1:2, 3, 17), κύριος, ποιμήν (2:25; 5:4), κριτής available. He chose Creator, and the reason is the deposit metaphor: the one who made the ψυχή is the party competent to hold it, and the one who made it out of nothing is not embarrassed by its destruction. 2 Macc 7:23 makes the same move in a martyrdom context — ὁ τοῦ κόσμου κτίστης will give back the πνεῦμα and the ζωή.

πιστός is the adjective proper to a depositary. It means reliable, one who can be counted on to perform — cf. πιστὸς ὁ θεός (1 Cor 1:9; 10:13; 1 Thess 5:24; 2 Thess 3:3), and 2 Tim 2:13 in a suffering context. Not “believing.”

Both words are anarthrous, and πιστῷ is fronted before its noun. The order is marked. Anarthrous divine titles in Greek are regularly definite by convention, so English properly reads “a faithful Creator” only in the qualitative sense — not “one creator among several.”

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

Per the standing corpus decision, ψυχή with the sense of bodily life at risk renders life, not “soul.” Hebraic nephesh: the whole living self, physical existence included.

1 Peter uses the word for the self as a whole and for what is saved or at stake: 1:9 (σωτηρίαν ψυχῶν), 1:22 (τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν ἡγνικότες), 2:11 (which war against the ψυχή), 2:25 (ποιμένα καὶ ἐπίσκοπον τῶν ψυχῶν ὑμῶν), 3:20 (ὀκτὼ ψυχαί = eight persons).

“Soul” here would be a positive error in two directions: it imports a body/soul dualism the letter does not use, and it makes the deposit a spiritual transaction while the thing actually under threat is the person’s continued existence. The plural τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν with the plural participle is distributive — each depositor lodging his own life.

Second hapax of the verse. ἀγαθοποιΐα is the abstract noun of ἀγαθοποιέω, and the ἀγαθοποι- family is a 1 Peter signature: 2:14 (ἀγαθοποιούντων), 2:15 (ἀγαθοποιοῦντας), 2:20 (ἀγαθοποιοῦντες), 3:6 (ἀγαθοποιοῦσαι), 3:17, and the antonym κακοποιός at 2:12, 14; 4:15. One English root must serve them all, so the abstract noun is “doing good,” not “good conduct” or “right behavior,” which sever the link.

The placement is the point: the phrase comes last, after the imperative, and refuses to let the deposit be a merely interior act of trust. Peter’s whole ethic is that the answer to unjust suffering is not withdrawal but continued visible benefaction (2:12, 15; 3:16).

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

παρατιθέσθωσαν is a third-person plural present middle imperative — a form English lacks. The obligatory “let them …” periphrasis is a real interpretive liability, since English “let” drifts toward permission or exhortation-about-others, where the Greek is a direct command to the class named.

Two constraints, consistent with corpus policy on third-person imperatives (Phil 4:5 γνωσθήτω; 4:6 γνωριζέσθω):

1. Keep the “let” periphrasis rather than converting to a second-person imperative (“entrust your lives”). The shift to third person here is deliberate: Peter has been addressing ἀγαπητοί directly (v. 12), moved to third-person commands at vv. 15-16 (πασχέτω, αἰσχυνέσθω, δοξαζέτω), and continues that mode.
2. Keep the middle voice audible in the note even where English cannot show it. “Let them entrust” reads as active; the note must record that the depositor acts in his own interest.

The present aspect (against an aorist παραθέσθωσαν) is durative: an ongoing practice of depositing, matching the ongoing πάσχοντες and the ongoing ἀγαθοποιΐα. Not a single act of resignation at the moment of death — which is precisely how the Luke 23:46 echo could be misread.

Proposed — pending reviewEdward Gordon Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1947)

NA28 prints ὥστε καὶ οἱ πάσχοντες κατὰ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ πιστῷ κτίστῃ παρατιθέσθωσαν τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν ἐν ἀγαθοποιΐᾳ without a bracketed reading, and the verse is not treated in Metzger’s commentary — a fair indication that the editors found no variation worth adjudicating.

Minor variation in the tradition, none of it affecting sense:

• ὡς for ὥστε in scattered witnesses — a simple visual/aural error, not a competing reading.
• ἑαυτῶν for αὐτῶν — reflexive for the ordinary possessive; Koine uses the two interchangeably in this slot and the sense is identical.
• Orthography of ἀγαθοποιΐᾳ, including the spelling ἀγαθοποιΐαις (plural) and the diaeresis, which is an editorial convention marking the ι as a separate syllable rather than a diphthong.
• Byzantine witnesses show the aorist παραθέσθωσαν for the present in a small number of manuscripts. This is the only variant with any exegetical bite, since it would convert the durative command into a punctiliar one — and it is exactly the direction a scribe familiar with Luke 23:46 (aorist-flavored moment-of-death entrusting) would drift. The present is both better attested and harder, and is retained.

Proposed — pending reviewNovum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior, IV: Catholic Letters, ed. Barbara Aland et al., 2nd rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2013)

Patristic comment on 1 Peter is thinner than on the Gospels or Paul, and the surviving Greek catena material on this verse is fragmentary. What is traceable clusters on two points.

κτίστης as the ground of confidence. The Greek commentators consistently link the title to the martyrs’ argument in 2 Maccabees: the one who made the body from nothing can restore it, so the Creator-title is chosen precisely because the deposit is a body about to be destroyed. This is the reading that makes the odd title choice make sense, and it is well grounded in the letter’s own resurrection framework (1:3-5, 21; 3:18-22).

ἐν ἀγαθοποιΐᾳ as anti-quietist. The commentators press the final phrase against any reading of the entrusting as passivity: the suffering are not told to withdraw and wait but to keep doing good under duress, which is the same move made at 2:15 (φιμοῦν τὴν τῶν ἀφρόνων ἀγνωσίαν) and 3:16.

The Latin tradition renders fideli Creatori commendent animas suas in benefactis — commendent catching the deposit sense well, animas fixing “souls” for the Western reading tradition, and the plural in benefactis (“in good deeds”) resolving the abstract noun into concrete acts. That last is a real narrowing: Peter’s abstract ἀγαθοποιΐᾳ names a practice, not a set of deeds, and the Latin plural should be treated as a reading rather than as evidence (§11).

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)