Verse 2 is not a new sentence in substance: it is the purpose-clause hanging off the imperative of v. 1 (ὁπλίσασθε, “arm yourselves”). Peter has told his readers to take up the same ἔννοια Christ had in suffering; v. 2 states what that arming is for. Everything turns on three things.

First, the frame is temporal and finite. The object of the infinitive is not “life” but τὸν ἐπίλοιπον … χρόνον — “the time still left over.” Two rare words carry it (both NT hapax legomena: ἐπίλοιπος, βιόω), and both push in the same direction: a measured remainder, a stretch to be spent. This picks up v. 3’s ὁ παρεληλυθὼς χρόνος (“the time gone by”) and sets past against remainder. Peter is running a ledger of a lifetime.

Second, the two datives are datives of rule, not of object. The contrast is not “desiring humans instead of desiring God” but “living by one standard rather than another”: ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαις against θελήματι θεοῦ. Note the number: cravings are plural and scattered (v. 3 will itemize them), the will is singular.

Third, σαρκί is neutral here. The same word appeared twice in v. 1 (Christ suffered σαρκί; the one who suffered σαρκί), and it means embodied earthly existence, not the Pauline polemical σάρξ. The remaining time is lived in the flesh — this is not an escape from the body but a re-governing of it.

The rhetorical shape is worth hearing: Peter wraps ἐν σαρκὶ βιῶσαι inside the phrase τὸν ἐπίλοιπον … χρόνον, so the sentence closes on the word “time.” English cannot reproduce the wrapping, and the apparatus notes it rather than faking it.

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

εἰς τὸ … βιῶσαι is the articular infinitive with εἰς, the construction already fixed in this corpus at Phil 1:10 as “so that / with a view to.” In Koine it is predominantly telic, with result-shading available (BDF §402).

The practical question here is what it depends on. Three candidates:

1. ὁπλίσασθε (v. 1a) — arm yourselves in order to live the rest of your time by God’s will. The imperative is the only finite verb in the neighborhood capable of taking a purpose clause, and this reading makes v. 2 the goal of the whole exhortation.
2. πέπαυται ἁμαρτίας (v. 1c) — the one who has suffered has been done with sin, with the result that he lives the remainder differently. This makes v. 2 unfold the ὅτι-clause.
3. Loosely on the whole of v. 1, without a single governing verb.

Reading (1) is preferable: it keeps the imperative load-bearing, and it explains why Peter uses the second-person-oriented purpose language at all. But (2) is not eliminable, since v. 1c is the clause immediately adjacent, and εἰς τό regularly attaches to what precedes it most nearly.

The infinitive βιῶσαι has no expressed subject accusative. It is supplied from the addressees of ὁπλίσασθε (“you”), which is how every ancient version read it — the Vulgate’s ut … vivat takes the singular ὁ παθών of v. 1 as subject, which is grammatically possible and worth recording as a minority route.

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

ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαις and θελήματι θεοῦ are the exegetical hinge, and the case is doing real work.

They are best classed as datives of rule (BDF §198–99; sometimes “dative of the norm” or “dative of respect”), the standard by which the living is conducted. English has no clean single-word equivalent; “by” is the least lossy, since it can carry both norm and instrument without committing.

The alternatives are worth naming and rejecting:

• Dative of advantage (“for human cravings … for God’s will”) — attractive because it produces a neat “no longer for X but for Y,” and it is how the traditional liturgical rendering (“unto the desires of men”) reads. But it makes the cravings a beneficiary, which is odd Greek and odd sense.
• Instrumental dative (“by means of”) — possible, but θέλημα θεοῦ as a means of living is strained, and the parallel demands one classification for both members.
• Locative/spherical (“in the sphere of”) — grammatically available, semantically thin.

The rule-dative is confirmed by the close parallel construction in v. 6 (κατὰ ἀνθρώπους … κατὰ θεόν), where Peter says the same thing with κατά + accusative, the preposition this corpus has repeatedly fixed as norm-marking. Verse 2’s bare datives and verse 6’s κατά-phrases are two ways of writing the same contrast, four verses apart. That internal evidence is stronger than any lexical argument.

One further feature: the number asymmetry. ἐπιθυμίαις is plural, θελήματι singular. Verse 3 will list six plural vices; the will of God is one. Retain the asymmetry in English (“cravings … will”) rather than levelling to “desires … desires of God.”

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

The corpus glossary already fixes ἐπιθυμία as “longing / desire,” morally neutral in stem, with the ethical charge supplied by the object or qualifier — and it explicitly forbids “lust” as the base gloss, since modern English has narrowed that word irrecoverably.

Here the qualifier is ἀνθρώπων, and the immediate context (v. 3, where ἐπιθυμίαις stands second in a list running from ἀσέλγειαι to εἰδωλολατρίαι) makes the charge unmistakably negative. This licenses the marked rendering “cravings” rather than the neutral “desires”: the appetite-word without the moralizing narrowness of “lust.”

The same combination — human ἐπιθυμία as the governing principle of a former life — appears at 1 Pet 1:14 (μὴ συσχηματιζόμενοι ταῖς πρότερον … ἐπιθυμίαις), 2:11 (τῶν σαρκικῶν ἐπιθυμιῶν), and 4:3. It is a running term in the letter, and one English word should serve all of them.

The genitive ἀνθρώπων is best read as subjective/possessive — the cravings that belong to human beings as such, hence “human cravings.” It is not partitive (“cravings of some people”) and not objective (“cravings for people”). Per §3, the masculine plural ἄνθρωπος is the Greek generic for humanity and the referent is certainly mixed; “human” in the smooth tier, “men” retained only in the wooden tier with the generic force noted.

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θέλημα θεοῦ is a structural refrain in 1 Peter, and the verse should be read against its other occurrences: 2:15 (οὕτως ἐστὶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ), 3:17 (εἰ θέλοι τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ), and above all 4:19 (οἱ πάσχοντες κατὰ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ). At 4:19 the phrase governs suffering; here it governs the whole remaining lifespan. The two are the same claim at different scales.

The noun is the thing willed (‑μα formation), not the faculty of willing (θέλησις), so “will” in the sense of a determination or decree rather than an inclination. The phrase is anarthrous here, against the articular τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ at 2:15 and 4:19. Anarthrous θελήματι θεοῦ is qualitative — “by God’s will as such,” a kind of standard — and it stands in exact formal parallel to the equally anarthrous ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαις. Do not supply “the” in the literal tier; the balance is the point.

Against the alternatives: “God’s purpose” imports προθεσις, “God’s pleasure” imports εὐδοκία (fixed elsewhere in this corpus as “good pleasure”), and “what God wants” drops the register of a determinate decree.

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ἐπίλοιπος is a NT hapax legomenon. The corpus already fixes the simplex λοιπός as “the rest / the remaining ones,” marking a remainder relative to a set already named; ἐπίλοιπος is the compound with intensive/additive ἐπι-, “still left over, remaining besides.”

It is ordinary Hellenistic Greek and well attested in the LXX for what is left after a subtraction — e.g. survivors of a slaughter or the remainder of a period. The nuance the compound adds over λοιπός is slight but real: what remains after something has already been counted out. That is exactly the logic of vv. 2–3, where ὁ παρεληλυθὼς χρόνος (“the time gone by,” v. 3) is the part already spent and ὁ ἐπίλοιπος χρόνος is the balance.

Render “remaining” or “still left”; the smooth tier’s “the time that remains” carries it. Avoid “the rest of your life,” which supplies a noun (“life”) the Greek withholds — Peter wrote χρόνος, a quantity of time, not βίος, a life.

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βιῶσαι is the second hapax in the verse: βιόω occurs nowhere else in the NT. Peter had ζάω available — he uses it at 1:23; 2:4, 24; 4:5, 6 — and chose otherwise.

The distinction is real and old. ζάω is “be alive,” the state of animate existence; βιόω (from βίος, a life-course, a livelihood, a manner of living) is “live out, pass one’s life,” with an implied span and an implied manner. The classical and Hellenistic evidence is consistent: βιόω takes objects like χρόνον, ἔτη, βίον — measures of time to be got through. Here it takes χρόνον exactly.

So the rendering must be “live out” and not bare “live.” “Live out the time that remains” preserves both the durative object and the sense of conducting a course. Avoid “spend” (drifts toward the commercial register, and Peter is not running a ledger metaphor here), and avoid “pass” (too passive for an aorist infinitive under an imperative).

The aorist is complexive: it views the whole remaining span as a single completed course, not as an iterative habit. This is not a command to live day by day but to spend the whole balance one way.

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The corpus glossary fixes χρόνος as “time (duration)” and requires it be kept lexically distinct from καιρός (“appointed / opportune moment”) wherever both are available. 1 Peter 4 makes the distinction visible within twenty verses: χρόνος at 4:2 and 4:3 (measured spans, past and remaining), καιρός at 4:17 (ὁ καιρὸς τοῦ ἄρξασθαι τὸ κρίμα — the appointed moment for judgment to begin).

That internal contrast is exegetically live. The believer’s remaining χρόνος is a quantity to be spent; the καιρός of judgment is a fixed point already arrived. Render “time” or “span” for χρόνος throughout and reserve “appointed time” for καιρός, so a reader tracking either word can see which Greek term stands where.

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ἐν σαρκί here is neutral: embodied, mortal, earthly existence. This is the fourth occurrence of the word in four verses (v. 1 twice, v. 2, then v. 6), and Peter’s usage in this stretch is remarkably consistent — σάρξ is the sphere in which Christ suffered, in which believers suffer, in which the remaining time is spent, and in which the dead were judged κατὰ ἀνθρώπους (v. 6).

The corpus policy on σάρξ (fixed across Phil 1:22, 24; 3:3-4; Gal 4:13-14) is to retain the single gloss “flesh” across neutral and polemical uses so the reader can see one Greek word doing both jobs, and to flag the register in apparatus rather than substituting “body.” That applies here with particular force, because 1 Pet 3:18 (θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκὶ ζωοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι) has already set up the σάρξ/πνεῦμα pairing that 4:6 will repeat. Rendering 4:2 “in the body” would break the chain.

Note also that ἐν σαρκί here is prepositional, whereas v. 1’s two occurrences are bare datives (σαρκί, dative of sphere or respect). Peter adds the preposition precisely where the phrase must be unambiguously locative and cannot be mistaken for another dative of rule alongside ἐπιθυμίαις and θελήματι. That is a small but real piece of authorial care.

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

μηκέτι is the μή-form corresponding to οὐκέτι, obligatory here because the negative attaches to an infinitive. The corpus already fixes οὐκέτι as “no longer,” marking the termination of a prior state, with the force frequently logical as well as temporal.

The temporal force is dominant here, because the whole verse is about time: the prior state is ὁ παρεληλυθὼς χρόνος (v. 3), the state terminated is life governed by cravings. Render plain “no longer.”

Word placement matters: μηκέτι stands immediately after the article, before ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαις, so it negates the first dative specifically and not the infinitive as a whole. The ἀλλά then supplies what replaces it. English must keep “no longer” attached to “by human cravings” and not float it onto “live” — “so as no longer to live” would wrongly suggest the living itself is what ceases.

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Peter’s word order is deliberate and cannot be reproduced in English, so it should be recorded:

εἰς τὸ μηκέτι | ἀνθρώπων ἐπιθυμίαις | ἀλλὰ θελήματι θεοῦ | τὸν ἐπίλοιπον | ἐν σαρκὶ βιῶσαι | χρόνον

Two features:

1. The two datives are fronted ahead of the infinitive and its object. The norm is stated before the action it governs — the contrast is what the sentence is about, and it comes first.
2. Hyperbaton of τὸν … χρόνον. The article and its noun are separated by five words, with ἐπίλοιπον next to the article and χρόνον stranded at the very end. The effect is to close the sentence on the word χρόνον, and to make ἐν σαρκὶ βιῶσαι sit inside the temporal frame rather than beside it. Classical prose does this for emphasis and rhythm; it is not carelessness.

English has no equivalent device. The smooth tier settles for “the time that remains in the flesh,” which happens to keep “in the flesh” inside the noun phrase — a lucky partial match. The literal tier keeps Greek order as far as English syntax bears it. Do not add emphasis words to compensate (§4).

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The verse is textually quiet. NA28 prints it without a variation unit, and Metzger’s commentary passes over it — there is no reading here that affects sense.

The minor scribal movement that does exist in the tradition runs in predictable directions: some witnesses supply the article before θελήματι (τῷ θελήματι θεοῦ), assimilating to the articular τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ of 2:15 and 4:19; and some smooth the hyperbaton by moving χρόνον forward. Both are the ordinary Koine tidying this corpus has repeatedly flagged as the direction to avoid: the anarthrous parallelism and the strained word order are what the author wrote.

No rendering decision in this apparatus depends on a disputed reading.

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Two patristic emphases are worth recording, because they bear on how the datives were heard before any grammatical classification existed.

The Latin tradition read the datives as datives of reference or advantage. The Vulgate has ut iam non desideriis hominum sed voluntati Dei quod reliquum est in carne vivat tempus — “that he may now live the time that remains in the flesh not for the desires of men but for the will of God.” Note also that the Vulgate takes the subject of the infinitive as the singular ὁ παθών of v. 1 (vivat), not the plural addressees. That is a real construal of the Greek and a minority route worth preserving in the apparatus, though the imperative ὁπλίσασθε makes the second-person reading stronger.

The Greek commentators consistently tied v. 2 back to the arming of v. 1 and read the whole as a two-standard ethic: the will of God displaces human appetite as the rule of the remaining life. They also uniformly took ἐν σαρκί as neutral — the continuing embodied existence, not a condition to be escaped — which is a useful check against reading Pauline σάρξ into Peter here.

The patristic reading of ἐπίλοιπον χρόνον as a genuinely finite and shrinking quantity is also worth noting, since it coheres with v. 7’s πάντων δὲ τὸ τέλος ἤγγικεν. For the Fathers the shortness of the remainder was itself the argument for the change of governance. That is reception, not lexical evidence (§11), but it reads the discourse structure of 1 Peter 4 correctly.

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

The verse makes a modest but load-bearing claim, and it is worth stating precisely what it does and does not say.

It does not promise the end of suffering or of embodiment. The remaining time is lived ἐν σαρκί — in the same flesh in which Christ suffered (v. 1) and in which these readers are suffering (4:12–19). Peter is not offering escape.

It does not promise the end of desire as such. The word is ἐπιθυμία, whose stem is morally neutral. What is renounced is desire-as-governor, cravings as the norm of the span.

What it claims is a change of rule over a finite quantity. The one who has taken up Christ’s mindset in suffering now spends the balance of his time under a different standard. This is the same move 4:19 makes at the end of the chapter: οἱ πάσχοντες κατὰ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ — those suffering by the standard of God’s will entrust their lives to a faithful Creator. Verse 2 and verse 19 bracket the chapter with the same phrase and the same logic.

The eschatological pressure is real but implicit. It becomes explicit at v. 7 (πάντων δὲ τὸ τέλος ἤγγικεν) and v. 17 (ὁ καιρὸς τοῦ ἄρξασθαι τὸ κρίμα). The remainder is short, the accounting is coming (v. 5, ἀποδώσουσιν λόγον), and the question of who governs the balance is therefore urgent. The apparatus records the connection without importing v. 7’s language into v. 2’s rendering.

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