A four-word doxology and a one-word response. It closes the letter’s body by handing back to God the very thing v. 10 has just promised he will do: the God who will restore, strengthen, make strong, establish is the God to whom the might belongs, without term.

Three features carry the weight:

1. No verb. Greek writes no copula, so the sentence is formally open between a statement (“the might is his”) and an ascription (“to him be the might”). Both are live, and the reading text keeps English ‘be’ — the residual subjunctive of blessing — which performs the ascription without flatly asserting.
2. The article on κράτος. Peter does not write “glory be to God” in general terms. τὸ κράτος is anaphoric: the might, the one just exercised in the four future verbs of v. 10.
3. The shorter form. This is 1 Peter’s second doxology (cf. 4:11), and it is markedly briefer — κράτος alone, without δόξα. The manuscript tradition found that terseness uncomfortable and expanded it; the shorter text is original and the expansion is the transmission of the liturgy, not of the letter.

A smaller point, easily lost in English: nothing here is asked for. The verse makes no petition. It states where power sits, and the congregation says Amen.

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

The sentence is verbless. Greek doxologies characteristically omit the copula, and which verb to supply is a real question with two defensible answers.

The strongest internal evidence in the NT is 1 Pet 4:11, where the same author writes the copula out: ᾧ ἐστιν ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος — “to whom is the glory and the might.” That is an indicative. It tells strongly for reading 5:11 the same way: an assertion about where dominion lies, ratified rather than requested.

Against that stands the liturgical function of the formula. A doxology said aloud in assembly is a performative act, and the Amen that follows is a ratification of something said, not merely of something observed.

αὐτῷ is fronted and emphatic. Its antecedent is ὁ θεὸς πάσης χάριτος of v. 10 — not Christ, despite ἐν Χριστῷ standing in that verse, because the whole subject-chain of v. 10 (ὁ καλέσας, αὐτὸς καταρτίσει) is God. The dative is one of possession or ascription; do not render ‘for him’ (advantage) or ‘by him’ (agency).

κράτος is dominion actually exercised, and in the NT it is almost exclusively doxological: 1 Tim 6:16, 1 Pet 4:11, 5:11, Jude 25, Rev 1:6, plus Eph 1:19 and Heb 2:14 in other constructions. The LXX pairs it with δόξα in ascriptions to God (1 Chr 29:11, in David’s prayer over the temple offerings).

It must stay lexically distinct from three neighbours the corpus already fixes:

• δύναμις — ‘power,’ effective capacity
• ἰσχύς — ‘strength’ possessed and exerted (1 Pet 4:11 has κράτος; 4:11 also has ἰσχύς two clauses earlier, ἐξ ἰσχύος ἧς χορηγεῖ ὁ θεός — so Peter distinguishes them within one verse)
• ἐξουσία — ‘authority,’ delegated or held right

‘Power’ is therefore excluded here: it belongs to δύναμις. ‘Dominion’ is closer to the ruling sense but reads territorially in modern English. ‘Might’ is retained.

The article matters. τὸ κράτος is not a generic quality but the might just displayed: the four futures of v. 10 (καταρτίσει, στηρίξει, σθενώσει, θεμελιώσει) are what κράτος looks like in practice, applied to people who have suffered ὀλίγον. Flattening to ‘power be to God’ severs a demonstrable link to the preceding verse and turns a specific ascription into a generic pious phrase.

What is absent is also data. Peter had δόξα available — he used it at 4:11, at 5:1, at 5:4, and at 5:10 — and here he writes κράτος alone. The reader should be able to see that.

Proposed — pending reviewJohn H. Elliott, 1 Peter, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000)

NA28 prints αὐτῷ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων· ἀμήν without brackets, on the strength of the earliest and most diverse witnesses (including the Alexandrian uncials and the Vulgate’s ipsi imperium in saecula saeculorum).

The later tradition expands, in three overlapping directions:

1. Addition of ἡ δόξα καί before τὸ κράτος — assimilation to the fuller doxology at 1 Pet 4:11 and to the Pauline pattern.
2. Addition of a copula (ἐστίν) — the same levelling toward 4:11, and toward the commoner NT doxological shape.
3. Minor expansions of the eternity formula.

Every one of these makes the text longer, smoother, and more like a familiar liturgical form. That is the classic profile of secondary reading: the direction of change in doxologies is always toward the shape the copyist heard on Sunday. A scribe who knew 4:11 by heart would supply δόξα here almost involuntarily; no scribe deletes glory from a doxology.

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

A Semitizing superlative: plural noun governing the genitive plural of the same noun, on the pattern of ‘holy of holies’ (ἅγια ἁγίων) and ‘king of kings.’ It is a construction calqued from Hebrew liturgical idiom through the LXX (Ps 83:5; 89:2 LXX; and pervasive in Revelation), not a native Greek way of saying ‘forever.’

Two things the doubling does not do:

• It does not assert timelessness. Per the mandatory diachronic review of αἰών/αἰώνιος (§9), αἰών denotes a span of time — an age — within the two-age scheme (Matt 12:32; Eph 1:21; Gal 1:4). The later philosophical sense of atemporal eternity is post-biblical and may not be read back in.
• It is not mere emphasis-by-repetition of a fixed English adverb. ‘Forever and ever’ is idiomatic and readable, but it discards the noun αἰών entirely and hides the fact that the intensifier is the doubling.

Hence the wooden ‘into the ages of the ages,’ retained in the reading text as well as the literal tier. The reader should see that Peter wrote a Semitic superlative of duration, not a Greek abstraction of eternity.

Note also εἰς rather than ἐν: the ascription is directed forward into the ages, not located in them. This is not a claim about where the might is stored but about how far the ascription reaches.

Hebrew loanword (אָמֵן, root אמן ‘be firm, reliable’), left untranslated in both LXX and NT. Per §4 a transliterated term with no adequate equivalent stays transliterated: rendering ‘so be it’ or ‘truly’ explains the word at the cost of the act.

1 Cor 14:16 is decisive for what the act is: the outsider cannot say the ἀμήν over a prayer he does not understand. The word is the congregation’s spoken ratification of what has been said in its hearing, which is precisely why it stands here and why it stands after a doxology rather than after an argument. It is not punctuation.

Capitalized, as it stands alone as a response. (Lower case is reserved for the doubled ἀμὴν ἀμήν of the Johannine sayings, a different usage — introductory asseveration rather than answering ratification.)

Two observations from early reading that bear on the rendering:

The doxology was heard as addressed to God the Father, not to Christ. The Greek commentary tradition takes αὐτῷ back to ὁ θεὸς πάσης χάριτος of v. 10, which is the natural syntactic reading and rules out the occasional modern suggestion that ἐν Χριστῷ in v. 10 makes Christ the antecedent. Nothing in the patristic reception treats the referent as an open question.

The brevity was felt. The tendency of the liturgical tradition — visible in the manuscript expansions, in the Latin ipsi gloria et imperium variants, and in the shaping of Eastern anaphoras — is consistently toward fuller ascriptions. That the letter itself stops at κράτος tells against reading 5:11 as a stock formula Peter reached for; he wrote the shorter, harder form, and the argument of v. 10 explains why. Might, not glory, is what people who have suffered ὀλίγον need ascribed to God.

Proposed — pending reviewKarl Hermann Schelkle, Die Petrusbriefe, der Judasbrief, Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 13/2, 5th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1980)

Doxology, not epistolary argument. Per §10 the register must be matched, not flattened: the verse is verbless, rhythmic, and formulaic, and the English should be short and weighted rather than explanatory.

That governs three small decisions:

• No supplied connective. The verse follows v. 10 asyndetically. No ‘therefore’ or ‘and so’ is added; the abruptness is the shape of a doxology breaking in.
• Punctuation. The Greek raised dot before ἀμήν separates the ascription from the response. A period in English keeps them as two acts rather than one sentence.
• No expansion of the eternity formula. Doxological register tempts toward ‘for ever and ever, world without end’ — accretions from English liturgical tradition, which §11 permits to be named but never used as evidence for a rendering.