One imperative, one participle, and three matched pairs of adverbs. Everything in the verse hangs on ποιμάνατε — a single aorist command to the elders addressed in v. 1 — and everything after it specifies how.

The highlights, in the order the Greek delivers them:

1. The flock is God’s, not theirs. τὸ ποίμνιον τοῦ θεοῦ, with the elders located among it (ἐν ὑμῖν) rather than over it. The genitive does the pastoral work before a single adverb arrives.
2. Shepherding is defined as oversight. ἐπισκοποῦντες ties the ποιμήν image to the ἐπίσκοπος word-family — the same equation Acts 20:28 makes. The participle is textually contested, and its presence or absence bears on how early the two terms were fused.
3. Three antitheses, each a not/but. Compulsion vs. willingness; shameful gain vs. eagerness; and (v. 3) domineering vs. becoming a pattern. Two of the six adverbs are NT hapaxes and one more is near-hapax; Peter is reaching for precise vocabulary about motive, not conduct.
4. κατὰ θεόν sits awkwardly between the first and second pair and is itself a variant. Wherever it attaches, it measures the willingness against God rather than against inclination.

The register is a formal charge — the aorist imperative plus a chain of qualifying adverbs is the shape of a commission, and it lands hardest on money and on reluctance, which is to say on the two ordinary failure-modes of paid religious office.

ποιμάνατε is the aorist imperative of ποιμαίνω, ‘act as shepherd.’ The verb covers the whole of the herdsman’s work — leading, pasturing, guarding, retrieving — and is not a synonym for ‘lead’ or ‘govern,’ though rule is one of its LXX applications.

The substrate is Ezekiel 34, where the LXX uses the ποιμ- family throughout of Israel’s failed shepherds and of YHWH taking over the flock himself (Ezek 34:2-10, 23), and 2 Samuel 5:2 / Ps 78:71-72, where David is called from the sheepfolds to shepherd the people. Jesus’ commission to Peter in John 21:16 uses this same verb (ποίμαινε τὰ πρόβατά μου) between two occurrences of βόσκε, which is why the early tradition read 1 Pet 5:2 as Peter passing on what he had received.

The metaphor is live, not dead (§8). The verb is retained rather than resolved into ‘care for,’ ‘lead,’ or ‘pastor’: the first drains the image, the second imports governance vocabulary the next verse explicitly restricts, and the third smuggles in a modern office.

ποίμνιον is a diminutive in form (from ποίμνη) but the diminutive force is spent in Koine; it means simply ‘flock.’ It is a small-scale word — the flock a single shepherd can manage — which suits a charge addressed to elders of particular congregations rather than a claim about the church universal.

The decisive element is the genitive τοῦ θεοῦ. Possessive: the sheep belong to God. This is exactly the point of Ezek 34:10 LXX (καὶ ἐκζητήσω τὰ πρόβατά μου ἐκ τῶν χειρῶν αὐτῶν) and of Acts 20:28 (τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ, ἣν περιεποιήσατο). Everything in vv. 2-3 that restrains the elders’ authority follows from this genitive: one does not domineer over another man’s sheep, and one does not monetize them.

Chrysostom and the Greek commentators press exactly this: the elders are stewards of what is not theirs. The rendering keeps ‘the flock of God’ rather than ‘God’s people’ or ‘the congregation,’ both of which discard the image on which the whole paragraph runs.

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

The word order is τὸ ἐν ὑμῖν ποίμνιον — article, prepositional phrase, noun. The prepositional phrase stands inside the article-noun unit, which makes it attributive: ‘the flock that is among you,’ not an adverbial qualification of the shepherding.

The force of ἐν ὑμῖν is locative-inclusive. The elders are not positioned over the flock but within it, and the phrase quietly limits the charge to the congregation actually at hand.

The participle ἐπισκοποῦντες is genuinely disputed.

• Present: 𝔓72, Sinaiticus (ℵ*, and again by a corrector), A, P, Ψ, the great majority of minuscules, and the Latin and Syriac versions.
• Omitted: Vaticanus (B), ℵ (one hand), and a small number of other witnesses.

NA28 prints it, and UBS5 rates the decision as difficult rather than settled. The internal arguments run both ways. In favour of omission: a scribe conscious of the developing monarchical episcopate might well have added a participle that makes the elders formally ἐπίσκοποι, and Vaticanus is not a witness to be dismissed. In favour of the text: the omission is easily explained as accidental (the eye moving from -ον of ποίμνιον to the following participle), and a scribe uneasy about the equation of πρεσβύτεροι with ἐπισκοποῦντες would have had motive to drop it — the harder reading is the one that has elders overseeing.

The external spread of the participle across geographically independent witnesses is the strongest single consideration, and it is retained here with the seam declared rather than hidden (§4).

What is at stake is not small. With the participle, 1 Pet 5:2 joins Acts 20:17/28 and Titus 1:5-7 as evidence that in the first century πρεσβύτερος and ἐπίσκοπος named one office from two angles — seniority and function. Without it, the verse says nothing about the ἐπίσκοπ- family at all.

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

ἐπισκοπέω is ἐπί + σκοπέω, ‘look over, watch over, inspect.’ The corpus has already fixed σκοπέω as ‘fix attention on / keep in view’ (deliberate, sustained, consequential attention) and ἐπίσκοπος as ‘overseer’ against the anachronistic ‘bishop.’ The verb must stay in that family: ‘exercising oversight,’ not ‘caring for’ or ‘serving as bishops.’

The pre-Christian range is wide and instructive — civic inspectors, temple-works supervisors (2 Chr 34:12, 17 LXX), officers of religious associations — and the LXX also uses the cognate noun ἐπισκοπή of divine visitation (Job 10:12; Wis 3:7). The word carries responsibility for the condition of something, with accountability upward.

Only two NT occurrences of the verb: here and Heb 12:15 (ἐπισκοποῦντες μή τις …), where it clearly means keeping watch lest something go wrong. That parallel supports a vigilance sense here rather than an institutional one.

The participle governs three matched pairs, the third running over into v. 3:

Two structural features must survive into English. First, μή … ἀλλά is corrective, not additive: the first member is denied and the second substituted. Second, μηδέ links the second and third pairs to the first as a single continuous prohibition — ‘and not … and not’ — rather than starting fresh clauses. Peter is not listing three separate faults but describing one wrong way of holding office from three angles: reluctance, greed, and domination.

Note the asymmetry of the pairs. Each negative is an adverb of manner; each positive answers it in kind, except that the third pair breaks the adverbial pattern for two participial constructions. That break is where the argument lands — the alternative to domineering is not a better attitude but becoming something the flock can copy.

The adverbs are all six of them motive-words, not conduct-words. The verse says nothing about what elders should do; it legislates entirely on why.

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

ἀναγκαστῶς is an NT hapax, formed on ἀνάγκη (‘necessity, constraint’) — the same root as ἀναγκάζω, already fixed in this corpus as ‘compel / press,’ coercion that leaves no honourable exit. The adverb names service rendered because one could not decline: pressure from the congregation, from circumstance, or from one’s own sense of being cornered. ‘Reluctantly’ is close but locates the problem in the feeling; ‘under compulsion’ keeps it in the situation, which is what the ἀνάγκη root supplies.

ἑκουσίως is its exact counterpart: from ἑκών, ‘willing, of one’s own accord.’ Also rare — Heb 10:26 is the only other NT occurrence — but well attested in the LXX and in the papyri for voluntary as against enforced action, and standard in the LXX sacrificial vocabulary for the freewill offering (ἑκούσιον, Lev 7:16; Deut 12:6; Ps 118:108 LXX). That background gives the positive member a cultic overtone: the shepherd’s willingness is of a piece with the offering nobody extracted.

The pair must stay lexically matched in English so the antithesis is audible. ‘Not under compulsion but willingly’ preserves both the ἀνάγκη frame and the volition.

κατὰ θεόν is κατά + accusative in the norm/standard sense already fixed throughout this corpus (disposition-nouns, credential-lists, concrete targets, quantity-nouns, personal names, antithetical standard-pairs). It measures the willingness against God: ‘in line with God,’ ‘as God would have it.’ Not agency (‘by God,’ which would need ὑπό) and not perspective (‘in God’s eyes,’ which reduces a standard to an opinion).

The closest internal parallel is 1 Pet 4:6, κατὰ ἀνθρώπους … κατὰ θεόν, where the same phrase names God as the measure against which something is assessed. Cf. also 2 Cor 7:9-11, ἡ κατὰ θεὸν λύπη.

The phrase is textually contested. It is read by 𝔓72, ℵ, A, P, Ψ, and the bulk of the tradition; omitted by B and some others, and its position varies slightly in a few witnesses. As with ἐπισκοποῦντες, the omission is in the witness that also omits the participle, which weakens the case for treating either omission as independent evidence. NA28 prints it.

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

αἰσχροκερδῶς is an NT hapax adverb, a compound of αἰσχρός (‘shameful, disgraceful’) and κέρδος (‘gain, profit’ — already fixed in this corpus as a live commercial metaphor). The cognate adjective αἰσχροκερδής appears at 1 Tim 3:8 of deacons and Titus 1:7 of overseers, in both cases as a disqualification for office; the noun αἰσχροκέρδεια is standard in Greek moralists for sordid profiteering.

Both morphemes are load-bearing and must survive. The fault is not the taking of support — Paul defends that right at 1 Cor 9:7-14 with, precisely, a shepherd analogy — but the pursuit of gain as motive, and the compound marks it as shameful gain, disgraceful in the eyes of those who see it. Rendering simply ‘for money’ drops αἰσχρός; rendering ‘greedily’ drops κέρδος and the commercial register that ties this verse to the ledger vocabulary running through the NT epistles.

The presence of this word is itself evidence: elders in the churches Peter writes to handled money, or the warning would be idle. Cf. 1 Pet 5:2 with Titus 1:11 (αἰσχροῦ κέρδους χάριν) and 2 Pet 2:3, 15.

Proposed — pending reviewCeslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, trans. and ed. James D. Ernest, 3 vols. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994)

προθύμως (πρό + θυμός, ‘forward-spirited’) answers αἰσχροκερδῶς and is the third NT hapax-or-near-hapax in the verse; the adjective πρόθυμος occurs at Matt 26:41 / Mark 14:38 (τὸ πνεῦμα πρόθυμον) and Rom 1:15, and the noun προθυμία four times in Paul, mostly of readiness to give (2 Cor 8:11-12, 19; 9:2).

The sense is eagerness that leans forward into the task before being asked. Set against αἰσχροκερδῶς it produces a pointed contrast: the two motives are not ‘greed’ versus ‘generosity’ but greed versus eagerness for the work itself. The elder who is eager needs no inducement, which is exactly why the greedy elder is disqualified.

Note that θυμός in this compound is the older sense of spirit or drive, not the ‘rage’ sense the noun carries alone in NT vice-lists (already fixed as ‘rage’ at Gal 5:20). The compound is not built on anger and the English rendering must not suggest it. Avoid ‘enthusiastically’ (modern and thin) and ‘zealously’ (belongs to the ζῆλος family).

The Greek commentators read the verse as a charge about motive and as Peter’s discharge of John 21:15-17.

Chrysostom, preaching on the pastoral office, takes ποιμάνατε with the Ezekiel background and presses the genitive τοῦ θεοῦ: the shepherd handles what belongs to another and will answer for it. Oecumenius and Theophylact, commenting on this verse directly, make the same move and read κατὰ θεόν as the standard by which the willingness is judged — willing as God wills, not merely without reluctance.

On αἰσχροκερδῶς the tradition is uniformly severe and takes it as evidence that the danger was real rather than theoretical; the Didache’s tests for itinerant teachers (Did. 11-12) and Polycarp’s warning about φιλαργυρία in presbyters (Phil. 11) belong to the same first- and second-century concern.

Notably, the Fathers do not read ἐπισκοποῦντες as making the elders bishops in the later sense. Chrysostom and Theodoret elsewhere observe that in the apostolic period the two titles were interchangeable, which is a datum about how the equation looked to Greek readers before the institutional question hardened — and a reason not to render the participle with a title (§9).

Proposed — pending reviewOecumenius and Theophylact, Commentaria in epistolas catholicas, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca 119 and 125 (Paris, 1857-66)

Vulgate: pascite qui in vobis est gregem Dei, providentes non coacte sed spontanee secundum Deum, neque turpis lucri gratia sed voluntarie. Jerome renders ἐπισκοποῦντες as providentes, which keeps the watching sense and avoids the episcopus title — a restraint worth noting. Turpis lucri gratia preserves both morphemes of αἰσχροκερδῶς exactly. But spontanee … voluntarie renders ἑκουσίως and προθύμως with two near-synonyms of willingness, losing the eagerness of προθύμως and flattening the second antithesis; the Vulgate here is a warning against letting two Greek adverbs collapse into one English idea.

Peshitta: renders the shepherding imperative with the ordinary Syriac verb for pasturing and supplies the object of oversight, in line with the Syriac tradition’s general tendency to fill out participial constructions. The material point is that the Syriac witnesses read the participle rather than omitting it, which adds an independent geographical voice to the textual question above.

LXX comparison: for the vocabulary of this verse the decisive comparanda are Ezek 34 (ποιμαίνω, πρόβατα, the indictment of shepherds who feed themselves), Lev 7:16 and Ps 118:108 LXX (ἑκούσιον, the freewill offering), and 2 Chr 34:12, 17 (ἐπίσκοπος of works-supervisors). All three fields are audible in Peter’s word choices.

Proposed — pending reviewRobert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds., Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)