Verse 4 is the payoff clause of the elders’ charge (vv. 1-3). Peter has just told the elders how not to shepherd — not under compulsion, not for shameful gain, not lording it over the allotments — and now names what actually comes to them. Four features carry the weight:

1. A genitive absolute, not a temporal conjunction. Greek does not say “when he comes”; it says “the Chief Shepherd having been made manifest.” The event is presupposed as the frame within which the reception happens.
2. A passive with no agent. He is made manifest — by God, unstated. Peter uses ἀποκάλυψις elsewhere for this event (1:7, 13; 4:13); here he switches to the φανερόω family, which fits the shepherd image: the one already over the flock becomes visible.
3. ἀρχιποίμην, a NT hapax, ranking Christ above the elders who have just been told to shepherd (ποιμάνατε, v. 2). The title is the ground of the whole ethic: they are undershepherds, and the flock is God’s (τὸ ποίμνιον τοῦ θεοῦ), not theirs.
4. A wreath of amaranth. Not a royal διάδημα but the victor’s or honorific garland — with the material specified as the flower that does not wilt. Set against the withering plant-glory of Isa 40:6-8, quoted at 1 Pet 1:24, and against the fading garlands of the games and civic honors the readers knew.

The pastoral logic is exact: elders are told to refuse present gain (αἰσχροκερδῶς, v. 2) and present dominance (κατακυριεύοντες, v. 3), and are handed instead a deferred honor conferred by a superior. Peter is not abolishing the honor economy; he is relocating who awards the wreath and when.

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

The clause is one sentence with two parts: a genitive absolute (φανερωθέντος τοῦ ἀρχιποίμενος) and a main clause with a future middle indicative (κομιεῖσθε … στέφανον).

The genitive absolute has its own subject, distinct from the subject of the main verb (‘you’) — the regular condition for the construction (BDF §423). Greek adverbial participles carry no explicit conjunction, so the relation between the two clauses is left to the reader: temporal (‘when’), causal (‘since’), and conditional (‘if’) are all formally available. Context makes the temporal reading overwhelmingly likely, and it is adopted in the reading text; but the literal tier keeps the bare participial construction so the absence of a marker stays visible, in line with the corpus policy on unmarked adverbial participles (ὑπάρχων, Phil 2:6; ὤν, Gal 4:1).

The aorist of the participle is not past relative to the main verb in absolute terms — it is antecedent to the reception, which is future. Aorist participles express aspect (a complete event) rather than tense; the appearing is viewed as a single completed act, after which the crowning follows. English ‘when … is made manifest’ is the natural equivalent.

The initial καί links v. 4 to the imperatives of vv. 2-3 rather than beginning a new topic. It is not consecutive (‘and so’), which would make the wreath the result of the shepherding, nor merely additive filler. Per §10 it is rendered and not dropped.

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φανερωθέντος — aorist passive of φανερόω, ‘make visible, bring to light,’ causative of the adjective φανερός (already fixed in the corpus as ‘manifest / publicly evident,’ Phil 1:13; Gal 5:19). The verb does not mean ‘arrive’; it means to bring into the open what was there but unseen.

That is why the choice matters here. 1 Peter’s normal word for this event is ἀποκάλυψις / ἀποκαλύπτω (1:5, 7, 13; 4:13; and 5:1 τῆς μελλούσης ἀποκαλύπτεσθαι δόξης, three verses earlier), which the glossary fixes as ‘unveiling / reveal, uncover’ — the removal of a covering. φανερόω is close kin but comes at it from the other side: not the veil taken off, but the thing becoming visible. Applied to Christ it appears at 1 Pet 1:20 (φανερωθέντος … ἐπʼ ἐσχάτου τῶν χρόνων, of the incarnation) and in the Johannine tradition of the parousia (1 John 2:28; 3:2; Col 3:4).

The passive is a divine passive: God makes him manifest, and the agent is left unexpressed. English must leave it unexpressed too. Renderings such as ‘when the Chief Shepherd appears’ are idiomatic but quietly convert a passive into an intransitive and lose the fact that even the parousia is presented as something done to the Son by the Father.

The pairing with the shepherd image is deliberate: a shepherd who is already over the flock does not arrive; he becomes visible. Peter is not describing a distant figure travelling in but a present authority stepping into view.

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ἀρχιποίμενος — genitive of ἀρχιποίμην, a NT hapax and absent from the canonical LXX in this form, though the compound (or its equivalent) is attested in Hellenistic documentary Greek for the head shepherd over subordinate herdsmen, and a related form appears in a Greek version at 4 Kgdms 3:4 of Mesha the sheep-master. The ἀρχι- prefix is the ordinary Koine formation for the head of a body of workers or officials: ἀρχιτελώνης, ἀρχισυνάγωγος, ἀρχιτρίκλινος, and in the same letter’s world ἀρχιερεύς.

So the term is not exotic vocabulary — it is administrative. And that is the point: Peter has just used the cognate verb of the elders (ποιμάνατε, v. 2) and the cognate noun of the congregation (τὸ ποίμνιον, vv. 2, 3). The three ποιμ- words in three verses establish a chain of command. The elders shepherd; they are not the shepherd. Rendering ἀρχιποίμην as anything that breaks the root link — ‘Great Shepherd,’ ‘Head Pastor’ — hides the chain.

Capitalization. Rendered as a title (‘Chief Shepherd’) because the referent is Christ and the noun is articular and singular. This is an English orthographic decision, not a Greek one; Greek marks the referent by context and article alone.

The OT substrate is the shepherd-God of Ps 22:1 LXX (κύριος ποιμαίνει με), Isa 40:11, and above all Ezek 34, where YHWH removes the failed shepherds of Israel and shepherds the flock himself, and Ezek 37:24 where the Davidic ruler is the one shepherd. Peter has already called Christ ποιμὴν καὶ ἐπίσκοπος τῶν ψυχῶν ὑμῶν (2:25). The transfer of a YHWH-role to Jesus is flagged rather than adjusted (§1, §6).

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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

κομιεῖσθε — future middle indicative of κομίζω, with the Attic contracted future (κομιοῦμαι rather than κομίσομαι), a mildly literary form consistent with 1 Peter’s generally polished Greek.

The active means ‘bring, carry’; the middle is the settled Hellenistic idiom for ‘receive back, get what is due to one, collect what belongs to one.’ It is the register of receiving wages, recovering a deposit, or collecting a legacy, and it is well represented in the documentary papyri. The NT usage confirms it: 2 Cor 5:10 (κομίσηται ἕκαστος τὰ διὰ τοῦ σώματος), Eph 6:8, Col 3:25, Heb 10:36, 11:39, 1 Pet 1:9 (κομιζόμενοι τὸ τέλος τῆς πίστεως ὑμῶν), 2 Pet 2:13.

Two consequences for rendering:

• The middle is lexical, not reflexive, and must not be over-read into ‘procure for yourselves’ as though the elders obtained the wreath by effort. But neither should it be flattened to a bare ‘get.’ ‘Receive for yourselves’ in the literal tier preserves the voice; ‘receive’ suffices in smooth English.
• The verb carries an implication of something owed and now handed over — which is precisely the tension of the verse. The elders were told to serve not αἰσχροκερδῶς, not out of an eye for gain. Peter then promises them something they will collect. The resolution is not that gain is bad but that the timing and the payer are different: the wreath is conferred by the Chief Shepherd at his manifestation, not extracted from the flock now.

The future indicative is a plain promise, not a hortatory or conditional. It is not hedged, and English should not hedge it.

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Proposed — pending reviewJames Hope Moulton and George Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930

ἀμαράντινον — NT hapax. It must be distinguished from ἀμάραντος, which Peter uses at 1:4 of the inheritance (ἄφθαρτον καὶ ἀμίαντον καὶ ἀμάραντον). ἀμάραντος is the α-privative verbal adjective, ‘unwithering’; ἀμαράντινος is the -ινος form, which in Greek regularly denotes material: ξύλινος ‘of wood,’ λίθινος ‘of stone,’ δερμάτινος ‘of leather.’ So ἀμαράντινος στέφανος is strictly ‘a wreath made of amaranth.’

The amaranth (ἀμάραντον) was a real flower, prized in antiquity precisely because its blooms kept colour and shape when dried — hence its name and its use in garlands meant to last.

Policy: retain ‘unfading’ in the reading text, since it is correct on either construal and is what the word conveys; record the amaranth in the literal and study tiers and in the note, so the material sense stays visible and the ἀμάραντος / ἀμαράντινος distinction is not erased. Avoid ‘that never fades away’ (paraphrase) and ‘immortal’ (imports a different category).

The contrast being drawn is with the perishable garlands of the games and of civic honour — pine, celery, olive, laurel — which the readers in Asia Minor saw awarded and saw wilt. Paul makes the same move with φθαρτόν / ἄφθαρτον at 1 Cor 9:25. And 1 Peter has already set the whole letter under Isa 40:6-8 (quoted at 1:24: πᾶσα σὰρξ ὡς χόρτος … ἐξηράνθη ὁ χόρτος καὶ τὸ ἄνθος ἐξέπεσεν): all human glory is a flower that drops. Here is the one flower that does not.

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

στέφανον — the woven wreath, already fixed in the corpus glossary (Phil 4:1) as ‘crown (wreath, victor’s garland),’ lexically distinct from διάδημα, the royal band (Rev 19:12). Greek keeps the two apart and so must English wherever the distinction is live.

Three first-century contexts feed the word, and all three are plausibly in play here:

• the games — the victor’s garland (1 Cor 9:25; 2 Tim 4:8);
• civic honour — the wreath voted by a city or association to a benefactor, recorded in hundreds of honorific inscriptions across Asia Minor;
• the banquet and the cult — festal garlands.

The pastoral setting of vv. 2-3 (an office discharged, and the refusal of gain and dominance) fits the honorific register best: this is the wreath awarded for service rendered, and the awarding authority is named in the same clause. But the agonistic register cannot be excluded, especially given ἀντίδικος, λέων, and ἀντίστητε in vv. 8-9.

English has no single word for the wreath, so ‘crown’ is retained per the standing glossary decision, with the wreath-background flagged. ‘Diadem’ is excluded (wrong object) and ‘reward’ is excluded (that belongs to μισθός and imports wage-vocabulary, which is exactly what v. 2’s αἰσχροκερδῶς forbids).

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Word order. Greek has τὸν ἀμαράντινον τῆς δόξης στέφανον — the genitive is interposed between the article-adjective unit and its head noun, a marked arrangement (the unmarked order would be τὸν στέφανον τῆς δόξης, as at Jas 1:12 τὸν στέφανον τῆς ζωῆς). The interposition binds δόξης tightly into the noun phrase and gives it prominence. English cannot reproduce the sandwiching; the literal tier keeps the sequence woodenly and the emphasis is recorded here rather than compensated with added words (§4; cf. the standing entries on τῆς ὑμῶν δεήσεως, Phil 1:19, and πηλίκοις ὑμῖν γράμμασιν, Gal 6:11).

The genitive itself.

Policy: keep the bare ‘of’ genitive in every tier. English holds an unresolved genitive, so it does, per the standing policy on πίστις Χριστοῦ, καρπὸς δικαιοσύνης, and ἐλπὶς δικαιοσύνης. ‘The glorious crown’ is excluded from the reading text because it adopts the qualitative reading and, worse, converts glory from the substance of the gift into a decorative property of it. The modern tier signals the epexegetical option with a dash appositive without deleting the alternatives.

The article τῆς is retained: it may well be anaphoric to v. 1, and dropping it (‘a crown of glory’) severs a link Peter appears to have built.

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

The verse is textually stable in its substance; NA28 prints it without significant variation in the apparatus, and Metzger’s committee did not treat it. The minor movements worth recording are these:

• φανερωθέντος is read by the whole tradition. A handful of witnesses show orthographic and morphological levelling of the genitive absolute, and the Latin (cum apparuerit) resolves it into a temporal clause with a subjunctive — a rendering decision, not a variant.
• κομιεῖσθε: the Attic contracted future is universal; where later minuscules substitute the sigmatic κομίσεσθε, this is normalization toward the commoner formation and carries no semantic weight. Some witnesses read a present or aorist, but the future is secure.
• ἀμαράντινον is the reading of the earliest and best witnesses. Assimilation to ἀμάραντον (the form at 1:4) is attested in part of the tradition, and it is the easier reading in exactly the way scribal harmonization within a single letter tends to be: the copyist has met ἀμάραντον three chapters earlier. The rarer -ινος form is therefore to be preferred, and its preservation is what makes the material sense of the adjective discussable at all.

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Vulgate: et cum apparuerit princeps pastorum, percipietis inmarcescibilem gloriae coronam.

Three things to note. (1) cum apparuerit converts the genitive absolute into a temporal clause with a perfect subjunctive — a legitimate resolution, but it supplies the temporal marker that Greek withholds. (2) princeps pastorum renders the compound analytically, losing the single-word title; Latin had no ἀρχι- formation ready to hand. (3) inmarcescibilem is a coinage from marcesco ‘wither,’ and is precise for the privative sense — but it drops the flower, and with it the -ινος material force. The English tradition’s ‘unfading’ descends from it.

Syriac (Peshitta) likewise renders with a temporal construction and represents ἀρχιποίμην with a phrase for the chief of shepherds. Neither version can reproduce the interposed word order of τὸν ἀμαράντινον τῆς δόξης στέφανον, and both regularize it.

Per §2 and §11, these are recorded as reception — evidence of how the clause was construed early, never as evidence for the rendering itself.

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The early readers were struck by two things: the ranking, and the deferral.

The ranking. Christ as ἀρχιποίμην over the presbyters is taken as the ground of pastoral humility. Augustine’s repeated point in the Sermons on the Shepherds (on Ezek 34) is that all good shepherds are one shepherd because they are members of the one Shepherd; the sheep belong to him, and the pastor who feeds them for his own gain is condemned by the same Ezekiel text Peter is standing on. This reading is not imposed on the verse — it is the plain force of τὸ ποίμνιον τοῦ θεοῦ in v. 2 plus ἀρχιποίμενος here.

The deferral. The wreath is not now. Patristic comment consistently reads the verse as answering the question the imperatives of v. 2 raise: if not for gain and not for dominance, then for what? The answer is an honour conferred later by a superior — which is a reordering of the honour economy rather than its abolition. The amaranth is read against the wilting garlands of the games and the civic decrees.

Proposed — pending reviewAugustine, Sermons on the Shepherds (Sermones 46-47), in Sermons III/2, Works of Saint Augustine, ed. J. E. Rotelle, trans. E. Hill, Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990

Three claims sit in one clause.

1. Christ occupies the shepherd-role of YHWH. Ezek 34 has God removing Israel’s failed shepherds and shepherding the flock himself; Ps 22:1 LXX and Isa 40:11 make the shepherd God’s own office. 1 Peter has already applied ποιμήν to Christ at 2:25, and now ranks him as ἀρχι- over those who hold the derivative office. The flock is called τὸ ποίμνιον τοῦ θεοῦ (v. 2) and its head is Christ. Per §1 the Greek is rendered as written and the substrate footnoted, not imported; but the transfer of a divine role is data and is flagged.

2. The parousia is described as an unveiling of what is already the case. φανερωθέντος, passive, no agent. The Chief Shepherd is not absent and then present; he is present and then visible. This coheres with 1 Peter’s whole eschatological vocabulary (ἀποκάλυψις, 1:7, 13; 4:13; 5:1) and with the letter’s pastoral strategy: the readers’ present situation is not what it looks like, and what is coming is a disclosure, not a reversal of the facts.

3. Ministry is remunerated, but not by the flock and not yet. The verse does not deny that the elders receive something. It relocates the payment: κομίζω is the verb of collecting what is due, and the wreath is conferred by the Chief Shepherd. The prohibition of αἰσχροκερδῶς (v. 2) is therefore not asceticism but a claim about who the payer is. Peter’s ethic here is of a piece with the rest of the letter: honour deferred, vindication deferred, and a present bearing calibrated to a future assize (4:5, 17; 5:6).

Note finally that the promise is given to elders specifically in this context, though the substance (glory, an unfading inheritance) is promised to the whole congregation at 1:4 and 5:10. The verse singles out a group without creating a separate category of reward; the wreath is the same glory, named for those who did the shepherding.

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