2 Peter 3:15-16

The context

Second Peter 3 addresses a delay that has become a crisis. Scoffers ask where the promise of Christ's return is, since everything continues as it always has. The author answers with God's patience — a thousand years are like a day — and then turns the argument: the delay is opportunity, not failure.

Verses 15-16 make that turn explicit and add a remarkable aside. The author says "our beloved brother Paul" wrote to the same readers about these things, and that his letters contain material hard to understand which the unstable distort. The letter's authorship is disputed among scholars, a question this passage does not settle.

The words

Makrothymia, "patience" or long-suffering, is the word for God's delay; the author tells readers to count it as salvation rather than slackness.

Dysnoētos, "hard to understand," occurs only here in the New Testament. A compound of "badly" and "understand," it is not a polite hedge: the author concedes that some of Paul's material is difficult.

Strebloō, "to twist," derives from the word for a torture rack and is used metaphorically of distorting a text. The twisting is done by the ignorant and unstable, so the problem lies in the reader as well as the text.

The decisive phrase is tas loipas graphas, "the other Scriptures." By setting Paul's letters beside "the other" writings, the author classes them as Scripture — a judgment made about a collection that had no fixed table of contents.

What this passage establishes

That an early Christian writer treated a body of Paul's letters as Scripture, and did so while admitting they were hard. Difficulty and authority are held together here rather than traded against each other.

What it does not establish

It does not define the canon. "All his letters" is not a list, and "the other Scriptures" does not name which books are included. The verse is evidence for an early high view of Paul, not for the boundaries of the New Testament.

It does not claim that every passage is clear. It says the opposite about some of Paul's material. Arguments for the clarity of Scripture have to reckon with a text that concedes obscurity and places part of the problem in the reader.

It does not resolve the difficulties it names. The author warns against distortion without supplying the correct reading. Citing the verse as though it settled Paul's hard passages cites a warning, not an interpretation.

How the church has read it

The verse has been a standard citation in canon discussions since antiquity, and in the Reformation debates over the clarity of Scripture. Protestant readers answered that the difficulty is real but limited — that what is necessary to salvation is plain. Modern scholarship has concentrated on authorship and on what exactly "the Scriptures" refers to.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• It should be called Paulianity – for centuries Christians have presented the ideas of Paul as the teachings of Jesus, and that’s a mistake. It was all Paul’s INTERPRETATION. Check the data.
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• God can't make up his inspirational mind. Is justification by faith (Paul) or by works (James)?
• I only trust the words of Jesus. Why should I accept Paul and the rest of the New Testament?
• Didn't Paul invent Christianity? Why should I trust letters Jesus never wrote?
• If only the words of Jesus matter, why do we need Paul and the rest of the New Testament?

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.