The Role of Emotion in 1 Peter

In this book, Katherine M. Hockey explores the function of emotions in the New Testament by examining the role of emotions in 1 Peter. Moving beyond outdated, modern rationalistic views of emotions as irrational, bodily feelings, she presents a theoretically and historically informed cognitive approach to emotions in the New Testament. Informed by Greco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical views of emotions along with modern emotion theory, she shows how the author of 1 Peter uses the logic of each emotion to value and position objects within the audience's worldview, including the self and the other. She also demonstrates how, cumulatively, the emotions of joy, distress, fear, hope, and shame are deployed to build an alternative view of reality. This new view of reality aims to shape the believers' understanding of the structure of their world, encourages a reassessment of their personal goals, and ultimately seeks to affect their identity and behaviour.

Part I. Introductory Matters: 1. Emotion studies and the New Testament; 2. Emotion studies – theoretical foundations; Part II. Emotions in Antiquity: 3. Stoic philosophy of emotion; 4. The rhetorical use of emotion; Part III. The Present Experience: 5. Joy despite distress – 1 Peter 1.6-8; 6. Joy in suffering – 1 Peter 4.12-13; Part IV. Future Expectation: 7. Fearful hope; 8. Appropriate and inappropriate shame; 9. Conclusion; Appendix 1: chronology of the leading stoics.

Katherine M. Hockey is the inaugural Kirby Laing Postdoctoral Fellow in New Testament Studies at the University of Aberdeen.  She is co-editor of Muted Voices of the New Testament: Readings in the Catholic Epistles and Hebrew (2017) and Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts, and in Modern Biblical Interpretation (2018).