Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Peter 3:14

"But even if ye should suffer for righteousness` sake, blessed [are ye:] and fear not their fear, neither be troubled;" — 1 Peter 3:14 (ASV)

But and if ye suffer.—The old-fashioned phrase would read more intelligibly this way: Nay, if you should even suffer. Men’s attempts to “harm” us (by acts of malice to property or good name, etc.) are so far from really injuring us that even if it should come to be a matter of “suffering,” we are to be congratulated.

What he means by this “suffering,” which is so much more than being “harmed,” may be seen from 1 Peter 2:21; 1 Peter 3:17; 1 Peter 4:1; and 1 Peter 4:15. He means the horrors of capital punishment. He does not speak of this as something that was already occurring, nor as if it were something immediately and certainly impending, but as a case that could well be supposed. At that time, there had not yet been any martyrdoms in Asia. The letter is therefore earlier in date than the Apocalypse (Revelation 2:13). It is a noticeable point that in all St. Paul’s Epistles the word “to suffer” occurs only seven times, and never twice in the same Epistle; whereas it occurs twelve times in this one short Letter of St. Peter.

For righteousness' sake.—Like the “suffering wrongfully” of 1 Peter 2:19. It is not as suffering that it is valuable.

Happy are ye.—This is quite the right word, yet its use obscures the obvious reference to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:10). The reference to it is all the clearer in the Greek from the significant way in which St. Peter leaves his sentence incomplete, merely giving the catchword of the beatitude. We might represent this to ourselves by putting “Blessed” in inverted commas and a dash after it. He makes sure his readers will catch the allusion. There is no part of our Lord’s discourses that seems (from the traces in the earliest Christian literature) to have taken such a rapid and firm hold on the Christian conscience as the Sermon on the Mount.

Be not afraid of their terror.—Here the translators might with advantage have kept the same word and said (as in the original passage from which St. Peter is quoting, Isaiah 8:12), Fear ye not their fear—i.e., the thing that makes them fear; do not regard with dread the same object as they do. In the original, the persons whose fears Isaiah and the faithful Jews are not to fear are those who were in dread of Syria and Israel. Here, the persons are not named. However, according to this interpretation, “they” cannot be the enemies who try to harm the Christians; rather, if “they” refers to anyone, it would be those Christians who, for fear of man, were beginning to abandon Christianity. The intention, however, is not to press this clause for its own sake but to throw greater force upon the clause that begins the next verse. It argues carelessness about the passage in Isaiah to interpret it as: “Be not afraid of the fear which your foes strike into you.”