2 Peter 1:16

For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you More accurately, For it was not as following cunningly devised fables that we made known the connexion being one not of time but of causation. The "fables" or "myths" referred to are probably those of which St Paul speaks in the Pastoral Epistles (1Ti 1:4; 1 Timothy 4:7; 2 Timothy 4:4; Titus 1:14), which were, as the description there given of them indicates, mainly of Jewish origin. With these there might be mingled the germs of the Gnosticism incipient in the Apostolic age, and developed more fully in the next century. Possibly there may be an allusive reference to the claims of the sorcerer of Samaria, with whom the Apostle had himself come into collision (Acts 8:10). The boast of Simon that he was the "great power of God," and that his mistress Helena was the incarnation of the Divine Thought or Wisdom by which the worlds were made, would answer, closely enough, to the "cunningly devised fables" of which St Peter speaks. The word for "cunningly devised," framed, i.e., with fraudulent and sophistical purpose, is not found elsewhere in the New Testament. The question what the Apostle refers to in "we made known to you:" it may refer either to unrecorded teaching addressed to the Asiatic Churches, or to the wider circle of readers defined in 2 Peter 1:1, or, more probably, to the teaching of the First Epistle as to the glory that was to be manifested "at the appearing of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:7; 1 Peter 1:13; 1 Peter 4:13). The tone in which the offensive epithet is used suggests the thought that he is defending himself against a charge of having followed "fables." Is it possible that that charge had been brought against his teaching as to "the spirits in prison," as something superadded to the received oral traditions of the Church, or to the written records, whether identical with our present Gospels or not, in which that teaching had been embodied?

the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ The "coming," here, as in every other passage of the New Testament in which the word occurs, is the Second Advent, not the first. The mind of the Apostle goes back to what he had witnessed in the glory of the Transfiguration, as the pledge and earnest of that which was afterwards to be revealed. The word does not occur in the First Epistle, but the fact is implied in 1 Peter 1:7; 1Pe 1:13; 1 Peter 4:13; 1 Peter 5:4.

but were eyewitnesses of his majesty Both words are significant. That for "eye-witnesses" (not found elsewhere in the New Testament, but used of God as the all-seeing in 2Ma 7:35; 3Ma 2:21) was applied in Classical Greek to the highest order of those who were initiated as spectators of the Eleusinian mysteries. It would, perhaps, be too much to say that that association was definitely present to the Apostle's mind, but the choice of an unusual and suggestive word at least implies that he looked on himself as having been chosen to a special privilege. It deserves notice also, as bearing on the authorship of the Epistle, that the verb derived from the noun had been used by the writer of 1 Peter 2:12; 1 Peter 3:2. (See notes there.) The word for "majesty" also has the interest of having been used in the Gospel narrative in close connexion with the healing of the demoniac boy which followed the Transfiguration (Luke 9:43), and, as found there, may fairly be taken as including, as far as the three disciples who had seen the vision of glory were concerned, what had preceded that work of healing, as well as the work itself. The only other passage in the New Testament in which it is found is in Acts 19:27, where it is used of the "magnificence" of the Ephesian Artemis.