2 Peter 2:19

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption We have here the characteristic feature of the teaching which St Peter condemns. It offered its followers freedom from the restraints which the Council of Jerusalem had imposed alike on participation in idolatrous feasts and on sins of impurity (Acts 15:29). That this was the key-note of their claims we have a distinct indication in St Paul's teaching on the same subject. His question "Am I not free?" (1 Corinthians 9:1), his condemnation of those who boasted of their "right" ("liberty" in the English version) to eat things sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 8:9), who proclaimed that all things were "lawful" for them (1 Corinthians 10:23), shew that this was the watchword of the party of license at Corinth, and the language of St Peter, though more coloured with the feeling of a burning indignation at the later development of the system, is, in substance, but the echo of that of his brother Apostle. In his contrast between the boast of liberty and the actual bondage to corruption we may trace a reproduction of our Lord's teaching in John 8:34, of St Paul's in Romans 6:16. The word for "they are the servants" (literally, being the servants) implies that this had been all along their settled, continuous state. The very phrase bond-slaves of corruption seems to reproduce Romans 8:21.

of whom a man is overcome The Greek leaves it uncertain whether the pronouns refer to a person, or to a more abstract power wherein a man is overcome, to that he is enslaved. On the whole the latter seems preferable. Here again we have an echo of St Paul's language in Romans 6:16.