Crisis in the Church is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the Church has always been--and probably always will be--involved in some kind of crisis. Even in the apostolic period, which is regarded by many as the Church's golden age, there were serious crises coming both from the outside, as in 1 Peter, and from the inside, as in Jude and 2 Peter. The three short New Testament letters treated in 1 Peter, Jude, and 2 Peter illustrate the problems early Christians faced, as well as the rhetorical techniques and theological concepts with which they combated those problems. In the first part of this volume, Donald Senior views 1 Peter as written from Rome in Peter's name to several churches in northern Asia Minor--present-day Turkey--in the latter part of the first century C.E. The new Christians addressed in 1 Peter found themselves aliens and exiles in the wider Greco-Roman society and suffered a kind of social ostracism. But they are given a marvelous theological vision of who they have
