Post Edited (markporter) : 4/30/2005 6:10:37 PM (GMT-5)

¹⁸For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, ¹⁹through whom^[d] also he went and preached to the spirits in prison ²⁰who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, ²¹and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge^[e] of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, ²²who has gone into heaven and is at God's right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.

 

• It is connecting material between verses 18 and 22 - ie, connecting Jesus' resurrection with the action of the Holy Spirit, and that with the preaching to spirits in prison, and that to the flood, and that to the waters of baptism, and that to salvation, and that to Jesus' resurrection again.  Notice how the literary connections go full circle, from Jesus' resurrection and back to his resurrection again.  It looks like a literary device whose elaboration serves to underscore the basic point, which, as said above, is that Jesus is the Messiah who bridges the gap between God and man.

• It is connecting material between the story and role of Jesus, and the ancient traditions of the Hebrew heritage.  Jesus is literarily connected by the author to the flood, in that the deliverance of Noah's family to safety through the waters of the flood story, is interpreted by the author to symbolize how Jesus delivers us to salvation through the waters of baptism.  Thus the material serves to connect the new Christian tradition of Jesus and baptism with the old Hebrew traditions, and thereby demonstrate the continuity, indeed culmination, of the old with the new (such continuity and culmination being very important to legitimize the new Christian faith with a Jewish audience).  So this is another literary device, very similar to how Matthew's gospel uses Old Testament citations (ie as analogical demonstration of how the new story of Christ recaps and fills-full the patterns and types of the long-accepted old story).

Because of this, I think it is (at risk of using too strong a word) "hopeless" to parse the words of 1 Peter 3:19-21 too closely and too matter-of-factly, whether as fodder with which to support views about the flood, about the Nephilim, about postmortem evangelism, about the necessity of physical baptism to salvation (ie one is not saved unless one has been baptized), or etc.  (All of which are purposes for which 1 Peter 3:18-22 has been mis-appropriated, in my opinion.)  After all, just because Matthew cites Hosea (11:1, "Out of Egypt I called my son") and claims Jesus fulfilled it, we wouldn't interpret this matter-of-factly to mean that Matthew is claiming Hosea's passage was a grammatical prediction of Jesus (because read in context, Hosea 11:1 quite clearly means something else entirely, grammatically).  We would have to seek a less-literal meaning instead, looking for how Matthew's use of Hosea would have been intended in the culture and literary conventions of the time.  Same here.

Scott