CHRIST AND "THE SPIRITS IN PRISON"

FEW passages of the NT are as difficult to interpret as 1 Pet 3:18-20. The history of interpretation, beginning in patristic times, has witnessed numerous attempts to unravel its meaning. In the early third century, St. Clement of Alexandria took these verses to mean that Christ, during the silence of Holy Saturday, descended to the dead to make a final offer of salvation to the deceased sinners of Noah's day (Stromata 6, 6, 44-46). In the fifth century, St. Augustine proposed a different interpretation: Christ, by an exercise of his preexistent divinity, preached to the ancient world through the person of Noah, urging the wicked to repent before the floodwaters of judgment came to sweep them away (Letters 164). Much later, near the turn of the seventeenth century, St. Robert Bellarmine reconnected the passage with Holy Saturday, only he proposed that Christ descended to the dead to announce his salvation to those sinners who had privately repented just before the onset of the flood (Disputations on Christ 2, 4, 13). Modern times have seen the rise of yet another interpretation: the passage concerns, not the descent of Christ to the realm of the dead, but his Ascension into glory. On his way up, it is said that he presented himself as Victor and Conqueror to a company of demons imprisoned in the lower heavens.

In view of this diversity of opinion, even among great theologians of the Church, a definitive interpretation of the passage seems out of the question. Still, it is worthwhile to wrestle with the difficulties of the text and to offer a reasonable judgment as to its meaning. This might best be achieved by keeping one eye on the history of interpretation and the other on contemporary insights of biblical scholarship. Below is a brief examination of these verses and the challenges they present to the interpreter.

1 Peter 3:18

It is clear that Peter refers to the Crucifixion when he says that Jesus was "put to death in the flesh". What is more difficult to interpret is the statement that he was "made alive in the spirit". At first sight, this would seem to refer to the Resurrection, for this is how the verb "make alive" (Gk. zōopoieō) is often used in the New Testament (Jn 5:21; Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 15:22). Not all agree, however. Given the tradition that links these passages with the descent of Jesus into Hades (i.e., Sheol, the realm of the dead, visualized as a chamber of souls hidden deep in the underworld), some take the expression "made alive in the spirit" to mean that Christ was "kept alive in his soul". The question is whether Peter is talking about the activity of Jesus on Holy Saturday, when his soul descended to the dead without his body, or at some time subsequent to Easter Sunday, when his body and soul were forever reunited. No firm answer can be given until we consider what follows.

1 Peter 3:19-20

Here we come to the crux of the matter, to the question of when and where Christ went to preach "to the spirits in prison" (1 Pet 3:19) who were disobedient "in the days of Noah" (1 Pet 3:20). Historically, the spirits in this verse have been identified with the souls of the wicked that perished in the flood. The problem, however, is that "spirits" (Gk. pneumata) is not a word that is normally used in Scripture for the souls of the dead (the lone exception is Heb 12:23). Beyond that, it is difficult to see why Jesus should single out these particular sinners as his audience for preaching in Hades. Surely they could not experience a saving conversion after death, and none of the ancient texts or traditions known to us indicates that any of Noah's contemporaries repented at the last moment. On the contrary, the generation that drowned in the flood is taken as an example of a generation condemned by God (Lk 17:2627; 2 Pet 2:5).

Modern scholarship has, thankfully, recovered Jewish traditions about the flood that had long been forgotten, traditions that were no doubt known to the earliest Jewish Christians. These ancient accounts have since helped to bring the picture of Christ's preaching to the spirits into focus. The main element of interest concerns an interpretation of the "sons of God" mentioned in Gen 6:2. According to several Jewish texts, these are rebel angels (called "the Watchers") who corrupted the world of men before the flood (1 Enoch 6-21; Jubilees 5, 1-11). Being spirits, they could not be destroyed by the waters of the deluge, so the Lord thrust them into the prisons of the underworld to await their final doom (1 Enoch 14, 5 and 18, 14). One tradition has them locked up, not in the depths of the earth, but in the lower heavens (2 Enoch 7, 1-3).

The benefit of retrieving this forgotten perspective is obvious for interpreting 1 Pet 3:18-20. It seems now that "the spirits in prison" are not human souls at all, but fallen angels whose wickedness was closely connected with the flood in Jewish tradition. This accords well with the frequent use of "spirits" for angels in the NT (Mt 12:45; Lk 10:20; Heb 1:14). The question remains whether Peter locates these demons in heaven above or in the netherworld below. Some, as stated above, connect these verses with the Ascension; the idea would be that Christ proclaimed himself Victor over evil as he passed by the spirits bound in the lower regions of heaven. More likely, however, Peter is referring to Christ's descent into the darkness and gloom of Hades, for that is where the disobedient angels are kept in chains, according to other biblical texts that allude to this Jewish tradition (2 Pet 2:4; Jude 6). Thus, in addition to liberating the righteous dead of the OT for entrance into heaven, he also proclaimed himself Conqueror of evil to the infernal spirits whose power had just been shattered by his redeeming death.

In this way, insights from the history of interpretation can be coupled with modern findings to produce a new and more plausible—though not definitive—interpretation of 1 Pet 3:18-20. Readers faced with the hardships of persecution would be led to see that Jesus was victorious over evil, not in spite of his death, but precisely in his death. For at that moment, lowered into the darkness of Hades, Jesus Christ descended as the victorious Savior of the world (CCC 632-37). « Back to 1 Peter 3:1.