The New Testament letter known as 1 Peter has often been the victim of benign neglect and treated as a pale reflection of some of Paul's epistles. Recent studies, beginning with the commentaries of E.G. Selwyn and F.W. Beare in the forties, began to redress this situation; more recently still, with the work of Leonhard Goppelt in Germany, a new phase of research employing the approaches of sociology and offering a classification of the letter as a social tract has opened up exciting new possibilities for interpretation.