There is a move common in Torah-keeping communities and Hebrew Roots circles that sounds, on the surface, like an appeal to humility. When a Christian presents the plain reading of Galatians, Romans, or Colossians - when they show that Paul's words about the law say what they appear to say - the Torah-observant response is often a knowing nod toward 2 Peter 3:15-16:

"Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." - 2 Peter 3:15-16

The implication is clear: Paul is hard to understand, your plain reading is simplistic, and the Torahism framework - the Hebrew mindset, the Second Temple context, the oral tradition background - is what unlocks what Paul really meant. Without it, you are among the ignorant and unstable who distort his letters.

It is a powerful move. It sounds like it comes from within Scripture itself. And it collapses completely when the passage is read carefully - because the passage, on its own plain reading, says the opposite of what Torah-observant teachers need it to say.

Who Was Peter Writing To?

Before examining what Peter says about Paul, it is essential to establish who Peter was addressing - because the Hebrew Roots Movement and Torah-keeping communities consistently apply this passage to Gentile Christians as though Peter were warning them about their own inadequate reading of Paul. He was not.

2 Peter 1:1 opens the letter with a precise identification: "To those who through the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours." The "ours" is Peter's - an apostle writing to Jewish believers. The 1 Peter address is equally specific: "To God's elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia." The diaspora. Jewish believers dispersed throughout Asia Minor.

Peter is not writing to Gentile Christians who lack a Hebrew framework. He is writing to Jewish believers - people who had the Hebrew framework, who knew the Torah, who understood the Second Temple context - and who were still struggling with Paul's teaching on freedom in Christ and the fulfilment of the law.

This is not a peripheral observation. It is the key that unlocks the entire passage. The people finding Paul hard to understand are not Gentiles who need a Hebrew mindset to read him correctly. They are Jewish believers who already have the Hebrew mindset - and whose difficulty with Paul is precisely that Paul's teaching on the law's fulfilment challenges what that mindset told them.

Who Were the "Ignorant and Unstable"?

Peter identifies two groups in 2 Peter 3:15-16. First, the recipients of his letter who receive Paul's teaching as he intended it. Second, "ignorant and unstable people" who distort Paul's letters to their own destruction.

Torah-observant teachers typically assume they are in the first group - the ones who correctly understand Paul - and that plain-reading Christians are in the second. But examine what Peter actually says about the distorters.

He calls them ignorant and unstable. And he says they distort Paul's letters "as they do the other Scriptures." The same people. The same pattern. Distorting Scripture generally, not just Paul specifically. This is not a description of Christians who read Paul too plainly. It is a description of people with a habitual pattern of twisting Scripture toward their own purposes - people whose instability and ignorance are already established before they reach Paul.

Peter also places this warning in the context of what immediately precedes verse 15 - his discussion of the Lord's patience and the coming day of the Lord. The chapter is about people who mock the promise of Christ's return, who use the delay as licence for their own agenda, who twist the concept of God's patience into permission for continued sin. These are the people distorting Paul. Not sincere Christians reading Galatians too plainly.

"Hard to Understand" - What This Does and Does Not Mean

The Hebrew Roots Movement and Torahism broadly interpret "hard to understand" as a concession that Paul's plain reading is insufficient - that his letters require a corrective interpretive framework to be read correctly, and that framework is Torah observance in its Second Temple context.

But "hard to understand" does not mean "the plain reading is wrong." These are completely different claims.

Paul's letters are theologically dense. They move quickly between argument and application. They engage complex questions of Jewish covenantal theology, Gentile inclusion, the relationship between promise and law, and the implications of Christ's resurrection for every category of religious life. That density creates genuine difficulty for anyone reading carefully and honestly - not because the plain reading leads you astray, but because the plain reading requires sustained engagement with a sophisticated argument.

What makes Paul hard to understand is not that his words mean something other than what they say. It is that what they say is theologically rich enough that a reader who is not engaging honestly can find apparent handles to grab - phrases that, lifted from context, could be made to support positions Paul explicitly argues against elsewhere. This is precisely what "distorting" means. Not misreading the plain sense. Taking the plain sense of one phrase and using it to override the plain sense of the surrounding argument.

The Fulfilment Problem - Why Jewish Believers Struggled

If Peter's audience were Jewish believers in the diaspora, the specific difficulty they had with Paul becomes clear - and it has nothing to do with a missing Hebrew framework. It has everything to do with Paul's teaching on the fulfilment and completion of the very covenant they had lived under their entire lives.

Paul taught that the Mosaic covenant was a guardian until Christ - and the guardian's era was over. The full covenantal framework that explains why this matters is examined elsewhere on the site. He taught that believers died to the law through the body of Christ. He taught that the Sinai covenant corresponded to Hagar and produced children for slavery. He taught that circumcision - the oldest written covenant sign in existence - made Christ of no advantage to those who received it as a covenantal requirement.

For a Jewish believer raised in Torah observance, shaped by the synagogue, formed in the covenant identity of Israel, this teaching was genuinely difficult to absorb - not because Paul's words were unclear, but because what they clearly said required an enormous reorientation of everything the Torah-keeping life had meant. The difficulty was not linguistic or cultural. It was the difficulty of hearing that the covenant you had built your identity around had been superseded by something it was always pointing toward. Our article on the Pauline paradox examines why this specific difficulty runs through every HRM engagement with Paul.

This is the difficulty Peter acknowledges. Not "Paul is unclear and needs a Hebrew framework to decode him." But "Paul's teaching on fulfilment and freedom is so challenging to our Torah-keeping instincts that unstable people are twisting it rather than receiving it."

Torah-observant teachers in the Hebrew Roots movement face the same challenge in reverse. They are not struggling to understand Paul because they lack a Hebrew framework. They are struggling to accept what Paul plainly says because it challenges the Torah-observance framework they have built their lives around. As our article on the HRM closed loop demonstrates, this is the mechanism by which the framework protects itself from the texts that most directly challenge it.

The Deepest Irony

Here is what Torah-keeping communities consistently miss when they cite 2 Peter 3:15-16: Peter's description of those who distort Paul does not fit the people they think it fits.

Peter calls the distorters "lawless" - athesmon in Greek, meaning those who disregard established moral order and use freedom as licence for sin. As established above, this is not Torah non-observance. It is moral and ethical lawlessness - using Paul's teaching on grace and freedom to justify continued sin. The distortion moves Paul in the direction of moral licence, of freedom from ethical accountability, of using the gospel as a cover for ongoing immorality.

The Hebrew Roots Movement and Torahism are not doing this. They are not twisting Paul toward moral lawlessness. They are twisting him toward law-keeping. They read "we are not under law" and say it means something other than what it says - but in the direction of more Torah observance, not less. The specific distortion Peter warns against - grace as a cover for sin - is the opposite of what Torah-observant teachers are doing. Which means the very passage Torahism deploys against the plain reading of Paul is a passage that does not describe their situation and does not support their argument.

Which means the passage Torahism uses to dismiss the plain reading of Paul is a passage that does not describe their situation, does not address their audience, and does not concede their interpretive framework. It simply observes that Paul's theological depth gives dishonest, unstable people something to grab - and warns readers to receive his teaching as Peter's own audience received it: as wisdom given by God, to be accepted and applied, not twisted toward any agenda.

The plain reading of Paul that Torah-keeping communities resist is not the distortion Peter warns against. It is the teaching Peter commends. And the interpretive framework that Torahism offers as the corrective to "simplistic" plain reading is precisely what Peter's Jewish audience needed to move past - not toward.

What Peter Never Does

There is a final observation worth making about Peter's letters as a whole. If 2 Peter 3:15-16 were a concession that Paul requires a Torah-observance framework to be read correctly, you would expect Peter's own letters to supply that framework - to model the Torah-keeping approach to faith that supposedly unlocks Paul's real meaning.

Peter never does this. In two letters addressed to Jewish believers in the diaspora - people who had the Hebrew background, the Torah formation, the Second Temple context - Peter does not once instruct them to keep the Sabbath, observe the feast calendar, follow the dietary laws, or observe any element of Mosaic covenant practice as a requirement of their new life in Christ.

What Peter does instead is point consistently to Christ - his suffering, his resurrection, his glory, his coming return - as the ground and content of the believer's life. His ethical instructions are the fruit of the Spirit: love one another deeply, be hospitable, exercise your gifts in service, be humble, resist the devil, stand firm in grace. This is what Peter's Torah-formed Jewish audience needed to hear from him. Not a Torah-keeping corrective to Paul. The gospel itself, applied to a life already being transformed by it.

If Peter thought Paul required Torah observance as an interpretive framework, his own letters - addressed to the very audience he was warning about Paul - are the most inexplicable omission in the New Testament. Our article on Acts 15 shows that this pattern is consistent across the apostolic witness: not once does the apostolic leadership instruct Gentile believers to adopt Torah observance as their covenantal framework.

Reading Paul as Peter Commends

Peter commends Paul's letters as containing "the wisdom that God gave him." He places them alongside "the other Scriptures." He presents them as authoritative, Spirit-given teaching that his readers should receive and apply.

The appropriate response to Peter's commendation of Paul is to read Paul as Peter commends him - with the wisdom God gave him, as Scripture, as authoritative teaching that says what it says and means what it means. Our article on what the real gospel is shows what that plain reading produces. Not to import an interpretive grid that requires Paul's plain words about the law to mean something other than what they say.

As our article on show me that in the text demonstrates verse by verse through Galatians, Paul's plain reading of Galatians is not the distortion Peter warns against. It is the teaching that the distorters were working against. The people finding Paul hard to understand were not those who read him plainly. They were those whose prior commitments - to Torah observance, to Sinai covenant identity, to the religious framework the law had given them - made his teaching on fulfilment and freedom genuinely difficult to receive.

That difficulty has not changed. The Torah-keeping movement faces the same challenge Peter's audience faced. And Peter's answer to that challenge is the same answer Paul gave: receive the wisdom God gave him. Do not twist it. Do not import a framework that softens what he plainly said. Read it as Scripture - which means reading it as it is written.

His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. - 2 Peter 3:16