Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Peter · About this commentary
The Spirits in Prison
1 Peter 3:18-20
18 Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, · WEB
The letter has already said whose Spirit spoke through prophets and when this preaching happened, so the passage is read from inside the letter rather than from outside it.
Verse 18 sets the frame: Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, put to death in flesh and made alive in spirit. Verse 19 then continues in which — and the antecedent is the spirit just named, not a body and not a disembodied journey.
The letter has already supplied what that means. It has stated that the Spirit of Christ was in the prophets, testifying beforehand, centuries before the incarnation 1 Peter 1:11. Christ's Spirit speaking through a human preacher to a generation that had not yet heard is not a foreign idea imported here; it is this letter's own stated background, laid down two chapters earlier.
Verse 20 then dates the preaching, and this is the decisive detail. Those addressed were disobedient in Noah's generation, during the years when God held back and the vessel was under construction. The preaching belongs to that period of building. And the letter's companion names the preacher of that generation with the same root word — Noah, a herald of righteousness 2 Peter 2:5.
So the sequence the text gives is: preached then, through Noah, by the Spirit of Christ; imprisoned now, awaiting judgment. Nothing here describes a visit to the dead or a message delivered after death, and the alternative reading has to supply both.
Honest readers differ here, and the difference is old; the clauses that carry a date are what the difference must contend with.
held with reason What this mark means