05_Biblica_1_H_Collins_Layout 1 13/11/12 12:12 Pagina 423 423 NOAH, DEUCALION, AND THE NEW TESTAMENT continued all that time ordered just as they are now [ ]” (Laws, 677c). The reminiscence is more at the level of the thought than the specific words, though the cognate verbs and and the adverb do establish some points of contact. Again, 2 Peter 1,4 calls his readers people who “have escaped from the corruption [ ] that is in the world because of sinful desire”. Perhaps this echoes the phrase from Plato, which describes the sur- vivors of the flood as “those who escaped destruction/corruption” ( , 677b) 41; if so, 2 Peter is drawing a typological connection between the escape from the flood and the greater escape from sin’s defilement and inevitable punish- ment. These would not even enter into our consideration as allusions, except for the suggestive echoes elsewhere in the letter. This connection to the Platonic account appears as well in 1 Peter 3,20 (perhaps by way of Wisdom 14). There we read that Noah’s “ark was being prepared” ( ), with wording like that in Hebrews 11,7; and Wisdom 14,2 had used the verb for ship-building in a context that eventually goes on to speak of Noah’s ark. But 1 Peter also mentions that eight people “were brought safely through” ( ) the water, using a verb that appears in Plato (Timaeus, 22d; Laws, 677b) and in texts influ- enced by his account (which may be true of Wis 14,5) 42. Even if the verbal echoes seem to point toward an allusion to non- biblical sources, and especially to Plato, we must certainly face the prob- lem of whether such an allusion is plausible. The following lines of argument make it reasonable to allow for an allusion in the Petrine let- ters to a version of the flood story that owes its ultimate origin to Plato’s telling of the story. First, as several researchers have shown, Jews in the Hellenistic world were acquainted with Plato; not only was Philo fa- miliar with him, as was the author of Wisdom of Solomon (a work more popular than Philo’s, and more representative of mainstream Judaism), Observe the effective synonymy of the cognate verbs and 41 , a phenomenon that we also noted above in Theophilus. A commentator such as SPICQ, Les Épîtres de Saint Pierre, 141, simply 42 notes that the verb is suited to being brought safely through in a nautical situation (Acts 27,43-44; 28,1.4; Wis 14,5); that is of course true, but when taken with other factors the connection with Plato’s flood account becomes worthy of inves- tigation.