JH Elliott argued that the Petrine terms παροικία, πάροικος, and παρεπίδημος are literal, while the majority of scholars understand them metaphorically. This chapter therefore defines metaphors, establishes the criteria by which they can be identifies, and develops tools for their analysis. Metaphors are defined as speaking about one thing (tenor, or target domain) in terms of another (vehicle, or source domain). Though the Petrine regeneration metaphor is cognitive, it is expressed in language grounded in Jewish and Greco-Roman culture. Metaphors are rich, interactive, and not reducible to prose. Simple metaphors can be combined into complex, systematic and narrative structures, which may contain embedded, culturally-based value judgments. This study employs the Metaphor Identification Process (MIP) to determine whether kinship terms in 1 Peter are metaphorical.

In the chapter, I attempt to identify and briefly describe the main features of CMT, as I see them. Other researchers might emphasize different properties of the theory. At the same time, I tried to select those features on which there is some agreement among practitioners of CMT. At the end of the chapter and given the description of the properties, I list a number of outstanding issues in CMT – issues that we need to get clear about in order to make CMT an even more powerful theory of metaphor.