In the Greek, this verse is part of the sentence which began at 1.22, and gives an additional reason for the exhortation to love one another, namely, the fact of their being born again. This new birth is a gift from God through his living and eternal word. As already stated, this is a further elaboration of the truth in 1.22, and is defined in 25b as equivalent to the Good News. It is through this Good News that believers have received new birth.

The causal relationship expressed by the conjunction for may require some repetition and expansion, for example, “you should love one another because….” This may be particularly necessary if the preceding sentence has undergone considerable alteration in order.

There are various ways of dealing with the adjectives living and eternal. One possibility is to understand them as modifying not word, but God himself (for example, Knox “the word of God who lives and abides forever”). Another possibility is to understand living as modifying God and eternal as modifying word, or vice versa (for example, Phillips “permanent word of the living God”; Jerusalem Bible “the everlasting word of the living and eternal God”). Most commentaries, however, understand it in the same sense as Good News Translation does, namely, that both adjectives modify word.

There is no problem in rendering living and eternal if these adjectives modify God, because one can readily speak of “God who is alive and never dies” or “God who is alive and lives forever.” It is much more difficult, however, to employ living and eternal as modifying word. Living word is not equivalent to “word of life” in the sense that it is “the word which gives life” or “the word which causes people to live.” It may, therefore, be necessary to render “living word” as a type of simile, for example, “the word which is as it were alive.” One way of speaking of the eternal word is to say “the word which is always true” or “the word which is always valid.” One other way of speaking of the eternal word is to characterize the word as “the word that never changes.”

Born again contrasts spiritual birth with physical birth (as in John 3). Physical birth is made possible through parents who are mortal, but spiritual birth is made possible only through a parent who is immortal, that is, God. In the Greek, parent is literally “seed,” here used figuratively to refer to origin or parentage.

You have been born again is a very strong metaphor which may need to be transformed into a simile, for example, “you have been born as it were again” or, by introducing an agent, “it is as though God has caused you to be born again.”

As the children of a parent who is immortal, not mortal may be rendered as “as the children of one who never dies and not the children of one who does die, such as our own parents are.”

Quoted with permission from Arichea, Daniel C. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on The First Letter from Peter. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .