Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Savior Jesus Christ:

Grace and peace be multiplied to you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord,

According as his divine power hath given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:

Whereby are given to us exceeding great and precious promises; that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

For he received from God the Father honor and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will privately bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

And many will follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth will be evil spoken of.

And through covetousness they will with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.

(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, grieved his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)

But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption:

And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day-time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you;

For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that had quite escaped from them who live in error.

For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.

Knowing this first, that there will come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,

As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction.