1. Greeting (1:1)
1 Thessalonians
1. Greeting (1:1)
Letters in antiquity began with some variant of the formula ‘A to B greeting’, usually followed by some pious expression such as a prayer. This was just as much part of the letter as our ‘Dear Sir’ at the beginning and ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Yours sincerely’ at the end (though we may be addressing an enemy, and be neither faithful nor sincere). Here is an example of the beginning of an actual letter:
Antonis Longus to Nilus his mother many greetings. And continually do I pray that thou art in health. I make intercession for thee day by day to the lord Serapis.1
After this preamble the writer begins his message. Paul used the conventional opening, varying it according to circumstances; but in his hands it took on a characteristically Christian shape.
1. Here Paul associates Silvanus and Timothy (see Introduction, pp. 17–18) with himself, but there seems little doubt that the body of the letter is from Paul. It bears the marks of his style and gives no appearance of being composite. In all his letters, except those to the Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon, he asserts his apostleship; its absence here may point to the amicable relations between Paul and this church.
Though this is the shortest of the extant superscriptions it contains all the elements that appear in the fully developed form: the address to the church, the linking of the church with the Father and the Son, and the prayer for grace and peace. The address, To the church of the Thessalonians, is a form found only in these epistles, though it is not unlike that in Galatians, another early epistle. Paul may be thinking of the local gathering of believers, rather than of the church as the local expression of the church universal as in the later letters (so Milligan).
Also peculiar to these epistles is the phrase in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (Paul usually says ‘in Christ’). It is striking (a) that he speaks of the Father and the Lord in one breath (no-one else could be linked with the Father in this way), (b) that he joins the two under one preposition in, and (c) that he expresses the closeness of the tie linking the Thessalonians with their God in terms of Christ as well as the Father. ‘The association could hardly be closer’ (Ward). This high view of Jesus is continued with the use of Lord and Christ. Lord was used in LXX as the translation of the divine name and it was commonly used of deity in other religions (as well as having less significant uses). It points to a very high place. Christ means ‘anointed’ and is equivalent to ‘Messiah’. And all this in a letter written only about twenty years after the crucifixion. From very early times Jesus was seen to have the highest place.
The greeting Grace and peace to you looks like a combination of the usual Greek and Hebrew forms, with a slight but significant change in the Greek, from chairein (‘greeting’) to charis (‘grace’). Grace is one of the great Christian words. Cognate with chara (‘joy’), it means basically ‘that which causes joy’. In a Christian context nothing brings joy like the act of God in Christ whereby sin is put away and salvation is made available as a free gift. The word comes then to mean any free gift of God, and in greetings it is used in this general sense, though with a glance at God’s great gift to mankind.
With us peace is a negative concept, the absence of war. But the Hebrew equivalent, šālôm, is concerned with ‘wholeness’, ‘soundness’, and signifies prosperity in the widest sense, especially prosperity in spiritual things. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, šālôm was rendered by eirēnē (the word used here), and thus, for those steeped in the Old Testament, peace is this broad concept of the prosperity of the whole man, more especially his spiritual prosperity. But ‘peace of heart’ (LB ‘heart peace’, Amp.) misses the point that it is the prosperity of the whole man that is in mind.
There may be significance in the invariable order of these two words in greetings: first grace, then peace. There can be no true peace until the grace of God has dealt with sin.
The words ‘from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (AV, LB) are not in the oldest MSS and should not be read.