Thessalonians In Recent Study
THESSALONIANS IN RECENT STUDY
A feature of recent work on the Thessalonian correspondence is the attempt both to elucidate the social history of the context in which it was written and to erect sociological models to shed light on the church there. Writers such as R. Jewett, 33 A. J. Malherbe, 34 and W. A. Meeks 35 have stressed the importance of looking to the cultural background presupposed by these letters. Malherbe, for example, points to the importance of the "insula,” common in the cities of the time: a row of shops faced the street, while owners, workmen, and their families lived above or behind the shops and formed a natural community in which the preachers could work and preach. He points to the pastoral care so clear in what Paul wrote and so absent from most of the letters that have come down to us from that day. Jewett looks at the political, social, economic, and religious conditions in the city. Such approaches shed new light on the correspondence and help us better to understand some of the things Paul wrote. In contrast, the swing toward imposing modern sociological models (Jewett devotes his ninth chapter to "The Millenarian Model”) on first-century churches is frequently somewhat misleading. We have so little information from the first century, compared with the enormous statistical compilations where these modern models were first deployed. Sometimes these models become coersive, and subtle but important bits of information are ignored or deformed in the effort to make the model fit.
A few scholars have held that 1 Thessalonians is composite, sometimes seeing Paul as the author of fragments that have been pieced together and sometimes attributing parts of the letter to others than Paul. E. Best discusses, 36 for example, the views of K. Eckart 37 and W. Schmithals 38 but finds it difficult to accept such theories. "Paul was both too profound a thinker and too excitable a personality to be held within the categories of a fixed pattern of letter writing.” 39 Once we accept the position that Paul cannot be bound to the conventionalities of the day for letter writing, the problems alleged for 1 Thessalonians no longer appear so difficult. They certainly do not demand the hypothesis that the apostle wrote a number of letters that have been combined.
A good deal of attention has been given, especially in the United States, to the form of the letter and the function of the various parts that form criticism reveals. This aspect of Pauline studies is usually held to go back to the appearance in 1939 of P. Schubert’s Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgiving. 40 This leads to differences of opinion as to the centrality of the autobiographical part of 1 Thessalonians (1 Thess. 1-3) and the paraenetic section (chs. 4-5). A number of writers have drawn attention to what is called the apostolic parousia (i.e. his presence, or his impending appearance, from παρουσία, G4242)—a section that comes between the body of the letter and the exhortation, and that brings out something of the writer’s desire to come to the recipients, the hindrance to this, perhaps the sending of an emissary, a seeking of divine approval, and some indication of the benefit that would result to the apostle, the recipients, or both. Thus H. Boers insists, "In 1 Thessalonians the purpose of the letter is disclosed by the inner connection of thanksgiving, apostolic apology and apostolic parousia (from παρουσία, G4242).”41 A good deal of hard work has been put into such study of this letter, but with all respect to the participants, it is not easy to see that it has brought any significant increase in our understanding of the meaning of what Paul wrote.
A number of scholars have given attention in recent times to the problems connected with the authorship of 2 Thessalonians. As we saw earlier, there have been suggestions that one of Paul’s assistants wrote the letter, that 2 Thessalonians really preceded 1 Thessalonians, or that the two were written for different audiences. Others have suggested that 2 Thessalonians was written to Philippi, or that it is made up of a number of fragments put together by a redactor. None of these positions has won wide acceptance. A number of scholars explore the view that 2 Thessalonians is pseudepigraphical. Sometimes they suggest that the aim was to replace 1 Thessalonians (some suggest this is in mind in 2 Thess. 2:2), which for various reasons displeased the pseudepigrapher. 42 Others think that the writer wrote out of esteem for Paul and tried in the spirit of the great apostle to add a message for his own day to what the apostle had written to meet the needs of an earlier day. But such hypotheses have not been notably more successful than the others we have noticed.
One problem is that no one seems to have come up with a convincing historical situation for a pseudepigraph. When was it written? To whom? For what purpose? The answers given to such questions satisfy few but the proponents of the hypotheses. Childs complains that "the two most recent attempts, by Trilling and Marxsen, to work out the pseudepigraphical hypothesis in the form of a commentary have demonstrated a new set of exegetical difficulties.” He finds a problem in the situation envisaged in the letter; furthermore, "The effort to discover post-Pauline features, particularly to develop the idea of a portrait of Paul, seems often unconvincing and contrived.” In Marxsen "a new form of psychologizing emerges.” 43
Childs goes on to raise the possibility of "II Thessalonians being written by someone under Paul’s general direction, and signed by the apostle to legitimate the letter which was mediated in its actual composition by an associate.” 44 He does not see the linking of Silvanus and Timothy with Paul in the opening as militating against this, and he proceeds to locate the letter "at a period considerably later than suggested by the traditional position.” But when he comes to the situation that called forth this letter, he can say only that it was "a peculiar historical situation of one church, the exact details of which have been largely lost” 45—which comes very close to the objection he has made to others who put forward the hypothesis of pseudepigraphy. 46
Some have argued that these letters are rightly understood only when they are seen as dealing with the problem of Gnosticism. Marxsen argues this for 2 Thessalonians. He cites 2 Thess. 2:2, "The day of the Lord has come, is present” and says, "The difficulty disappears if we recognize that here a Gnostic idea is being expressed apocalyptically.” He goes on to say, "This provides us with a clue for understanding the whole situation.” 47 But this is a very slender basis on which to erect a Gnostic superstructure: for centuries other explanations of the passage have been found quite satisfactory.
Perhaps F. F. Bruce has it right when he says of this approach, "There is, in fact, nothing in the Thessalonian letters which requires explanation in terms of gnosticism; gnosticism can be read out of them only if it be first read into them.” 48