Section 13
C. NARRATIVE PART 1: THE THESSALONIANS’ CONVERSION AND FOLLOWING (1:4-10)
Without breaking stride, and still in the context of offering thanksgiving to God for the Thessalonian believers, Paul puts forth a third participle (“knowing”) 64 that modifies the main verb, “we give thanks.” But what begins as reassurance based on their divine election evolves immediately into a reminder of Paul’s preaching and of their coming to faith, both of which were accompanied by the Spirit’s power. So if the previous participle offered the immediate cause of thanksgiving — their service and love for Christ and others — this one offers the ultimate cause: their being grounded in God’s calling them to himself for his own divine purposes. And all of this has apparently been brought about by Timothy’s report as to their remaining faithful in the context of their present suffering.
The result is that Paul’s affirmation as to the divine source of their calling and election (v. 4) is followed immediately by a reminder, first, of the realization of that election through his effective ministry among them (v. 5), then of their own role in furthering the gospel in Thessalonica (v. 6), and finally of the widespread knowledge of their conversion65 and its radical nature (vv. 7-10). In the process the thankgiving disappears,66 as it segues into a long narrative about his and their past and most recent relationship. Since in 2:1 the narrative begins with a considerable recall of Paul’s (and his companions’) conduct while in Thessalonica, the present section, which reminds them of their own conversion, may be properly viewed as its introduction.
The two main concerns in the first part of the narrative that follows (1:7-2:12) are thus introduced in verse 5. (1) The fact and nature of their conversion are reiterated as a reminder that their true origins as followers of Christ were a combination of the gospel message accompanied by a powerful work of the Holy Spirit in their lives; this is then elaborated in verses 6-10. (2) The final clause in verse 5 (“just as you yourselves know how we lived among you for your sake”) elaborates the opening phrase, “our gospel came to you,” and thus anticipates the long elaboration in 2:1-12.
1. Paul Reminds the Thessalonians of Their Experience of Conversion (1:4-7)
4 For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, 5 because our67 gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with68 the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among6 you for your sake. 69 You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by70 the Holy Spirit. 7 And so you became a model71 to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.
With verse 4, and still in the mode of thanksgiving, Paul offers divine love and election as the foundation of the Thessalonians’ faith that prompts his thanksgiving. This is probably also intended to be a theological undergirding of their faith, so as to lead to yet further faithfulness, which is where verse 5 fits in. The evidence of their election is to be found in their conversion itself. What is significant in this reminder is the experienced, evidential nature of what is to be recalled. Their election itself is a positional reality;72 but their own appropriation of that reality came about through a combination of experiential factors: Paul’s powerful, Spirit-inspired preaching of the gospel, resulting in their joyful experience of conversion, all orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. Thus, just as later in writing to the Galatians,73 Paul here shows none of the contemporary Western church’s anxiety about appealing to experience as part of the overall reality of coming to Christian faith.
In this case Paul’s concern seems clear. He grounds their experienced faith in God’s prior love and election (v. 4). And since he is appealing to their own conversion as a means of encouragement in the midst of present suffering, 74 the reminder is twofold: of the nature of Paul’s proclamation of the gospel, that it was accompanied by the Holy Spirit’s power (v. 5); and of their own experience of receiving the gospel (“the word”), that it was accompanied by an untrammeled joy produced by the Holy Spirit — despite the sufferings they also came to experience (v. 6). The net result of all this was their serving as a model for believers throughout Greece.
4 The “for” with which this sentence begins in the TNIV (cf. NRSV) is an attempt to capture the sense of the participle “knowing,” as the cause or basis of the apostles’ thanksgiving. The content of what is known reflects Paul’s understanding of the inclusion of Gentiles in the divine plan, given that his language deliberately echoes the foundational text of Jewish understanding of their relationship with God, Deuteronomy 7:7-8: “The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, . . . but it was because the LORD loved you . . . that he brought you out with a mighty hand.”75 The point, of course, is that Israel did nothing to deserve God’s redemption from slavery and election as his people; it was God’s doing altogether. Given that many of the first Gentile converts to Christ had regularly attended the Jewish synagogue in Thessalonica, it seems very likely that a goodly number of them would have heard Paul’s usage here as a transfer of privilege to them as followers of the Jewish Messiah.
That such is the case seems especially so, given that the language “loved by God” modifies the vocative “brothers [and sisters].” This is the first of fourteen such vocatives in this letter, which, along with the eight in 2 Thessalonians, are by far the highest incidence of this vocative in Paul’s extant letters.76 The commonplace nature of this appellation should not make us immune to its considerable significance in the Pauline corpus, where it reflects the imagery of the church as God’s household, where Christ is the householder and all who are his are family, related to one another as “brothers and sisters.” This familial metaphor for the believing community can be traced back biblically to Exodus 2:11, where Moses goes out to visit his own “brothers” (= fellow Israelites) and sees an Egyptian beating one of his “brothers” — a usage that then carries throughout the Old Testament.77 Usage by early Christians, and especially the inclusion of Gentiles, can be traced back directly to Jesus himself, where in a strictly family-oriented context he deliberately throws the net wide to include all in God’s family who do God’s will (Mark 3:34-35 // Matt 12:49-50 // Luke 8:20).78
The noun “election” itself is found elsewhere in Paul’s letters only in Romans 9-11, all having to do with Israel.79 Elsewhere Paul uses the verb (Eph 1:4) or the adjective “elect.”80 Although this language does not occur frequently in his letters, its occurrence in a passage like the present one indicates that it is presuppositional for him. It should be noted that in the present case Paul is thinking of the whole body of Thessalonian believers as elect, not individual believers. Indeed, although he refers once to an individual as “chosen” (Rom 16:13), his understanding of such election is presuppositionally related to a person’s incorporation into the community of believers. Moreover, for Paul “election” is always a referent to believers, and thus reflects a reality after the fact, not before; and as here it is always seen as an action of God’s love, and thus it becomes a dynamic force in the life of the believing community.81
Almost certainly all the language of this opening clause (“elect, brothers [and sisters], loved by God”), as the first affirmation of what Paul “knows” about them, is in direct response to their present suffering at the hands of their fellow countrymen.82 The Thessalonian believers may be disdained and persecuted by their pagan neighbors, but they are assured at the outset that they are loved by God and therewith his “chosen ones” in Thessalonica — and “brothers and sisters” of Paul and his companions and to all others who belong to God’s newly formed people.
5 With these next two clauses, in what becomes an even longer sentence, Paul offers the content83 of what he knows. First, he reminds the Thessalonians of the experiential, thus evidential, nature of their election, as to how it came about. Second, he then uses this as a point of departure to remind these believers about his (and Silas’s and Timothy’s) ministry among them, a matter elaborated at such length in 2:1-12 that one is led to believe that this issue has been raised by others (probably his detractors) to call into question the Thessalonians’ own existence as believers.
The reason for this clause in its present context thus seems clear enough. What is less certain are some of the details, especially the phrase “in word only”84 and the twin phrases “with power” and “with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction.”85 Regarding the first matter, the use of “word” in the singular is most likely for rhetorical effect, since it is followed by two further singular nouns, “power” and “Holy Spirit.” Paul’s emphasis lies with the adverb “only.” His preaching was in fact a matter of “word,” an oral communication of the truth of the gospel; his point is that it was not that only, since their conversion would then have been a matter of assent or persuasion alone. And whatever else, the phrase “not only in word” is not an attempt to play the Spirit off against the Word.86 Rather, Paul seems to be doing two things with this contrast: First, he is setting up the argument in 2:1-12, that his preaching and the Thessalonians’ response are quite unrelated to the kind of “word” one finds among the religious and philosophical charlatans. As they well know, and as he will argue in 2:1-12, his manner of life among them as proclaimer of the gospel was quite in contrast to such purveyors of empty words, who used “flattery as a mask for greed” (2:5). Paul’s “word” was accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit and carried deep conviction.
Second, Paul wants to remind them, as he will the Corinthians in another context (1 Cor 2:1-5), that the message of the gospel is truth accompanied by experienced reality. It did indeed come “in word,” meaning in the form of proclaimed truth, as a message from God himself (see 2:4 and 13). But for this appeal the proof is in the eating. Thus God verified the truthfulness of the message by a display of his power through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Paul’s present emphasis, therefore, lies not with the persuasive truth of the gospel itself, even though that would almost certainly be the major point of contention on the part of his detractors. Indeed, what is striking about the phrase “our gospel” is its presuppositional nature; that is, Paul uses the term as something already well known to his readers, so that he does not need to fill in the content. But we may well surmise that his use of the phrase “the gospel of Christ” in 3:2 and “the gospel of our Lord Jesus” in 2 Thessalonians 1:8, both of which are almost certainly objective genitives, indicates that the “good news” he preached had Christ, crucified and now risen Lord, as its primary content. And such “good news” would have been seen as utter folly by the pagan opposition to the Thessalonian believers.
Nonetheless, as important as that content would have been to their being persuaded to follow Christ, Paul’s present emphasis is on the Thessalonians’ own experience of entry into the people of God when they gave assent to that content. Thus his present emphasis — for their sakes — is to remind them not of the gospel itself, but of their own experience of it; and he can make this appeal, as he does later in Galatians 3:1-6, because of the manifest experience of the Holy Spirit that accompanied their “conversion.”
That much seems certain; but the specific nature of what Paul is appealing to is not as immediately clear, since there is a considerable textual variation that indicates early scribes had some difficulty with the phrase as well. At issue is whether Paul is intending to refer to a threefold accompanying reality (“with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction,” NIV) or to a single reality where the second is a doublet that stands in apposition to “with power” (“with power [even] with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction,” TNIV). The difference in this case is a matter of textual choice, where the primary criteria for making such choices support the latter as Paul’s original text.87
But that textual choice does not solve the major problem, namely how the phrase modifies “our gospel came to you.” Does it refer to Paul’s actual preaching of the gospel,88 to “signs and wonders” that accompanied that preaching (as in the similar passage in Rom 15:19),89 or, as is almost certainly true of the similar passage in 1 Corinthians 2:4-5,90 to the Thessalonians’ actual conversion?91 Or do two or all three of these somehow coalesce in this sentence?
Most likely the answer lies with this last suggestion, so that at least the two realities of Paul’s Spirit-empowered preaching and their Spirit-experienced conversion are both in view, the latter being the consequence of the former (or, in this case, they represent the two sides of one reality). Nonetheless, even though in context (esp. vv. 2-4 and 6-10) the overall emphasis is on their becoming and being Christian believers, the primary emphasis in verse 5 falls on Paul’s Spirit-empowered preaching of the gospel that brought about their conversion. This seems certain from both the contrasting phrase, “not only in word,” and the concluding clause, “even as you know what manner of men we were toward you for your own sakes.” The latter in particular focuses on Paul’s and his co-workers’ preaching and behavior — and thus anticipates 2:1-12.
What this means, then, is that the twin phrases, “but in power” and “with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction,” refer primarily to Paul’s preaching, but not so much to the manner92 (or style) of the preaching as to its Spirit-empowered effectiveness. This seems to be the best way to make sense of what might at first blush look like a mere compounding of words. Contrary to some,93 the appeal can scarcely be to Paul’s own sense that his ministry was accompanied by power. The sentence insists that his gospel “came to you”94 in a certain manner. Thus the initial phrase on the positive side is not “with the Holy Spirit and power,”95 but simply “in power,” precisely because that for Paul is the proper contrast to coming merely “with speech” (cf. 1 Cor 2:1-5; 4:19). But lest “power” not be fully understood, Paul immediately qualifies by adding, “[that is], with the Holy Spirit and deep/full conviction.” Thus, the Holy Spirit is being designated as the source of the power in his preaching the gospel, the evidence of which was the full conviction that accompanied his preaching and resulted in their conversion.96
To be sure, the meaning of the latter expression (“full conviction”) is not that certain. Some97 have argued that the Greek noun98 should carry its ordinary meaning of “fullness” and thus refer to the great results of the work of the Spirit. Others99 would see it as referring to what happened to the Thessalonians in their hearing and receiving the gospel, and still others,100 to the assurance and confidence with which the missionaries presented the message. Most likely, as with the former phrase, it refers in a way both to Paul’s preaching and to their response to it. His preaching was accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit so as to carry great conviction, which finally was evidenced by their conversion.
Whether this language also presupposes accompanying “signs and wonders” is less certain. Very likely it does that as well. That is, even though the primary referent in the phrase “with power, [that is], with the Holy Spirit and full conviction” is to Paul’s Spirit-empowered proclamation of Christ, such passages as 2 Corinthians 12:12 and (esp.) Romans 15:18-19 indicate that his Spirit-empowered word was regularly accompanied by Spirit-empowered miracles as well. Not only so, but the evidence from Galatians 3:1-5 shows that his converts’ own experience of the Spirit was also accompanied by experiential phenomena to which Paul can appeal as evidence of their having become the children of God by faith. Thus, even though the first referent in the present language is to Paul’s Spirit-anointed preaching of Christ, the very presence of the “power of the Spirit” most likely implies these other accompanying phenomena as well. And in any case, the Thessalonians undoubtedly experienced such phenomena, so that the reminder of Paul’s preaching and their conversion as accompanied by the “power of the Spirit” would have brought to mind this whole complex of Spirit-empowered phenomena.101
In sum, this sentence points primarily to Paul’s Spirit-empowered preaching that led directly to the Thessalonians’ own reception of the Spirit in conversion, which is what Paul will go on to remind them of in verse 6. What is finally significant, of course, is that in both cases — his preaching and their conversion — the Spirit is the key; and there was an evidential expression to the work of the Spirit that Paul refers to as power, to which he can appeal so as to make his point stick. What follows — all the way through 3:10 — gives us all the necessary clues as to the reasons for this emphasis. The concern is twofold: their belonging to God’s elect; and that by virtue of the work of Christ and the Spirit.
But this appeal is not quite enough, so Paul shifts from reminding them of the Spirit-inspired preaching that led to the Thessalonians’ conversion to appealing to their own memory of what manner of men the three of them had been while in Thessalonica. This is in clear anticipation of the defense of the apostles’, especially Paul’s, own character that will be picked up in 2:1-12. “You know” what manner of men we were “among you102 for your sake.” This appeal to the Thessalonians’ recall of what they “know” is one of the notably repeated themes in these two letters, occurring no fewer than nine times.103 The later occurrences of the “you know” motif suggest that Paul is here already anticipating this emphasis on their recalling their own experience of his ministry. As 2:1-12 makes certain, Paul is doing so in light of some slanderous accusations against him that form part of the Thessalonians’ current “suffering” for the sake of Christ. To this suffering Paul will return next (v. 6), along with a substantial reminder of how well known their turning to Christ had become (vv. 7-10). All of this together suggests that slanders against Paul and the Thessalonians’ suffering merge at the point of what they have been experiencing at the hands of their detractors in Thessalonica.
6 This sentence has the closest kind of ties to what has just preceded. Indeed, even though most English translations follow the Greek editors and put a full stop at the end of verse 5, it seems more likely that the “and” with which the present clause begins (omitted in the TNIV) is to be understood as a coordinating conjunction.104 This would probably be seen more clearly had he not included the somewhat parenthetical “just as” clause at the end of our verse 5. Thus the full sentence appears to have the following structure (abbreviated in order to see its essential parts):
Knowing your election, that our gospel came (egenēthē) to you . . . with power, (just as you know how we were toward you), and you became (egenēthēmen) imitators of us and of the Lord. . . .
Thus, even though the thanksgiving is beginning to get away from Paul somewhat, 105 this clause still forms part of it and elaborates the two concerns of verses 4-5: the reality of their own election and its relationship to Paul’s ministry. It begins with the latter but concludes with, and thus emphasizes, the former. Paul has just said: “You know how we were toward you for your sakes”; now he adds: “indeed, you yourselves106 became107 imitators of us — and of the Lord.” The content of their “imitation” is then spelled out in terms of their having received the word108 in the midst of great affliction, but accompanied by the joy of the Holy Spirit.109 Each of these items needs further comment.
It should be noted, first, that what they “received” is “the word,”110 thus picking up the proclamation dimension of verse 5, and so verifying that “not in word only” is not downplaying the message itself, but rather is emphasizing that it was accompanied by the Spirit’s power. This is further substantiated in verse 8, where “the word of [= that comes from] the Lord” has been broadcast throughout Macedonia and Achaia in the form of a report about its effectively bringing about the Thessalonians’ putting their faith in God.
Secondly, for Paul the concept of becoming “imitators” ordinarily means far more than what is said in this instance.111 Indeed, Paul’s calling on his converts elsewhere to “imitate” him as he “imitated” Christ is the key to the ethical instructions given in his churches, where they have no “book” to follow. 1 Corinthians 11:1 provides the starting point: Paul considered himself a follower of the example and teaching of Christ; his following Christ then served as a “model” for his churches, who in turn, as verse 7 in our present passage makes clear, became “models” for others.
His present concern, however, is with their imitating Paul, and thus maintaining faith, in the midst of suffering.112 For Paul, suffering was an expected concomitant of discipleship (see 3:2-3 below); indeed, it is something believers “glory in” (Rom 5:3), not because they love to suffer, but because for Paul it is the mark of genuine discipleship. Hence he reminds them that in this matter — suffering as believers — they have his own example (cf. 2:1-2, 15; 3:8), and especially that of their common Lord, Jesus Christ.113 So much is this a “matter of fact” for him that over a decade later he writes to their fellow Macedonians in Philippi that “it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him” (Phil 1:29). Such suffering as an expected dimension of life in Christ very likely also had an eschatological dimension to it; disciples were expected to join in the sufferings of the Messiah that would usher in the Eschaton.
What strikes one here is what he recalls for them as the evidence of their genuine conversion: their experience of joy, resulting from the Holy Spirit’s invasion of their lives. The little phrase, “with the joy of the Holy Spirit,” probably tells us much about both the paganism from which they had come and the life of the Spirit into which they had entered. On the one hand, life as a pagan may have had its moments of happiness, as it does for humanity in general, but by and large it was for them a life of heaviness and toil, arid in religion and empty in personal fulfillment — especially for the slaves and poor freedmen who would have made up a large sector of the typical early Christian congregation (cf. 1 Cor 1:26).114 But in coming to Christ and thus receiving the Holy Spirit, they had been filled with such an unparalleled joy that even in the midst of genuine hardships related to their having become believers, this is the one characteristic of their life in the Spirit that Paul recalls for them as clear evidence of their conversion. This suggests in the strongest possible way that for Paul joy is one of the certain hallmarks of genuine spirituality (Spirit-uality?).
Thus we find here that remarkable collocation of joy and suffering found throughout the New Testament.115 The early church understood suffering to be part of its lot, and believers were not to be surprised by it (1 Thess 3:2-3); yet because they had experienced their new life as the indwelling of the Spirit, they also lived with great joy. In the midst of present suffering, their experience of the eschatological Spirit had given them a foretaste of the life to come.116 Precisely because of the Spirit’s presence in this way, Paul will later in this letter describe the “will of God” in the form of three imperatives, the first of which is, “Rejoice always” (5:16-18). It should also be noted that, although not expressed elsewhere in quite this way, Paul will regularly pick up on the theme of joy in his letters, and in Galatians 5:22 will place this quality of life in the Spirit as second in the list of the Spirit’s “fruit.”
7 If our surmise that the “and” with which verse 6 begins functions grammatically to connect the second part of a (now very long) compound sentence, then the present result clause (v. 7) finally brings the whole to a conclusion. In any case, it brings the clause that began in verse 6 to its conclusion. As a further word of reassurance Paul informs the Thessalonian believers’ that their “imitation” of Paul, Silas, and Timothy, and thus of the now-reigning Lord (see n. 48 above), has in turn served as a “model”117 for “all the believers in Macedonia and [in] Achaia.”118
That much is clear enough. The difficulties arise with the relationship of this sentence to that which follows immediately (as our v. 8), which elaborates by explaining “how” they had become such a model. “All the believers” refers to those who had come to faith119 — almost certainly through the ministry of the three itinerants — in the two provinces that make up the whole of ancient Greece, which would include all of modern Greece and at least the southern part of modern Macedonia. Although his and Silas’s path was most likely more narrowly circumscribed, Paul is well aware that word about the gospel and its affects in Thessalonica had spread like wildfire among the Jewish synagogues in Greece, and therefore especially among the Gentiles who attended the synagogues. And as the word spread, the Thessalonians served as a “model” of “faith in the midst of suffering” as the gospel continued west and southward. Thus Paul sees them, like a stone thrown into the water, as fitting into an ever-widening circle of “models” to be “imitated”: Christ → Paul → Thessalonica → Macedonia and Achaia.
This passage has considerable significance, both theologically and in terms of Christian conversion, well beyond its first purpose of encouraging the Thessalonians by reminding them of both the fact and nature of their conversion. Indeed, it is of more than passing interest that Paul’s first recorded thanksgiving is so full of information regarding his understanding of “conversion” as such. In fact, had the majority of people who made up the believing community in Thessalonica had Jewish origins, this “thanksgiving” would have been expressed quite differently. But as it is, it stands as the first — and vivid — reminder that early Christian conversion among Gentiles was an experienced reality, and that both “faith,” here expressed as “deep conviction,” and the gift of the Holy Spirit were its essential ingredients. Even so, it was not their “conversion” itself that was to serve as a model for others, but the way they welcomed the gospel in the context of “severe suffering” that served as the model, and continues still to do so where “conversion” takes place outside of cultures deeply influenced by “Christendom.”
2. The Thessalonians’ Following Christ Had Become Well Known to Others (1:8-10)
8 The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia120 — your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, 9 for they themselves report121 what happened when we visited you. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the122 dead — Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
Our verses 8 and 9-10 are two separate explanatory sentences in Paul’s Greek, which the TNIV has helpfully broken into three, so that the various connections are more immediately accessible to the English reader. His first sentence (v. 8) explains the content of verse 7 by way of elaboration; the second sentence (vv. 9-10) starts out (v. 9a) to explain how Paul and his companions have arrived at their knowledge of the Thessalonians noted in verse 8, with emphasis again on his/their role in the Thessalonians’ becoming believers. The rest of the sentence (vv. 9b-10) then goes on to remind the Thessalonians about the content of the report regarding their own becoming followers of Christ. What is thus kept alive in this long explanation are the twin concerns of the Thessalonians’ own (widely known) faith in Christ and Paul’s and his companions’ role in the same.
8 With another explanatory “for,” Paul sets out to elaborate the content of verse 7. In so doing, however, his aim is not to specify how the Thessalonian believers had become a model for those in the rest of Macedonia and in Achaia who had come to believe. Rather, he notes the considerably extensive nature of the report itself. His emphasis is thus twofold: on the fact that it was from you — the first thing up in his sentence — that “the Lord’s message” had gone out; and on the truly expansive nature of what had “rung out from you” — not only Macedonia and Achaia, but everywhere. At issue are the “what” and “how” of this report, which is expressed in a sentence whose grammar works technically, but whose overall sense is not immediately clear, thus the dash in the TNIV.
We begin with the structure of the sentence itself, which reads (somewhat literally):
For from you has rung out the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia; but everywhere your faith toward God has gone out.
The (apparent) grammatical difficulty is related to Paul’s use of “not only” in the first clause, which ordinarily would be followed with a “but also.” In this case, however, his concern is not with the specifics of the geographical dimension of what has “rung out/gone out,” but with the what that has spread so broadly. Thus instead of the expected “also,”123 the present clause basically repeats the concern, if not the actual content of the first clause.124 What this means then (apparently) is that the two clauses should be viewed as in near apposition to each other. This is supported by the two verbs themselves, where the first one125 is a metaphor for something’s being “noised abroad,” while the second is more literally descriptive (“has gone out”). If this is the case, and everything grammatically lies heavily in its favor, then we should understand the second clause as further explaining the first. Given this understanding of the difficult structure of Paul’s sentence, that would mean further that the phrase “from you” is not to be taken as a form of “agency” — as though the Thessalonian believers themselves had preceded Paul in proclaiming Christ elsewhere126 — but in its ordinary sense of “the point from which something begins.”127
What has “rung out from you,” Paul affirms, is “the word of the Lord,” a phrase which in most cases, as it surely is in 4:17 below,128 would be a subjective genitive, referring either to a word the Lord has spoken129 or to the gospel message that has its origins with the Lord.130 But in this first instance the phrase is best understood as an objective genitive, referring to the message about the Lord. It is also likely, therefore, that the phrase does not refer directly to the content of the gospel,131 as though the message itself about Jesus had preceded the missionaries wherever they have gone in Greece. Rather, what has “rung out” from Thessalonica is a report about what the Lord has done in and among them, a word that has (probably) spread like wildfire from place to place, so that the synagogues in Berea and Corinth, to name the two we know about for sure, have heard about what happened in Thessalonica before Paul and Silas (and later Timothy) made their way there. To be sure, such a message would have had some measure of content of the gospel in it, or what has been reported would make little sense. The content of what was being noised abroad is what Paul will take up in verses 9-10; and that indeed does have some gospel content to it. Nonetheless, it serves primarily to describe what has happened to the Thessalonians themselves, and does so in terms of what it would mean for Gentiles to respond to the message of the gospel.
Thus, as much as some might wish to think of the Thessalonian believers as becoming evangelists to the rest of Greece before Paul and Silas got there, the evidence of this letter (and of 2 Thessalonians) suggests otherwise. They have become a suffering minority in Thessalonica, who for the most part have stayed home and faced the pagan onslaught there.132 Indeed, when Paul himself explains what he means, he notes that “your faith in God has become known everywhere, so that133 we do not need to say anything about it.” Thus “the word about the Lord” that has “rung out” from them is the fast-spreading report about “their faith, a faith which is (directed) toward God,” which is further explained in verse 10 as their “turning to the living God from idols.”134 Thus Paul is here anticipating what he will say next in verses 9 and 10.
While that much seems clear from both the content and the forced grammar of Paul’s sentence, what we do not know is how all of this happened. What we may guess with some degree of confidence is related to the significance of the city itself. Unlike Philippi, which served as a Roman outpost on the eastern end of the Macedonian plain, Thessalonica was a thriving Greco-Roman city, situated on a splendid seaport and sitting astraddle the very important Egnatian Way that connected Rome with all points east, especially Byzantium (later Constantinople and Istanbul). News from here spread naturally and swiftly to other parts of the two provinces by way both of ship and of the major roads that connected Thessalonica with Athens and Corinth in the south. And since, according to Acts 17 and 18, this is the route Paul and Silas themselves took, it would have been easy for news about the stirring things that had happened among these Gentiles — who had formerly attended the synagogue in Thessalonica — to make its way rather quickly west and south. Whether the Thessalonian believers themselves knew about their “fame” is moot — probably not — but in any case Paul’s telling (or reminding) them of it here is undoubtedly intended to be a means of encouragement in the midst of their present suffering.
9-10 With this explanatory sentence Paul now concludes his considerable narrative of the notoriety of the Thessalonians’ faith and of his and his companions’ role in the same. The structure of the sentence tells it all. What “they themselves” (people in Macedonia and Achaia) report is twofold: what sort of welcome we had among you; and how you turned from idols to serve the living and true God. At the same time he concludes with a note regarding the “coming wrath,” which will be the lot of those who are presently making life miserable for the Thessalonian believers. It is to these detractors and their misrepresentations of Paul that he now turns.
Given the considerable apologia that follows immediately in 2:1-12, which is connected to the present narrative with an explanatory “for,” one should not be too surprised by how the present sentence begins — with an explanatory: “for they themselves report about us,135 what sort of welcome we had among you.” Indeed, this is quite in keeping with the way the first long sentence in the thanksgiving concludes (v. 5b), where Paul would have them recall for themselves “how we lived among you for your sake.” Although the emphasis throughout this thanksgiving report-turned-narrative is on the Thessalonians themselves, these two clauses together (v. 5b and v. 9a) remind the reader that the force of the opposition in Thessalonica was two-pronged: calling into question the Thessalonians’ faith, which was based in part on calling into question Paul’s ministry. So he begins this final explanatory sentence by focussing on his own ministry in Thessalonica, which is the first matter up in the long narrative that follows (2:1-12).
Nonetheless, the thrust of this final sentence does not focus on Paul and his companions but on the nature of the Thessalonians’ own conversion story, where the emphasis lies with two aspects of that conversion: that in becoming followers of Christ they had abandoned lifeless idols in order to serve the living and true God; and that they presently await the consummation of their salvation at which time their enemies will experience God’s wrath. As with so many such moments in Paul’s letters, some sectors of New Testament scholarship are enamored with the possibility that the content of this clause had preexistence as a creed of some sort, especially so since much of what is said here does not occur elsewhere in his letters.136 In any case, everything that is said here seems so carefully tailored to speak into the Thessalonians’ own situation, having already been anticipated in verse 8, that the question of sources seems ultimately irrelevant.137
But one matter that is raised by this passage, which is also not fully answerable, has to do with the ethnicity of the believing community to whom Paul is writing. The text clearly presupposes a congregation composed primarily of pagan Gentiles, since Paul would scarcely use this language when addressing ethnic Jews, and probably not when addressing Gentile “God-fearers” as well. His referring to them as having “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God,” which on the surface seems to be all-embracing, must in this case be understood as directed toward this formerly pagan majority. In this respect even God-fearers among them who had attached themselves to the synagogue would have previously belonged to the Gentile population that alone could be described in this way. In the end, therefore, regarding the makeup of the believing community in Thessalonica this sentence tells us only that it was composed chiefly of Gentiles; and Paul’s emphasis in this description thus lies with Gentile, rather than Jewish, conversion to the Christian gospel.138
Three points are made by Paul in this concluding sentence: (1) the contrast between the Thessalonians’ “before” and “after,” with scarcely hidden Jewish scorn for idolatry and a typically Jewish designation of God as “the living and true God”; (2) that they are currently “between the times” and are waiting for the conclusion of their salvation, which includes escaping the coming wrath (which their persecutors will indeed experience); and (3) that the one responsible for their salvation is the risen Jesus, here designated as “the Son of God.”
One should note, first, that the passage breathes the perspective of Jewish monotheism. Both epithets, “the living God” and “the true God,” reflect the language of such monotheism in Israel’s long struggle against idolatry. To be sure, the two terms appear together only in Jeremiah 10:10 (“But Yahweh is the true God; he is the living God, the eternal King”);139 nonetheless, they appear separately in a variety of polemical contexts.140 Whatever else is true of the God of the Jews, he is “the living God,” over against the lifeless idols of the pagan world; and precisely because he alone is the living God, he is therefore “the [one] true God” over against the false gods of idolatry. Moreover, the living and true God is further identified, here for the first time in the corpus, as the God “who raised [his Son] from the dead.” This remarkable way of identifying the God of Israel occurs just often enough in Paul for Hans Küng to remark that “ ‘he who raised Jesus from the dead’ becomes practically the designation of the Christian God.”141
What is striking, therefore, on further reflection, is the designation of Christ as “his Son from heaven,142 whom he raised from the dead — Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.” That is, the “living and true God” has a Son, who is currently “in heaven” by virtue of the Father’s having raised him from the dead;143 and this Son is none other than the earthly Jesus, the one who also rescues144 us from the wrath of God that will be poured out on all who do not obey him (cf. 2 Thess 1:6-10). It should be noted that this is the earliest known reference in Christian literature to the resurrection of Christ, the single most crucial event in early — and all — Christian faith. What is further significant in this reference is the absolutely presuppositional way it is mentioned,145 in the same way as the Son’s present exaltation in heaven is assumed throughout the letter. This primary Christian assumption thus especially lies behind several items that follow: the prayer directed to him in 3:12-13; the mention of his Parousia in 3:13; and the whole argument about the resurrection of believers in 4:13-18 (esp. v. 16).
With the designation “[God’s] Son” what was assumed in 1:1 about God as Father now becomes explicit. Although the designation “Son” is not especially frequent in Paul, occurring only here in the Thessalonian correspondence, 146 it is expressed in such a presuppositional way that Paul assumes his readers to be on the same page with him. This designation of the risen Christ as “Son” appears again in 1 Corinthians 15:28; but it occurs most often in Paul’s letters with reference to the Son’s “giving his life” for us (2 Cor 1:19; Gal 2:20; 4:4-5; Rom 8:3, 32; Col 1:13). Paul also designates Christ as “Son” when he thinks of salvation as effecting the new creation, in which we are being transformed back into the divine image, whose perfect expression is to be found in God’s Son (Rom 8:29-30).
Several passages in Paul indicate that the presuppositional beginning point for this title is Jewish messianism, namely 1 Corinthians 15:23-28; Romans 1:3-4 (and 8:32 indirectly); and Colossians 1:12-15.147 Although one cannot be sure how much instruction the Thessalonians had received on this usage, Paul’s reference here to the Son as in heaven with the Father most likely (presuppositionally) carries the double sense (a) of the Son’s now reigning as the Jewish Messiah, seated at God’s right hand (Ps 110:1), who (b) through his resurrection and exaltation has come to be understood as the eternal Son, who had been sent from the Father to redeem.148
Whether this double sense would have been available to the Thessalonians is perhaps moot. But both the internal evidence found elsewhere in these letters (Paul’s intertextual use of the Septuagint) and the external evidence from Acts 17:1-6 would lead one to think so. The passage in Acts indicates that many of these former idolators had already attached themselves to the Jewish synagogue and thus formed the nucleus of the neophyte Christian community.149 One may therefore also assume that they had already been instructed in the (now) double sense of Jesus as the Son of God.
It is of further interest that this single reference to “the Son” in this letter occurs in connection with his earthly name “Jesus,” where the emphasis is on his role at the eschatological conclusion of things. This seems especially to be in anticipation of 4:13-18.150 The significance of this is that in the latter passage Paul shifts in verse 14 — after explicit reference to Jesus’ resurrection — from the name “Jesus” to the title “the Lord.” This combination indicates that the two most significant messianic “titles,” Lord and Son, which occur together a little later in 1 Corinthians 15:23-28, are already in place when Paul wrote this letter.
One should also note that in the present passage the emphasis is not on believers’ being present with the Son at his coming, but on the fact that the now risen Jesus will “deliver us151 from the wrath that is to come.” It is of interest that the word “wrath” is used exclusively in the New Testament to refer to God’s final judgment on the wicked, and thus is never used regarding believers, whose present lot is “tribulation/suffering.”152 Thus the focus here is not on the Thessalonian believers’ final glory, but on their opponents’ final destruction, an emphasis which fits altogether the overall perspective of the present narrative.153 The encouragement, therefore, in this case is not with regard to their own future — that comes later — but on the fact that those who are making life miserable for them in Thessalonica, people who worship non-living, and therefore deaf and mute, idols are themselves destined for final judgment.
We should note finally that whether this passage had some kind of prior existence in a semi-creedal way is not only moot but ultimately irrelevant, since its point is precisely apropos to the present situation in Thessalonica. The Thessalonian believers themselves have abandoned “dead gods” for “the living and true God”; they may thus confidently await God’s Son from heaven, who will himself mete out divine “wrath” on their enemies. And all of this works especially well if one presupposes that the issue being addressed — somewhat indirectly — is opposition from within the pagan community in Thessalonica. Since the nature of that opposition is what Paul turns to next, this is very likely Paul’s way of deliberately introducing them into the narrative at this point as those destined to experience God’s wrath.
Two matters from this first recorded description of the results of Christian “conversion” would seem to have ongoing significance. First, Paul was aware of the fact that the news of it had spread rapidly to other population centers. One may rightly assume that this happened by way of the Gentiles who had formerly been associated with the Jewish synagogues, but had now become followers of the Crucified One. Good news is to be shared; and these early believers were doing only what one should expect of them. Nonetheless, second, Paul’s own emphasis is on the theological/experiential content of their conversion(s), which here focuses on the “before” and “after” of it. Former pagans, who had been worshipers of idols (“dead gods”), have now given themselves “to serve the living and true God.” The end result of such conversion was a new orientation, an eschatological one, wherein they were now waiting for the final consummation. For Paul, after all, conversion was not a changing of religious beliefs; rather, through the gift of the Spirit a person has passed from death into life — now and forever.