Section 16
F. NARRATIVE PART 3: THE THESSALONIANS’ (AND PAUL’S) ILL TREATMENT (2:14-16)
14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your fellow citizens the same things those churches suffered from the Jews,286 15 who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets287 and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone 16 in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God288 has come upon them at last.285
This passage, mostly a single long sentence in the Greek text,289 has also long been a major crux, both for those who are simply reading through the letter and for New Testament scholarship itself.290 So abrupt is this passage, beginning with the hoti (“because/that,” rendered as a colon in the TNIV) toward the end of verse 14 — and so unexpected by the reader — that it is not surprising that more than one New Testament scholar has been willing to excise it as a later addition to the text by an “anti-Judaic” faction within early Christianity. 291 But this is a counsel of despair, which is trying to “rescue” Paul from early Christian anti-Semitism. But the passage is simply too Pauline to yield to such despair; and those who take this position never answer the real historical question: why has it been inserted here and not in a more “logical” place in other letters? In any case, this view does not have a single solid historical leg to stand on — and could only have arisen at a time in history when one (rightly) fears anything that could be taken as anti-Semitic.292 But that is to misread Paul, who himself could be accused of such an attitude toward his own people, not only here but elsewhere. Thus scholarly integrity demands that one come to terms with the passage as having been written by one for whom its immediate context has touched a raw nerve regarding his own treatment by fellow, but non-believing, members of the Jewish community.293 Unfortunately, and quite beyond Paul’s own context, it has also served to inflame an anti-Jewish sentiment among some who would like to think of themselves as Christians, but at this point are acting otherwise.
The flow of the sentence is easy enough to trace. With an explanatory “for”294 Paul reminds the Thessalonian believers of what will serve for him as primary evidence of the reality of their “having received the message” (v. 13), namely, that in so doing they became genuine followers of the believers within the Jewish community in Judea. The reason for this example is not difficult to discover, although not explicit in the text itself; rather, it comes to us by way of the evidence given in Luke’s abbreviated (and telescoped?) account in Acts 17:1-10. A riot aroused by the Jewish community, but apparently then carried on by Gentiles,295 had taken a nasty turn with regard to Paul and Silas, which had caused them to be rushed out of the city at night. So here Paul reminds them that the ultimate source of the initial disturbance came from unbelieving Jews; and thus the Thessalonian believers experienced the same sort of persecution from their “own fellow citizens” that the Jewish believing community had experienced in Judea.
That much, at least, seems clear and understandable; our difficulties arise with the elaboration of the persecution of believers in Judea (ironically carried out in part at the beginning by Paul himself!), in which Paul now throws the net wide, starting with Jesus, then (probably) Christian prophets, and finally Paul and his companions themselves, all with an eye toward those who would forbid them to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles. However, Paul’s memory of that persecution is still sharp enough that he concludes by prophetically announcing their ultimate divine judgment. And at this point the narrative becomes much more oblique for those of us looking on from this historical distance.
14 With his fourth vocative in the letter, and with yet another explanatory “for,” Paul sets out to tie the second thanksgiving to the hard realities of life as a believer in pagan Thessalonica. In so doing he also returns to the “imitation” motif that flowed out of the first thanksgiving (1:6), and again, as before, does so in the context of the Thessalonians’ own suffering as followers of Christ. But with the comparison itself, “God’s churches in Judea which are in Christ Jesus,” the entire narrative shifts focus. With this phrase-turned-clause Paul accomplishes at least two things. First, he identifies the churches among the Jewish believers in Judea as also belonging to God; they are “God’s churches in Judea,”296 a geographical locator. Second, though belonging to God, as do all the churches, they presently, and always, exist “in Christ Jesus,” the ultimate “location” of their existence. As in 1:1 above, in this second use of the word ekklēsia in the letter (and thus in the corpus), Paul clearly thinks of the gathered people in any given locale as “the church in that town/city.”
But why, one might rightly wonder, does he choose to identify the “churches” that are being “imitated” as being “in Judea”? Why not, for example, mention Gentile believers in Asia Minor? The most likely answer297 would seem to lie with Paul’s understanding of the church as God’s eschatological people in whom the Abrahamic covenant is at last being fulfilled: “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen 12:3). While this is finally spelled out in detail in Romans, it is already at work, and articulated clearly, in Galatians. It is Paul’s indomitable passion for the final and full realization of God’s covenant with Abraham that drives him to think regularly in terms of “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Rom 1:16). While this might be seen as reading too much into the present context, it is difficult to imagine that Paul had not fully instructed these Gentile converts in his understanding of their place in the divine scheme of things, especially assuming the basic historical reliability of the account in Acts 17.
And in this case the comparison works all the better, because what the Jewish and Gentile believers have in common is their “suffering” at the hands of “your own fellow citizens.”298 Although some have seen this phrase as referring to a Jewish instigation of the problem in Thessalonica,299 that would be an unusual sense for the word “your own,” since the Thessalonian believers were predominantly Gentiles.300 This is made the more certain by Paul’s addition regarding the Jewish believers in Judea that their persecution was perpetrated “by the Jews,” in this case referring first of all to the original meaning of the Greek term, “the Judeans” (= the Jewish people of Judea).301 There is nothing inherently pejorative to this designation; rather, it is for Paul a simple historical reality — after all, he himself was one of the them!302 — that the death of Jesus and the persecution of his followers were carried out by those from Jesus’ own people group who had vigorously (and religiously!) rejected his claims and those of his followers. And it is in light of the historic rejection of their Messiah that Paul speaks so strongly regarding the Jewish opponents of Christ.303 Thus the persecution these Gentile believers in Thessalonica have experienced is in keeping with what the Jewish believing community had been experiencing in Judea.
15-16a What happens next is a long litany against a sector of the Jewish community’s sins against Jesus and his followers that comes in three basic, but unequal, parts. Paul first enumerates their “sins” (vv. 15-16a), then adds a result clause that expresses the cumulative effect of these misdeeds (v. 16b). He then concludes with an announcement of God’s wrath = judgment against them (v. 16c). One can scarcely miss the very personal dimension of the enumeration, which not only includes their treatment of Paul but also ties that persecution very closely to their previous treatment of his Lord and to Paul’s own calling to the Gentile mission. Indeed, the litany concludes with the reason for everything. The Judean Jews’ rejection of Jesus as their Messiah has entailed a rejection of the inclusion of (especially uncircumcised) Gentiles into the eschatological people of God that is being formed through Christ and the Spirit.
But while the whole is somewhat easily discerned, some of the details are not. The reason for this in part is the result of Paul’s extensive barrage of Jewish misdeeds, which is so intense, and thus emotional, for him that it has become one of the many places in the New Testament where precision in understanding is very difficult for later readers. Not only are we not quite prepared for it here, but also we are simply too far removed from some of the details to have a very high degree of certainty. And in some ways our understanding has been affected by matters that Paul had nothing to do with: the insertion of verse numbers and punctuation into the text. On the one hand, a person can only wonder how the sentence would have been punctuated had it not had a number in front of it; on the other hand, the insertion of the comma has been a major factor in the historic (almost certainly incorrect) interpretation of the entire clause.
At issue ultimately are two related matters: (a) whether one views the participial modifier of “the Jews” as restrictive or nonrestrictive,304 and (b) whether the litany that follows is to be understood in a broad, general way, and thus to include Jews of the Diaspora, or whether it is case specific to members of the Palestinian Jewish community. While these two issues are intimately related, the first is the crucial one, and should finally be resolved in light of Pauline usage elsewhere. The problem for the English reader, it should be noted, is that there is no relative pronoun in the Greek text; rather, what follows “the Jews” is a participial construction, where the definite article preceding the participle (lit. = “the also killing Jesus ones”) functions like a relative pronoun in English. It must further be noted that this particular grammatical construction is rarely, if ever, nonrestrictive in Paul’s letters. In fact, up to this point in the present letter there have been six such modifiers, and in each case they are restrictive.305
If one takes this grammatical reality seriously, then one should expect Paul’s modifier in this case to be restrictive.306 It is not all Jews who are in view, but those who in particular were responsible for the death of Jesus and the prophets. And if that is so, then one’s first interpretive instincts should be to see whether one can make sense of the whole passage with this usage in view. In any case, this is the perspective from which the rest of Paul’s long sentence will be interpreted in the comments that follows. Thus, it is not the Jewish community as such, nor as a whole, who are singled out here, but especially a part of the Judean sector of the community, whose leaders violently opposed Christ and his early followers.
The enumeration itself is fourfold307 but has six parts, which may be displayed thus (as much as possible in Paul’s word order so as to retain his emphases):
At issue finally in terms of overall interpretation are items (a’) and the two d clauses. Furthermore, it seems quite clear that everything ultimately focuses on the final item, which for Paul and the Thessalonians together is the really sore spot. A few words are needed about each of the items, some of which are especially difficult to pin down in terms of historical specifics.
(a) It is of some interest that in this first reference to the death of Jesus in his letters, Paul says simply that “the [Judean] Jews killed Jesus” rather than “crucified him.” This is probably because the Jews did not themselves crucify anyone; and in any case Paul’s concern is not with the salvific dimension of Christ’s death as “for us,” but simply with the fact that the Jewish community itself was ultimately responsible for the death of their Messiah. God’s own Son had been killed by God’s own people, a fact that Paul, in what follows, sees as part of a pattern of rejection of their (one and only) God.
(a’) By all counts the addition of “and the prophets” has been the most difficult part of this enumeration for later readers to discern what Paul intended. Historically this has been seen as a kind of afterthought, and thus as referring to the tradition about which Jesus himself refers in Matthew 23:33- 36 (“upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from Abel . . . to Zechariah, son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar”). Paul’s point would then be that the same community that killed Jesus and had persecuted the early followers of Jesus is now simply carrying on what their forebears had done as well,310 in which case “the Jews” is a much more generic, than case-specific, designation. That is, they are in the same lineage with those who before them had killed the prophets.
But there are considerable difficulties with this view. First, it does not seem to take Paul’s own wording seriously enough, where “and the prophets” is not an afterthought but the second part of a compound object, which in Paul’s sentence belong together as one (“both Jesus and the prophets”). Only the separating of this obviously compound object of “Jewish killing” allows one to make the entire clause nonrestrictive. But, second, this view scarcely fits with what else is said about the “Jews” who are the grammatical subject of the long clause. It was specifically the “Judean Jews” who killed Jesus and who “persecuted us,” who, along with others, are thus not pleasing to God and are hostile to all people. These same people, after all, did not kill the prophets of an earlier time; their forebears did. So to make this phrase refer to an earlier tradition of “killing the prophets” makes Paul a very untidy author at this point, since he could very easily have said, “who killed the Lord Jesus, as their fathers before them had killed the prophets.” Moreover, the same Matthean passage noted above continues with the words, “I [Jesus] am sending you prophets, . . . some of them you will kill” (v. 34), while in the lament in verse 37 Jesus speaks to “Jerusalem” as “you who kill the prophets.” Almost everyone recognizes that in “quoting” Jesus in this particular way, Matthew was well aware of what had already taken place among the followers of Jesus. If this is the correct understanding of the phrase, then Paul had in mind people like Stephen and James, viewing them as true Christian prophets. Thus, although the predominant view is possible grammatically, the view espoused here, despite its being a decidedly minority one, seems much more likely, since it fits both the grammar and the present context in a way the majority view does not.311
(b) The second phrase is even more difficult to pin down in terms of an actual historical moment. The verb itself can mean either “[who] persecuted us” or “[who] drove us out.” The former would seem to be more likely if we were to understand the whole passage as somewhat generic, and thus as referring to any number of such instances, rather than as a case-specific reference to a single event. On the other hand, this immediate addition of the Jewish community’s treatment of Paul makes considerable sense if at this point we take two other matters seriously: (i) that we in fact have limited access to Paul’s own personal history, and (ii) that among the matters about which we have almost no information is Paul’s own catalog of hardships listed in 2 Corinthians 11:22-29. Here, just a few years later, he enumerates among others things that “five times I received from the Jews [the same Greek word] the forty lashes minus one” (v. 24) and further as “in danger from my own people” (v. 26). One may readily grant that the latter item (v. 26) could easily be extended to what happened to Paul in the Diaspora,312 but it is nearly impossible to imagine that the former (v. 24) could be, since it seems most highly unlikely that Diaspora Jews could have so mistreated a Roman citizen — and no fewer than five times — while such things could easily have happened in Judea, where in these kinds of “religious” matters the Romans tended to turn a blind eye (as they seem obviously to have done regarding the stoning of Stephen). Thus, whether Paul meant “persecuted us” or “drove us out,” the clause makes especially good sense as referring to the Judean Jews’ treatment of Paul.313
(c-d) The third and fourth phrases in this enumeration are probably, as in the TNIV, to be understood together as a generalizing word that reflects on the relationship of these Jewish persecutors to both God and humankind. In anticipation of the final clause, which puts this whole litany into perspective (forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles with their salvation in view), Paul refers to them as simultaneously “not pleasing to God”314 and thus as “hostile to all people.”315 That is, on the one hand what they have been about and are still doing is diametrically opposed to what God is doing in the world, while on the other hand their displeasing God finds its ultimate expression in their hostility to humanity. This, of course, is hyperbole. As we discover momentarily, such hostility takes the form of their trying to deny the gospel to the Gentiles. One can well understand, therefore, how Paul sees this as “jealousy” on their part.
(d’) The purpose of this long and striking denunciation of the “Jews” — who had earlier been responsible for the persecution of “the churches of God in Judea, which belong to Christ Jesus” — is finally reached with this concluding modifier of the phrase “by the Jews” (mentioned at the end of our verse 15). How those responsible for killing both the Lord Jesus and the prophets have also “persecuted us” is by “[their effort]316 to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles” with their eternal salvation in view.
With this clause the entire sentence, from verse 14, begins to fall into place. Paul’s ultimate concern has been for the Thessalonian believers, who are mostly Gentiles. In their positive response to the apostles’ proclamation of Christ as savior of Jew and Gentile alike — and together as one people of God — they have experienced the same kind of suffering that the Jewish believers in Judea before them had suffered from a similar source. That is, the Thessalonian believers have been suffering at the hands of their fellow Gentile citizens just as the Jewish believers — and Paul as well, he will add — suffered at the hands of fellow Jewish citizens. And when that reality is spelled out in some detail, as going back to their killing Jesus himself, not to mention some early Christian prophets, the point of the entire enumeration is reached with this final clause, having to do with the salvation of the Thessalonians themselves. Thus with this final clause the link is complete:
a) You became imitators of the churches in Judeab) in that you have suffered greatly from your fellow citizens in Thessalonica;b’) likewise the Jewish believers themselves suffered from fellow Jews [who were the same people responsible for the death of Christ and early Christian martyrdoms, . . . ],a’) people who would also have forbidden you to become followers of Christ.
Thus the ultimate aim of this enumeration is to remind the Thessalonians that their own sufferings are quite in keeping both with the crucifixion itself and with the sufferings that ethnic Jewish believers have already undergone before them. Unfortunately, this aim can be deflected by the way Paul himself brings the whole to its final conclusion, which can easily distract the reader to reflect on other issues.
But the concluding elements that tend to distract the later reader make perfectly good sense in Paul’s original context. As the Thessalonians themselves well know, the apostles’ original harassment in Thessalonica had been instigated by fellow Jews, who were jealous of a “gospel” that allowed Gentiles to become full members of the people of God without also adhering to the minimum requirements of Torah that they followed in the Diaspora (circumcision, food laws, keeping sabbath). It is in this way, by persecuting Paul (and Silas?), that they had tried to stop the Christian message from reaching the Gentiles in Thessalonica. What Paul has done in this passage is basically to equate the Thessalonians’ present suffering (1:6) with that which he, Silas, and other Jewish believers had experienced at the hands of their own people.
16b The immediate result of this Jewish antagonism toward Gentiles’ receiving the good news without adhering to Torah is found in the final clause in Paul’s (now very long) sentence: “In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit.” Although the Greek clause itself is a bit awkward to put into English, its point seems clear enough. Indeed, Paul’s word order gets at the double emphasis: “they fill to the full” their sins “always.”317
That seems to mean that by their antagonism to the gospel as God’s good news for the Gentiles on equal grounds with the Jews, these members of the Jewish community have been regularly (“always”)318 “stockpiling” their sins to the very top measure. The “always” at the end of the clause seems to imply that the “full number” was not yet complete. In any case, it is this form of antagonism toward other people’s becoming followers of “the Lord Jesus” (v. 15a) that leads to the word of judgment which concludes the passage.
16c If the immediate result of contemporary (for Paul) Jewish antagonism toward Christ had as its goal forbidding Gentiles from being saved, then the final result is God’s judgment on them (in Paul’s word order and thus his emphasis): “Has come on them the wrath eis telos.”319 For good reason this final phrase has proven to be one of the more problematic passages in the entire Pauline corpus. The basic difficulties are with the verb “has come on them” and the concluding adverbial construction eis telos, since the two items stand in considerable tension with each other. And these in turn create a measure of difficulty for the word “wrath,” which in Paul ordinarily refers to God’s eschatological judgment, as in 1:10 and 5:9 in the present letter.
We begin with the verb, since it seems more certain than the meaning of “the wrath” and of the prepositional modifiers. Although the same verb occurs again in 4:15 of this letter (“we will not precede those who have fallen asleep”), its usage there is unique in the New Testament. Here its meaning is comparable to the usage in 2 Corinthians 10:14 (“for we did come to you [= reach you] with the gospel”). The point is that the verb in its aorist (past tense) form can hardly refer to anything other than an event that has already “arrived” for these who have become Christ’s enemies. This understanding is further corroborated by the prepositional phrase eis telos, which literally means “at/to the end,” but also can carry an adverbial sense of “finally.” Under any normal circumstances that would be seen by all to be its meaning here.
But our problem in this instance is that the circumstances are anything but normal. The tension between the verb and its adverbial modifier rests finally with the subject of the sentence, literally “the wrath,” which is just oblique enough to throw the whole sentence into a pool of confusion. Scribes in the West (associated also with translating the Greek into Latin) did exactly what the TNIV and many English versions have done — turn it specifically into “the wrath of God.” However, even though there can be little question that “the wrath” in view here has to do with God, the fact that Paul does not himself make that qualification should cause us to pause before making that specific addition to the text, since in Paul that combination invariably refers to the negative side of God’s final judgment in the world.320 At issue is what this shortened form can possibly mean regarding something that has already come on the Jewish opponents of Paul and his gospel. And it is precisely at this point that, from this distance, we can either speculate (which I find not at all useful) or simply admit that we do not know to what Paul was specifically referring.321 The most likely suggestion is that we are here dealing with a prophetic word on the part of the apostle. 322 Thus, Paul is so certain of God’s soon-coming judgment on his ancient people that he speaks of it — future though it still is — as an event that has already taken place.
So is the Jewish Paul anti-Semitic, as has sometimes been suggested? 323 Hardly. He regularly strikes his note of passion for “the Jew first.” But his own calling is to bring the good news to the Gentiles; his frustration is with fellow countryfolk who would thwart that calling and mission. Thus, it is hardly surprising that he should weigh in against those who have regularly tried to do this.
This is not a passage that is easily brought into a contemporary Christian church — in part because one fears doing anything that might sound antiSemitic, even though it is certainly not intended to be so. Nonetheless, it needs to be heard on its own terms, regarding opposition on the part of “religious” people, who think that any deviation from their own orthodoxy should be fair game for public abuse of some kind. And especially this passage allows for no continuation of the long history of anti-Semitism that has plagued the Christian church for centuries. After all, Paul is here passionately pro-God and pro-God’s people, not anti-people as such.