I. Authorship And Date
I. AUTHORSHIP AND DATE
If one were to take this letter at face value, as a “second”722 letter from the apostolic trio to the believers in Thessalonica, then this section of the Introduction would be very brief indeed. And because the commentary is in fact written from that perspective — as the only way one can make good sense of it at all — it will be much briefer than some think is fair or reasonable. But the writing of a commentary on this letter in and of itself tends to push one toward authenticity regarding authorship, so that there has been only one significant commentary in English723 over the past century and a half that has tried to make sense of this letter as a forgery.724
When one reads the literature by those who argue that Paul is not the author of this letter, one is struck by the “thinness” of the argumentation as such, especially since there is hardly a single argument that does not take some form of subjectivity on the part of its proponent(s). And at the end of the day, it becomes quite clear that had this letter not contained the material in 2:1-12, this view would not have arisen at all. Indeed, the most often-recurring argument against Pauline authorship is a very subjective one, that this letter lacks the “warmth” of the first one. But one may rightly wonder how this is an objective argument at all. And in any case, why should the letter not come across thus, given (a) that some misinformation regarding the day of the Lord has been attributed to Paul himself, and (b) that he has to deal with one situation (the disuptive-idle) for a second time and now at length!
I do not intend here to “reinvent” the wheel, as it were, regarding the arguments pro and con for Pauline authorship. This has been done several times, and I find especially salutary and useful the even-handed treatment of these matters in the commentary by Marshall (28-45) and the detailed “pro and con” handling of this question by Malherbe (349-74). But it is of some interest that those who argue most strongly against this letter as authentic have also seldom written a commentary on it, with the single exception in English of that by Richard noted above; and his attempt at trying to make sense of it as a forgery in itself would seem to push a reader back toward viewing the letter as authentic.
It is not my purpose here to go over all that ground yet again, and thus I advise the reader to consult the three commentaries just noted for the arguments pro and con.725 I have chosen rather to introduce the present commentary only, and not to engage in further debate on this issue, except to note with approval the conclusion made by Marshall some years ago that “it is very doubtful whether a set of weak arguments adds up to one powerful one” (34). Since one can in fact make good sense of this letter as a follow-up to the first one, and since the internal data in the second letter basically push one in this direction, this will be the assumption of the present commentary.
In defense of going this route, however, I here offer a (very brief) sampling of items found in the second letter, in relationship to the same phenomena in the first letter, which would seem to push forgery beyond the bounds of ordinary historical probability. And what makes this sampling the more telling from my perspective is the “incidental” nature of these items, the kind of matters that would seem to require the “author” of the second let-ter to have gotten into the skin, as it were, of the author of the first letter, which of course would indeed be the case if it is authentic.
1. In both letters the thanksgiving evolves into a major item that Paul feels he needs to address, yet the two matters themselves are without an even remotely close relationship to one another (Paul’s past relationships with the Thessalonians; and the fact that their persecutors are headed for divine judgment). How, one wonders, could a forger have pulled this off, and have done so in such a radically different manner from the first one, the only Pauline letter he knew.
2. The use of the vocative adelphoi (“brother [and sisters]) is distributed about the same number of times throughout the two letters, and at an extremely higher rate of occurrence when contrasted to the rest of the corpus; furthermore, it occurs in both letters toward the front of the elongated “thanksgiving,” the length of which in both cases is yet another feature that does not happen elsewhere in the corpus.
3. In this same regard, these are the only two letters where on one occasion in each Paul elaborates on the vocative itself; in 1 Thessalonians 1:4 as “adelphoi loved by God,” and in 2 Thessalonians 2:13 as “adelphoi loved by the Lord.” A forger who knew well the first letter might have been able to do this, but could he have also done so by changing the second one so as to use the language of the Benjamin blessing in Deuteronomy 33:12?726
4. One of the features of Paul’s later letters is his love of ὑπέρ (hyper) compounds, so much so that in the commentary on Philippians (221) I suggest “that Paul virtually holds the copyright” on them. Thus Paul’s thanksgiving (1:3) that the Thessalonians’ faith “is growing more and more” (hyperauxanei) has all the earmarks of an authenticity that would be difficult for one who does not know the rest of the corpus to imitate.
5. Another feature found in these two letters is Paul’s use of pistis (ordinarily, “faith”) to refer to someone’s “faithfulness.” This is an especially striking feature in the first letter (see on 3:1 and 5); it occurs again at the opening of this letter in 1:3 and 4. Thus, even though in its first instance (v. 3) one could argue that “your faith” is what is increasing, that is more difficult to do with its next appearance in verse 4, where Paul commends them (in this order!) for “your perseverance and faith(fulness).”
6. Although the specific phenomenon does not occur elsewhere, the unusual redundancy in 1:3 of (literally) “the love of each one of all of you for one another” is an especially Pauline feature.
7. It would seem only remotely possible, if at all, for a forger to capture Paul’s noteworthy use of kyrios to refer exclusively to Christ and theos to refer to God, a feature that is maintained throughout the second letter. On the other hand, this consistency is easily explained as Pauline, since in his next preserved letter (1 Cor 8:6) Paul breaks up the familiar Shema so that the word kyrios (“Lord”) refers exclusively to Christ the Son, while the word theos (“God”) is used equally exclusively to refer to God the Father.
8. The arresting intertextual use in 3:2 of precise language from the Septuagint of Isaiah 25:4, where it differs considerably from the Hebrew, is a feature that is so thoroughly Pauline that one can scarcely imagine a forger having been able to do this, especially one who knew only the first letter.
9. Perhaps the most striking feature of all is the anarthrous use of “the Lord” in the phrase en kyriō, which is found in abundance thoughout the corpus and occurs three times in the first letter (3:8; 4:1 [plus “Jesus”]; and 5:12), and occurs in the second letter twice (3:4 and 12 [plus “Jesus Christ”]). One would seem to need familiarity with the entire Pauline corpus to have been able to duplicate this phenomenon; but it makes perfectly good sense as stemming from Paul himself and thus reflecting a usage that was already in place and that will last a lifetime.
Finally, what is perhaps the most significant feature of all regarding this letter is the fact that its author has a thoroughgoing acquaintance with, and use of, language and terms from the first letter, but knew next to nothing, if anything at all,727 of the Paul of the later letters. As many have pointed out before, this phenomenon in itself calls the theory of pseudepigraphy into an extemely high level of suspicion, while at the same time it makes it nearly impossible that someone with knowledge of the whole corpus wrote it at a later time.
The ultimate question on this matter, of course, is “why?”; why would anyone care to write such a letter simply for the sake of “palming off” as Pauline the singular (even for Paul) eschatological material in 2:1-12 — and one could surely posit no other meaningful reason for a forgery. And to let that material sit in the middle of the letter rather than at the end would seem to make almost no sense at all.
At the end of the day, therefore, one must make allowance for our oth-erwise rather limited knowledge of Paul — on the basis of a somewhat small “literary” output — and note that all such idiosyncratic moments as 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 (cf. esp. Romans 9-11) remind us how much we really do not know about Paul on the basis of this limited collection of letters — although, of course, they do tell us a great deal, and by and large show a considerable consistency in thought and content.
Given, therefore, the strong evidence in favor of viewing this letter as authentic, the question of date is related to the date suggested for the first letter — probably a few months later and thus probably sometime circa 50 CE.