A. The Issue Presented (2:1-2)
A. THE ISSUE PRESENTED (2:1-2)
1 Concerning the coming of our811 Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, 2 not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us — whether by prophecy, or by word of mouth or by letter — asserting that the day of the Lord812 has already come.
This is one of those sentences in Paul that, if we could be sure how to unpack it, many of our difficulties in understanding the entire passage would be resolved. But the sentence is in fact both complex in its own right and at the same time full of grammatical and lexical uncertainties. The TNIV has chosen (correctly) to “unpack” it by a slight rearrangement of the phrases. To help the reader see the difficulties, I here offer the following “word for word” version of verse 2 — without punctuation as in the Greek:
that you not be quickly shaken in your minds nor alarmed whether through Spirit whether through word whether through letter as through us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.
The issue itself is presented in a straightforward manner (v. 1). It has to do with “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him.” The concern (v. 2) is related to some misguided information regarding this event, to the effect that “the day of the Lord has already come.” The complexity lies in two places. First, what could this possibly mean, given that a visible Parousia of the kind described in the first letter (1 Thess 4:13-17) had not in fact happened. Second, the middle part of verse 2 is quite ambiguous. On the one hand, the misinformation had been attributed to Paul himself; on the other hand, Paul is not certain as to the actual means by which it had been communicated to them — all of which makes for an unusually complex sentence for later readers. Thus we are faced with one of those moments in Paul where what he says seems plain enough — and at this point the TNIV appears to have gotten it right — but what it means in terms of how this kind of misinformation took hold among these early believers is not at all certain.
1 Our verse 1, which basically presents the subject matter, has three parts. First, Paul begins by presenting his request, “We ask you, brothers and sisters.” The verb itself is the standard Greek word for requesting something from someone;813 thus it scarcely alerts us to what comes next. At least it does not send up a red flag, as it were, indicating that what follows will be heavy. Ordinarily in moments like these Paul “urges” or “exhorts” his congregations toward (or away from) a given behavior; but here he simply “asks.” The verb is followed, second, by the vocative “brothers and sisters,” the second of seven in this letter.814 And again it appears in such a way that one is hardly set up for the much stronger words that follow.
Third, the subject matter is then introduced with a preposition815 that traditionally meant “on behalf of,” but here must mean something like “with reference to.” The concern itself is then expressed as a kind of “two sides of a single coin.”816 The more significant “side” of the event is mentioned first: “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and thus the readers are introduced once more to the key word Parousia.817 That this refers to what the later church referred to as “the second coming” is made certain by the second “side”: “our gathering unto818 him.” At this point the person who has read 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 will see that this is simply a condensed version of what Paul had said there, without any of the trimming.
2 Given this opening indication of the subject matter, one is poorly prepared for the content of Paul’s request that makes up the rest of the sentence. In some ways the issue is plain enough. Some of the believers have been either “shaken out of [their] minds”819 or simply “disturbed.” And this has happened apparently “quickly,”820 not meaning so soon after their conversion, but so readily upon hearing the false report. Paul’s doubling of the verbs of distress probably points to two degrees of their being “shaken up” by what others among them have been saying about the day of the Lord — that it has “already come.”821 What this may have meant to its proponents, or how the Thessalonian believers would have understood it, lies ultimately in the realm of speculation. But in any case, it has had unsettling effects, and Paul is deeply concerned by what has been communicated to them, allegedly as ultimately coming from the apostle himself.
But a clause that on the surface seems plain enough in fact contains two difficulties that require considerable discussion:822
(a) how has this thoroughly misguided understanding arisen among them at all, and (b) how is it related to anything Paul may have said or written? The problem is both linguistic (what does pneuma [Spirit/spirit]823 mean here, especially as the first member of an apparently equivalent triad that includes “word” and “letter”?) and grammatical (how is the final phrase “as though by [dia] us” related to the preceding triad, which also is “by [dia]” these possible means?). The resolution of these difficulties involves two points.
First, one must take seriously that, as Paul’s own sentence makes plain, he is not at all sure as to the exact source of the misinformation. That is, he truly does not know whether it has come to them through a prophetic utterance, through some other kind of spoken word, or from a forged letter. Furthermore, one must take equally seriously the explicit statements in 2:5 and 15 that Paul has indeed previously spoken to this question both when he was among them (“word”) and in his earlier letter (our 1 Thessalonians). All of this becomes the more problematic when one considers on the basis of verses 3-12 and 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 that Paul himself had been quite clear on this matter and that their present position is a far cry from what he had taught or written. Thus Paul seems to be faced with a situation in which (1) he knows that his own teaching has been either ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented (probably the latter), and (2) that even though he is not sure how this came about, the word circulating in Thessalonica is that what was currently being taught comes ultimately from Paul himself.
That leads, second, to the little phrase “as though through us,” which in Paul’s sentence follows hard on the heels of “whether by Spirit, whether by word, whether by letter.”824 All too frequently this has been understood as referring to the final item only (= “whether through a letter as though it had come from us”).825 This is usually supported by the signature in 3:17, that Paul in this case “signs” the letter in his own hand so that they will not mistake it for a forgery.826
As tempting as this reconstruction has been for many interpreters, it seems to run aground on what Paul actually says. First of all, such a position has great difficulty with 2:15, where Paul affirms that they are in fact to hold fast to what came to them from him by way of “word” and “letter.” Moreover, if a forged letter were his concern here, then one would expect “as though from us”; after all, letters do not come “through” an author but “from” him or her. Indeed, the repetition of the “through” in this phrase not only tends to spell the death knell to this traditional understanding,827 but also probably offers us the clue to what Paul did intend.
Because of the difficulty of the “through” (dia), many have suggested that the phrase goes with all three of the preceding words.828 Although this has more going for it grammatically, the problem with this solution lies with understanding how “the Spirit” might have been understood as mediated “through us,” since Paul has not recently been on the scene. Nor is it easy to see how this erroneous view about “the day” could have been attributed to Paul on the basis of what he had said in his previous letter.
The best resolution to this matter, therefore, lies with our seeing the sentence as somewhat elliptical. The enigmatic “as though through us” is best understood, as the TNIV has it, as referring not directly to the form by which the misinformation has been mediated to them (i.e., Spirit, word, letter), but to the content of it, and thus to the clause that follows. In this case Paul is not saying that the letter did not come from him — it did indeed — but that what they are now believing about the day of the Lord did not come through him.829 Thus Paul’s immediate concern is singular: he is in no way responsible for the misinformation regarding the Parousia that has in some way been attributed to him.
Thus the “logic” of Paul’s sentence seems to go as follows. His difficulty is twofold; first, he is aware that the misinformation has ultimately been attributed to him; but, second, he is not quite sure how it was communicated. He therefore begins with the latter item, the uncertain source, the first member of which is most likely the key to the whole. In all likelihood “Spirit” in this case refers to a “prophetic utterance.”830 By means of the “Spirit” someone could easily have represented himself/herself as speaking in Paul’s behalf. But for Paul it would be equally possible that such a “prophecy” may have been given in the form of an authoritative interpretation of what he had previously taught or written (e.g., “the Spirit says that what Paul meant was . . .”). In any case, having mentioned the uncertain source by the repeated “whether through . . . ,” he now moves toward the misrepresented content, as though that content, by whatever means it came, could be attributed to him.
This way of reading Paul’s sentence also helps to explain the negative implications of the “how that” (hōs hoti; TNIV, “asserting that”)831 that introduces the final clause. His intent seems clear enough; here, finally, is the content of what has been said in their midst that is currently troubling them. But the sentence itself has begun to get out of hand grammatically. Thus, the second word, hoti (“that”), serves to introduce the content of what has been said among them; the preceding hōs (“how”) picks up the sense of misrepresentation from the preceding phrase, and thus ties the two together. Teaching of this sort cannot in any way be attributed to Paul.
This understanding of Paul’s complex sentence, it should be further noted, makes sense of several matters in these letters. As noted in our comments on 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22, Paul has already anticipated the need for this community to be a bit more perceptive about “Spirit” utterances. Furthermore, and significantly, this explains why later on in the present passage (2:15) he refers again to “through word or through letter,”832 and urges them to hold fast to what they have previously been taught by him. He knows that his former teaching was not ambiguous; they must therefore hold fast to what has been “handed down” to them directly from him. What is conspicuously missing in this second instance is the first member of the present triad, “through the Spirit” — very likely because this is what Paul himself believed to be the ultimate source of the difficulty.833
If so, then the fact that such abuses of “prophetic utterances” are not in themselves directly condemned is in this case probably due to his relative uncertainty about the actual cause. At the same time, if this approximates Paul’s intent in 2:2, then in 2:15 he is also offering a criterion for “testing the spirits”: “the traditions you were taught, whether orally or by our letter.”834