B. Paul’S Personal Greeting (3:17)
B. PAUL’S PERSONAL GREETING (3:17)
17 I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters. This is how I write.
17 With this fifth — and final — occurrence in these two letters of the first person singular,1020 Paul has obviously now taken pen in hand and “signed off” personally. Nonetheless, one of the genuine idiosyncrasies of New Testament scholarship is that those who deny that Paul wrote this letter use this greeting as their ultimate evidence to condemn it as not from him. But that seems to be a matter of grasping at straws. This same phenomenon occurs also in Galatians 6:11, and the same kind of argumentation should prevail against the authenticity of that letter, but of course no one would ever think of doing so. In the present case, in fact, the evidence within the letter itself indicates that Paul is not at all sure of the source of the misinformation that has created unrest among them (2:2 and 15); thus the present emphasis seems designed to disallow a forged letter as one of the options.
What these two clauses further indicate for us is what could otherwise have been observed only by the original recipients, namely that the penmanship of the body of the letter and of this closing greeting would have been obviously different. Although in one later instance we know the actual name of the “scribe” (Tertius; Rom 16:22), this letter and Galatians together offer the further evidence that Paul’s letters were dictated by him, and he signed off on them at the end.
Of high, but ultimately unsolvable, interest is how many of his prior “all my letters” were penned to churches, as with our 1 Thessalonians and this one. In any case, this concluding phrase suggests that Paul had already begun the habit of communicating with his churches by way of letter, which further suggests — along with the missing correspondence to Corinth — that our collection is but a portion of the letters he wrote to his churches. At this point the historic doctrines of divine providence and divine inspiration take over in light of what the historical evidence cannot demonstrate, one way or the other.