I. Authorship And Date
I. AUTHORSHIP AND DATE
Although Pauline authorship of this letter has been denied from time to time, dating back to the extreme historical scepticism of F. D. Baur in the midnineteenth
century, such denial faces enormous historical difficulties — so much so that one wonders, “Why bother?” Baur’s reasons were ultimately based not on historical grounds as such, but on his own buying into Hegelian philosophy. Thus since the turn of the twentieth century, the Pauline authorship of this letter has been rather universally accepted as historical fact.
But the more significant question in this regard is that of single or plural authorship, since the two letters to this church are the only two in the corpus with two unique features. First, the “author(s)” in this case are identified without further qualification (“apostles,” “servants,” etc.), which becomes the standard feature in all subsequent letters beginning with our 1 Corinthians. 2 Second the first person plural is basically maintained throughout the letter, so that by all normal historical standards the letter should be identified as Paul’s, Silas’s, and Timothy’s letter to church of the Thessalonians. Indeed, given that all three are named in the address, one must take seriously that Paul intended the letters to have come from all three of them.
Nonetheless, the letter was basically dictated by only one of them, the apostle himself, as the occasional “lapses” into the first person singular (2:18; 3:5; 5:27) make certain. But even so, given the uniqueness of the plural “we” in these two letters, plus the fact that the letter begins by naming the three of them, we should probably take the plurality of authorship more seriously than most of us are wont to do. This becomes the more certain, it would seem, because of the fact that in this first letter (as well as the next) Paul makes absolutely no point of his authority to speak into their situation. This phenomenon begins — for good reason, it turns out — with his first preserved letter to the believers in Corinth. This further adds to the evidence that, however else this letter might be described by ancient standards, it is first of all a letter of friendship. Paul is designated neither as “an apostle of Christ Jesus” nor as “a servant of Christ.” The three of them are simply named as co-authors, jointly speaking into the situation in Thessalonica, even though the letter itself is dictated by Paul.
The date of the letter is based primarily on the combined data from Acts 17:1-9 and the singular mention by Paul of his (and presumably Silas’s) being left alone in Athens by his (their) having sent Timothy to the Thessalonians from there (3:1-2). The very way this is stated implies that Paul was no longer in Athens, but had gone on to Corinth.3 From the Acts reference, where one is told that Paul and his companions came to Thessalonica by way of Philippi, from whence they had been asked to leave by the town authorities, we may legitimately assume a date circa 49 or 50 CE for the writing of this letter.
What is unknown specifically is Paul’s actual location at the time of writing, since the mention in 3:6 of Timothy’s return has no geographical referent regarding the place of return. Therefore, on the basis of the Acts account the majority of scholars have assumed the return of Timothy and the sending of this letter to have taken place in the early months of Paul’s visit to Corinth narrated in Acts 18:1-18a. This can be neither proved nor disproved; it is simply based on — and fits well with — the few historical data at our disposal.