3:16-18 Conclusion
2 Thessalonians
INTRODUCTION
Authorship. Some scholars have denied that Paul wrote this letter, because it differs in some respects from 1 Thessalonians; conversely, they attribute the similarities it has with 1 Thessalonians to imitation. But 2 Thessalonians is Pauline in style and moves in the same *apocalyptic world of thought that much of 1 Thessalonians 4–5 does; the differences are no greater than one would expect in two separate letters dealing with such a broad topic, or even than one sometimes finds in passages within a single apocalypse. It seems unlikely that 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 was written after the temple’s destruction (A.D. 70); because *pseudepigraphic letters were rarely written during or immediately after the lifetime of their alleged author, 2 Thessalonians was most likely written by Paul (who died around A.D. 64). The majority of commentators today accept it as Pauline.
Relationship to 1 Thessalonians. Although scholars have debated which letter was written first, most scholars think that 1 Thessalonians was written before 2 Thessalonians (the original letters were not titled or numbered, of course). The bearer of his first letter has probably returned with news about the situation in Thessalonica; some of the Christians have embraced Paul’s message about future hope without the qualifications he had attached to it, and have decided that the day of the Lord has already come (2:2).
Commentaries. See those listed in the introduction to 1 Thessalonians. Most commentaries cover both letters.
1:1-12
Introduction, Thanksgiving and Prayer
Paul’s letters usually open with the basic introduction (“Paul . . . to . . . ”), a thanksgiving and either a prayer or a mention of his prayers for the recipients. Each of these features was typical of letters in his day, but Paul adapts them in a Christian way. Paul also stocks his *apocalyptic language here with phrases from the *Old Testament.
1:1. The basic format of letter openings was: sender’s name, to recipient’s name; greetings.
1:2. The typical Greek greeting was chairein, which Paul adapts to charis, “*grace.” Jewish letters usually added the typical Jewish greeting of “peace,” which functioned as a wish-prayer: “May God’s peace be with you,” “May all be well with you.” (On wish-prayers, see comment on 1 Thess 3:11.) Paul makes this prayer more explicit by adding the source of grace and peace: both God the Father and the Lord Jesus. Both “God” and “Lord” are divine titles in the Old Testament.
1:3. Thanksgivings for the recipients were common in Greek letters and helped establish a friendly tone at the beginning of the letter.
1:4-5. A major theme in Jewish thought by this period, including in apocalypses, was God’s reward for the righteous who suffer. Developing this theme from the Old Testament, Jewish writers emphasized that God would punish their persecutors in the end and deliver the righteous, no matter what they suffered now. This deliverance was intimately bound up with the hope of the *resurrection of the righteous at the end of the age. Often the present or imminent tribulation was viewed as the final “messianic birth pangs” that would usher in the era of the *kingdom. Some philosophers also spoke of sufferings proving one worthy of God.
1:6-7. As in Jewish literature, so here the righteous receive rest from their tribulation only at the same time that God vindicates them by his final judgment on the wicked (cf. also Deut 32:34-36, 41). God’s coming to judge the world appears in various texts (e.g., Zech 14:3-5), including destruction by fire (e.g., Is 66:15-16, 24; *1 Enoch 91:7-9). Fire burning one’s adversaries was a common image in the Old Testament (e.g., Num 11:1; Ps 97:3; Is 26:11; cf. Jer 4:4; 15:14; 17:4; 21:12; Ezek 21:31; 22:20; Nahum 1:6; Zeph 1:18; 3:8) and continued in Jewish expectations (e.g., *Sibylline Oracles 3.760-61; 4.43, 161, 176-78). This image was natural because of the use of fire in war and because “wrath” was often described in Hebrew and cognate languages in terms of “burning.”
This also became customary end-time imagery in Jewish literature; in some Jewish texts the whole earth would be destroyed, in others the kingdom would be established without such cosmic transformation. The wording here is particularly from Isaiah 66:15 (presumably envisioned as belonging to the same era as the new world and new Jerusalem, Is 65:17-18). The “mighty” angels are envisioned as the Lord’s army (cf., e.g., 2 Kings 6:17; *Dead Sea Scrolls 1QM 12.8).
1:8. On God’s vengeance or repaying his people’s enemies, see Deuteronomy 32:41, Isaiah 35:4 and 66:6; it was also an important theme in post-Old Testament Jewish literature.
1:9. This verse directly echoes the *Septuagint of Isaiah 2:10, 19 and 21 (roughly, “from the face of the fear of the Lord and the glory of his strength”). That Jewish literature often describes God turning his “face” (literally) or “presence” from the wicked may be theologically significant, but Paul directly takes over the Semitic idiom (“from the face of” means “from before,” “from the presence of”) as the Septuagint of Isaiah rendered it. “Eternal destruction” in the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 1QS 2.15; 1QM 1.5; 9.5-6) and elsewhere (e.g., *Psalms of Solomon 2:31; 3:11-12; 15:10) usually meant that the wicked were completely destroyed, but in the contexts of many of these passages they also suffered eternally (both could be mentioned in the same passage, e.g., *Jubilees 36:10; cf. Is 66:24, cited in Mk 9:48).
1:10. Kings’ “glory” was their splendor and royal bearing; the glorification of God’s people was to be at the time of Israel’s restoration (Is 46:13; 60:1-2; 62:2), when God (here Jesus) would come to vindicate them. (Paul normally associates the *saints’ “glorification” with their bodily resurrection—e.g., Rom 8:17-23; 1 Cor 15:43; Phil 3:21. For future glory in ancient Jewish texts, see, e.g., *4 Ezra 7:98; *2 Baruch 51:3.) “When he comes” echoes the language of the Septuagint of Psalm 96:13, applying language about God to Jesus. “On that day” is the “day of the Lord” (see 2 Thess 2:2; cf. Is 2:11-12, 17, 20; 11:10-11; Joel 3:18—“in that day”).
1:11. Ancient letters, including Paul’s, often contained prayers or mentions of prayers on behalf of the recipients. On “worthy,” see comment on 1:5.
1:12. The Lord could be glorified in his obedient people in the present (Jer 13:11), but the ultimate glorifying of God in his people would be on the day when he would bring all things to light (see comment on 1:10).
2:1-12
The Final Rebellion
Some Thessalonian Christians thought that the day of the Lord had been so “imminent” that it had already come. To correct their misunderstanding, Paul reminds them of Jesus’ sayings he taught them while he was there (2:5, 15): a final period of rebellion constituted an essential prerequisite for Christ’s return.
2:1. The “coming” (described further in 2:8; cf. 1 Thess 4:15) and “gathering” here are grammatically linked, and the use of both terms derives from the sayings of Jesus. “Coming” was a common word, but when applied to a king it took on special connotations of a glorious visitation. Some Jewish texts applied it to God’s past theophanies and future revelation in glory; Matthew 24:3, 27, 37 and 39 use it for Jesus’ return to judge the world. Many texts, both in the *Old Testament (e.g., Is 27:12-13) and later Jewish literature (*Psalms of Solomon 8:28; 11:2-5; 17:26; 4 Baruch 3:11), speak of Israel’s gathering as God’s people; Paul probably takes the image of the gathering of the righteous from Jesus’ saying later recorded in Matthew 24:31 and Mark 13:27 (which uses a related term).
2:2. Those who heard Paul’s first letter read only once in the congregation may have misunderstood its point. The Greek outlook included an afterlife in the underworld or an escape of the soul to the highest heavens, but not a future event when the dead would be resurrected. Thessalonian Christians may have read Paul in the light of their own cultural predispositions: they may have assumed that the future reality was already fulfilled, not just initiated, in Christ. Paul replies that the future “day of the Lord” is indeed imminent or unexpected in its timing (1 Thess 5:2) but still preceded by the final rebellion (2 Thess 2:3-12).
2:3-4. The first prerequisite is either the “rebellion” (NIV, NRSV, GNT) or the “apostasy” (NASB). If it is a “rebellion” against God, it is the world’s final insult to him (2:4); if “apostasy,” it refers back to Jesus’ sayings later written in Matthew 24:10-13. Both sins are characteristic of Jewish lists of end-time sufferings, but because Paul omits most of the signs found in such lists and focuses only on those cited by Jesus, the term here might mean apostasy. In either case, Paul indicates that the term does not apply to his readers (2:10-15).
In Jewish sources the figure of a general future antichrist (as he is commonly called) seems to occur mainly later, but contemporary Jewish texts do describe some past or present rulers in similar terms (cf. also the evil rulers in Dan 9–11); the tradition of pagan kings who made themselves out to be gods is also quite ancient (Is 14:13-14; Ezek 28:2; Dan 6:7). The *Dead Sea Scrolls speak of a “man of lies” who opposed the founder of their community; the Psalms of Solomon portray the Roman general Pompey in such terms; and Roman emperors lent themselves to such portrayals in general. Nearly a decade before this letter, Gaius Caligula had tried to set up his image in the Jerusalem temple, nearly sparking a Judean revolt. (Caligula immediately preceded Claudius, the current emperor in A.D. 41–54.) Two decades after this letter, when Titus destroyed the temple, his soldiers desecrated the temple by paying divine honors to the insignia of Emperor Vespasian on the site of the temple.
The imagery used here derives especially from Jesus, however (cf. Mt 24:15), who took it from Daniel (Dan 7:25; 8:11; 9:26-27; 11:31, 36; cf. 2 Chron 33:7; Ezek 8:3). Some scholars who have examined the prophecies carefully have concluded that Daniel 11 describes the abomination caused by Antiochus Epiphanes; yet the “end” seems to come at that time (12:1), about two centuries before Jesus. Like the promise of the land to Abraham’s descendants, deferred repeatedly during the period of the judges, between David and Josiah, and afterward due to Israel’s disobedience, this text might be seen as an example of deferred eschatology. The way that some count (and in the first century counted) the period of Daniel 9:24-27, the anointed prince (whom some held to be the *Messiah) was to be “cut off” around the time that Jesus died; the destruction of the city followed forty years later, again indicating a delay of at least forty years. Christian interpreters differ as to whether (1) a specific future tribulation remains (perhaps 2 Thess 2:8-9), (2) the Jewish war in A.D. 66–70 fulfilled it completely (cf. Mt 24:15-21), (3) the whole course of history constitutes this period (cf. comments on Revelation, especially chap. 12) or (4) the language is reused in different ways, any and all of which ways may be true.
2:5. The Thessalonians apparently misinterpreted Paul’s talk about the future *kingdom (Acts 17:7), much of which seems to derive from teachings of Jesus that Paul is transmitting to them (2 Thess 2:15). Ancient works sometimes refer to information shared between writers and their designated readers but obscure to subsequent readers.
2:6-7. The interpretations of this passage are more diverse than those of most passages in the *New Testament. Even the translation is not certain (is the restrainer “taken out of the way” or does the lawless one “come forth from the midst” at the end of v. 7?). Views of the “restrainer” are plentiful. Some have thought that the “restrainer” is one prerequisite for the end stated by Jesus, the preaching to all the nations (Mt 24:14); this view makes some sense, but the completion of this preaching was technically to precede the end itself, not the rebellion that preceded the end.
The “restrainer” could be simply God’s sovereign restraint (e.g., Ezek 5:11); it could be the archangel Michael, angelic protector of Israel in Jewish tradition (also Dan 12:1); it could be the presence of Christians in Jerusalem (Mt 24:16-21); or it could be, as many scholars have argued, the ruler preceding the self-deifying emperor or succession of emperors. (Those who hold the last view sometimes suggest that the name of the emperor when Paul was writing this letter was Claudius, which was related to a Latin word for “restrain”; he immediately preceded the persecutor Nero, on whom see introduction to 1 Peter. But Claudius’s name resembles more Latin terms for lameness, and most of Paul’s Greek-speaking audience in Thessalonica, not a Roman *colony, would not have caught the pun in any case.) Many of the early church fathers took the view that the “restrainer” was the Roman Empire.
One popular modern view that has no specific contextual support is that the “restrainer” is the *church, which had inadequate social power in Paul’s day to perform that function. The church’s removal from the earth by the *resurrection described in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 does not fit this context, because the Thessalonian Christians were to receive rest from affliction only at the day of judgment (2 Thess 1:6-9), and be gathered (2:1) only in the day of the Lord (2:2), which was to be preceded by the rebellion (2:3-4), which in turn was to be preceded by the restrainer (2:6-7). Although no ancient Christian authors attest the view that the restrainer is the church (the idea of a rapture before the tribulation first explicitly appears in history around 1830, as a corollary of traditional dispensationalism), adherents of this view today cite various other New Testament texts for its support.
In any case, the Thessalonians would apparently understand what Paul means (2:5), and his point is not in question: this event has not yet happened, so the rebellion and hence the day of the Lord and the church’s gathering are still future.
2:8. Paul describes the end of the lawless one in terms borrowed from Isaiah 11:4 (cf. Hos 6:5) and similar to those in other Jewish texts. Paul contrasts Jesus’ own coming (cf. 2 Thess 2:1) with the lawless one’s (2:9); on such contrasts see comment on Revelation 13.
2:9. Deceptive signs already occurred in Paul’s day. Sorcerers and shrines of healing gods were common; although healing was not the primary focus of the imperial cult, some people in the eastern Mediterranean also invoked the spirit of the emperor, who was worshiped as a god, to deliver or heal them. Propaganda circulated that the emperor Vespasian (to whose insignia homage was paid on the site of the temple in A.D. 70) worked miracles, but emperors themselves were not usually known as miracle workers. Although miracle-working false prophets appear early in the Bible (Ex 7:11), Paul’s source for their association with the end is probably again Jesus’ teachings (cf. Mk 13:22; Mt 24:24).
2:10-12. In the Old Testament, God often punished people by giving them the very blindness they had chosen for themselves (Is 19:14; 29:9-10); in Jewish tradition, all the nations chose to turn away from God’s truth, and only Israel accepted his *law. *Satan’s primary roles in Jewish thought were accuser and deceiver or tempter; for Antiochus Epiphanes’s deceit, see Daniel 8:25; for that of idolatry in general, see Isaiah 44:20 and Jeremiah 10:3-5. Philosophers characterized themselves as lovers of truth, and this characterization was accepted as a morally high ideal among the leisured class of Paul’s day and probably among others who stopped to listen to public lectures. But Paul, like most Jewish people, believed that God’s perfect truth came by revelation, not by humans’ finite reasonings.
2:13–3:5
Thanksgiving, Wish-Prayer and Prayer Request
As in 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, here Paul offers a second thanksgiving and a wish-prayer before moving into the hortatory (exhortation) section of his letter.
2:13-14. In the *Old Testament, God “chose” Israel; *Gentile believers grafted into his people are often called “chosen” in the New Testament (see comment on Rom 9:14-29; cf. Mt 24:31). On the *Spirit (often linked with spiritual purification in segments of Judaism) and sanctification, see comment on 1 Thessalonians 4:7-8. On “glory,” see comment on 2 Thessalonians 1:10 and 12.
2:15. Pharisaic Judaism emphasized the careful passing on of traditions from earlier teachers. Paul passed on to the Thessalonian believers the teachings of Jesus, many of which he has alluded to in this chapter (see the introduction to 1 Thess 4:13-18).
2:16-17. Here Paul offers a “wish-prayer,” a prayer to God addressed as a wish for a person. Although not directly addressed to God grammatically, such blessings were meant as prayers for God to answer.
3:1-4. The prayer request that God’s word may “run” (literally) or “spread” swiftly probably borrows the image from Psalm 147:15. The Thessalonians would think of runners in an athletic competition.
3:5. Paul concludes with another wish-prayer (see comment on 2:16-17).
3:6-15
Dealing with Idlers
3:6. Paul acts “in the name of Jesus”—as his representative. By this period “unruly” (NASB) usually meant “idle” (NIV, NRSV), the clear meaning in this context. The origin of this group of idlers in the *church might be the Greco-Roman aristocratic disdain for manual labor, or *clients or parasites dependent on wealthier *patrons, or a mistaken belief that the day of the Lord had come and canceled the need for such labor (2:2). Alternatively, they may have pursued a philosophic, specifically a *Cynic, lifestyle (see comment on 3:11-12). More certainly, idlers were known to pass their days in the marketplaces of Greek cities (including Thessalonica—Acts 17:5), sometimes easily stirred by demagogues. Some may have been genuinely converted but not given up their previous lifestyle.
3:7-9. Students commonly imitated their teachers. On the labor of Paul and his companions, see comment on 1 Thessalonians 2:9. As some commentators point out, to “eat bread” seems to have been a Jewish figure of speech for “making a living” (e.g., Gen 3:19).
3:10. Although Paul’s saying here has no exact parallel, some Jewish and Greek sayings had similar meanings. Judaism had a strong work ethic and a heavy emphasis on charity; Proverbs emphasized both the need to help those who have nothing and for those who are able to work to do so. “Eat” refers either to food provided by other believers (cf. 3:12), as *synagogues cared for needy Jews, or food provided at the churches’ communal meals (cf. 3:14), a practice known among religious associations in the Greco-Roman world.
3:11-12. For “eat their own bread,” see comment on 3:7-9. “Busybodies” could refer to those engaged in superfluous activity, wasting their time on irrelevant details, or to troublesome “meddlers” (see GNT), or to both. Some Christians may have decided to justify their idleness by citing the lifestyle of traveling sages, such as Paul and his companions. But although Paul and his companions had distinguished themselves from the “bad” Cynic philosophers (see comment on 1 Thess 2:1-12), some Thessalonians may have continued fully in the Cynic vein: unlike Paul, Cynics begged rather than worked; and with their denunciations of passersby they were certainly “meddlers.” Alternatively, they may have followed other models for idleness (see comment on 2 Thess 3:6).
3:13. “Doing good” (NASB, GNT) includes charity, as in Judaism; Paul does not want his readers to misinterpret his limitation of charity.
3:14-15. The synagogue community enforced different levels of discipline, which the churches largely adopted (except for corporal punishment). Even under later rabbinic rules, which allowed less diversity of practice than was common in Paul’s day, full excommunication involved treating the person as an infidel, bringing him under a curse (cf. 1 Tim 1:20; 1 Cor 5:5; Mt 18:15-20), but lesser bans that still treated a person as part of the religious community were practiced as well. The *Essenes also had different levels of discipline (1QS 7.1-20 in the *Dead Sea Scrolls).
3:16-18
Conclusion
3:16. This verse and 3:18 are final “wish-prayers”; see comment on 2:16-17.
3:17-18. Forged letters did exist (e.g., *Livy 40.55.1). In law courts, orators often had to argue that documents were forgeries (so *Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 5.5.1), and some commentators have compared 3:17 with 2:2 to propose that Paul here reinforces the suggestion that the Thessalonians check to ascertain which letters were genuine. But most letter writers used *scribes and signed their names at the end (or sometimes added brief comments, e.g., *Cicero, Letters to Atticus 8.1), and Paul often follows this practice elsewhere in his letters (e.g., 1 Cor 16:21). That he fears the work of forgers is thus possible but not certain.