First and Second Thessalonians by Nathan Eubank

Author:Nathan Eubank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Commentary-New Testament;Bible (Thessalonians—­Commentaries);REL006070;REL006100;REL010000
ISBN: 9781493419661
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

[4:15]

Verse 14 argued on the basis of traditional belief in Jesus’s resurrection, which the Thessalonians already shared. Verse 15 continues the argument on the basis of new information, a word of the Lord. Here as elsewhere in the letter “the Lord” is probably Jesus. The following verses do not correspond exactly to anything in the Gospels. What is the source of this “word of the Lord”? There are two main possibilities: (1) Paul could be summarizing a traditional teaching of Jesus that doesn’t sound like anything in the Gospels because it wasn’t written down or because Paul does not cite it word for word (see Matt 24:29–33, 40–41). (2) The saying could have come through a Christian prophet who spoke “by the word of the Lord” just as some Old Testament prophets (e.g., 1 Kings 13:2) and John the Seer had done (e.g., Rev 1:9–20). It is difficult to decide between these possibilities. Fortunately, however, it makes little difference to our understanding of what Paul says. Another question about this “word of the Lord” confronts us: Which part of what follows is from Jesus, and which part is Paul’s commentary? There are no quotation marks in Paul’s text to help us decide. Many commentators argue that verse 15 is Paul’s application of the message to the Thessalonians’ situation and that the actual word of the Lord is found in verses 16–17. This latter portion contains non-Pauline vocabulary and sounds like a generic description of the †parousia, whereas 4:15 focuses on the Thessalonians’ worry that the dead would be at some disadvantage.

Verse 15 introduces the word of the Lord by drawing out the point that Paul wants the Thessalonians to take away from it. Paul emphatically denies that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will be in a better position than those who have died. His language is emphatic: the living will surely not (ou mē) precede those who have died. As noted above, the Thessalonians seem to have believed in the resurrection of the dead, but they worried that those who were not alive when the Lord returned would miss out on Jesus’s triumphant return in some way. Some first-century Jews believed that those who remained alive until the end of time would be better off. The noncanonical text 4 Ezra (late first century AD) states that those who remain until the end are more blessed than those who have died because they will be protected during the trials of the last days (13.24). It is, however, doubtful that the Thessalonian congregation would have known about inside debates of Jewish †apocalyptic expectation. Perhaps Paul’s description of the triumphant return of Jesus (1 Thess 1:9–10) impressed them so much that they assumed that those who died before it occurred would lose out. Their anxiety—like our anxieties—does not need to have been sophisticated or even sensible.

The word that Paul uses to describe the “coming” of the Lord is parousia, a word that could refer to any ordinary arrival or coming (e.

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