Framing Paul by Campbell Douglas A.;

Author:Campbell, Douglas A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: 2014-09-24T13:02:13+00:00

(2) Clues in the Letter Endings

Both letters have distinctive conclusions that seem at first glance to convey helpful information about sequencing. But on closer examination, both pieces of data collapse into unhelpful ambiguity.

Somewhat distinctively in the Pauline corpus, 1 Thessalonians charges its recipients to have the letter read out to all the community: [5:27] Ἐνορκίζω ὑμᾶς τὸν κύριον ἀναγνωσθῆναι τὴν ἐπιστολὴν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς. This could suggest the correction of their reception of a previous letter that was not read out to all the adelphoi — presumably 2 Thessalonians. However, it might be no more than an instruction not to treat 1 Thessalonians as a private letter so much as a public one, the genre of an apostolic letter from Paul apparently being a little difficult to comprehend even in the first century (see Richards 2004, 126, 202, 221). And this would have been a particular difficulty if 1 Thessalonians was the first letter that the Thessalonians received from Paul. So this datum is ambiguous.

More promisingly, 2 Thessalonians takes pains to affirm its personally signed autograph as a marker of authenticity:

[3:17] Ὁ ἀσπασμὸς τῇ ἐμῇ χειρὶ Παύλου, ὅ ἐστιν σημεῖον ἐν πάσῃ ἐπιστολῇ· οὕτως γράφω. [18] ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ πάντων ὑμῶν.84

It has been suggested plausibly that the Thessalonians would already know that Paul authenticated his letters with a personally written autograph if they had already received 1 Thessalonians. So the information in 2 Thessalonians 3:17-18 belongs rather more plausibly at the front end of an epistolary sequence, as the first letter the Thessalonians received — if, that is, this is not evidence of a brazen forger.85 However, Paul writes here that his autographed grace wish is the key authenticating sign in every letter, and this opens the door to a possible scenario within which the Thessalonians have been confused by letters arriving in two forms. They might have known that a letter authenticated by a signed grace wish was Pauline, but they did not necessarily know from 1 Thessalonians that this was invariable, a gap in their knowledge that a clever and malicious pseudepigrapher might have chosen to exploit. Second Thessalonians indicates clearly, moreover, that this is a scenario of which Paul is well aware (2:2). In response to this possibility, then, Paul could well have written in a second genuine letter that “this [signature] is the sign [of authenticity] in all my letters.” So this initially promising data is unhelpful for our present question; it is undermined by multiple plausible narrativity.

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