Corpus-Paul

["Frank W. Hughes" <fwhughes AT sunbeach.net>]

The scholarly understanding of 2 Thessalonians as pseudonymous goes back
to Johann Ernst Christian Schmidt in 1801 and Friedrich Heinrich Kern in
1839, as well as Ferdinand Christian Baur in Paulus, der Apostel Jesu
Christi (1845).  In order to save Pauline authorship of 2 Thessalonians,
Hugo Grotius had reversed their order in the 1820s.  Baur had held
that both 1 and 2 Thess. were pseudonymous, but he also reversed their
order in response to Richard Adelbert Lipsius!

After Baur's death another Tübinger, Adolf Hilgenfeld, wrote an article in 1862 that is pretty close to where I think most scholars are now concerning the relation between 1 and 2 Thessalonians.  I quote from my translation:  "The teaching of the first letter, that the Day of the Lord comes abruptly and unpredictably, like a thief in the night, is not the teaching of the second letter, which rather gives ascertained omens of the return of Christ."  These signs included the revelation of the Man of Sin (2 Thess. 2:3-4) who divinizes himself, setting himself up in the Temple.  Yet these signs are said to be part of the oral teaching of Paul (2 Thess. 2:5).  But if this were really true Pauline oral teaching, this makes doubtful the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians, Hilgenfeld argued.  Relating the teaching in 2 Thess. 2:3-12 to materials from Revelation, Hilgenfeld concluded that 2 Thess. reflected a provenance since the time of Nero, even into the time of Trajan.  The material in 2 Thess 2:13-3:5 reflected a "somewhat catholic recommendation of oral and written traditions of the apostle in general."  The prayer for peace in 3:16 Hilgenfeld thought to be an "unpauline employment of kyrios, but it made clear the dependence of 2 Thess. on 1 Thess.  Of the ending of 2 Thess., Hilgenfeld commented:  "Who indeed finally can retain the real Paul as the author of 2 Thess. 3:17-18, where the peculiar ending greeting is given as a guarantee of the authenticity of every letter?  This self-attestation which has rightly attracted attention since Baur, obviously belonging with the indication of forged letters in 2 Thess 2:2, indeed makes the plethora of doubt full.  According to the natural simplicity of an apostolic situation, it is a pure impossibility that a short time after the founding of the Church at Thessalonika a letter could be falsely attributed to Paul, and that an authentic writing of Paul should require such an attestation.  Only a later writer could first devise this method of self-attestation, who wished to add a new letter to the letters already present and known as Paul's letters, and to have this new letter accepted as such.  In this way he positioned himself with his second edition of an authentic Thessalonian letter in such a doubtful relation to the first, that he not only leaves behind to us a noteworthy sign of the agitated state of affairs of Christians under Trajan, but also an illuminated monument of the fuller development of early Christian eschatology at the beginning of the second century."

The first Meyer-commentary on Thessalonians in 1894 by Wilhelm Bornemann accepted Pauline authorship for both letters.

William Wrede in 1903 wrote Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbrief untersucht.  It has generally been acknowledged as the watershed event in 2 Thess. studies.  You can see from my above discussion that Kern and Baur had problems with the Pauline authorship because of trying to relate 2 Thess. 2 to a particular emperor.  Baur also denied Pauline authorship of both 1 and 2 Thess., evidently because of their lack of justification by faith.  With Wrede we turn for the first time to a close and consistent comparison of 1 and 2 Thess. with each other.  He compared 1 and 2 Thess. with each other in parallel columns like a gospel synopsis.  He found major parallels between 1 Thess. 1:2-12 in 2 Thess. 1:3-12.  Other parallels were found at 2 Thess. 2:13-14 (parallel to 1 Thess. 2:12-13) and 2 Thess. 3:6-15 (parallel to 1 Thess. 4:1ff.).  Most notably parallels to 1 Thess. were lacking in 2 Thess. 2:1-12.  The similarities between 1 and 2 Thess. were "most striking" to Wrede, especially if Paul was the author of both epistles and if these letters were supposed to have been written within about 3 months of each other, especially since whole phrases seem to have been taken over from 1 Thess. to 2 Thess. without change.  The parallels were too close for Wrede to believe that Paul wrote them both.  "There was no case such as this.  On this account, those who hold to authenticity must be wrong, who presume this.  This is the decisive fact, certainly indirect, but as it appears to me, extremely strong, indeed the compelling proof."  This led Wrede to ask whether the author of 2 Thess. possessed 1 Thess. when writing the second letter.  Wrede concluded, "We have here characteristic marks of literary use."  Wrede thought it unlikely that Paul, so very creative, could have written a letter so terribly similar to 1 Thess. within a short time to the same church.  Thus Wrede concluded that Paul did not write 2 Thessalonians.  Like many other scholars, Wrede had difficulties with 2 Thess. 3:17, not believing it possible that Paul would have thrown doubts on his own previous letter.  Wrede concluded: "The author must therefore have been a later one, and the letter is a fiction."  Wrede thought it most likely that 2 Thess. was written after A.D. 70, and that 2 Thess. was not meant as a letter peculiar to the Thessalonians, but as a general letter, especially since the words "in every letter" seem to presuppose the existence of a collection of Pauline letters.  Wrede believed that a longer time after the death of Paul was necessary for a forgery such as 2 Thess. to be believable.  Also the eschatological differences between 1 and 2 Thess. Wrede felt to be sharp, since 1 Thess. 5:1-4 advises that the Day of the Lord comes "like a thief in the night" whereas 2 Thess. 2:1-12 gives clues as to when the Day of the Lord is to come.

Wrede believed that 2 Thess. presupposed a time in which "the Apostle" had for the first time denoted an authority figure whose stamp of approval carried clout in his churches, an "ideal, intangible, and uncontrollable canon."  Hence the "clothing" of the "Paul of the Pastoral Letters" was "not accidental," since this Paul became the "entmy of heretics, the patron of sound doctrine and church order.  "From this Paul of orthodoxy, we make a clear distinction from the Paul constituted in a wholly different way by Marcion, the enemy of Judaism, the Law, the Old Testament.  According to our epistle we now have, so to speak, yet another wholly different Paul before us: the Paul who was the representative of a stormy eschatological expectation, in whose letters the weightiest matters were what he said of the End.  . . .  This 'Paulinism' -- if we may use such a term overall -- remains for us an isolated fact.  Whether it had a wider-reaching significance, and what this was, we do not know."  (Please note: In chapter 5 of my book, I suggest what I believe this "wider-reaching significance" to be.)

Wrede's work became the lightning rod for those who defended the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians.  The article by Adolf von Harnack and the commentaries by Ernst von Dobschütz and Martin Dibelius were answers to Wrede.  Harnack and Dibelius proposed to keep Paul as the writer of both 1 and 2 Thess. by arguing that he wrote to different groups (Jewish, Gentile) within the same Thessalonian church.

I have summarized and quoted this material from my dissertation, "Second Thessalonians as a Document of Early Christian Rhetoric" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1984, pp. 3-74.  It is available from University Microfilms International.  I have very extensive translations of the debate from Latin (Hugo Grotius) as well as French and German in this chapter.

All best,
Frank W. Hughes
Lecturer in NT Studies
Codrington College
Barbados, West Indies