letter, as they present themselves in their further development. The disturbing influences whose presence is only indicated in I Thessalonians, have now reached their crisis. And the Apostle's thanksgiving (ch. i. 3—12) implies an advance both in the severity of persecution, and in the growth and testing of Thessalonian faith; for which faith he gives thanks in terms even stronger than before. The personal recollections and explanations, so interesting a feature of the other Epistle, are eminently suited to the Apostle's first communication of the kind with this beloved Church. The absence of such references in the shorter Epistle marks it as virtually an appendix to the other, following it after a brief interval. The expression of ch. ii. 2, "neither through word, nor through letter as on our authority," is most naturally explained as alluding to some misquotation or misunderstanding of the language of 1 Thessalonians on the subject in question.

I

The two Epistles were written, as we have seen, from Corinth; not from Athens, as it is stated in the concluding note, or "subscription," attached to the Epistles in the MSS followed by the Authorised English version. They were both composed during the Apostle's residence of eighteen months in Corinth (Acts xviii. 11), extending from Autumn 53 to Spring 55 A.D. (possibly, 52-54). They belong therefore, as nearly as we can judge, to the winter of 53—54 A.D.,—the last year of the Emperor Claudius; being 23 years after our Lord's Ascension, two years after the Council at Jerusalem, four years before the Epistle to the Romans, thirteen years, probably, before the death of St Paul and the outbreak of the Jewish War, and seventeen years before the Fall of Jerusalem.

CHAPTER V.

THE GENUINENESS OF THE TWO EPISTLES.

THAT these two letters were written by the author whose name they bear, has never been doubted by anyone until the

present century. No writings of the N. T. are more strongly and unanimously supported by the testimony of the Early Church. The German writer Christ. Schmidt first raised suspicions against 2 Thessalonians in the year 1801, and Schrader against Thessalonians in 1836. The objections of these scholars were further developed by Ferdinand C. Baur, the founder of what is called the Tendency School of N. T. Criticism, who gave them currency in his influential work on "Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ" (1845: Eng. Trans., 1873). Baur supposed the Epistles to have been written by some disciple of Paul, with the Apocalypse of John in his hand, who wished to excite renewed interest amongst Pauline Christians in the Second Advent. He dates them therefore in the reign of Vespasian, subsequently to the Fall of Jerusalem (70 A.D.).

I. The authenticity of the First Epistle has been amply vindicated, and is now acknowledged even by the leading sceptical critics of the school of Baur, such as Holtzmann and Pfleiderer. If any one expressed doubts on the subject, it would be sufficient to point (1) to the picture the Apostle gives of himself and his relations to this Church in chaps. i.-iii. It is an exquisite piece of self-portraiture, bearing all the marks of circumstantial truth and genuine feeling, harmonizing with what we learn of St Paul from other sources, and free from anything that could make us suspect imitation by another hand. One feels the beat and throb of Paul's heart in every line of these chapters. Nemo potest Paulinum pectus effingere (Erasmus).

(2) The same air of reality belongs to the aspect of the Thessalonian Church, as it is delineated in these letters. It exhibits the freshness, the fervour and impulsive energy of a newborn faith, with something of the indiscipline and excitability that often attend the first steps of the Christian life, so full at once of joy and of peril. The Church of Thessalonica has a character of its own. It resembles the Philippian Church in the frankness, the courage, and the personal devotion to the Apostle, which so greatly won his love; also in the simplicity

and thoroughness of its faith, which was untroubled by the speculative questions and tendencies to intellectual error that beset the Corinthian and Asiatic Churches. These characteristics agree with what we know of the Macedonian temperament. At the same time, there was at Thessalonica a tendency to morbid excitement and to an unpractical and over-heated enthusiasm, that forms a peculiar feature in the portrait the Epistles furnish of this Christian Society.

(3) The attitude of St Paul toward the parousia is such as no disciple or imitator, writing in his name, could possibly have attributed to him after the Apostle's death. He is made to write as though Christ were expected to come within his own lifetime: "we the living, those who survive till the coming of the Lord," 1 Ep. iv. 15, 17. These words, taken in their plain sense, leave it an open question whether the Lord Jesus would not return while the writer and his readers yet lived. That a later author, wishing to use the Apostle's authority for his own purposes, should have put such words into his master's lips is inconceivable. For then St Paul had died, and Christ had not returned.

(4) Observe, too, the manner in which the writer speaks in the same passage of "those falling asleep" (present tense: see note ad loc.), in such a way as to show that the question concerning the fate of believers dying before the Lord's return was a new one, that had arisen in the Thessalonian Church for the first time. If this be the case, the letter can only have been written within a few months of this Church's birth. For it is never long in any large community before death has made its mark.

II. The suspicions cherished against the Second Epistle have been more persistent; but they are equally ill-founded. Baur rightly maintained that the two letters are from the same source, and that both must be regarded as spurious, or both authentic. The Second is closely bound to the First, alike in language and in matter; and the two chief and distinctive passages of the former (ch. ii. 1—12; iii. 6—15) are based on the corresponding paragraphs of the latter. If we ascribe the

Second Epistle to an imitator of the Apostle, we must suppose that another writer, at least 20 years later1, taking up 1 Thessalonians and adding this sequel to it, has reproduced the Apostle's manner to perfection, and has carried his thoughts and his line of exhortation forward precisely where he left them off; and that in doing so he has escaped detection by skilfully avoiding every kind of reference to intervening events and to the circumstances of his own time. We have no reason to believe that any post-Apostolic writer had either the skill or cunning to execute such a feat. And no adequate motive for the forgery is adduced.

It is alleged that the purpose of the supposed inventor was to introduce into the Pauline theology Apocalyptic ideas, similar to those found in the Revelation of St John, and to disseminate them amongst Gentile Christians. There is manifestly a relation between the Johannine and the Pauline Apocalypse, but as we shall endeavour to show (Appendix on “The Man of Lawlessness"), it is St John who has derived from St Paul, not vice versa. The brief and enigmatic sketch of this Book is developed and filled out in larger proportions and with glowing dramatic colours by the Seer of Patmos. Moreover, it is impossible to point to any time subsequent to the year 70, at which there existed an expectation of the immediate coming of Christ so intense and overpowering as is indicated in 2 Ep. ii. 2, and which needed to be qualified and checked in the manner of this Epistle. John's Apocalypse, on the contrary, is designed to quicken a flagging faith in the parousia.

Add to this, amongst the details of St Paul's Apocalyptic sketch, the expression of ver. 1, "our gathering together unto Him," which accords with 1 Ep. iv. 13-18, and indicates a time when in the first freshness of Christian hope it was natural to think that the Lord would return to find the body of His people still living on the earth; "the temple of God," ver. 4, pointing to the Jewish Temple yet standing (see note ad loc.); and the description of "the Adversary" as "exalting himself 1 Recent hostile critics, such as Hilgenfeld and Pfleiderer, would say, 60 years later, "in the closing years of Trajan"!

against every one called God,"-"seating himself in the temple of God, showing off himself as God," which is quite intelligible if written when the blasphemous freaks of the Emperor Caligula and his attempt to set up his statue in the Temple at Jerusalem (40 A.D.) were still vividly remembered. At a later period these incidents were effaced by other and yet more portentous developments of "the mystery of lawlessness," such as have left their trace on the pages of the Book of Revelation, but are not indicated here.

There is said to be, after all, a contradiction between 1 Ep. iv. 13—v. 10 and 2 Ep. ii. 1—12, the First Epistle representing the parousia as near and sudden, the second as more distant and known by premonitory signs. But the latter modifies and corrects an erroneous inference drawn from the former statement. The premonitory sign of the coming of Antichrist shews that the end, though it might be near, is not immediate. On the other hand, no date is given for the advent of Antichrist in 2 Ep. ii.; and the "times and seasons" still remain uncertain, as in 1 Thessalonians. The same contrast

is found in Christ's own predictions—e.g. between Matt. xxiv. 33 (a preparatory sign) and ver. 36 (uncertainty of date).

Outside ch. ii. 1-12 there is nothing to lend a colour to the theory of a later origin for the Second Epistle. The directions given respecting the treatment of the "brother walking disorderly" belong to quite the incipient stage of Church government and discipline. To suppose this passage written in the second century, or even in the last quarter of the first, is to attribute to the author an extraordinary power of ignoring the conditions of his own time, and a power exercised in a quite gratuitous fashion. But these directions harmonise well enough with those addressed to the Corinthians (1 Cor. v.) respecting the extreme case of disorder occurring in that Church.