1 Thessalonians: The Oldest Christian Writing

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Paul, with Silvanus and Timothy named beside him (1 Thessalonians 1:1). No one seriously doubts it.

When: About the year 50, from Corinth, a few months after Paul had been forced to leave Thessalonica. It is probably the oldest writing in your New Testament.

Written for: The young church in Thessalonica, which Paul had to leave after a short stay. Its members were harassed by neighbors, and they were grieving friends who had died, afraid that the dead would miss my coming.

What it remembers of me: That I was killed (2:15), that I died and rose again (4:14), and what Paul calls the word of the Lord about my coming (4:15).

How close it stays to me: Close on gentleness and on not repaying evil. Far in chapter 2, on my own people.

If you only read three chapters: 1 Thessalonians 1, 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Thessalonians 5.

Words to Know

Thessalonica — the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, a busy port on the main road across northern Greece. Today it is Thessaloniki.

Coming — in Greek, parousia. It was the word for the arrival of a king or emperor visiting a city.

To meet — in Greek, apantēsis. It was the word for a city’s delegation going out to welcome an arriving dignitary.

The day of the Lord — the day, promised by the prophets, when God would come to judge and set things right.

The Book in Brief

Paul, Silvanus and Timothy write to the church in Thessalonica. In chapters 1 to 3 they thank God for the believers, who turned from idols to wait for God’s Son from heaven. Paul recalls how the three of them lived among the church, gently, working night and day to burden no one. The church has suffered from its own countrymen, as the churches in Judea did. Paul was kept from returning, so he sent Timothy, whose good news cheered him.

Chapter 4 gives instructions about sexual conduct, love for one another, and quiet, working lives. Then it takes up the grief of believers whose friends have died. Those who have fallen asleep will not miss the Lord’s coming. He will descend with a shout, the dead in Christ will rise first, and then the living will be caught up to meet him.

Chapter 5 says that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, so they must stay awake and sober. Short commands follow: encourage the faint-hearted, do not repay evil for evil, rejoice always, pray, give thanks, test everything. The letter ends with a blessing and an order to read it to everyone.

About twenty years after I died, Paul wrote to a small group of my followers in Thessalonica. He had been with them only a short time before he was forced to leave. Acts says he preached in the synagogue there for three Sabbath days (Acts 17:2) before a riot drove him out by night.

Paul was frantic to know how they were. When we couldn’t stand it any longer, he sent Timothy back to check on them (1 Thessalonians 3:1–2). Timothy returned with good news. They were holding on. Paul wrote this letter in relief.

But Timothy also brought back a question, and it is the question that makes this letter so important. Some of the believers in Thessalonica had died. And the ones still living were grieving in a particular way. They were afraid that their dead had missed it.

Go deeperWhy the city was nervous about a new king

Acts tells how Paul left Thessalonica, and it shows why the believers there had reason to be afraid.

A mob attacked the house of a man named Jason, where Paul had been staying. Not finding Paul, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the rulers of the city, with a political charge: These all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus! (Acts 17:6–7). The rulers took security from Jason and let them go. That night the brothers sent Paul and Silas away (Acts 17:9–10).

Luke’s Greek word for the rulers is politarchai. It is rare in surviving Greek writing, and some critics once thought Luke had the title wrong. Then inscriptions turned up. One taken from the city’s Vardar Gate, now in the British Museum, names Thessalonica’s politarchs, and others from Macedonia use the same title.¹

The charge about a rival king would have worried them. After the victory at Philippi, the city had honored Antony and Octavian lavishly, and its coins showed Julius Caesar as a god.² Paul had told the believers that God calls you into his own Kingdom and glory (1 Thessalonians 2:12). In that city, those were dangerous words.

They were waiting

To understand their fear, you have to know what they were waiting for.

Paul reminds them how they began: you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10).

They were Gentiles, mostly, who had given up the gods of their city. And they were waiting. Paul had told them I would come back, and they understood him to mean soon, in their own lifetimes. They had arranged their lives around it.

Then some of them died before it happened. Would the dead miss the day? Had they believed for nothing?

Paul’s answer

But we don’t want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

Then he describes what will happen.

For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with God’s trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore comfort one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:15–18).

Notice two things.

First, we who are alive, who are left. Paul counted himself among the living who would be there to see it. He wrote this around the year 50. He expected to be alive when I came.

Second, the purpose. Comfort one another. This passage was written to grieving people at a funeral, to tell them their dead were not lost. It was not written as a timetable for the end of the world.

Go deeperWhat a pagan gravestone said

Paul says the Thessalonians must not grieve like the rest, who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). That was a fair description of how many of their neighbors thought about death.

A century before Paul, the Roman poet Catullus wrote that suns can set and rise again, but for us, when our short light has set, there is one endless night to sleep. The Greek poet Theocritus wrote that hope is among the living, and the dead have none. On Latin gravestones, a stock formula said it in a few words: I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.³

Not everyone thought so. Some Greeks and Romans hoped for a happy life after death, and the mystery cults promised it to those who were initiated. But these voices show the feeling Paul was speaking into.

Paul’s word for the dead, asleep, was a common way of speaking about death. What was new was that for these believers the sleep would end. Early Christians took the word seriously. Their burial ground became the koimētērion, the sleeping place, and that is where we get the word cemetery.³

To meet him

Now look closely at the words to meet the Lord in the air.

The word Paul uses for meet had a specific meaning in his world. When an emperor or a general came to visit a city, the leading citizens went out through the gates to meet him on the road, and then escorted him back into the city. That going-out-to-meet was called the apantēsis.⁴

You can see the word used exactly that way elsewhere in your Bible. When Paul was brought to Rome as a prisoner, the believers in the city heard he was coming, and came to meet us as far as The Market of Appius and The Three Taverns (Acts 28:15). They went out to meet him on the road, and walked back into Rome with him. In my parable of the bridesmaids, the cry goes up, The bridegroom is coming! Come out to meet him! (Matthew 25:6), and they go out to bring him back to the wedding.

So the picture in Paul’s mind is not of believers being taken away from the earth. It is of the faithful going out to welcome the arriving king, and coming back with him. The direction of travel is toward the earth, not away from it.

Where the rapture comes from

In the 1830s, an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby, of a small group called the Plymouth Brethren, taught that this passage describes a secret event. Believers would vanish from the earth before a time of tribulation, and I would return again later. That idea, the rapture, spread through American churches by way of a popular study Bible in the early 1900s, and then through bestselling novels and films.⁵

Read the passage again. With a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with God’s trumpet. Nothing in it is secret. It is the loudest arrival Paul could describe. And there is no second coming after it. It is one coming, with a welcome party.

The rapture is not in Paul. It is in a nineteenth-century reading of Paul.

Go deeperCaught up: the Latin behind “rapture”

The English word rapture comes from Latin. Where Paul says that believers will be caught up (1 Thessalonians 4:17), the Greek verb is harpazō, to snatch or seize. The Latin Bible, the Vulgate, translated it rapiemur, from the verb rapere.⁶ English took rapture from that root, and in time it became the name of Darby’s doctrine.

The Greek verb is not unusual. It is used when the Spirit of the Lord caught Philip away (Acts 8:39), and of a man caught up into the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2). In each case someone is carried from one place to another. The verb does not say whether it happens in secret or in public.

What divides readers is the timing. Darby’s followers hold that the snatching comes before a time of great trouble, and is a different event from my coming to the earth. Many American evangelical churches and scholars still hold this view. Most biblical scholars, and most Christians through history, read the verse as part of one coming. The dead rise, the living go out to meet the king, and he arrives.

Another text used for the secret view is my own saying, one will be taken and one will be left (Matthew 24:40). But the sentence before says that the flood took them all away (Matthew 24:39). Readers disagree whether being taken means rescue or judgment.

Like a thief

After the comfort, Paul turns to the question everyone always asks: when?

But concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need that anything be written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night (1 Thessalonians 5:1–2).

That image is mine. I told my friends that if the master of the house had known when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake (Matthew 24:43). Paul had heard it from someone. It is one of the very few places where his letters seem to echo my words.

And then a line aimed at the empire: For when they are saying, “Peace and safety,” then sudden destruction will come on them (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Peace and safety was close to a Roman slogan. The empire advertised itself as the bringer of peace and security, on its coins and its monuments. Many scholars think Paul’s first readers would have heard the jab.⁷

Work with your hands

The letter is full of practical advice, and much of it is about ordinary work.

Paul reminds them that while he was with them, he did not live off them. For you remember, brothers, our labor and travail; for working night and day, that we might not burden any of you (1 Thessalonians 2:9).

He tells them to lead a quiet life, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands … that you may walk properly toward those who are outside, and may have need of nothing (1 Thessalonians 4:11–12). Some of them, waiting for the end, may already have stopped working. Paul tells them to keep at it.

And he describes how he treated them: we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother cherishes her own children (1 Thessalonians 2:7). The man who is so often painted as stern described himself as a nursing mother.

Near the end, a string of short commands, among the best Paul ever wrote: Admonish the disorderly; encourage the faint-hearted; support the weak; be patient toward all (1 Thessalonians 5:14). See that no one returns evil for evil to anyone, but always follow after that which is good for one another and for all (1 Thessalonians 5:15). Always rejoice. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

A hard passage

There is one passage in this letter that has done great harm, and you should know what scholars say about it.

Paul says the Thessalonians suffered from their own countrymen, just as the believers in Judea suffered from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and drove us out, and don’t please God, and are contrary to all men … But wrath has come on them to the uttermost (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16).

Killed the Lord Jesus. Contrary to all men. For centuries those words were used to brand my people as enemies of humanity and killers of God.

Some scholars think Paul did not write these verses at all. They argue that wrath has come on them to the uttermost sounds like someone looking back on the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, twenty years after this letter, and that the passage was added later. Others think Paul wrote it in a moment of fury, as a Jew speaking about some of his fellow Jews who had driven him out of town.⁸ Either way, it is not the same Paul who later wrote that God had not rejected his people, and that all Israel would be saved.

And either way, it was Roman soldiers who killed me.

The oldest

This is probably the oldest writing in your New Testament, older than any gospel. It was written to be read aloud: I solemnly command you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the holy brothers (1 Thessalonians 5:27).

Imagine that room. A few dozen people, in a house in a Greek port city, grieving the friends they had buried, hearing that their dead would rise first. They had never seen me. Most of them had seen Paul for only a few weeks. And they were holding on.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, then Acts 28:15.

You will find: Paul expecting to be alive at my coming, and the word for meet used of a welcome party walking a visitor back into the city.

Then read 1 Thessalonians 4:18. What is the passage for?

The Short Version

• 1 Thessalonians is probably the oldest writing in your New Testament, from about 50.
• It was written to people who were grieving their dead and afraid they had missed my coming.
• Paul expected to be alive when I came: we who are alive, who are left.
• The word for meeting me in the air meant going out to welcome an arriving king and escort him back. The rapture came from a nineteenth-century reading.
• One passage blaming “the Jews” for my death may be a later addition, and it was Rome that killed me.