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THE ESCHATOLOGY OF 2 THESSALONIANS

II. 1-12.

IN considering the Eschatology of 2 Thessalonians ii. 1-12, I must ask to be allowed to assume the authenticity of the Epistle from which it is taken. This may seem a somewhat large assumption in view of the arguments that have recently been directed against its Pauline authorship. But, as I have tried to show elsewhere,1 interesting though these arguments often are, they are by no means convincing while the still greater difficulties that surround all conflicting theories of the Epistle's origin are in themselves important evidence in favour of the traditional view. We may accept, then, that view for the present, if only for want of a better. And we may do so the more readily because, as it is the teaching of this very passage which has been generally used as the principal objection to the Epistle's genuineness, we shall have an opportunity of testing the force of that objection when we have seen what it is that the passage really means.

It may seem to some perhaps a more serious matter that in thus postulating the Pauline authorship we at once necessarily exclude all such interpretations of the passage as make it in any way dependent on the teaching of the Apocalypse, or the Nero-redivivus legend, or the Gnostic heresies of the second century. But this again need be the less regretted because there has been a growing tendency to abandon this line of interpretation, even on the part of those scholars who deny the Epistle's authenticity. Wrede, for example, admits that any reference of the passage to Nero has been made wholly impossible by the researches of Bornemann, Jülicher and Zahn, and, from another point. of view, of Gunkel and Bonsset 2; while the assertion that 1 The EXPOSITOR for June, 1904.

2. Die Deutung der Stelle auf Nero ist jedenfalls gründlich erschüttert."

the chapter is in any way influenced by the Johannine Apocalypse no longer finds the support that once it did. And if we can show, as I hope to be able to do, that the passage can be understood in connexion with the conditions of S. Paul's own time, and the general characteristics of his mode of thought, it will be generally admitted that there is no need to go further afield in search of a writer.

For this let me only add by way of preface, that it is solely with the historical interpretation of the passage— what it meant for the writer, and for those to whom it was first addressed-that we are at present concerned. It is impossible to attempt even a résumé of the different interpretations that have been applied to it throughout the course of the Church's history and it lies equally beyond our scope to determine what place, if any, the teaching here embodied is to have in our dogmatic systems regarding the Last Things.

In turning, then, to the passage as an integral part of S. Paul's Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, it may be well, before proceeding to examine it in detail, to recall the circumstances under which that Epistle was written, so far as we can now ascertain them.

On his arrival at Athens, shortly after his expulsion from Thessalonica and brief ministry at Bercea, S. Paul, it will be remembered, had despatched Timothy to Thessalonica to "establish" his converts amidst the afflictions from which he had heard that they were suffering, and to "comfort" them concerning their faith (1 Thess. iii. 2). The report which Timothy brought back from Thessalonica, either by word of mouth or in the form of a letter, was in the main highly satisfactory, to judge from the expressions of warm praise which S. Paul bestowed upon the Church

Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefs, p. 1. For the relation of the Neronic myth to Antichrist see especially Charles, The Ascension of Isaiah, p. li. ff

as a whole in the opening verses of his First Epistle to them-an Epistle which was evidently written immediately after Timothy's return (aprɩ dè èxlóvтos Tipoléov, 1 Thess. iii. 6). One matter only gave the Apostle grave concern, and that was to hear of the aspersions and slanders that had been cast upon the character of his own and his companions' ministry at Thessalonica, after they themselves had left. He nowhere definitely tells us by whom these attacks had been made, but to judge from the language of 1 Thessalonians ii. 14-16—and the point is not without importance for our future inquiry-there can be little doubt that they were the work of the unbelieving, fanatical Jews who had already secured his expulsion from Thessalonica, and who were now doing their utmost to prejudice his converts against him by throwing discredit upon the purity of his motives. It was a charge which the Apostle had little difficulty in meeting by an appeal to the actual experience of the Thessalonian Church. And no sooner had he disposed of it than he turned aside from this, the immediate cause of his writing, to deal with one or two questions of a more practical nature that had been suggested by Timothy's report.

One of these concerned the moral danger which the Thessalonian Christians, who were evidently for the most part Gentiles by birth, ran from contact with the too often vicious and depraved state of the pagan society around them. Another sprang from certain doctrinal difficulties in connexion with the Parousia of the Lord Jesus. We are not concerned with these last at present further than to notice that they were evidently due to the stress which S. Paul had laid on the near approach of Christ's Parousia in accordance with his own personal belief and expectation at the time. And accordingly, no sooner had he reassured the Thessalonians on the special point that was causing them trouble than he proceeded to

inculcate anew the need of constant watchfulness and preparedness in view of a fact so certain in its occurrence, but so uncertain in its precise time and season. "As a thief in the night," so he pointedly warned them, "there is a coming of a day of the Lord" (1 Thess. v. 2).

This teaching, however, had at least one unexpected result. Instead of allaying, it seems rather to have increased the restless excitement of which there had already been signs amongst the Thessalonians (see 1 Thess. v. 12-22), and to have led even in certain cases to an abandonment of their daily tasks-" a business which was no business," "a minding of everybody's business but their own." And accordingly in his Second Epistle, written very shortly after the First, S. Paul set himself to rebuke and correct this state of things. And he did so all the more emphatically because he had heard that the Thessalonians were being encouraged in their idle and fanatical conduct by certain misleading and false influences, which he describes as "by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us, as that the day of the Lord is now present (2 Thess. ii. 2). The verse is one of the most difficult in the Epistle; but whatever the exact interpretation we may attach to its different clauses, they evidently point to certain misleading utterances, and even to carefully planned words and a letter, one or all of them shielding themselves under the Apostle's name and authority, and all calculated to throw the Thessalonians off their balance by insinuating that the Day of the Lord was not only imminent, but was actually come.2

1 2 Thess. iii. 7-12. It is true that nowhere in the Epistle does the Apostle directly connect the two things-the near approach of the Parousia and this restless idleness; but, as Hollmann has recently pointed out, only to some such cause can this "Arbeitsscheu" in a Church like the Thessalonian Church be ascribed. Die Unechtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefs in the Zeitschrift f. d. neutest. Wissenschaft, 1904. Heft i.

2 For this meaning of évéσrŋkev, cf. Rom. viii. 38, 1 Cor. iii. 22, vii. 26, Gal. i. 4.

Here, then, was the situation that S. Paul had to facehow, on the one hand, to unmask the error underlying these false representations; and on the other, to do nothing to discourage the Thessalonians' belief in the near approach of their Lord. And it must be at once admitted that the manner in which he proceeds to do so is to us at first sight both strange and bewildering. For, instead of conveying his warning in a clear and definite form, the Apostle prefers to embody it in a mysterious apocalyptic picture, which has not only no parallel in his own writings, but is unlike anything else in the New Testament, unless it be certain passages in the Apocalypse of S. John.1 Nor is this all, but the difficulties of the passage are still further increased by the grammatical irregularities and frequent ellipses with which it abounds, and even more by the manifest reserve with which the whole subject is treated. In the case of the Thessalonians this might not much matter in view of the oral instruction regarding these very things which, as S. Paul reminds them, he had been in the habit of imparting while he was still with them. But to us, who have not had this advantage, the unexplained words and veiled phrases are of such a nature as to make it very questionable whether, with the resources at our disposal, any full and adequate interpretation of them is any longer possible. At the same time we can at least endeavour to indicate the main lines along which any such interpretation must be sought, and to guard against the manifest errors which so often, in popular estimation at least, have been associated with the passage.

Literally translated, it runs as follows:

Now we beseech you, brethren, touching (or, as to) the Parousia of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto Him, to the end that ye be not hastily shaken from your reason-driven by feverish expectations from your sober senses (Lightfoot)—nor yet be

1 See especially Rev. xiii. 5–8, 12–17, xvi. 9–11.