I and II Thessalonians: a Commentary - M Eugene Boring - Books - Westminster John Knox Press - 9780664220990 - August 24, 2015
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I and II Thessalonians: a Commentary

M Eugene Boring

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I and II Thessalonians: a Commentary

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes:"M. Eugene Boring's treatment of 1 and 2 Thessalonians is thoroughly researched, exegetically perceptive, and theologically insightful. Boring helps the contemporary reader listen in on the conversations between Paul and the Thessalonians and between Paul's literary descendent and those same Christians with keen awareness of the political, social, and religious environments in which they lived. This is a master work by a wise and seasoned scholar." E. Elizabeth Johnson, J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary"Brief Description: Reading in Context(s) All meaning is contextual. "The" context of every biblical text is multidimensional. Four overlapping and interwoven aspects of the context of 1 Thessalonians call for recognition and exploration: (1) the reader's context; (2) the canonical context; (3) the context in the history of interpretation; (4) the original historical context. In the lived experience of interpreting the Bible, these con- texts overlap and interpenetrate, but for purposes of clarification and discussion, they may be distinguished--though they cannot be separated. The Reader's ContextWe readers of 1 Thessalonians have no choice but to begin where we are. Each reader's context is different from that of every other--a particular location in time and space, a particular location in social groups with their own history, and within this, the individual reader's unique life story and set of experiences. My context inevitably limits and distorts what I can see, but I may nonetheless see something in the text besides my own reflection and hear more than the echo of my own voice--something that is actually there, before me and apart from me. I may hear something true and important, something the text itself wants to say. While one's own context can be as invisible or unnoticed as water to a fish, it is crucial that every reader be aware of the particular set of eyes with which they peer out at the world, including the words on the pages of the Bible. As a reader, I bring my agenda to the text, and I cannot do otherwise. While hidden agendas are rightly frowned upon, the word itself has no sinister over- tones. The agenda is simply the list of business items that is to be taken care of, that with which we are concerned, what we are about. I need to be aware of the contents and priorities of my agenda, how it influences what I can hear from the text, and acknowledge that I may need to amend it en route, in dialogue with the voice that speaks to me from the text. Hermeneutics can never be neatly settled in advance and then "applied," cookie-cutter-like, to the text; interpretation is always rebuilding the ship at sea. Each biblical author also has an agenda; every biblical text represents some- thing of this agenda. For the biblical text to get into the discussion, to gain a hearing in the dialogue between text and readers, its agenda must be respected. This involves inquiring what its concerns are, what it is about. Therefore interpreting in context requires the exploration of other contexts besides the reader's own. A principal function of historical criticism is to bring the text's original context into focus, in order to facilitate a hearing of the text in terms of its own agenda. This approach is particularly appropriate in interpreting a letter such as 1 Thessalonians, where the original context is relatively clear. In 2 Thessalonians, if the letter is not by Paul himself, the concept of "original context" becomes more diffuse, and even more so in the interpretation of such texts as the Gospels and the Pentateuch. Even so, such texts do not float above history, and the effort to root them in their historical context cannot be abandoned or considered irrelevant. The Canonical ContextFor every modern reader, the Thessalonian Letters have another context that is immediately perceivable and inescapable: the document is part of the Christian Bible. In the last generation, this fact has been made into the basis for a significant strand of biblical interpretation, canonical criticism. Canonical location. From the viewpoint of canonical criticism, each biblical text has already been integrated into a coherent set of documents, which are more than random clusters. The texts with which each text is read--its canonical con-text2--are theologically important. First Thessalonians, for instance, must be read in relation to the other canonical documents such as 2 Thessalonians, Acts, and the Gospels. Noncanonical texts such as 3 Corinthians, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla may also provide illuminating historical insights, but receive a different kind of attention than canonical texts. While each text of Scripture is read in the light of Scripture as a whole, this approach does not mean that texts can be drawn from all over the Bible and fitted into one harmonious scheme, and that this homogenized product can be presented as the "canonical" meaning of a particular text. The varied voices ofScripture retain their differences, including their irreconcilable disagreements. It does mean that, for example, 1 Thessalonians is heard within the whole historical range and theological spectrum of the canonical texts. On almost every topic, the biblical canon contains a spectrum of views, with considerable--but not unlimited--variety. Each text is allowed to speak in its own voice; harmonization does not mean that differences are leveled into a monotone, but rather that each is heard in concert with the other. Dialogue and mutual correction are facilitated when canonical texts are read in relation to each other rather than in isolation. What each distinctive voice has to say is properly heard within the chorus of other voices. Some have used a different image, with canonical location as "conference table."3 Not just anyone is invited to the table, but a plurality of voices are invited, and all those invited are heard. In the New Testa- ment canon, more than one point of view is acceptable--but not just anything. To what extent may the modern exegete seek illumination on the meaning of1 Thessalonians from the other letters in the Pauline corpus, all of which were written later? This is a knotty question, involving the overlapping approaches of historical criticism and a canonical perspective. On the one hand, the new converts in Thessalonica had none of the other letters of Paul, not to speak of the rest of the New Testament, and the later insights of these texts were not available to them, so they could not use them to explicate the meaning of the particular letter addressed to them. Since Paul's Letters are shaped by the par- ticular situation he addresses, these insights may not yet have dawned on him as he writes 1 Thessalonians. On the other hand, Paul writes as one who has been preaching and teaching the basic themes of the faith for more than fifteen years, and he must have already thought through some of the issues that do not explicitly emerge until the later letters. In this commentary, I will mainly attempt to help the modern reader hear 1 Thessalonians as it might have been heard by its first readers, without allowing every occurrence of a key Pauline word ("faith," "church") to trigger the composition of a mini-essay on this theme derived from the whole Pauline corpus. Even so, it is historically impossible, as well as theologically illegitimate, for the modern exegete to pretend that one does not know the later letters, which on occasion are indispensable for clarifying the meaning of the earliest letter. Moreover, the Thessalonians themselves were illuminated by Paul's instruction to them (cf. the repeated "as you know"), instruction that we do not have, but which can to some extent be excavated by what he writes in later letters. While all the insights of later letters must not be read into 1 Thessalonians, there is no way to understand this letter in isolation. Understanding 1 Thessalonians calls for both diachronic and synchronic approaches, attending to the particular text before us yet also seeing it in its canonical context, which includes its comprehensive Pauline context. Authoritative claim. Canonical context signals not only location but also authoritative claim. Reading each text of Scripture in the light of Scripture as a whole means it is being read in the context of the community that accepted this collection of documents as mediating the word of God, the authority for its life and work. The later church reads this constellation of texts together, in the expectation that the word of God that generated them will continue to be heard through them. From the perspective of canonical criticism, canonization by the later church is not seen as the imposition of an external authority on the texts, but as the recognition and acknowledgment of a claim inherent in the texts themselves. When a letter that Paul wrote for a church gathered in a specific time and place became a letter for the whole church around the world and through the centuries, this was in accord with, and the realization of, the text's original impact (cf. 1 Thess 5:27). What it meant/what it means? In this regard, canonical criticism challenges a two-stage hermeneutical approach that has become conventional for many in the last generation of biblical scholarship. This two-stage line of thought claims to distinguish the original historical meaning ("what it meant") from later theological interpretations and applications ("what it means").4 In this perspective, contemporary readers of all faiths and none can theoretically agree on the descriptive historical meaning, observing what the text meant to the author and original readers ("what it meant," i.e., "what the historical exegete thinks it meant"). In this view, dissension only arises when this theoretical agreement on the historical meaning is pursued beyond the original context and translated into the conceptuality and terminology of the later reader's own time. This normative sense explicates the meaning and claim of the text for the contemporary reader. In the former reading, the text was "not written to us," and the reader is a more or less interested spectator to a communication event between two other parties. In the latter reading, when readers understand themselves to belong to the same believing community that originally received the canonical documents, "what it means" is or can be a matter of normative theology, existential involvement, and confession of the faith to which the text witnesses and communicates: hence there is a sense in which it is (also) "written to us." This hermeneutical dynamic of "what it meant" // "what it means" and "not written to us" // "written to us" is inherent in affirming historical texts as Holy Scripture. Advocates of contemporary canonical criticism and theological interpretation have been critical of this two-stage approach to hermeneutics. Some of their objections are well taken, for they are quite right that this meant/means, then/now distinction needs to be nuanced as too quantitative, too partitioned, too diachronic, too assured that both "what it meant" and "what it means" are univocal realities.5 Such a too-rigid and too-simple view tends to think of the historical "what it meant" as a separate, descriptive task that can be completed without raising normative questions of theological meaning, as though the historical critic could deliver an objective, value-and-ideology-neutral product, the ancient and original meaning uncontaminated by later concerns. Those who have a mind to do so could then take this "objective" meaning and, as an optional additional step, translate it into "meaning for today," in terms of their subjective commitments and/or communities to which they belong. Canonical criticism disputes this sort of partition of the interpreter's task into "then" and "now" components and sees hermeneutics as one dynamic whole. First Thessalonians was not, in fact, written to isolated individuals in Thessalonica, but to a church. Had the letter been lost en route to the congregation for which it was intended, falling out of the courier's backpack on a street in Thessalonica and found by a casual passer-by, it would not have been understood in the same way the new converts in Thessalonica would have understood it, even though the reader might understand the Greek vocabulary and syntax perfectly. Both author and intended recipients would have considered this understanding to be defective. The letter required the community, and its shared history with the author, in order to understand it rightly. When the letter(s) to the Thessalonians were incorporated into the Scriptures that belong to the whole church, and accompanied it on its journey through his- tory, this original dynamic was not lost. It is the history of the church as the ongoing people of God that binds together the original addressees of 1 Thessalonians and contemporary readers who belong to the same community of faith; this ongoing peoplehood bridges the gap between the historical "what it meant" and theological "what it means."Canonical criticism vis-a-vis historical criticism. The "canonical" and "historical-critical" approaches to interpretation have sometimes defined them- selves in contrast to each other, with occasional touches of caricature from both sides, or have simply stared at each other from across the street. Historians who want to hear biblical texts in their original settings may, in a disdainful tone of voice, refer to canonical groupings artificially imposed on the text centuries later, groupings of which the first readers were completely unaware. Advocates of canonical interpretation may suppose that they are the only ones interested in the "final form of the text," and that historical critics are mainly interested in peeling away the layers of the present form of the text to get behind it to its sources or to "what actually happened." Numerous scholars, however--including the present one--have recognized that each approach may have something valuable to contribute to the other. Just as numerous hardline historical critics insist on the theological relevance of their work, so several leading advocates of canonical criticism have emphasized that their approach affirms and incorporates historical criticism.6We modern readers cannot be unaware that 1-2 Thessalonians come to us only as integrated into a firm collection that includes the Jewish Scriptures that became the Christian Old Testament, the Gospels, the stories of Paul in Acts, and the later New Testament Letters. When reading 1 Thessalonians, we already know Paul retrospectively and anachronistically as the martyred missionary hero of Acts and author of major letters in the church's Scripture. The first readers knew him as an itinerant leatherworker (or awning maker, tentmaker) and part-time preacher who worked in a local shop, who still bore bruises from his latest missionary effort in a town some days up the road. His preaching had converted them to a new faith and involved them in a new com- munity, but suddenly he left town when troubles arose, leaving them to bear the brunt of local violence. Now they have a letter from him. The difference between these two starting points for reading the letter cannot be ignored, but accepting the one does not necessarily mean rejecting the other. While the historical critic cannot escape the canonical context of 1 Thessalonians, neither can the canonical critic use the "canonical approach" or "theological interpretation" as a pretext for flight from historical study or for ignoring its results. The Mediating Context: Church Tradition, Academic ResearchAll modern readers receive 1-2 Thessalonians from the hands of the church, which included these two documents in the Christian Bible and handed them on through more than nineteen centuries of translation and interpretation. While the modern reader cannot simply ignore this historical context and cultural gap, it need not be seen merely as a barrier that separates original text and modern reader. This history also binds the text to contemporary readers, transmitting it to them along with a rich heritage of interpretation with which it is already bound up. Rather than trying to make exegetical work the means of collapsing the gap between the first and the twenty-first centuries, contemporary interpreters might better explore the resources of this rich heritage. This is more than a borrowing of insightful comments and inspirational paragraphs from great expositors of the past. Reading their--sometimes startling--interpretations of familiar texts may serve to break up the crust of modern readers' perceptions, cause the text to be seen in a new light, and create space for new insight that transcends both the interpretation offered by an earlier generation and the reader's own previous understanding. One of the biblical scholar's roles is to guard the alterity, the otherness, of the biblical text--in the Bible's own terms, its holiness (Rom 1:2; 2 Tim 3:15). Study of the history of interpretation will both put our own interpretations in proper context and guard against attempts to make the biblical authors sound too much like our own voices. This commentary will occasionally indicate its indebtedness to major interpreters of Paul through the centuries and will seek to help its readers become more aware of the tradition in which we all stand; to do otherwise is inevitably to interpret out of context.7 "Tradition is not a veneration of the ashes, but a handing on of the fire."8 This tradition includes not only the ecclesial context, but, overlapping it, the tradition of analytical study of the Bible in the academy. The Thessalonian Letters in Recent ScholarshipWith varying degrees of awareness of the history in which they stand, modern interpreters also do their work in the context of the history of academic research. During the last two centuries, the similarities and differences between 1 and 2 Thessalonians have generated a variety of views of the origins and mutual relations of these two letters.9 Only two have found substantial support: 1. Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians, followed in a few months by 2 Thessalonians. This is the traditional view, generally assumed in the church until the advent of modern historical study of the Bible. The similarities between the two documents are explained by their proximity in time: the structure and wording of 1 Thessalonians were still fresh in Paul's mind when he wrote 2 Thessalonians. The differences are due to Paul's perception of the changed situation of the Thessalonians in the brief interval.2. Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians; 2 Thessalonians was written by a later disciple of Paul. In the last thirty years, critical scholarship has increasingly moved toward this position, which is now the dominant critical view, and the perspective of this commentary (see intro to 2 Thessalonians, below). Other proposals include the following: Paul wrote both letters about the same time, to different groups in the same church. Adolf Harnack argued that 1 Thessalonians was written to the Gentile Christian majority, and 2 Thessalonians was addressed to the Jewish Christian faction of the congregation that met separately. Martin Dibelius suggested that 1 Thessalonians was written to the church leaders, while 2 Thessalonians was intended for liturgical reading in the congregation as a whole. E. Earle Ellis reversed this argument, contending that 1 Thessalonians was written to the whole church, while 2 Thessalonians was only for the leaders and coworkers, who had authority to deal with the problematic "idlers." Abraham Malherbe has recently argued that 1 Thessalonians was written to those whom Paul had converted and knew personally, and that 2 Thessalonians was written a short time later, to those converted in the meantime, who had not known Paul directly and had appropriated a distorted understand- ing of 1 Thessalonians.10Paul wrote both letters at the same time, but to congregations in different towns. First Thessalonians was written to Thessalonica, but 2 Thessalonians to a church in a different town in Macedonia, perhaps Beroea or Philippi.11Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians prior to 1 Thessalonians. Since the seventeenth century, a number of scholars have resolved the difficulties of the traditional view by arguing that 2 Thessalonians was written first.12 This hypothesis requires a lost letter, since 2 Thess 2:15; 3:17 could not refer to 1 Thessalonians. A place for the writing of 2 Thessalonians must be found in the history Paul rehearses in 1 Thess 2:17-3:10, which reads as though there had been no previous letter. It also requires that 1 Thessalonians be read as an interpretation of 2 Thessalonians, and that 2 Thessalonians be regarded as the earliest extant Christian document. These difficulties have proved insuperable to most contemporary interpreters. Paul wrote a number of letters that have been combined into 1 (and 2) Thessalonians. A few have argued that the two canonical letters are editorial compositions of three or more letters.13Paul wrote neither letter. F. C. Baur and his disciples, the nineteenth-century Tubingen school, regarded only four New Testament Letters as from the hand of Paul: 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans (the Hauptbriefe). Scholarship of the early twentieth century, conservative and liberal alike, took these challenges seriously and responded with detailed refutations and positive argument. Today, 2 Thessalonians is often considered deutero- pauline, but the Pauline authorship of 1 Thessalonians is virtually unchallenged. The Historical Context of 1 ThessaloniansEach of the contexts discussed above is crucial to understanding. Hearing the text in its ancient historical context is the most difficult task for the modern interpreter, and will require the most attention in this commentary. In the Context of Paul's LifeFirst Thessalonians15 is here understood to be not only the earliest Pauline letter that happens to be preserved, but also the first such letter ever written (see below, on the "Apostolic Letter"). This does not mean it was written early in his missionary career, or that it represents Paul's early, "undeveloped" thought. Paul's theology represented in the extant letters changed over the years, but this is a matter of adapting and rethinking his core convictions under the pressure of new situations, not an evolutionary development from primitive to sophisticated. This first apostolic letter was not the product of a neophyte missionary- theologian, advocating rudimentary ideas that the more mature Paul would abandon. All the extant letters of Paul come from a relatively brief period near the end of his missionary career. In the chronology here followed, the period from Paul's conversion until his final letter spanned twenty-four years, 33-57 C. E. All his extant letters were written in the final seven or eight years of that period, beginning with 1 Thessalonians in 50 C. E. and concluding with Romans in 57 C. E. Neither Acts nor Paul's Letters contain much information about the first 70 percent of his missionary career, the years 33-50, from his conversion until the writing of 1 Thessalonians. To be sure, in relative terms, 1 Thessalonians is early in the framework of the 50-57 period of his letters. The pressures that would trigger the responses of 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, where the legitimacy of Paul's apostleship and "justification by faith apart from the works of the law" become key themes, had not yet occurred.16 Yet the formative events of Paul's life had already happened long before he first appears on the New Testament scene as the writer of 1 Thessalonians--the work of a seasoned missionary and mature theologian. Saul of Tarsus, hard-liner Diaspora Pharisee, zealous opponent of what he saw as a deviant group within Judaism, had joined in the efforts to neutralize or destroy this group that was relaxing the Torah and admitting uncircumcised Gentiles to the holy people of God, thus threatening the very foundations of Judaism (1 Cor 15:9; Phil 3:6; Gal 1:13). In or near Damascus around 33 C. E., Saul the zealous opponent of aberrant Jewish believers in Jesus, convinced that he was doing the will of God, was encountered by the risen Christ (1 Cor 9:1; 15:8; Gal 1:15-16; Acts 9:1-8; 22:6-11; 26:9-18). Paul was converted into the Hellenistic church. Even if Paul had previously been in Jerusalem and knew something of the church there, it was in Damascus that his understanding of everything was turned upside down--he would have said "right side up"--and that he became a representative of the Hellenistic church. Three years after his conversion he made a brief visit to Jerusalem, then worked for some time as a missionary of the Antioch church. The church at Antioch was an innovative, integrating Christian community that began among the Gentile God-fearers in the synagogues, but then formed its own congregations of (mostly) Gentile Christians. Here for the first time the church was recognized as a distinct religious community separate from the synagogue, not a subset within Judaism, and for the first time its members were called "Chris- tians" (Acts 11:26). Paul's several years as a missionary of the Antioch church was a formative period for what came to be identified as "Pauline" theology: Antioch receives traditions from Jerusalem and elsewhere, both Aramaic and Hellenistic, trans- mitting and interpreting them with varying degrees of loyalty to traditional understandings of torah and temple, reflecting a spectrum of theological beliefs and practices of the church expanding from Jerusalem. This period was characterized by a dialogue from which Paul received and to which he contributed. Much of what later emerges in 1 Thessalonians and later Pauline writings was hammered out during this dynamic, formative period. With his Jewish Christian colleague Barnabas and uncircumcised Gentile Christian Titus, he represented the Antioch church at the Jerusalem Council (Gal 2:1-10; Acts 15:1-29), where the Gentile mission of welcoming converts without the requirement of circumcision received approval from the Jerusalem leaders. The Jerusalem Council had preserved the unity of the new movement by recognizing the parallel existence of two forms of Christian mission within the one church. It did not deal with an issue that could have been foreseen--how Jewish and Gentile Christians could live and work together in one congregation, respecting the convictions of both, without violating the conscience of either. This issue soon came to a head in the "Antioch incident," as it has come to be called, in a confrontation between Peter and Paul. Acts is silent about the incident, which Paul reports (from his perspective) in Gal 2:11-21. Visitors to Antioch claiming to represent James and the Jerusalem church insisted that Jewish Christians must continue to maintain the Jewish way of life, including the purity laws related to food: Jews may not eat with Gentiles as a matter of ritual purity (Gal 2:12). This was not a matter of bigotry or religious snobbishness. From their theological perspective, it was inherent in the vocation of Israel, the people of God, to remain faithful to the covenant and its stipulations, a conviction for which Israel's martyrs had died. They did not claim that Gentile Christians need live by these laws, but insisted that when Jews became Christians, they were not free to violate them. This meant that Jewish Christians could not continue the table fellowship with Gentile Christians, and some withdrew, including Peter and Barnabas. In Paul's version of the incident, he soundly denounced and defeated the compromising Peter and "even Barnabas," his former colleague in the Gentile mission. Since Peter remained in Antioch, and Antiochene Christianity turned away from its previous radical openness in the direction of the more conservative Jacobite Jewish Christianity of Jerusalem, it appears that Paul lost the debate and decided he could no longer participate in the Antiochene mission program. Peter would remain in Antioch, and Paul would leave, never to return. In studying 1 Thessalonians, it is important to see that the church in Thes- salonica was established after Paul's break with Antioch. Although the new converts were instructed to understand themselves as a congregation belong- ing to the same church as their sister congregations in Judea (1 Thess 2:14), they would not have understood themselves as a mission project of the mother church in Antioch or Jerusalem. The Aegean mission was an independent Pau- line mission in the sense that Paul was no longer operating as a representative of the Antioch church: he did not consider himself subordinate to the Jerusalem "Pillars" (Gal 2:1-10). The movement into the Aegean area, within which the church in Thessalonica was founded, was for Paul a fresh beginning. He could even refer to his mission to Philippi, just prior to the church-founding visit to Thessalonica, as the "early days of the gospel" (Phil 4:15). Paul chose Silvanus ("Silas" in Acts) as his new coworker, a Jewish Christian and prophetic leader in the Jerusalem church who was affirmative of the Gentile mission. The two missionaries set out along the land route from Syria through Cilicia, visiting congregations previously established (Acts 15:40-41). According to Acts, Timothy is converted by Paul at Lystra and, at Paul's invitation, joins the mission team (Acts 16:1-3; cf. 1 Cor 4:17). Guided by divine revelation (Acts 16:6-10), they are led through northern Galatia, where Paul's illness requires an extended pause. It was probably during this time that the Galatian churches were founded. Guided by the Spirit and visionary experiences, they cross over to Macedonia and begin their mission work in Philippi. The Aegean mission represents a new missionary strategy on Paul's part. His plan of action is not to try to visit each town and village separately, but to establish a mission center in major metropolitan areas, especially provincial capitals, from which his missionary team and the new converts can evangelize neighboring regions. From such centers (Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus), Paul's plan is to evangelize the surrounding region with the distinctively Pauline gospel, establishing a symbolic and functional beachhead for the dissemination of the faith and the gathering of the eschatological community. Previously he has evangelized as the missionary sent out by a major mission center. He made "missionary journeys," accompanied by a senior colleague such as Barnabas, and returned to report to the church that had sent him. So long as Paul understood his own commission and theology to be in harmony with the church that sent him, his consciousness of being personally sent and called by the risen Christ did not constitute any problem for his serving as missionary delegate of a central church. The "Antioch incident" changed this situation. Henceforth Paul would not function as the representative of a mission center, making "missionary journeys" in its behalf, but with his own coworkers he him- self would found new mission centers in major cities. First Thessalonians was not written on "the second missionary journey," but at the beginning of his own mission, which would continue uninterrupted until concluded by his final visit to Jerusalem.18 Henceforth he needed to be clear that as an apostolos (apostle, one who is authorized and sent, missionary), he is the authorized representative of the risen Lord, not merely of other human beings (cf. Gal 1:1; 2 Cor 10-13), but thPublisher Marketing: I and II Thessalonians are letters written to new Christian communities in Thessalonica early in Paul's ministry. Paul wrote these letters after a brief stay in order to instruct them further as they anticipate Jesus' second coming. In this new volume in the acclaimed New Testament Library series, M. Eugene Boring offers a scholarly interpretation of I and II Thessalonians while examining their historical context. Boring helps the reader learn to read these letters in context, particularly in relation to Paul's life as well as to the new converts who lived in Thessalonica. He addresses aspects such as structure, tone, style, language, and--for II Thessalonians--questions of authorship, while offering insightful theological perspectives. Boring's critical interpretation is a welcome addition to the New Testament Library and provides a solid resource for both the academy and the church. The New Testament Library offers authoritative commentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, providing fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, careful attention to their literary design, and a theologically perceptive exposition of the biblical text. The editorial board consists of C. Clifton Black, Princeton Theological Seminary; M. Eugene Boring, Brite Divinity School; and John T. Carroll, Union Presbyterian Seminary. Contributor Bio:  Boring, M Eugene M. Eugene Boring is I. Wylie Briscoe Professor of New Testament Emeritus at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University. He is the author of numerous books on the New Testament, including An Introduction to the New Testament, Mark from the New Testament Library series, and Revelation from the best-selling Interpretation series, all published by Westminster John Knox Press.

Media Books     Hardcover Book   (Book with hard spine and cover)
Released August 24, 2015
ISBN13 9780664220990
Publishers Westminster John Knox Press
Genre Textbooks     Religion     Religious Orientation > Christian
Pages 400
Dimensions 152 × 229 × 48 mm   ·   612 g

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