The First Letter to the Thessalonians — The Earliest Christian Writing and Its Journey to Canon

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Somewhere around the year 50, in a rented room in Corinth, Paul dictated a short letter to a congregation he had been forced to abandon after only a few weeks. He had come to Thessalonica, preached in the synagogue for three sabbaths, gathered a mostly pagan following, and then fled a riot that his own success had provoked. He worried about the converts he had left behind — whether their faith had survived the pressure, whether they still trusted the man who had run. When Timothy returned from checking on them with good news, Paul sat down and wrote.⁠¹

That letter is almost certainly the oldest surviving Christian document in existence. It was written a full decade or more before the earliest Gospel reached its final form, and roughly twenty years after the crucifixion — close enough to the events that the man dictating it had known the risen Christ’s own apostles, argued with them, and been corrected by them. When a modern reader opens the First Letter to the Thessalonians, he is reading the first Christian words ever committed to writing that we still possess: the earliest description of the second coming, the earliest naming of faith, hope, and love as a triad, and the single verse from which, eighteen centuries later, an entirely new doctrine called “the rapture” would be spun.⁠²

This post examines when and why 1 Thessalonians was written, what it actually says, and how a brief, urgent, pastoral note to a frightened church became one of the least-disputed books of the New Testament — along the way untangling the most widely misread passage Paul ever wrote.

The oldest letter in the New Testament

Paul did not date his letters, and for most of them the date must be reconstructed. For 1 Thessalonians the reconstruction is unusually firm, because it can be tied to one of the few fixed points in all of first-century chronology.

The story begins in the Acts of the Apostles. On his second missionary journey Paul crossed from Asia into Greece, preached in Philippi and then in Thessalonica, was driven out, passed through Beroea and Athens, and finally settled for eighteen months in Corinth.⁠³ It was during that Corinthian stay, after Timothy had returned from a mission back to Thessalonica with news of the young church, that Paul wrote — most probably in the early summer of 51.⁠⁴

What pins the date is a slab of stone. At Delphi, archaeologists recovered fragments of a letter of the emperor Claudius that names Lucius Junius Gallio as proconsul of Achaia and can be dated, from Claudius’s own imperial titulature, to about AD 51–52. Acts reports that the Corinthian Jews hauled Paul before this same Gallio’s tribunal during his stay in the city. The inscription therefore fixes Paul in Corinth in the early 50s — the single firmest peg in the whole chronology of his life, and the anchor from which the date of 1 Thessalonians is calculated.⁠⁵

The consequence is remarkable. A letter written from Corinth around 50 or 51 was composed years before Mark, the earliest Gospel, took written shape; before any other book of the New Testament that can be dated with confidence. Most scholars therefore judge 1 Thessalonians to be the earliest surviving Christian writing of any kind — the first page, chronologically, of the New Testament. A minority would give that honor to Galatians, whose date depends on disputed questions about which visit to Jerusalem Paul is describing; but the majority verdict falls to Thessalonians.⁠⁶

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy write to Thessalonica

The letter opens not with one name but with three: “Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy to the church of the Thessalonians.”⁠⁷ These were the three who had founded the community together, and the memory of that founding runs through every line.

Luke’s account in Acts sets the scene. Paul came to Thessalonica — the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, a free city astride the great Via Egnatia — and “for three sabbaths he entered into discussions” in the synagogue.⁠⁸ He made converts, and he made enemies. A mob formed, attacked the house of a believer named Jason, and, failing to find Paul, dragged Jason before the city’s magistrates with the charge that these men “all act in opposition to the decrees of Caesar and claim instead that there is another king, Jesus.” The officials took a bond from Jason and let him go; Paul slipped away by night.⁠⁹

That scene contains a small, telling detail. Luke calls the magistrates of Thessalonica politarchs — a title found in no classical Greek author, and long suspected to be one of his errors, until dozens of Macedonian inscriptions turned up bearing exactly that word for exactly those officials. It is one of the many points where Luke’s incidental accuracy has been vindicated by the spade, and a reason his narrative of Paul’s travels deserves the credit it is often denied.⁠¹⁰

Who were the Thessalonian Christians? Paul tells us himself. They were, in the main, converts from paganism: he reminds them how they “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to await his Son from heaven.”⁠¹¹ This was a Gentile congregation, freshly pulled out of the ordinary religious life of a Greek city, and now enduring the suspicion and hostility of the neighbors they had left behind. Paul’s letter is written to people under pressure, and its warmth is the warmth of a founder who fears for children he had to leave too soon.

The letter Paul actually wrote

For all the theological weight later readers would place on it, 1 Thessalonians is first of all a pastoral letter — a mixture of relieved thanksgiving, self-defense, and practical exhortation. Its structure is simple: a long thanksgiving and review of Paul’s relations with the church (chapters 1–3), followed by a series of specific exhortations (chapters 4–5).⁠¹²

The thanksgiving sets the tone. Paul recalls “your work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ.”⁠¹³ The phrase is easy to pass over, but it is a genuine first: this verse, together with 1 Thessalonians 5:8, is the earliest appearance in all of Christian literature of the triad the Church would later call the theological virtues — faith, hope, and love. When Paul wrote his famous hymn to those three in 1 Corinthians 13, he was returning to a pattern he had already struck here, in his very first letter.⁠¹⁴ He praises the Thessalonians for having “became imitators of us and of the Lord,” so that “you became a model for all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.”⁠¹⁵

Much of the middle of the letter is Paul defending himself. Traveling preachers were a familiar and often disreputable type in the ancient world, and Paul is at pains to distinguish himself from the charlatan with something to sell. He reminds the Thessalonians of his “toil and drudgery,” how he had labored “night and day in order not to burden any of you” — supporting himself by his own trade rather than living off his converts — and how he had been “gentle” among them, “as a nursing mother cares for her children.”⁠¹⁶

Then come the exhortations, and they are strikingly ordinary. Paul urges holiness in sexual conduct: “This is the will of God, your holiness: that you refrain from immorality.”⁠¹⁷ He urges quiet diligence: “aspire to live a tranquil life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your [own] hands … that you may conduct yourselves properly toward outsiders and not depend on anyone.”⁠¹⁸ The advice is the advice of a man who wants his converts to be unremarkable in the best sense — hardworking, self-supporting, and respectable in the eyes of the pagan neighbors watching to see what this new sect amounts to. It was only when Paul turned to the one question that was troubling the Thessalonians most that the letter rose to the register for which it is remembered.

“The dead in Christ will rise first”

The Thessalonians had a problem their founder had not anticipated. Some of their number had died, and the survivors were grieving — not merely with ordinary sorrow, but with something like despair, as though those who had died before the Lord’s return had missed their chance at it. Paul writes to steady them, and in doing so gives the New Testament its earliest sustained teaching on the fate of the Christian dead:

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep … For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and 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. Thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore, console one another with these words.⁠¹⁹

The pastoral point is the whole point. The dead are not at a disadvantage; if anything they have the precedence, for “the dead in Christ will rise first.” Paul’s aim is consolation — “console one another with these words” — not the construction of a timetable. He plainly expects to be among “we who are alive” at the Lord’s coming; the Catechism’s own edition of the New American Bible notes candidly that “Paul here assumes that the second coming, or parousia, will occur within his own lifetime,” while insisting that the time is unknown.⁠²⁰ The most important thing about the parousia, for Paul, is not its schedule but its outcome: “Thus we shall always be with the Lord.”

What most people get wrong: the “rapture”

No verse of Paul’s has been more heavily loaded with later doctrine than the promise that believers will be “caught up … in the clouds.” From it comes the entire modern industry of “the rapture” — and, with it, one of the most instructive misreadings in the history of biblical interpretation.

Start with the word itself. The Greek verb Paul uses, harpagēsometha, is a form of harpazō, “to seize, snatch, carry off.” When Jerome rendered the verse into Latin, he used rapiemur, “we shall be caught up,” from the verb rapio — and from that Latin word, by a straight line, comes the English “rapture.” The word is perfectly legitimate; it is simply the Latin for what Paul says. Even the New American Bible’s own footnote traces the etymology precisely: “From the Latin verb here used, rapiemur, has come the idea of ‘the rapture,’ when believers will be transported away from the woes of the world,” a construction it goes on to identify with “a scheme of millennial dispensationalism.”⁠²¹

There is the crucial distinction. The word is ancient and unobjectionable. The doctrine usually attached to it is neither. The idea of a secret rapture — a silent, any-moment removal of true believers from the earth before a seven-year tribulation, followed later by a separate, public second coming — was systematized by John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s, embedded in the study notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, popularized by Hal Lindsey in 1970, and sold by the tens of millions in the Left Behind novels a generation ago. No Church Father taught it. No medieval theologian taught it. No Reformer taught it. It is, on the scale of Christian history, about 190 years old.⁠²²

What did Paul mean, then, by being “caught up … to meet the Lord in the air”? The decisive clue is the Greek phrase for “to meet,” eis apantēsin. As the scholar Erik Peterson showed, apantēsis was a semi-technical term for a familiar civic ritual: when a king or governor approached a city, its citizens would stream out through the gates to meet him and then escort him back in, in honor. The movement is outward to welcome, and then back with the arriving dignitary — the same idiom Luke uses when the Roman Christians came out “as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet” Paul and walk him into Rome, and the same picture as the wise virgins going out to meet the bridegroom.⁠²³ On this reading — the one favored by most scholars, and attested in the Fathers — the risen and the living do not abandon the earth to escape it. They go out to welcome their descending Lord and to accompany him.

That this is no modern Catholic invention is clear from John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage at the end of the fourth century:

If He is about to descend, on what account shall we be caught up? For the sake of honor. For when a king drives into a city, those who are in honor go out to meet him; but the condemned await the judge within … And as He descends, we go forth to meet Him, and, what is more blessed than all, so we shall be with Him.⁠²⁴

Fifteen centuries before Darby, in other words, the greatest preacher of the Greek Church read the “catching up” exactly as the welcoming of a king, not the evacuation of an army. The Catholic Church knows one second coming, not two: the Christ who “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” publicly and unmistakably, “with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God.”⁠²⁵ A trumpet blast heard around the world is precisely the opposite of a secret.

“Like a thief at night”: vigilance, not escape

The chapter that follows only sharpens the point. Turning from the fate of the dead to the timing of the end, Paul writes: “For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night. When people are saying, ‘Peace and security,’ then sudden disaster comes upon them … and they will not escape.”⁠²⁶

It is worth noticing whom the thief surprises. The unexpectedness that dispensationalists press into service for a secret rapture is here aimed squarely at unbelievers — “they will not escape” — while the faithful are told the opposite: “But you, brothers, are not in darkness, for that day to overtake you like a thief. For all of you are children of the light and children of the day.”⁠²⁷ The response Paul asks of Christians is not that they wait to be extracted but that they stay awake: “let us not sleep as the rest do, but let us stay alert and sober,” “putting on the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet that is hope for salvation.”⁠²⁸ One public day, for which the Church watches — not one from which she is quietly removed.

Is the letter authentic and intact?

Because 1 Thessalonians is Paul’s earliest letter, it also serves as a control case for the whole question of Pauline authorship. Here the modern verdict could hardly be firmer. Of the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, scholars distinguish a core of seven whose authenticity is essentially uncontested — Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and First Thessalonians. Whatever debates surround the other six, these seven are the bedrock.⁠²⁹

It was not always quite so unanimous. In the mid-nineteenth century the radical Tübingen critic Ferdinand Christian Baur, who accepted only four letters as genuine, actually rejected 1 Thessalonians; it was later scholars, Hilgenfeld and Holtzmann, who restored it and settled on the seven now universally granted. Baur’s doubt has long since collapsed, and today the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians is about as secure as any judgment in New Testament scholarship.⁠³⁰

One passage, however, still draws real debate: the sharp lines in chapter 2 in which Paul says of certain Judean opponents that they “killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets,” and that “the wrath of God has finally begun to come upon them.”⁠³¹ In 1971 Birger Pearson argued that these verses were a later interpolation, inserted after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 to which “the wrath … at last” seemed to refer. The theory was influential for a generation, but the tide has turned back toward authenticity: there is no manuscript evidence that the verses were ever absent, Paul elsewhere speaks of God’s wrath as already being revealed, and the rhetoric fits the letter. The Catechism’s own edition of the New American Bible treats the passage as genuinely Pauline and warns pointedly that Paul’s words give “no grounds for anti-Semitism to those willing to understand” him, since he is describing specific historical opponents and takes evident pride in his own Jewish heritage.⁠³²

A word, finally, about the sequel. Second Thessalonians presents itself as a follow-up to this letter, and its authorship — unlike that of 1 Thessalonians — is disputed; some scholars read it as written in Paul’s name by a later hand. What matters for our purposes is that the debate runs the other way: the very existence of a second letter that leans on the first is one more witness to the priority and authenticity of 1 Thessalonians.⁠³³

The journey to canon

For a book so early, 1 Thessalonians had one of the smoothest passages into the canon of any New Testament writing. It was never seriously doubted by anyone.

The earliest trace of its authority comes, ironically, from a heretic. Around 144 Marcion of Sinope assembled the first known Christian canon — a truncated Gospel and ten letters of Paul — and 1 Thessalonians was among the ten. We know this in detail because Tertullian, refuting Marcion around the turn of the third century, works through Marcion’s own copy of the letter line by line in the fifth book of his Against Marcion, confirming that the heretic had kept it.⁠³⁴ When even the man who cut the New Testament down to eleven books keeps your letter, its early standing is beyond question.

The orthodox witnesses follow quickly. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest known list of New Testament books, records that Paul wrote “to the Thessalonians sixth” among the seven churches he addressed, and notes that he wrote to them “once more … for the sake of admonition” — a clean attestation of both letters.⁠³⁵ Irenaeus, writing around 180, quotes the letter’s closing prayer by name, “in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians”: “may your spirit, and soul, and body be preserved whole … to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.”⁠³⁶ Clement of Alexandria and Origen both cite it as Pauline scripture in the decades that follow.⁠³⁷

By the early fourth century the matter was closed. When Eusebius drew up his famous inventory of the New Testament, sorting the books into the “acknowledged,” the “disputed,” and the spurious, Paul’s letters sat squarely among the acknowledged: “First then must be put the holy quaternion of the Gospels; following them the Acts of the Apostles. After this must be reckoned the epistles of Paul … These then belong among the accepted writings.”⁠³⁸

The manuscript record tells the same story. First Thessalonians appears in Papyrus 46, the great codex of Paul’s letters copied around AD 200, though the middle of the letter — including, by an unlucky accident, the resurrection passage of chapter 4 — falls on leaves that have been lost; the opening and closing survive. It is present, complete, in the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.⁠³⁹ A letter this old, this well attested, and this useful was never going to be left out.

What the Catholic Church makes of 1 Thessalonians

If 1 Thessalonians entered the canon quietly, it has never left the center of Catholic life. Its verses are woven through the Catechism, the liturgy, and the tradition of prayer.

The Catechism cites the letter’s teaching on the resurrection directly. Explaining when the dead will rise, it answers with Paul’s own words: “the resurrection of the dead is closely associated with Christ’s Parousia: ‘For the Lord himself will descend from heaven … and the dead in Christ will rise first.’”⁠⁴⁰ The same passage supplies the Church her funeral hope. First Thessalonians 4:13–18 is one of the appointed second readings for the Order of Christian Funerals, so that the earliest Christian words about the Christian dead are still read over Catholic coffins today — “console one another with these words,” now consoling the living at the grave.⁠⁴¹

Smaller phrases have had lives of their own. Paul’s terse command “Pray without ceasing” became one of the pillar texts of the entire Christian tradition of prayer; the Catechism quotes it more than once as a summons to the constant prayer of the heart.⁠⁴² His naming of faith, hope, and love seeded the Church’s doctrine of the three theological virtues.⁠⁴³ And his closing prayer that “your spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless” — the very verse Irenaeus quoted — is cited in the Catechism’s account of the human person, and stands behind its teaching that the whole person, and not merely the soul, belongs to God and is destined for glory.⁠⁴⁴

The letter has drawn the Church’s greatest minds as commentators. John Chrysostom preached a full set of homilies on it; Thomas Aquinas lectured through it verse by verse.⁠⁴⁵ That so brief and occasional a note — dashed off to steady a handful of anxious converts in a Macedonian port — should have become a fountainhead of Catholic teaching on death, resurrection, prayer, and virtue is itself a small argument for the way the Church reads Scripture: not as a museum of ancient opinions, but as a living word, its earliest page still speaking.

Further reading

The standard critical commentaries on 1 Thessalonians are Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, Anchor Bible 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000); Charles A. Wanamaker, The Epistles to the Thessalonians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); and Ernest Best, A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, Black’s New Testament Commentaries (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972). For the letter’s place in Paul’s life and corpus, see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 456–466, and, on the Corinthian chronology that dates it, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002). On the canon, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 1 Thessalonians the oldest book in the New Testament?

Most scholars think so. Written from Corinth around AD 50–51 — a date fixed by an inscription naming the proconsul Gallio, before whom Paul appeared in Corinth — it predates the earliest Gospel and every other datable New Testament book. A minority of scholars would give priority to Galatians, whose date is harder to pin down, but the majority verdict holds that 1 Thessalonians is the earliest surviving Christian writing of any kind.

Did Paul really write 1 Thessalonians?

Yes, and almost no one doubts it. It is one of the seven “undisputed” letters that virtually all New Testament scholars accept as authentically Pauline, alongside Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. A handful of nineteenth-century critics questioned it — the Tübingen scholar F. C. Baur even rejected it — but that doubt collapsed long ago, and its authenticity is now about as secure as any judgment in the field.

Where does the “rapture” come from, and is it Catholic?

The word comes from the Latin of 1 Thessalonians 4:17: Jerome translated the Greek “caught up” as rapiemur, from which “rapture” derives. The word is fine. The doctrine of a secret, pre-tribulation rapture — believers silently removed before a seven-year tribulation, followed by a separate public return — is not Catholic and is not ancient. It was invented by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and spread through the Scofield Reference Bible and the Left Behind novels. The Catholic Church holds to one public second coming. Paul’s image of being “caught up … to meet the Lord” draws on the ancient custom of a city going out to welcome an arriving king and escort him home — not of believers fleeing the earth.

What is 1 Thessalonians about?

It is a warm, pastoral letter written to console and encourage a young, mostly Gentile church that Paul had been forced to leave under persecution. He gives thanks for their faith, defends the integrity of his own ministry, urges them to holiness and quiet, hardworking lives, and — the letter’s most famous section — consoles them about fellow Christians who have died, assuring them that “the dead in Christ will rise first” at the Lord’s coming.

How does the Catholic Church use 1 Thessalonians?

Its teaching on the resurrection is cited in the Catechism, and its great consolation passage (4:13–18) is one of the readings appointed for Catholic funerals. Its command to “pray without ceasing” is a classic text of the Church’s tradition of prayer, and its naming of faith, hope, and love stands behind the doctrine of the three theological virtues. John Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas both wrote commentaries on it.

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. The circumstances are reconstructed from the letter itself (1 Thes 2:17–3:10) and from Acts 17:1–18:5. Timothy's return with news of the church is the stated occasion of the letter (1 Thes 3:6). See the Introduction to 1 Thessalonians in the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

2. 2. On the letter's priority and date, see Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 456–466; Abraham J. Malherbe, *The Letters to the Thessalonians*, Anchor Bible 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 71–74.

3. 3. Acts 16:11–18:11 (NABRE). On the Acts narrative of this journey and its historical value, see [The Acts of the Apostles—The Birth of the Church and Its Journey to Canon](/book-of-acts/).

4. 4. "Timothy and Silvanus finally returned to Paul when he reached Corinth (Acts 18:1–18), probably in the early summer of A.D. 51. Timothy's return with a report on conditions at Thessalonica served as the occasion for Paul's first letter (1 Thes 3:6–8)": Introduction to 1 Thessalonians, NABRE, bible.usccb.org.

5. 5. The Delphi (Gallio) inscription, a rescript of Claudius, is dated from the emperor's titulature (his twenty-sixth imperial acclamation and twelfth tribunician power) to AD 52, placing Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia in AD 51–52; Acts 18:12–17 sets Paul before Gallio's tribunal during his Corinthian stay. Text in *Fouilles de Delphes* III.4, no. 286. See Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, *St. Paul's Corinth: Texts and Archaeology* (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), 161–169. This is the firmest fixed point in Pauline chronology.

6. 6. Brown, *Introduction*, 456–457. The rival candidate is Galatians, whose date turns on which Jerusalem visit (Acts 11 or Acts 15) Paul recounts in Galatians 2 and whether the letter's recipients are in "South" or "North" Galatia; the uncertainty keeps most scholars from dating it earlier than 1 Thessalonians with confidence.

7. 7. 1 Thes 1:1 (NABRE). Silvanus is the Silas of Acts; Timothy, Paul's frequent co-worker, would later receive two canonical letters of his own.

8. 8. Acts 17:1–2 (NABRE): "When they took the road through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they reached Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. Following his usual custom, Paul joined them, and for three sabbaths he entered into discussions with them from the scriptures." The civic status of Thessalonica — provincial capital, free city on the Via Egnatia — is standard; see Malherbe, *Letters*, 13–16.

9. 9. Acts 17:5–9 (NABRE). The charge that the missionaries proclaimed "another king, Jesus" (17:7) illuminates the letter's heavy emphasis on the coming *kingship* of Christ at the parousia.

10. 10. The Greek term is *politarchai*; the NABRE renders it "city magistrates" (Acts 17:6, 8). Once thought a Lukan blunder because it appears in no classical author, the title has since been confirmed as the genuine local term by dozens of Macedonian inscriptions. On Luke's accuracy in such civic details, see the discussion in [The Acts of the Apostles](/book-of-acts/).

11. 11. 1 Thes 1:9–10 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:14 observes that "Paul pictures the Thessalonian community as composed of converts from paganism."

12. 12. The NABRE Introduction divides the letter into Address (1:1–10), Previous Relations with the Thessalonians (2:1–3:13), Specific Exhortations (4:1–5:25), and Final Greeting (5:26–28).

13. 13. 1 Thes 1:3 (NABRE).

14. 14. The NABRE note on 1:3 states that this verse, "along with 1 Thes 5:8, is the earliest mention in Christian literature of the three 'theological virtues' (see 1 Cor 13:13)." Because 1 Thessalonians predates 1 Corinthians by several years, the triad appears here first. The order in 1:3 — faith, love, hope — places hope last, in keeping with the letter's eschatological emphasis; cf. CCC 1813.

15. 15. 1 Thes 1:6–7 (NABRE).

16. 16. 1 Thes 2:9, 2:7 (NABRE). Paul's insistence that he worked to support himself recurs across his letters and is one of the marks of his ministry.

17. 17. 1 Thes 4:3 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 4:3–8 records that some interpreters read the passage more narrowly, taking "immorality" to mean "unlawful marriage" within forbidden degrees of kinship rather than fornication in general.

18. 18. 1 Thes 4:11–12 (NABRE). The counsel to quiet, self-supporting industry connects to the more pointed treatment of idleness in 2 Thes 3:6–12.

19. 19. 1 Thes 4:13–18 (NABRE), abridged.

20. 20. NABRE note on 1 Thes 4:15: "Coming of the Lord: Paul here assumes that the second coming, or parousia, will occur within his own lifetime but insists that the time or season is unknown (1 Thes 5:1–2)."

21. 21. NABRE note on 1 Thes 4:17: "Will be caught up together: literally, snatched up, carried off . . . From the Latin verb here used, *rapiemur*, has come the idea of 'the rapture,' when believers will be transported away from the woes of the world; this construction combines this verse with Mt 24:40–41 . . . and passages from Revelation in a scheme of millennial dispensationalism." The Greek is *harpagēsometha* (from *harpazō*, "to seize, snatch"); the Latin Vulgate reads *rapiemur*.

22. 22. On the origin of dispensational pretribulationism: John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) systematized it among the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s; C. I. Scofield embedded it in the notes of the *Scofield Reference Bible* (1909); Hal Lindsey popularized it in *The Late Great Planet Earth* (1970); Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins dramatized it in the *Left Behind* series (from 1995). No patristic, medieval, or Reformation writer taught a secret, two-stage coming.

23. 23. Erik Peterson, "ἀπάντησις," in *Theological Dictionary of the New Testament*, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 380–381. The idiom of the formal civic welcome (*eis apantēsin*) appears at Acts 28:15 (the Roman Christians coming out to meet Paul) and Mt 25:6 (the virgins going out to meet the bridegroom).

24. 24. John Chrysostom, *Homily 8 on First Thessalonians* (on 1 Thes 4:15–17), in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13, trans. John A. Broadus (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), newadvent.org.

25. 25. The quoted phrase is from the Nicene Creed; the Church's teaching on the one, public, glorious second coming is set out at CCC 668–682, and CCC 676 explicitly rejects "millenarianism," the expectation of an intra-historical messianic reign. The trumpet-and-command imagery is Paul's own (1 Thes 4:16).

26. 26. 1 Thes 5:2–3 (NABRE).

27. 27. 1 Thes 5:4–5 (NABRE).

28. 28. 1 Thes 5:6, 5:8 (NABRE).

29. 29. The seven undisputed letters are Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. See Brown, *Introduction*, 4–6, 456.

30. 30. Ferdinand Christian Baur accepted only the four *Hauptbriefe* (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians) and rejected 1 Thessalonians; Adolf Hilgenfeld (1875) and Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1885) expanded the accepted list to the seven now universally granted. See Malherbe, *Letters*, 68–71.

31. 31. 1 Thes 2:15–16 (NABRE).

32. 32. Birger A. Pearson, "1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation," *Harvard Theological Review* 64 (1971): 79–94, argued for interpolation; for a survey of the reversal toward authenticity see Matthew D. Jensen, "The (In)authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2.13–16: A Review of Arguments," *Currents in Biblical Research* 18 (2019): 59–79. The NABRE note on 2:15–16 stresses that the passage gives "no grounds for anti-Semitism to those willing to understand" Paul, who "quickly proceeds to depict the persecutors typologically, in apocalyptic terms," and who elsewhere takes pride in his Jewish heritage.

33. 33. On the disputed authorship of 2 Thessalonians see Brown, *Introduction*, 590–598. Ironically, 2 Thes 2:2 itself warns its readers against a letter "purporting to be from us."

34. 34. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 5.15, treats Marcion's text of 1 Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians follows in 5.16), confirming that both letters stood in Marcion's Apostolikon; Epiphanius, *Panarion* 42, likewise lists 1 Thessalonians among Marcion's ten Pauline letters. On Marcion's canon generally, see [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/).

35. 35. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 50–55, in Bruce M. Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), Appendix IV, 305–307: Paul writes "to the Thessalonians sixth" among the seven churches, and "once more . . . to the Thessalonians for the sake of admonition."

36. 36. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 5.6.1, quoting 1 Thes 5:23, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), newadvent.org.

37. 37. E.g., Clement of Alexandria, *The Instructor* 2 (citing 1 Thes 5:5) and *Stromateis* 1 (citing 1 Thes 5:21); Origen, *Commentary on Matthew* (citing 1 Thes 5:5, 5:17). Both cite the letter as authoritative Pauline scripture by the early third century.

38. 38. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.25.1–2, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), newadvent.org. Eusebius elsewhere notes that "Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed" (HE 3.3.5).

39. 39. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II, c. AD 200) preserves the opening (through 2:3) and the close (5:5, 23–28) of 1 Thessalonians; the intervening leaves, which held chapter 4, are lost. The letter is complete in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (the latter's New Testament breaks off only in Hebrews 9).

40. 40. CCC 1001, quoting 1 Thes 4:16, vatican.va. The Catechism also cross-references 1 Thes 4:14 in its profession of belief in the resurrection of the dead (CCC 989).

41. 41. 1 Thes 4:13–18 is among the appointed New Testament readings for the Order of Christian Funerals (Lectionary for Mass, no. 1014); see the USCCB list of funeral readings, usccb.org.

42. 42. 1 Thes 5:17 (NABRE). The Catechism quotes "Pray constantly" at CCC 2742 and again at CCC 2757 ("It is always possible to pray. It is even a vital necessity").

43. 43. On the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, see CCC 1813; on their earliest scriptural naming, see note 14 above.

44. 44. 1 Thes 5:23 (NABRE): "May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Cited at CCC 367. On sanctification as God's will (1 Thes 4:7), see CCC 2813.

45. 45. Chrysostom's eleven *Homilies on First Thessalonians* are in NPNF, First Series, vol. 13; Thomas Aquinas, *Super I ad Thessalonicenses* (Commentary on First Thessalonians), trans. F. R. Larcher, is available at aquinas.cc.