The Second Letter to the Thessalonians — The Man of Lawlessness and a Disputed Letter's Path to Canon

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

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. It is a letter that warns its readers, in so many words, not to be taken in by a forged letter circulating under Paul’s name — and it is, in turn, one of the letters bearing Paul’s name whose authenticity modern scholarship has seriously questioned, suspecting it, too, of being written by another hand.⁠¹

The letter presents itself as a quick follow-up to the First Letter to the Thessalonians, written to steady the same young Macedonian church against a new panic — a rumor, apparently backed by a letter “allegedly from us,” that the day of the Lord had already arrived. In answering that rumor Paul (or someone writing as Paul) produced the New Testament’s single most detailed portrait of the end: an “apostasy,” a “man of lawlessness” who exalts himself in the temple of God, and a mysterious “restrainer” holding the whole scenario back until its appointed hour. From those few verses would come nearly everything later Christianity said about the Antichrist.⁠²

This post examines what 2 Thessalonians actually says, the two great puzzles it left the Church — the identity of the man of lawlessness and the meaning of the one who restrains him — the modern debate over whether Paul wrote it at all, and how a short, urgent, contested letter nonetheless walked into the canon without a single ancient objection.

A short, urgent sequel

Second Thessalonians is brief — three chapters, forty-seven verses — and it wears its relationship to the first letter openly. The address barely expands on the address of 1 Thessalonians; whole phrases are repeated almost verbatim; the structure runs parallel. Yet the tone has cooled. Where the first letter is warm, relieved, and personal, the second is more formal, more official, and more preoccupied with a single problem: what the Thessalonians were being told about the end of the world.⁠³

Two disturbances had reached the writer. The first was doctrinal. Someone was teaching — on the strength of “a ‘spirit,’ or … an oral statement, or … a letter allegedly from us” — that “the day of the Lord is at hand,” or, more precisely, that it had already dawned. The second disturbance was practical and, in its way, a symptom of the first: some members of the community had stopped working. If the world were ending, why labor? They had become, in the letter’s memorable phrase, not busy but “busybodies,” idle and dependent on others.⁠⁴

The letter answers both. To the panic about the parousia — the Greek word for the Lord’s “coming” or “arrival” — it responds with a checklist of things that must happen first. To the idleness it responds with a blunt rule of thumb and the example of Paul’s own working hands. Around those two answers the whole letter is built: a thanksgiving that promises God’s justice on the persecutors (chapter 1), the great apocalyptic correction (chapter 2), and the closing exhortation about work and order (chapter 3).⁠⁵

“The day of the Lord is at hand”

The trigger for the whole letter is named in its second chapter. The writer begs the Thessalonians “not to be shaken out of your minds suddenly, or to be alarmed either by a ‘spirit,’ or by an oral statement, or by a letter allegedly from us to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand.”⁠⁶

The problem was not, as in the first letter, that Christians were dying before the Lord returned. It was the opposite: someone was claiming that the great Day had, in some sense, already come — that the decisive event was behind them, not ahead. The claim carried a forged warrant. The reference to “a letter allegedly from us” is why, at the letter’s end, Paul draws attention to his own handwriting as a mark of authenticity: “This greeting is in my own hand, Paul’s. This is the sign in every letter; this is how I write.” A false letter is circulating; here is how you tell a real one.⁠⁷

That detail — a warning against forged apostolic mail, sealed by an appeal to Paul’s signature — will matter enormously when we come to the modern authorship debate. For the moment, notice only what the writer does with the panic. He does not soothe it with reassurance that the end is far off. He corrects it with a sequence.

The man of lawlessness

The correction is the most detailed piece of apocalyptic in all of Paul:

Let no one deceive you in any way. For unless the apostasy comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one doomed to perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god—do you not recall that while I was still with you I told you these things?⁠⁸

Before the Day can come, two things must appear: an “apostasy” (Greek apostasia, a falling away or rebellion) and a figure the letter calls “the lawless one” — literally “the man of lawlessness,” and in a well-known textual variant “the man of sin” — who is also “the one doomed to perdition,” the “son of destruction.” He is a blasphemous usurper who “exalts himself above every so-called god” and installs himself “in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god.”⁠⁹

The imagery is not invented from nothing. It is stitched together from the Old Testament, and above all from the book of Daniel — the arrogant king of Daniel 11 “who shall exalt himself … above every god,” the desolating sacrilege of Daniel 9 and 12. Behind the language stands the memory of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who around 167 B.C. desecrated the Jerusalem temple in the name of Olympian Zeus, and perhaps the more recent threat of the emperor Caligula, who in A.D. 40 nearly installed his own statue there. The New American Bible, Revised Edition notes that the passage depicts “human self-assertiveness against God in the temple of God itself,” with “the lawless one” as the climax of that self-assertion.⁠¹⁰

Whatever the writer’s own referent, the early Church read the figure as a single, still-future enemy: the Antichrist. Irenaeus, writing around 180, is the first surviving author to quote the passage and name its source. Discussing “the fraud, pride, and tyrannical kingdom of Antichrist,” he cites “the apostle … in the second Epistle to the Thessalonians,” and reproduces the verses: “the man of sin shall be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God … so that he sits in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God.”⁠¹¹ From Irenaeus forward, 2 Thessalonians 2 becomes the master text of Christian reflection on the last enemy.

“What is restraining”: the New Testament’s greatest riddle

Then comes the sentence that has baffled interpreters for nineteen centuries. Having named the lawless one, the writer adds that his manifestation is, for now, being held back:

And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. But the one who restrains is to do so only for the present, until he is removed from the scene.⁠¹²

Something — “what is restraining,” a neuter to katechon — and someone — “the one who restrains,” a masculine ho katechōn — is holding the lawless one back until the appointed moment. The Thessalonians, the writer says, know perfectly well what he means. We do not. He never says, and the terms appear nowhere else in Greek in this sense, so there is nothing to compare them to.⁠¹³

The Fathers proposed answers, and disagreed. The oldest and most durable was that the restrainer is the Roman Empire and its emperor: the rule of law and imperial order that, so long as it stands, keeps the ultimate anarchy at bay. John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage at the end of the fourth century, laid out the options and picked one: “Some indeed say, the grace of the Spirit, but others the Roman empire, to whom I most of all accede.” His reasoning was political as much as exegetical — Paul wrote “covertly and darkly,” Chrysostom thought, because to announce openly that Rome would one day be swept away “they would immediately have even overwhelmed him, as a pestilent person.” When the empire “is taken out of the way, then he shall come.”⁠¹⁴

Augustine was less sure. In The City of God he took up the same verses, ran through the conjectures — the Roman Empire, the hidden wicked within the Church — and then did something rare for a commentator: he admitted defeat. “I frankly confess I do not know what he means,” he wrote. “I will nevertheless mention such conjectures as I have heard or read.”⁠¹⁵ The honesty is bracing, and it should chasten anyone tempted to read the restrainer off the morning news.

Modern scholarship has multiplied the options without settling them. The New American Bible, Revised Edition catalogs three main lines: the traditional Roman reading; a cosmic or angelic reading, in which a spiritual power (some suggest Michael the archangel) binds Satan for a time; and a more recent proposal that “it is the preaching of the Christian gospel that restrains the end, for in God’s plan the end cannot come until the gospel is preached to all nations” — making Paul himself, the missionary “par excellence,” the one who restrains, whose death would remove the last barrier.⁠¹⁶ This last reading, it is worth noting, was already the instinct of the Antiochene Fathers such as Theodoret, who tied the restraint to the divine plan that the nations first hear the gospel.⁠¹⁷

John Henry Newman, surveying the same tradition in his lectures on Antichrist, summed up the patristic consensus and its limits. “This restraining power,” he wrote, “was in early times considered to be the Roman Empire” — and he was willing to grant it: “he ‘that withholdeth,’ or ‘hindereth,’ means the power of Rome, for all the ancient writers so speak of it.” Yet Newman drew the properly cautious conclusion. The Fathers spoke of prophecy, he insisted, not with the authority they carried on doctrine, but as men offering “their own private opinions, or vague, floating, and merely general anticipations.” On the restrainer, reverent uncertainty is the oldest and safest position.⁠¹⁸

The Antichrist and the Church’s final trial

Here the letter’s afterlife turns doctrinal, and here too lies the thing most readers get wrong. In popular Christianity — especially in the dispensational strain that also produced the “rapture” — 2 Thessalonians 2 is treated as a coded timetable, a set of clues for identifying the Antichrist and clocking the end. The Catholic Church reads it very differently: not as a schedule but as a warning about the shape of the Church’s last ordeal.⁠¹⁹

The Catechism gathers the letter’s imagery into its teaching on the Antichrist. Before the second coming, it says, “the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers,” a persecution that “will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’” — a phrase lifted straight from 2 Thessalonians 2:7. And then, in words that echo the letter directly: “The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” The Catechism’s own footnote at this point sends the reader to 2 Thessalonians 2:4–12.⁠²⁰

What the Church draws from the passage is precisely not a program for date-setting. Just the reverse. The Catechism uses the “man of lawlessness” to reject the idea that any earthly movement can bring in the kingdom by its own progress. It condemns “millenarianism” — the expectation of an this-worldly messianic reign — and “especially the ‘intrinsically perverse’ political form of a secular messianism,” the various utopias that promise heaven on earth and deliver the opposite. The Church “will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover,” following her Lord in death and resurrection; the triumph comes “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil.”⁠²¹ The lawless one, in other words, is a warning against precisely the confidence — religious or political — that thinks it can build the kingdom itself. That is a far cry from scanning the headlines for the number of the beast.

“If anyone is unwilling to work”

The letter’s third chapter descends abruptly from the cosmic to the domestic, and it is here that 2 Thessalonians left its most quoted line. The idlers had to be dealt with. Paul reminds the Thessalonians of his own example — “in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked, so as not to burden any of you” — and then states the rule he had given them in person: “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”⁠²²

The target is specific. These were not the poor who could not find work, but believers who would not work — who had spiritualized their idleness, perhaps on the theory that the end was upon them, and had become “disorderly,” “not keeping busy but minding the business of others.” The pun survives translation: they were not busy but busybodies. The remedy was not charity but correction: “work quietly and … eat their own food.”⁠²³

The verse then escaped theology entirely and had one of the strangest afterlives of any line in Scripture. Its logic of no-work-no-food was congenial to revolutionaries who would have been startled to find themselves quoting Paul. Lenin made “he who does not work shall not eat” a fundamental principle of socialism in The State and Revolution, aiming it not at the idle poor but at the idle rich; a version of it was written into Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution.⁠²⁴ Paul would not have recognized the use, but he would have recognized the premise: that work is a duty, not merely a necessity.

That is exactly what the Catholic tradition made of the line. The Catechism cites this very verse in its teaching on human labor: “Hence work is a duty: ‘If any one will not work, let him not eat.’” Work “honors the Creator’s gifts,” “can also be redemptive,” and is a share, however humble, in the unfinished work of creation. The idlers of Thessalonica were not merely inconveniencing their neighbors; they were, in the letter’s theology, refusing a share in something good.⁠²⁵

“Hold fast to the traditions”

Tucked between the apocalypse and the work rule is a single verse that would place 2 Thessalonians squarely in the middle of the Reformation. Having warned against deception, the writer exhorts: “Therefore, brothers, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.”⁠²⁶

The word is paradoseis, “traditions” — the things handed on — and the letter puts oral teaching and written letter on the same footing: “either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.” A few verses later the point recurs, when the community is told to keep away from any brother living “not according to the tradition they received from us.” For Catholic theology this is a foundational text, because it locates apostolic authority not in Scripture alone but in the whole living deposit of what the apostles handed down, whether written or spoken.⁠²⁷

The reading is not a modern polemical invention. Chrysostom drew exactly this conclusion sixteen centuries ago: “Hence it is manifest, that they did not deliver all things by Epistle, but many things also unwritten, and in like manner both the one and the other are worthy of credit. Therefore let us think the tradition of the Church also worthy of credit. It is a tradition, seek no farther.”⁠²⁸ The Second Vatican Council put the same verse to the same use. Its constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, teaches that the apostles “warn the faithful to hold fast to the traditions which they have learned either by word of mouth or by letter” — and cites 2 Thessalonians 2:15 by name.⁠²⁹

A Protestant reader will answer, reasonably, that the content handed on orally was the same gospel later written down, so that the verse proves less than it seems. The Catholic rejoinder is that the letter itself does not restrict “the traditions” to what happens to have been inscripturated; it commands the church to hold both, without ranking them. The exegetical dispute is old and will not be settled here. What is worth seeing is that a two-sentence aside in Paul’s shortest apocalyptic letter became, and remains, one of the load-bearing texts of Catholic theology.⁠³⁰

Is the letter Paul’s?

Now to the question the letter itself raises. Of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul, scholars distinguish seven whose authenticity is essentially undisputed — Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and First Thessalonians. The other six are contested in varying degrees. Second Thessalonians sits among the contested six, and its position there is peculiar: it is, with Colossians, generally reckoned the most likely to be genuine of the disputed letters, and yet the argument over it is unusually even. One survey of New Testament scholars taken at a 2011 conference found sixty-three judging it authentic, thirteen judging it not, and thirty-five uncertain — a rough thermometer of a field with no consensus, and one that tilts more toward pseudonymity in Germany than in the English-speaking world.⁠³¹

The doubt is entirely modern. It began in 1801, when J. E. C. Schmidt questioned the letter, and it received its classic form in 1903 from William Wrede, whose monograph Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefs made the case against authenticity that later critics would refine; the fullest modern argument for pseudonymity is Wolfgang Trilling’s, in a 1972 study and a 1980 commentary.⁠³² The arguments run along three lines.

The first is eschatology. The first letter says the day of the Lord will come suddenly, “like a thief at night,” with no warning; the second says it cannot come until the apostasy and the man of lawlessness appear first, in plain sight. Can the same author, writing weeks apart, have said both?⁠³³ The second is style. Second Thessalonians is cooler and more formal than the first, and it reuses the first so heavily — roughly a third of it has verbal parallels — that some critics infer a later imitator copying his model rather than an author writing freshly. The third is the letter’s own defensiveness: the warning against a forged letter (2:2) and the insistence on the authenticating signature (3:17) read, to skeptical eyes, like a forger protesting too much, installing false guarantees of genuineness.⁠³⁴

The case for authenticity answers each. The eschatologies are not truly contradictory: imminence and “signs first” sit side by side throughout Jewish apocalyptic and even within a single New Testament chapter — Mark 13 both lists preceding signs and warns that the hour is unknown, so a mind that could hold Mark 13 could hold both Thessalonian letters. The differences of tone are explained by a different occasion — a sharp corrective against an over-realized eschatology and idleness, not a warm reunion letter. The signature in 3:17 is nothing unusual: Paul authenticates his letters by his own hand in undisputed letters too (1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; Philemon 19). And the whole pseudonymity theory has to swallow an awkward irony: it must explain why a forger would compose a letter warning against forged letters — and would do so, moreover, in a way that a church holding the genuine first letter could easily have exposed. Ernest Best put the paradox memorably: if we possessed only 2 Thessalonians, few would doubt Paul wrote it; the doubts appear only when it is set beside 1 Thessalonians. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor judged the arguments against authenticity so weak that the traditional ascription is preferable.⁠³⁵

Where does the Catholic reader stand? On firm ground either way, and this is worth dwelling on. The New American Bible, Revised Edition — the translation used in the American lectionary — states the matter without flinching: “Increasingly in recent times … the opinion has been advanced that 2 Thessalonians is a pseudepigraph, that is, a letter written authoritatively in Paul’s name, to maintain apostolic traditions in a later period.”⁠³⁶ That an official Catholic study Bible can say this, calmly, without any sense that the faith is at stake, tells us something important: the Church’s confidence in a book rests on its place in the canon and its use in the Church, not on the resolution of a modern authorship dispute. Whether the human hand was Paul’s own or a disciple writing in his name and under his authority, the letter is Scripture. The question is real, and it is genuinely open; it is simply not a crisis.

The journey to canon

For all the modern argument, the ancient reception of 2 Thessalonians is a study in calm. Not one early writer doubted it, and the external evidence is early and unbroken.

The trail begins, as it so often does, with a heretic. Around 144 Marcion of Sinope assembled the first known Christian canon — a shortened Gospel and ten letters of Paul — and 2 Thessalonians was among the ten. We know this because Tertullian, refuting Marcion around the turn of the third century, works through the heretic’s own text of the letter in the fifth book of Against Marcion, immediately after treating the first letter; Epiphanius likewise lists it among Marcion’s Pauline collection.⁠³⁷ The orthodox witnesses arrive just as early. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest known list of New Testament books, accounts for both Thessalonian letters, noting that Paul wrote to that church “once more … for the sake of admonition.” Polycarp, early in the second century, seems already to echo the letter, and Justin Martyr writes of the coming “man of apostasy” in language drawn from it. Then comes Irenaeus, who around 180 quotes it twice, explicitly, as “the second Epistle to the Thessalonians” — the earliest surviving citation of the letter by name.⁠³⁸

By the early fourth century the matter was long closed. When Eusebius drew up his inventory of the New Testament, sorting the books into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the spurious, Paul’s letters sat among the acknowledged without qualification: “the epistles of Paul … These then belong among the accepted writings.” Elsewhere he says flatly that “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed.”⁠³⁹

The manuscript record fits the same pattern, with one accident of survival worth noting. Second Thessalonians does not appear in Papyrus 46, the great early codex of Paul’s letters copied around A.D. 200 — but only because the codex has lost its final leaves; on the standard reconstruction the letter stood there originally, right after the first. It is present and complete in the two great fourth-century codices, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.⁠⁴⁰ A letter this early, this widely used, and this uniformly received was never in any danger of exclusion. The contrast with its modern reputation is striking: the letter whose Pauline authorship is so sharply contested today was, in antiquity, entirely undoubted.

What the Catholic Church makes of 2 Thessalonians

If the authorship question is the modern preoccupation, it has never touched the letter’s standing in Catholic life. Second Thessalonians remains woven through the Church’s doctrine, liturgy, and moral teaching.

Its doctrine of the last things anchors the Catechism’s account of the Antichrist and the Church’s final trial, and its “mystery of iniquity” supplies the very language of that teaching.⁠⁴¹ Its command to “hold fast to the traditions” stands, through Dei Verbum, behind the Church’s doctrine of Sacred Tradition.⁠⁴² Its rule that “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat” grounds the Catechism’s teaching that work is a duty and a share in creation.⁠⁴³

It keeps its place in the Church’s prayer as well. In the Sunday lectionary the letter is read across three consecutive weeks — the thirty-first, thirty-second, and thirty-third Sundays of Ordinary Time in Year C — the eschatological closing weeks of the liturgical year, just before the feast of Christ the King, where a letter about the Lord’s coming belongs.⁠⁴⁴ And it has drawn the Church’s finest commentators: John Chrysostom preached through it, and Thomas Aquinas lectured on it verse by verse, wrestling like everyone else with the riddle of the restrainer.⁠⁴⁵

There is a fitting lesson in all this. One of the most-questioned letters in Paul’s collection — the one that warns against forgery and is itself accused of being one — turns out to be the source of some of the Church’s most enduring teaching: on the Antichrist, on Tradition, on the dignity of work. Its authorship may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Its place in the Church is not in doubt.

Further reading

The standard critical commentaries on the Thessalonian letters 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: A. & C. Black, 1972). For the authorship debate in particular, see the classic case against in William Wrede, Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefs (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), and the survey in Paul Foster, “Who Wrote 2 Thessalonians? A Fresh Look at an Old Problem,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35 (2012): 150–175. For the letter’s place in Paul’s life and corpus, Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997). On the canon, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Paul write 2 Thessalonians?

It is genuinely disputed. Roughly half of critical scholars accept it as authentically Pauline and roughly half regard it as a “pseudepigraph,” written in Paul’s name by a later disciple — one of the most evenly contested authorship questions in the Pauline corpus. The split runs closer to pseudonymity in Germany and closer to authenticity in the English-speaking world. The arguments against are entirely modern and internal — a perceived tension with 1 Thessalonians over the timing of the end, a cooler tone, heavy verbal borrowing from the first letter. No ancient writer ever doubted it. The New American Bible, Revised Edition, used in Catholic worship, presents the pseudonymity view as a respectable and open scholarly option, which tells you the question is not a matter of faith either way.

Who is the “man of lawlessness” in 2 Thessalonians 2?

The “man of lawlessness” (also “the man of sin,” “the son of perdition”) is a blasphemous end-time figure who “seat[s] himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god” (2 Thes 2:4). The imagery comes from the book of Daniel and the memory of tyrants like Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the emperor Caligula. From Irenaeus onward the Church identified this figure with the Antichrist, and the Catechism draws on the passage in its teaching on the Church’s final trial before Christ’s return (CCC 675).

What is “the restrainer” (the katechon) in 2 Thessalonians?

“The one who restrains” (Greek ho katechōn) is whatever holds the man of lawlessness back until his appointed time (2 Thes 2:6–7). It is one of the most debated phrases in the New Testament, and the Fathers could not agree: the oldest view, held by Chrysostom, identified it with the Roman Empire and its emperor; others suggested an angelic power, or the preaching of the gospel to all nations, which must be completed first. Augustine simply confessed, “I frankly confess I do not know what he means.” Reverent uncertainty remains the safest position.

Does 2 Thessalonians teach the “rapture”?

No. The secret, pre-tribulation “rapture” is a nineteenth-century idea drawn mainly from a misreading of 1 Thessalonians 4; 2 Thessalonians actually cuts against it, because it insists that the day of the Lord cannot come secretly or without warning — the apostasy and the man of lawlessness must be revealed first, in the open. The Catholic Church holds to one public second coming and reads 2 Thessalonians 2 not as an end-times timetable but as a warning about the Church’s final trial.

Where does “if you don’t work, you don’t eat” come from?

It comes from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.” Paul was correcting believers in Thessalonica who had stopped working — apparently because they thought the end was at hand — and had become idle “busybodies.” The line later took on a life of its own far outside the Church, invoked by Lenin as a principle of socialism and written into the 1936 Soviet constitution. In Catholic teaching the verse grounds the idea that honest work is a duty and a share in God’s ongoing work of creation (CCC 2427).

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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 warning against a spurious letter is at 2 Thes 2:2, and the self-authenticating signature at 3:17; on the modern doubt, see the section "Is the letter Paul's?" below and Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 585–600.

2. 2. On the letter as a follow-up to the first, and its apocalyptic scenario, see the Introduction to 2 Thessalonians in the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; on 2 Thes 2 as the seedbed of the Antichrist tradition, CCC 675–677.

3. 3. Introduction to 2 Thessalonians, NABRE: the letter "contains many expressions parallel to those in the First Letter to the Thessalonians, indeed verbatim with them," yet "other aspects of the contents . . . suggest a more impersonal tone and changed circumstances."

4. 4. 2 Thes 2:2 (the "spirit," oral statement, and letter) and 3:11 (the "busybodies"; NABRE renders the wordplay "not keeping busy but minding the business of others"), NABRE.

5. 5. The NABRE divides the letter into Address (1:1–12), Warning against Deception Concerning the Parousia (2:1–17), Concluding Exhortations (3:1–16), and Final Greetings (3:17–18).

6. 6. 2 Thes 2:1–2 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:2 explains "a letter allegedly sent by us" as "possibly a forged letter," which is why "Paul calls attention in 2 Thes 3:17 to his practice of concluding a genuine letter with a summary note or greeting in his own hand."

7. 7. 2 Thes 3:17 (NABRE). Paul's authenticating autograph appears likewise at 1 Cor 16:21, Gal 6:11, and Phlm 19.

8. 8. 2 Thes 2:3–5 (NABRE).

9. 9. The Greek is *ho anthrōpos tēs anomias* ("the man of lawlessness"), with the well-attested variant *tēs hamartias* ("of sin"); "the one doomed to perdition" renders *ho huios tēs apōleias* ("the son of destruction"). The NABRE prints "the lawless one."

10. 10. NABRE notes on 2 Thes 2:3b–5 and 2:4, which trace the imagery to Dn 7:23–25; 8:9–12; 9:27; 11:36–37; 12:11, "about the attempt of Antiochus IV Epiphanes to set up a statue of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple and possibly of the Roman emperor Caligula to do a similar thing (Mk 13:14)." Cf. Ez 28:2.

11. 11. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 5.25.1 (quoting 2 Thes 2:3–4), in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), newadvent.org. Irenaeus quotes the sequel, 2 Thes 2:8–12, at 5.25.3.

12. 12. 2 Thes 2:6–7 (NABRE).

13. 13. The NABRE note on 2:6–7 observes that the terms are "neuter and masculine, respectively, of a force and person holding back the lawless one," and are "seemingly found only in this passage and in writings dependent on it," hence "variously interpreted."

14. 14. John Chrysostom, *Homily 4 on Second Thessalonians* (on 2 Thes 2:6–9), in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13, trans. John A. Broadus (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), newadvent.org. Chrysostom reads the "mystery of lawlessness" already at work as Nero, "as if he were the type of Antichrist."

15. 15. Augustine, *The City of God* 20.19, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 2, trans. Marcus Dods (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), ccel.org. Augustine also records the reading by which the "temple of God" is the Church, and the man of lawlessness "not the prince himself alone, but his whole body."

16. 16. NABRE note on 2 Thes 2:6–7, canvassing the Roman, the angelic (with Michael, cf. Rev 12:7–9; 20:1–3), and the gospel-preaching interpretations (the last drawing on Mk 13:10).

17. 17. The Antiochene exegetes Theodoret of Cyrus and Theodore of Mopsuestia read the restraint in terms of the divine plan that the gospel first reach the nations, rather than the Roman-empire reading favored in the Latin West; their commentaries survive in Greek (PG 82) and in Latin fragments respectively.

18. 18. John Henry Newman, "The Patristical Idea of Antichrist," Lecture 1 ("The Times of Antichrist"), in *Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects* (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872), newmanreader.org. The lectures were first published as *Tracts for the Times* No. 83 (1838); Newman reprinted them after his conversion to Catholicism.

19. 19. On the dispensational misuse of the parousia texts and the Catholic reading of one public second coming, see [The First Letter to the Thessalonians](/1-thessalonians/) and CCC 668–677.

20. 20. CCC 675, with its footnote to 2 Thes 2:4–12 (and 1 Thes 5:2–3; 2 Jn 7; 1 Jn 2:18, 22), vatican.va. The phrase "mystery of iniquity" renders 2 Thes 2:7 in the older English of the Catechism's source text. The letter is also cited at CCC 671 (2 Thes 2:7) and 673 (2 Thes 2:3–12).

21. 21. CCC 676–677, vatican.va. The rejection of millenarianism is anchored in the 1944 decree of the Holy Office (DS 3839); the phrase "intrinsically perverse" is from Pius XI, *Divini Redemptoris* (1937).

22. 22. 2 Thes 3:8, 3:10 (NABRE). The NABRE renders 3:10 in the past tense: "when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat."

23. 23. 2 Thes 3:11–12 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 3:6 explains that the idlers had "probably . . . regarded the parousia as imminent or the new age of the Lord to be already here (2 Thes 2:2)" and so "ceased to work for a living."

24. 24. V. I. Lenin, *The State and Revolution* (1917), ch. 5, treats "He who does not work shall not eat" as "the socialist principle" ("The socialist principle, 'He who does not work shall not eat,' is already realized"), marxists.org; the maxim was written into Article 12 of the 1936 ("Stalin") Constitution of the USSR, which declared work a duty "in accordance with the principle: 'He who does not work, neither shall he eat.'" The Pauline source is 2 Thes 3:10.

25. 25. CCC 2427, quoting 2 Thes 3:10 (with a cross-reference to 1 Thes 4:11), vatican.va: "Hence work is a duty . . . Work honors the Creator's gifts and the talents received from him. It can also be redemptive."

26. 26. 2 Thes 2:15 (NABRE). The Greek for "traditions" is *paradoseis*; cf. 3:6, "the tradition they received from us."

27. 27. 2 Thes 3:6 (NABRE). On Scripture and Tradition as a single deposit, see CCC 80–82 and *Dei Verbum* 9–10.

28. 28. Chrysostom, *Homily 4 on Second Thessalonians* (on 2 Thes 2:15), NPNF, First Series, vol. 13, trans. Broadus, newadvent.org.

29. 29. Second Vatican Council, *Dei Verbum* (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 1965), no. 8, vatican.va: the apostles "warn the faithful to hold fast to the traditions which they have learned either by word of mouth or by letter (see 2 Thess. 2:15), and to fight in defense of the faith handed on once and for all (see Jude 1:3)." The Catechism transmits the same teaching at CCC 77–78, quoting *Dei Verbum* 8.

30. 30. The standard Protestant response — that "tradition" here denotes the apostolic gospel later inscripturated, not a body of teaching independent of Scripture — and the Catholic rejoinder are surveyed in most commentaries on the verse; see Malherbe, *Letters*, and the discussion of *sola scriptura* in the standard manuals.

31. 31. The seven undisputed letters are Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon; see Brown, *Introduction*, 4–6. On the roughly even split over 2 Thessalonians and the poll data, see Paul Foster, "Who Wrote 2 Thessalonians? A Fresh Look at an Old Problem," *Journal for the Study of the New Testament* 35 (2012): 150–175 (reporting a 2011 British New Testament Conference survey of 111 scholars: 63 for authenticity, 13 against, 35 uncertain).

32. 32. J. E. C. Schmidt first questioned the letter in 1801; the classic modern case against is William Wrede, *Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefs untersucht* (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903); the fullest pseudonymity argument is Wolfgang Trilling, *Untersuchungen zum zweiten Thessalonicherbrief* (Leipzig: St. Benno, 1972), and his commentary *Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher*, EKK 14 (Zürich: Benziger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1980). F. C. Baur of the Tübingen school had earlier rejected both Thessalonian letters.

33. 33. The contrast is between 1 Thes 5:2 ("the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night") and 2 Thes 2:3–8 (the apostasy and the lawless one must be revealed first).

34. 34. The "about a third" figure for verbal parallels traces to Wrede (1903); the precise fraction varies by author and should be taken as an estimate. On the defensiveness argument, see the NABRE note on 2 Thes 2:2 and Brown, *Introduction*, 590–598.

35. 35. On [Mark 13](/gospel-of-mark/) holding both imminence and preceding signs, cf. Mk 13:5–27 with 13:32–37. Ernest Best's formulation is in *A Commentary on the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians* (London: A. & C. Black, 1972); Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's judgment is in *Paul: A Critical Life* (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

36. 36. Introduction to 2 Thessalonians, NABRE, bible.usccb.org. The introduction adds that, "especially if the letter is regarded as not by Paul himself," its apocalyptic section profits from being read alongside Daniel, Isaiah, the synoptic apocalypse (Mk 13; Mt 24–25; Lk 21), and Revelation.

37. 37. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 5.16 (5.15 treats 1 Thessalonians), in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885); Epiphanius, *Panarion* 42, lists 2 Thessalonians among Marcion's ten Pauline letters. On Marcion's canon generally, see [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/).

38. 38. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 50–59, in Bruce M. Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), Appendix IV, 305–307 (Paul writes "to the Thessalonians . . . once more for the sake of admonition"); Polycarp, *To the Philippians* 11.3–4, echoes 2 Thes 1:4 and 3:15 (chapters 10–14 survive only in Latin); Justin Martyr, *Dialogue with Trypho* 110, speaks of "the man of apostasy" in language drawn from 2 Thes 2:3; Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 5.25.1, 3 (see n. 11 above).

39. 39. 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; the "fourteen epistles" remark is at HE 3.3.5.

40. 40. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II, c. A.D. 200) breaks off in 1 Thessalonians; its final leaves, which on the standard reconstruction (Kenyon) held 2 Thessalonians, are lost, so the letter is not extant in it — a fact of survival, not of exclusion. Second Thessalonians is complete in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (in the latter it precedes the point in Hebrews where the manuscript breaks off).

41. 41. CCC 675–677; see nn. 20–21 above.

42. 42. *Dei Verbum* 8, citing 2 Thes 2:15; CCC 77–78, 82; see n. 29 above.

43. 43. CCC 2427, citing 2 Thes 3:10; see n. 25 above. The same passage is invoked at CCC 2830 against idleness.

44. 44. In the Lectionary for Mass (Year C), the second readings for the Thirty-first, Thirty-second, and Thirty-third Sundays in Ordinary Time are drawn from 2 Thes 1:11–2:2; 2:16–3:5; and 3:7–12 respectively. The letter also supplies weekday readings in Week 21 of Ordinary Time (Year II).

45. 45. Chrysostom's five *Homilies on Second Thessalonians* are in NPNF, First Series, vol. 13; Thomas Aquinas, *Super II ad Thessalonicenses* (Commentary on Second Thessalonians), lectures on the katechon at ch. 2, lect. 2, and is available in translation at aquinas.cc.