Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 52:1 (NA 2001)
Article: 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 and the Church in Jerusalem
Author: Markus Bockmuehl

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1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 and the Church in Jerusalem

Markus Bockmuehl

Summary

Decades of interpretative controversy have failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of what Judaean events, if any, might have occasioned St Paul’s bitter invective in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. After re-examining the familiar arguments by B.A. Pearson and others for a non-Pauline interpolation, this study questions the widespread assumption that Jewish persecution of Christians cannot be substantiated prior to the first Jewish War. Rehearsing the evidence for hostile measures against Jewish believers c. ad 36 and again under Agrippa I in 41/42, the argument turns to the neglected suggestion by the sixth-century chronicler Malalas of Antioch that a further persecution of the Jerusalem church took place ‘in the eighth year of Claudius’ (ad 48/49). Such a course of events during the notorious procuratorship of Ventidius Cumanus would shed light not only on 1 Thessalonians 2, but possibly also on the setting of Galatians. In any case, both Josephus and rabbinic literature indicate that the death of Agrippa I was widely perceived as the beginning of a disastrous downturn in Jewish fortunes, to which Paul may be alluding in v. 17. Ironically, a number of these points were familiar to scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, but seem since then to have been forgotten.

I. Introduction

St. Paul’s intemperate outburst against ‘the Jews’ in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 has long troubled the politically reconstructed, post-Holocaust guild of Neutestamentler. How can the same man possibly have believed that God’s wrath and definitive condemnation have ‘finally come upon’ the Jews—only to claim elsewhere that ‘all Israel will be saved’? He cannot possibly have meant it, argue well-intentioned traditional scholars. No, he cannot possibly even have said

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it, responds another group, who over the last quarter-century seem for a while to have enjoyed the advantage of scholarly momentum.1 For others still, the fact that Paul both said it and meant it just goes to show that Christianity was irretrievably racist and anti-Jewish from its very foundation. As is the case for certain other famous interpretative conundrums, such diversity of opinion may here be more indicative of exegetes’ hermeneutical predilections than of the exegetically likely range of meanings.

Is it possible to shed any light on this question? Like so many overcrowded fields...

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