53 Α.Ρ., probably nearer the latter date than the former. The epistle itself contains no reference to any year or contemporary event, which would afford a fixed point of time. An ingenious at- tempt has been made by Prof. Rendel Harris (Exp.® viii. 161 f., 401 f.; cf. B. W. Bacon’s Introd. to N.T., 73 f. and his Story of St. Paul, 235 f.) to show that Timotheus had previously taken a letter from Paul to the church, and that the canonical epistle represents a reply to one sent from the church to Paul; the hypothesis is ten- able, but the evidence is rather elusive. The use of καὶ, 6.6., in ii. 13, iii. 5, is not to be pressed into a proof of this: οἴδατε is not an infallible token of such a communication ( = “ you have admitted in your letter,” which Timotheus brought), and ἀπαγγέλλετε 1 is an un- supported conjecture in i. 9.
$3. The Position of the Local Church.—The occasion and the significance of this efiistle to the Christians of Thessalonica thus become fairly clear.
(a) Paul and his friends had left them the memory and inspira- tion of a Christian character. The epistle came to be written because the legacy had been disputed.
The insinuations of some local Jews and pagans 2 against Paul’s character were like torches flung at an unpopular figure ; they simply served to light up his grandeur. Had it not been for such attacks, at Thessalonica as at Corinth, we should not have had these passages of indignant and pathetic self-revelation in which Paul opens his very heart and soul. But this is the compensation derived by a cool and later age. At the moment the attack was more than distasteful to Paul himself. He resented it keenly on account of his converts, for his enemies and theirs were trying to strike at these inexperienced Christians through him, not by questioning his apostolic credentials but by calumniating his motives during the mission and his reasons for not returning afterwards. To discredit him was to shake their faith. To stain his character was to upset their religious standing. The passion and persistence with which he finds it needful to re- pudiate such misconceptions, show that he felt them to be not simply
‘The ordinary reading gives quite a good sense: ἃ γὰρ αὐτοὺς ἐχρῆν παρ᾽ ἡμῶν ἀκούειν, ταῦτα αὐτοὶ προλαβόντες λέγουσι (Chrysostom). It is both arbitrary and fanciful of Zahn (Einleitung, § 13) to mould such allusions into a theory that the news had reached Asia, and that Paul was now in personal touch ‘with envoys from the churches of Galatia, to whom he wrote Galatians before Silvanus and Timotheus rejoined him at Athens.
2 It is unreal to confine the calumnies to the one or to the other, particularly to the pagans (so 6.5., von Soden, pp. 306 f.; Clemen, Paulus, ii. 181 f.).