held to denote the revision and correction of Paul’s ideas by a Jater writer who had to reconcile the apparent postponement of the Advent with the primitive hope. This Baur himself is forward to admit (Paulus, Eng. Tr., ii. 93). “It is perfectly conceivable that one and the same writer, if he lived so much in the thought of the παρουσία as the two epistles testify, should have looked at this mysterious sub- ject in different circumstances and from different points of view, and so expressed himself regarding it in different ways.’ This verdict really gives the case away. Such variations are hardly conceivable if both epistles emanated from a later writer, but they are intelligible, if Paul, living in the first flush and rush of the early Christian hope is held to be responsible for them. (b) The numerous and detailed similarities between the two epistles might be explained by the hypothesis that Paul read over a copy of 1 Thess. before writing 2 Thess., or that his mind was working still along the lines of thought voiced in the former epistle, when he came to write the latter. The first hypothesis is not to be dismissed lightly. The second can be illustrated from any correspondence. It is true that apart from ii. 1-12 the fresh material of 2 Thess. consists mainly in i. 5-12, ii. 15, iii, 2, 18, 14 f, and that there is throughout the letter a certain poverty of expression, a comparative absence of originality, a stiffness in parts, and a stereotyped adherence to certain forms.!_ But in the treatment of a subject like this it was inevitable that some phrases of self-repetition should recur, e.g., the θλῖψις-στοιρ (i. 4-6), the πίστις- group (i. 4, 10, 11, ii, 11-13, π|. 2, 3), ἐργάζεσθαι, etc. Parts of the letter are unlike Paul. That is practically all we cansay. But parts are fairly characteristic of him, and these not only outweigh the others, but dovetail into the corresponding data of 1 Thess. Such incidental agreements are too natural and too numerous to be the artificial mosaic of a later writer.
The internal evidence of ii. 3-12 is no longer adduced as a crucial proof of the un-Pauline origin of 2Thess. Indeed most recent critics have given up this argument as primary. Fresh investigations into the origins of gnosticism and of the semi-political variations in primitive eschatology have undermined the older hypothesis which relegated this prophecy to the latter part of the first or the opening part of the second century, and it is only necessary to determine which of the possible reconstructions is most suitable to the age of Paul himself. On the whole, no solution of the apocalyptic prophecy
‘ The severer tone (iii. 6-15), as well as the more official tinge, of the letter were as necessary now for the Thessalonians as they were soon to be for the Corinthians (1 Cor. iv. 21, ν. 3-5).