Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (44 page)

It is sometimes claimed, similarly, that if the letter was sent to the Thessalonians, and if it contradicted what was said in 1 Thessalonians, they would have known and rejected it as inauthentic.
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But this objection assumes that the letter would have been sent to Thessalonica. Why would it have been? It is a forgery! It could have been circulated absolutely anywhere in the Greek-speaking Christian world. Finally, it has sometimes been argued that there is no plausible historical context after Paul’s day for such a letter, when apocalyptic fervor had died out from the Christian communities: “it appears in fact that the intense expectation of the parousia typical for Paul’s lifetime tended to slacken after his death.”
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Even more than the other parries, this appears to be grasping at straws: imminent apocalyptic hopes have never yet died out, to our day, and never will within Christendom, world without end. Of greater moment, they certainly had not died out by the end of the first century. One needs only think of such texts as Didache 16 and (how can it not have occurred?) the book of Revelation.

A good deal of exegetical ink has been spilled over the source of the Thessalonians’ alleged disturbance that the Day of the Lord was imminent. The author tells them not to be upset
. Here again, there are two major issues. First, does the final phrase,
apply to all three sources of information or only to the third? Has some kind of spiritual (ecstatic?) communication “as by us,” some kind of oral teaching “as by us,” and some kind of letter “as by us” been invoked? Or has the teaching come through a spiritual communication, an oral teaching, and a letter that by itself is allegedly “by us?”
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For the purposes of my discussion here, the decision does not much matter, as in both cases, the author is referring to a letter “as by us.” Still, the exegetical
decision is best made in reference to the broader context, and, as we will see, this context is significant for yet other reasons. For there is a second reference to “our letter” in 2:15, where the author urges his readers to stand fast and hold to the traditions
. Since in this second case, there are only two items mentioned—a word and a letter—it does not appear to be an exact backward glance to the earlier list of three items. That in itself would suggest that the “spirit” was not included among the items connected with “us” in 2:2. And if all three items are not connected to “us,” then it seems unlikely that two of the three were. It is the third item in the list that came “as by us.”

Of greater moment for our reflections here is, second, the meaning and significance of
in 2:2. Does the author refer to the earlier letter “as having (really) come from us” or “as if (but not really) having come from us”? Despite the widespread disagreement among exegetes, here too the wording of 2:15 must be decisive. If the author of 2:2 wanted to refer to a letter that “really did” come from us, he would scarcely have needed to provide the
in the first place. He would simply have said “through our letter”—as he says in 2:15. The reference to a letter in 2:15, in fact, is given in contrast to the letter mentioned in 2:2. The earlier reference is to a letter “as if” by us, and is by implication denigrated by the author, who “corrects” the eschatology that this false letter conveyed. The later reference is to a letter that really is “ours,” which is affirmed in what it taught its readers (“stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught” in that letter).

Hanna Roose has recently argued that by using the phrase
the author of 2:2 intentionally left the reference to the earlier letter ambiguous, because as a forger claiming to be Paul writing to the Thessalonians he wanted the earlier letter to look believably Pauline (really from us, i.e., 1 Thessalonians) while casting some doubt in the minds of his actual readers (it was not really from us).
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This solution is probably too clever by half. Among other things it has to assume that there are no other references to Paul’s “first” letter in 2 Thessalonians, since, if there are, then the ambiguity of 2:2 falls apart. But 2:15 does seem to be a reference to Paul’s earlier letter (1 Thessalonians). How to resolve that problem? Roose, with a number of other scholars, including notably Lindemann, maintains that 2:15 refers not to an earlier letter but to the present one: the readers are to hold fast to the teachings found in it. This interpretation, however, overlooks the force of the aorist
in 2:15. The author is referring to a previous, past set of teaching that came by oral delivery (a word) and a written communication (a letter), not to the present letter.

This conclusion also shows the problem with the view widely taken otherwise, for example, by Lindemann and others, that 2:2 is to be understood to be a disparaging comment on 1 Thessalonians.
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In this view, by a forger who wanted
his readers to think that
this
letter (2 Thessalonians)—and its eschatological views—was the one from Paul, whereas the other, 1 Thessalonians, was the forgery. Were this view true, 2 Thessalonians would be a counterforgery with chutzpah. As Marxsen expresses the view, without reference to Lindemann’s influential article, which was published five years earlier: “In truth, 2 Thessalonians must be regarded as Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. It alone is the genuine Pauline letter. … The author of 2 Thess wants to edge out 1 Thess with his writing.” Later: “The author of 2 Thess wants to replace 1 Thess with his writing.”
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The problem overlooked by this view is, again, the positive reference to an earlier letter in 2:15. Whatever the author is castigating in 2:2, it is not the letter of 1 Thessalonians, as tempting as that view might be. The author in fact contrasts the
of 2:2 with
of 2:15. It is only the latter that is “actually” by the author; the other was not. This is an author who knows 1 Thessalonians, who realizes that it is accepted as authentically Pauline, who embraces it of necessity (and even copies it)—since he too wants to be thought of as Paul—and who speaks disparagingly of some other letter, allegedly but not really by Paul, which conveyed an aberrant understanding of eschatology. The irony is that this lost letter—whether it ever existed or not cannot be known—would have adopted an eschatology very much like that found in 1 Thessalonians, and the author does want to counter its views.