Second Epistle to the Thessalonians

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The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians is a short letter in the New Testament, three chapters long, addressed to the Christian community at Thessalonica — the capital of Roman Macedonia — and presented as a follow-up to an earlier letter sent to that same congregation. Where the first letter is warm and consoling, this one is taut, occasioned by a single problem that had begun to unsettle the church: believers there had come to think that the Day of the Lord, the appearance of Christ in judgment, had already arrived. Almost everything in the letter bends toward correcting that error — first by reordering the sequence of the end, then by repairing the behavior the error had produced.

“Saint Paul Writing His Epistles,” attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (c. 1618-1620); the letter presents itself as the work of Paul and ends with a greeting in his own hand — Valentin de Boulogne, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Senders and occasion

The opening names three senders: Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy — the same trio that heads the first letter to the Thessalonians. Silvanus is the missionary companion called Silas in the narrative of the early church; Timothy is Paul’s younger co-worker, the one the first letter records being sent back to Thessalonica to steady the converts. The body of the letter, however, speaks in a single apostolic voice, and it presents itself without qualification as the work of Paul: the closing verses turn on a greeting written, the text says, in Paul’s own hand.

“The Apostle Paul” by Rembrandt (c. 1657); the letter speaks throughout in a single apostolic voice and presents itself as Paul’s work — Rembrandt van Rijn, National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The trouble it answers is named precisely. Some in the congregation had been shaken — the letter allows three possible vectors for the rumor — by a spirit, by a spoken word, or by a letter purporting to come from the apostle himself, all carrying the claim that the Day of the Lord was now present. The first letter had taught that the day would come like a thief in the night, without warning; the unsettling rumor seems to have pressed that immediacy to its limit, collapsing the future hope into a present already underway. The second letter sets out to slow it back down.

The sequence of the end

Against the claim of a day already arrived, the letter insists on a sequence that must run its course first. Two things have to happen before the Day of the Lord can come. There must be the apostasia — a great rebellion or falling-away — and there must appear a figure the letter calls the man of lawlessness, also named the son of perdition. This figure is drawn in deliberately escalating terms: he opposes and exalts himself over everything called god or held sacred, and he installs himself in the temple of God, displaying himself as God. The imagery reaches back into the apocalyptic vocabulary of the Hebrew scriptures — the self-deifying tyrant of Daniel, the abomination that desolates the sanctuary — and recasts it as a single coming person whose self-exaltation is the signature of the end.

“Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist,” fresco by Luca Signorelli in Orvieto Cathedral (1499-1504); later readers folded the letter’s “man of lawlessness” into the figure of the Antichrist — Luca Signorelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

What holds this figure back is the letter’s most cryptic element. Something the writer calls “what restrains” — to katechon in the neuter, then the restrainer as a person, ho katechon in the masculine, a slide of gender the Greek makes within two verses — keeps the lawless one from being revealed before his appointed time. The mystery of lawlessness, the letter says, is already at work in the present; only the restrainer keeps it in check. When the restraint is removed, the lawless one will be unveiled, and the Lord Jesus will destroy him with the breath of his mouth and the splendor of his coming. The whole movement is a brake applied to over-eager hope: the end is real and certain, but it is not yet, because its own preconditions have not been met.

Two of these terms became durable engines of later interpretation. The man of lawlessness was folded, by readers across the centuries, into the larger figure of the Antichrist — though that word belongs to the Johannine letters and never appears here, and the identification is a reception, not a statement of the text. The restrainer generated a still longer tradition of guesswork. Among the church fathers the dominant reading made the katechon the Roman state: Tertullian named the empire as the power holding back the end, and John Chrysostom, late in the fourth century, weighed two candidates — the grace of the Spirit and the Roman Empire — inclining toward the empire; Augustine, in the twentieth book of The City of God, reported the Roman reading but confessed the passage frankly obscure. The question never closed. In the twentieth century the jurist Carl Schmitt lifted the katechon out of exegesis altogether and made it a category of political theology — the restraining authority that postpones the eschaton and so makes ordered history possible — a measure of how far one cryptic clause could travel from its eschatological origin.

The authorship question

Authorship is the standing scholarly question, and it is shaped quite differently from the disputes that attach to other letters in the corpus. Here the argument turns chiefly on eschatology and on the letter’s relation to its companion. (1) On the consensus of the historical record, the first letter to the Thessalonians is secure as Paul’s, among the earliest surviving Christian documents, written around 50 or 51 CE. (2) On the contested ground of the second, scholarship divides. Many accept it as Paul’s, written soon after the first; a substantial number judge it composed later, in Paul’s name, after the apostle’s lifetime. The case for pseudonymity rests on four interlocking observations: the unusually close verbal parallels between the two letters, read by some as the copying of a model rather than the natural repetition of an author; a perceived tension between their pictures of the end, the first treating the day as imminent and unheralded, the second insisting on signs that must precede it; a cooler, more authoritarian tone; and points of vocabulary. The eschatological argument is the load-bearing one: it is hard, on this reading, to hold together a day that comes like a thief and a day that cannot come until a rebellion and a self-deifying tyrant have appeared in plain view.

The irony has often been remarked. A letter that warns its readers against a forged communication circulating under the apostle’s name, and that ends by offering the hand-written greeting as the guarantee of genuineness, is itself suspected by some scholars of being exactly such a pseudonymous production — its very signature device the kind of move a careful imitator might deploy. The defenders answer in kind: that the parallels and the firmer tone fit an author writing again, shortly after, to the same church about an error that had hardened; that the two eschatologies are complementary rather than contradictory, addressing different anxieties; and that the warning against forgery and the authenticating signature are precisely what a genuine Paul, stung by a counterfeit, would write. No consensus has settled the matter, and the two readings continue to be held by serious scholars on both sides.

The rule of work

Beyond its eschatology the letter is remembered for one blunt practical instruction, addressed to members who had stopped working — apparently in the conviction that the end was at hand and ordinary labor pointless. The writer, citing his own example of manual labor and refusal to be a burden, lays down the rule that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. The principle is aimed narrowly at the willfully idle, the ataktoi or disorderly, not at those unable to work; but stripped of its setting it became one of the most quoted lines in the whole correspondence.

Its afterlife ran far past Thessalonica. The late first- or early second-century church manual known as the Didache turned the same instinct into a test for false itinerant prophets, judging them by their willingness to work rather than sponge. Basil of Caesarea made the rule central to his vision of the monastic life, where labor and prayer were braided together and idleness counted a spiritual hazard; through Basil and the Egyptian desert tradition the verse entered the foundations of Christian monasticism and, eventually, of a broader Christian ethic of labor that long outgrew its origin in a single overheated congregation. The line has been pressed into causes its author never imagined, from monastic discipline to modern arguments over welfare and work — an afterlife out of all proportion to a corrective aside about a few people who had quit their jobs to wait for the end.

Icon of Saint Anthony the Great, a founding figure of Egyptian monasticism; the desert tradition braided manual labor with prayer and made the letter’s work rule central to monastic life — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Scholarship and the text

The letter is preserved among the Pauline corpus in the great codices and the early papyri, and it has its own technical literature, distinct from the larger debates over the letters to the Corinthians or the Pastoral epistles. The modern authorship debate is conventionally dated from Wilhelm Wrede’s monograph Die Echtheit des zweiten Thessalonicherbriefes untersucht (1903), which pressed the literary-dependence argument for inauthenticity; the leading later case for pseudonymity is Wolfgang Trilling’s commentary Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher (1980). The most weighty recent defense of authenticity is Abraham J. Malherbe’s Anchor Yale Bible commentary on the Thessalonian letters (2000), which surveys Trilling’s arguments and finds them wanting — a defense whose force is sharpened by the fact that Malherbe himself takes the Pastorals as pseudonymous, so his verdict on this letter is not a blanket reflex of conservatism. Surveys from within the study of apocalyptic movements, such as the account at the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, lay out the four-part case for pseudonymity and the responses to it; treatments of the work rule, such as the Theology of Work commentary on the idleness passage, trace its movement from a local correction to a general principle.

For traditions that read the New Testament as prophecy, the man of lawlessness remains among its most worked-over passages, drawn into a long succession of attempts to name the Antichrist and to identify the restrainer with one institution or another — readings that this letter neither authorizes nor forecloses, since it supplies a sequence without naming the figures who fill it. The hand-written signature at the close was meant to settle exactly this kind of uncertainty about origin: the apostle’s own hand, offered as the mark on every letter, the seal against the counterfeit that had thrown the church into alarm. That a community could be panicked by the news that the end had already begun — and steadied not by a date but by an insistence that the appointed signs had not yet shown — is the letter’s most enduring testimony: the record of a young church learning to live inside a hope it could neither hurry nor let go.

→ Related: First Epistle To The Thessalonians · Second Coming · Eschatology · Paul The Apostle · New Testament · Christianity · Jesus Christ · Bible · Daniel · Second Epistle To The Corinthians · Second Epistle To Timothy · Prophecy · Monasticism · Basil Of Caesarea