Der erste Brief an die Thessalonicher

Pneumatological implications in Paul: convergence and modification of an existing reawakening terminology with the help of a catechetical foundation formula

The importance of Paul's first extant letter to the study of early Christianity has clearly been demonstrated by the attention paid to just a small part of it, the ‘dreadful text’ of 1 Thessalonians 214–16, a ‘passionate, generalizing, hateful’ diatribe against the Jews for having killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and for interfering with Paul's mission to the Gentiles Or so it has seemed to most historians, theologians, and exegetes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have studied the passage Those early, stunning verses of Paul, written probably in 50 or 51 CE from Corinth to his recently founded church in Thessalonica, have proved especially embarrassing to Jews and Christians who, in post-Holocaust self-examination and post-Vatican II ecumenical spirit, have been trying to exorcise the demons of antisemitism How could Paul, a proud Jew and Pharisee, so categorically condemn his own people? And how can so early and sweeping a condemnation be explained by scholars who argue that such virulent antisemitism did not in fact develop until the latter part of the century, after the destruction of the Temple and the council at Jamnia?

The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15

This study is an investigation of the function of emotion in the social formation of the believers in the Pauline churches. In his letters, Paul speaks often of his own emotions, and also promotes certain emotions while banishing others; all this surely indicates that emotion has an important role to play within the believing community. However, in New Testament studies, the study of emotion is still at an embryonic stage. This thesis, which represents the first thesis-length treatment of emotion in the Pauline letter corpus, attempts to take the discussion forward. It argues that for Paul, emotions are integral to the proper formation and stabilizing of Christian identity and community, because they encode structures of belief and influence patterns of sociality.

Chapter 1 reviews the nascent scholarship on emotion in Paul’s letters and the wider New Testament, and also surveys the state of play of emotions research in the sciences and social sciences. In chapter 2, we examine emotion in Stoicism, the dominant philosophical influence of the day, focusing particularly on joy and grief—the two emotions that we take up and investigate exegetically in chapters 3 and 4, which concern, respectively, joy in Philippians, and grief in 1 Thessalonians. Finally, in chapter 5, we enlist the sociological notion of the “emotional regime” to explore how authorized emotions are constructed and reinforced in the Pauline communities. I conclude by offering an account of emotion in Paul, contrasting it with Stoic thinking.

Taking its cue from current emotions research, which highlights the cognitive and social dimensions of emotion, this thesis proposes that as Paul sees it, right patterns of feeling stem from, and indeed embody, right patterns of belief, and that the social display of sanctioned emotions upbuilds the communal life of the believers. Furthermore, such right emotions, by squaring felt experience with held beliefs, and demarcating social boundaries between Christians and others, have powerful integrating and differentiating functions that profoundly influence identity and belonging. These conclusions have potentially far-reaching implications for our overall understanding of the social formation of the early believers, not least in terms of how a hitherto neglected aspect of that socialization—Paul’s emphasis on the affective dimensions of personal and communal life—is brought into active conversation with the theological realities that were believed to shape all of human existence and the practices that undergirded and sustained these beliefs.

Paul’s Emotional Regime: The Social Function of Emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians

‘To Master his own Vessel’. 1 thess 4.4 in Light of new Qumran Evidence

This study examines Paul’s presentation of his gospel as a divine communication in the OT prophetic tradition. Despite the importance of the word of God to the OT prophetic vocation, Paul’s use of the phrase rarely refers to his gospel as a ‘word of God’. The phrase occurs once in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 and twice in 2 Corinthians (2:17 and 4:2). His reference to the gospel as a ‘word of the Lord’ is equally rare, occurring only in the Thessalonian Correspondence (1 Thessalonians 1:8, 4:15; 2 Thessalonians 3:1). 
Chapter one of this study presents a contextual word study of Paul’s gospel language, illustrating the functional distinction between Paul’s primary gospel language terms. A survey of Paul’s primary gospel language in LXX usage provides background to Paul’s use of the prophetic topos ‘word of the Lord’. This word study demonstrates the importance of the Thessalonian letters as a source for our understanding of the phrases ‘word of God’ and ‘word of the Lord’ as categories of divine communication to which the gospel belongs.
Chapters two through five of this project substantiate a reading of 1 Thessalonians as source for Paul’s presentation of the gospel as a divine communication in continuity with the LXX prophetic tradition. Paul constructs a community narrative in 1 Thessalonians 1-3 central to which is the arrival of, resistance to and endurance of the gospel as a word of God / word of the Lord among the Thessalonian believers. The gospel as a word of the Lord proclaims and performs the eschatological hope of Gentile inclusion at the parousia. The gospel as a word of God emphasizes the divine origin and agency of the message, entrusted to and embodied by true apostles of the gospel of God. The prophetic tradition, in which a divine emissary embodies the word, is expressed in the cruciform embodiment of the gospel by Paul, Silvanus and Timothy. 1 Thessalonians provides a narrative source for Paul’s genuinely shared mission during the foundation of Gentile congregations.

Der erste Brief an die Thessalonicher

Citations

Pneumatological implications in Paul: convergence and modification of an existing reawakening terminology with the help of a catechetical foundation formula

The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15

Paul’s Emotional Regime: The Social Function of Emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians

‘To Master his own Vessel’. 1 thess 4.4 in Light of new Qumran Evidence

Divine communication in the letters of paul:1 thessalonians as source

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