2 Thessalonians: Author and Dating
The second letter to the Thessalonians is written in the name of Paul
Authorship
Most biblical scholars assume that this letter was not written by Paul for the following reasons:
- 1.Around a third of the words and phrases in 2 Thessalonians occur in 1 Thessalonians
, suggesting that 2 Thessalonians is a reworking of 1 Thessalonians. - 2.By contrast the tone of the two letters is not the same. 1 Thessalonians is warm and concerned in tone, whereas 2 Thessalonians is more in the style of an objective treatise.
- 3.A third factor is the way the two letters speak about the end time. There are different ideas about the time when Christ will come and these differences are hard to attribute to one author.
- 4.In 2 Thessalonians much detail is given about the punishment which non-Christians will receive. In the letters that we can definitely attribute to Paul, this topic is treated differently.
Dating
It is difficult to date 2 Thessalonians. The subject of the letter, the delay in the end time, means the text was written at the end of the first century AD. Probably it was composed by a group of believers for whom the collected letters of Paul
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