Comfort in Judgment: The Use of Day of the Lord and Theophany Traditions in Second Thessalonians 1

Description

Since Old Testament theophany, Day of the Lord and persecution (psalms of lament) texts are shown to he alluded to in II Thess.I, .this work surveys these traditions in a variety of sources (the Septuagint, the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran, the Samaritans, Philo, Josephus, the rabbis, the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers and, by way of comparison, profane Hellenistic Greek theophany traditions) to establish whether other writings, including any roughly contemporary with II Thess., also describe an intermediary agent in theophany and/or Day of the Lord language as effecting the final Judgment, as Jesus is In II 1. It also asks what kind of situations produced these descriptions. The result is positive, for Michael, the Son of man, the Messiah and Melchizedek are also so described, all in situations of some sort of distress or persecution, as in II 1. Since it is shown that theophany traditions were still operative at the time of the composition of II, it was not atypical of the author to describe Jesus as the coming judge in such terms because of the situation posed in the letter. The addressees believe that the persecution they are undergoing is part of the messianic woes. This leads them to believe that the Day of the Lord is in the process of coming or has come (2:2). The writer of II responds by stating in chapter one that their persecution indeed has a positive value to it, even if it does not effect the (second) coming of the Messiah, before which certain things must happen (chapter two). He comforts them in terms of a judgment theophany within the framework of an epistolary thanksgiving, stating that although the lord Jesus has not come yet, He definitely will come (1:7-10), and God’s judgment concerning the persecuted and their persecutors will be just, even if it does not appear so now. Chapter one is thus not merely an introduction to chapter two, the common opinion, but deals in a very pastoral way with what caused the Day of the lord fervor, the persecution of the addressees. Four excursus are included, the first on suffering and retribution in II 1; the second on the use of theophany texts and the latter chapters of Isaiah in the earliest Jewish lectionary systems; and the third and fourth on the relationships of the investigation to the questions of the authenticity of the letter (Pauline authorship is neither assumed nor denied during the investigation itself) and the larger issue of the application of God language to Jesus, which is found to occur nowhere more extensively than in eschatological contexts such as the Thessalonian letters.