Paul and "the Jews" in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

In 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, Paul wrote what appears to be the most virulent anti-Semitic expression of the New Testament. This text is so extreme, not to mention inconsistent with some of Paul’s other letters, that scholars have questioned whether it is original to the letter, not perhaps an interpolation by a later editor, yet the evidence points to the verses’ authenticity. Here is the ESV translation of the text:

For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, ¹⁵ who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind ¹⁶ by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!

What follows is a concise response from my postsupersessionist perspective. I’ve listed some key references at the end.

Firstly, there are good reasons to narrow the target of Paul’s attack to a small sub-group of the Jewish people at the time:

• The word that the New Testament uses for “Jew” can equally be translated as “Judean.” Use of people in the Diaspora, “Jew” is an appropriate translation, but when the setting is Jerusalem, “Judean” is generally better, differentiating Jews of Judea from Jews of the Diaspora. (At least the ESV translators inserted a footnote after verse 14 make mention of some ambiguity around the meaning of “the Jews”: “The Greek word Ioudaioi can refer to Jewish religious leaders and others under their influence, who opposed the Christian faith in that time.”)
• This comma between verses 14 and 15 is so critical that much research has been done on it. Why? Because by its inclusion, the text implies that all the Jews (at least of that era) were guilty of murdering Jesus and the prophets, but without the comma, the “who” restricts that guilt to specific Jews—those who committed such acts themselves.
• The comma simply cannot be justified, since it’s clear that Paul did not intend to condemn all the Jewish people. (Note that the punctuation was only inserted several centuries later.) 1 Thessalonians 2:14 shows that Paul is referring to the Judean Jews in particular; he is concerned about the churches in Judea. Moreover, Paul often used articular participles to restrict the application of a general term (here, “the Jews”) to a subset of that group. In all six times Paul used participles with the definite article from the start of the letter up to 2:15, he was denoting a sub-group of the broader group by that name. It’s good, therefore, to note that the NIV omits the comma, unlike most English translations.
• Tōn apokteinantōn (in v15), typically translated as “who killed” could reasonably be translated “those who killed.” Examples of such use of the definite article are easy to find, e.g. in Romans 1:32, hoi prassontes: “those who do.”
• Not only that, but Acts 21 tells us that myriads of Jews in Jerusalem were believers, so he didn't mean all Judean Jews.
• Some scholars have made a plausible case that “the prophets” referred to those of Jesus’ followers who had already been martyred. While, in no way would that alleviate the gravity of the offence, it would clearly restrict the blame to a minority group of Ioudaioi within the general population of Ioudaioi.

For all these reasons, the phrase is better translated to indicate a particular group of guilty individuals rather than the entire Jewish population:

“from those [particular] Judean Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets”.

Aside from that vital information, there are other mitigating factors to consider:

• Paul was writing as a Jew who practised a messianic form of Judaism. He had not converted to another religion. This much is clear from the New Testament, as confirmed by modern scholarship.
• Paul wasn’t standing apart from the Jewish people, pointing fingers at them, but he was standing as a representative of one Jewish sect critiquing others. It was very common to do so then even as it is today. There are many examples in Jewish and non-Jewish writings of the period in which members of a society make scathing attacks on other members, yet without meaning to attack all the people.
• Paul’s main purpose was to comfort and encourage the Thessalonian believers, not to vilify the Jews. He wanted to remind the Thessalonian believers who were being persecuted by their own people that the churches in Judea knew what that felt like. In fact, Judean believers had had it worse. God’s faithful people tend to get persecuted by their own people. Paul himself had suffered at the hands of his kinsmen. But we know from his other writings that Paul loved the Jewish people dearly – and so does the LORD.  The Thessalonian church was not alone in being persecuted by their countrymen.
• His forceful comments were a common rhetoric device. Both Jewish and non-Jewish writers of the time also used it. His critique is similar to that of the prophets and other Jewish writers of the time, like the Qumran community, who did not write off the people of Israel but sought their repentance, lashing out at those among them who hindered God's eschatological work. Likewise, Paul saw Judean opponents of the gospel as blocking God's purpose of saving the nations.
• On Jesus’ similar words about Jerusalemites, “who kill the prophets”: these were a lament, not a curse, and ended with confirmation that its people will repent and that Jesus will return to them.
• Ultimately, the wrath of God (v16) comes (aorist tense) on those particular Jews. The temporal sense of the verb is uncertain. Perhaps Paul thought the downturn of fortunes of Judean Jews in the late forties signalled the soon return of Messiah. Or perhaps he was expecting a worse outcome for them in the future. In any case, we should not be surprised that, inasmuch as the guilty are judged, those not guilty (the majority of the Jewish people) of the particular offence Paul mentioned are not judged for it.
• Finally, the purpose of Paul in mentioning the judgement of those particular Jews who were guilty of killing Jesus and the prophets was simply to encourage the believers in Thessalonica: their own persecutors would face God’s wrath. Paul wasn’t developing some doctrine of anti-Semitism.

All told, the evidence in this very superficial study is more than adequate to challenge the tradition Christian reading of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16. What’s the problem with this text? Paul is not the problem. His writing is not the problem. Rather, it is the translation of his text, its reading, and application by Christians that is the problem! And the evidence for this gets stronger the more closely one studies the literature. (See the readings listed below; I didn't use them all but found Brown very useful.)

Recommended Reading

Bockmuehl, Markus N A. “1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 and the Church in Jerusalem.” Tyndale Bulletin 52, no. 1 (2001): 1–31.

Brown, Dave. “Documentary Study of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16,” n.d. https://www.academia.edu/9256736/Documentary_Study_of_1_Thessalonians_2_14-16.

Dickieson, Brenton DG. “Antisemitism and the Judaistic Paul: A Study of I Thessalonians 2:14-16 in Light of Paul’s Social and Rhetorical Contexts and the Contemporary Question of Antisemitism,” n.d. http://place.asburyseminary.edu/trendissertations/4126.

Gilliard, Frank D. “Paul and the Killing of the Prophets in 1 Thess. 2:15.” Novum Testamentum 36, no. 3 (1994): 259.

Gilliard, Frank D. “The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma Between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15.” New Testament Studies 35, no. 04 (1989):481–502.

Lowe, Malcolm F. “Who Were the ΙΟΥΔΑΙΟΙ?” Novum Testamentum 18, no. 2 (1976): 101–30.

What's in a word: διακρίνω (diakrino) - doubt, discrimination or distinction?

Bible translators have a tough job. In fact, in some ways they can never win. There is just no 1:1 mapping between words and phrases of one language and those of another. Bill Mounce, an expert in biblical Greek who was on the Translation Oversight Committee of the ESV, offers a brilliant lecture on this in his free course, Greek for the Rest of Us. (Go to www.teknia.com, create an account and then look for lecture 1b of this course.) Mounce emphasises,

All translations are interpretive

and goes on to explain that all translators are biased. Bible publishers have to decide in advance what kind of translation they are aiming for.

For example, do they want to use gender-inclusive language? If so, they might translate "your sons" as "your sons and daughters", since that appears to be what is meant in many places of the text (because men were representative of the whole population). Today we no longer see men as representing the general population so it may make more sense to say "your sons and daughters" in a modern English translation. Translators constantly have to wrestle with the issue of whether to interpret words or meanings, and we should not be quick to accuse them of deliberately mistranslating certain texts. If they translate those same texts differently, then other people will be clamouring against them. The only way to win is for every Christian to become thoroughly competent in the biblical languages -- and that ain't gonna happen!

With that background in place I do want to raise a challenging question for the translators of several modern translations, the English Standard Version (ESV, 2001) in particular. It seems to me that they have imposed their theology on a word in Acts 11:12, theology that they probably drew out of other parts of the Bible.

Theology in the Park: The mystery of Romans 11:25

Yesterday I attended an all-day Theology in the Park conference organised by Messianic Good News, an organisation directed by Peter Cohen and Kevin Daly "who are both actively involved in writing and spreading the good news" (see their website), most especially to the Jewish people. In spite of some theological differences I have with them, I really think they do great work; their articles are thoroughly researched and they know what they believe, and why.

One of the exercises the conference participants were given was to identify the 'mystery' (Greek: μυστήριον, 'mysterion') mentioned by Paul in Romans 11:25. Immediately I felt embarrassed because I should know the answer off the top of my head (since it is closely related to my Masters topic), but I didn't. So I quickly looked up the verse and read the surrounding verses before my turn came up. As we went around the circle of about 20 people, we had an equal number of different answers though of course many overlapped. Nevertheless, there were some very different answers. Some people offered great biblical truths as the meaning of the mystery that Paul was writing to the church in Rome about. They really were wonderful gospel truths, but they were not the right answer to the question.

I feel there were two critical oversights that were made by most participants. Firstly, Paul says he does not want his readers to be ignorant of this mystery, and then he goes on to tell them what the mystery is in the same sentence! (The explanation also runs into the next verse, which in some translations is the same sentence.) Both the demonstrative pronoun this (τοῦτο, 'touto') and the conjunction that ('in order that': ἵνα, 'hina') appear in Greek text - the translators did not 'supply' them (that is, add them in, as is sometimes necessary in interpretation): "I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery... that..." and then Paul spells it out.

The second oversight was equally significant. The 'answer' to the question was supposedly given in Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Now I do believe that the Bible is an integrated whole -- that it is internally consistent, that apparent contradictions are solvable, and that one passage of scripture may be vital to unlocking the meaning of another. And certainly the mystery mentioned in Ephesians is related to the one in Romans 11, but the church in Rome did not have Paul's letter to the Ephesians at hand. Paul had to describe the mystery in the self-same letter in which he refers to it, or his readers would not have known what he was talking about. There are many mysteries in the Bible, but there was no need for my companions to explore further; Paul gives the answer then-and-there.

Why don't you take a look at Romans 11:25-26 and see what you think the 'mysterion' (secret, mystery) is that Paul was writing about?