In the extant text of 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul is made to say:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: you suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

1 Thess. 2:14-16 (NIV)

This would be good evidence that Jesus was a historical person, known to Paul to have been killed by the Jews as with other prophets before him. The problem is that most mainstream scholars have long agreed these verses are fake. Paul never wrote this. The whole passage is far more likely an interpolation, added by Christian scribes half a century or more later.

Some scholars even think the preceding verse (2:13) is also part of this interpolation, but as it works as well, if not better, as a closing of the preceding point than as an introduction of the ensuing digression on persecution, I have no opinion on verse 13’s authenticity. It works either way; apart from unusually duplicating a thanksgiving, there isn’t anything out-of-place or un-Pauline about it. Likewise, the first half of verse 14, right before mentioning Jesus, could also be authentic (I have written before as if it were), but the whole structural unit it there begins to form seems more likely to go together. But either way, the rest of verses 14-to-16 are more obviously out-of-place and un-Pauline.

Nevertheless, there are attempts, even by some mainstream scholars, to try and rehabilitate these verses as authentic. None of their arguments make any logical sense. And understanding why provides a good primer on the difference between logically doing history and irrationally doing history; between, again, history and apologetics.

Summarizing the Scholarship

I’ve already covered this question before of course, in Chapter 14 of Hitler Homer Bible Christ (where I also discuss the general phenomenon of scribal interpolation in Chapters 16, 19, and 20) and in On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 566-69). Crucial scholarship for understanding the issue, particularly with respect to interpolations in Paul’s Epistles generally—surveying both the evidence for them and the applicable methodology for detecting them—is contained in William Walker’s Interpolations in the Pauline Letters (Sheffield Academic 2001).

With respect to this specific interpolation, required reading remains:

• Birger Pearson, “1 Thessalonians 2.13-16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971), pp. 79-94 (reproduced in Pearson’s The Emergence of the Christian Religion).
• G.E. Okeke, “1 Thessalonians 2.13-16: The Fate of the Unbelieving Jews,” New Testament Studies 27.1 (1980), pp. 127-36.
• Daryl Schmidt, “1 Thess 2:13-16: Linguistic Evidence for an Interpolation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 102.2 (1983), pp. 269-79.
• Earl Richard, First and Second Thessalonians (Liturgical Press, 1995), pp. 123-27.
• And summarizing extant apologetic debate: Matthew Jensen, “The (In)authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2.13-16: A Review of Arguments,” Currents in Biblical Research 18.1 (2019), pp. 59-79.

You can find a typical example of attempting to restore this passage’s authenticity from Daniel Wallace, but as with most, it’s just specious Christian apologetics. It carries very little objective merit. More significant is a recent attempt to rehabilitate it by the far more liberal scholar Gerd Lüdemann in The Earliest Christian Text: 1 Thessalonians (Polebridge 2013). But even his case is wholly illogical, based more on his need to rescue his own pet theories about early Christianity than on an actual critical consideration of the evidence. A similar example can be found in the first chapter of Todd Still’s Conflict at Thessalonica (Sheffield Academic, 1999). Here I’ll be addressing the arguments in all the above.

Absence of Manuscript Evidence

As I explain in Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts, we know that all surviving manuscripts and even quotations of the New Testament (hereafter the NT) derive from a collated edition published in the mid-to-late second century in response to what was actually the first New Testament, assembled by Marcion (which apart from a few polemical quotations is lost, not even a single extant manuscript surviving: see Jason BeDuhn’s The First New Testament). Which means any editing of our NT texts in the creation of that anti-Marcionite edition or predating it (or indeed even predating Marcion’s edition) will not be evidenced in any manuscripts we have. That leaves about a century of undetectable meddling, and then an undetectable meddling program by that extant edition’s editors on top of that.

The lack of manuscript evidence is therefore not evidence against a passage being interpolated. Judging by the average rate of interpolation observed in extant manuscripts, we should expect at least twenty interpolations occurred across the whole NT in the period before the production and dissemination of that later edition (see my old slideshow explaining how anyone counting up examples will end up with that result, and indeed as only a lower bound; cf. On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 276-77 & Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 370-71). Therefore we should expect at least as many interpolations will exist without manuscript evidence.

There are roughly 8000 verses in the NT, so if there are at least 20 pre-edition interpolations (and there is no reason to doubt that), this entails the prior probability that any passage in the NT is or contains an interpolation, without surviving manuscript evidence, will be no lower than 1 in 400. More even than that, of course, since we also cannot expect manuscript evidence of every interpolation after that edition either (we only get random snapshots of the state of isolated pieces of text in any given decade); but in this case we can be certain all of the interpolations before that edition will not be announced in any manuscripts we have. The probability that we’d have a manuscript evincing the interpolation if the interpolation occurred in the first hundred years is therefore effectively zero; ergo, the converse probability, P(no manuscript|interpolation), is effectively 100%, more or less the same probability of that same evidence if it wasn’t an interpolation, which leaves us with a ratio of 100/100, or 1/1, which is simply 1—and any probability multiplied by 1 remains unchanged. Which eliminates this observation as evidence. We so fully expect there to be no manuscript evidence that our having none carries no weight at all against the interpolation hypothesis—as long as we accept a prior probability of 1 in 400 (as opposed to, say, 1 in 200, if we hypothesized this interpolation could also have occurred in the second hundred years of the NT’s history, but we have no need of that hypothesis).

It is also a generally understood fact that most interpolations in any tradition occur in the first century of transmission, and particularly for the NT, as its transmission was not professionalized for hundreds of years but earlier on carried out by relatively amateur scribes with little in the way of organized controls. And that’s precisely the century we cannot check manuscripts from. So the rate of meddling then must have been higher than the later observed rate of 1 in 400 verses per century. So either way, 1 in 400 is a hard minimum for the prior probability of interpolation. No case can be made the prior is lower—other than by undercounting interpolations. Which we might want to do simply to argue a fortiori, but I will stick to the more probable estimate here.

This still does mean we need evidence to claim any given passage is an interpolation—evidence, in fact, that is at least four hundred times more likely if an interpolation occurred there than if it didn’t. You can’t just assert that some passage was interpolated because that would be convenient to some theory you want to advance. That would reduce the probability of your thesis four hundred times. Hence “possibly, therefore probably” is a fallacy (see possibiliter ergo probabiliter in the index to Proving History). But manuscript evidence is only one way to get a higher posterior probability for an interpolation having occurred. Other evidence could exist besides that. So we have to look at the evidence overall.

Minor Arguments

Many of the arguments for and against this interpolation angle around whether this digression “fits” where it has been placed in this letter. I think it definitely looks awkward where it is. For example, in 1 Thess. 2 (which simply expands on 1 Thess. 1), Paul starts by talking about his worries that the Thessalonians have strayed from the faith and soured on him, and ends by delighting in finding out they haven’t—leaving no truly coherent place for him to insert this anti-semitic rage-post in between, referencing a supposed pagan persecution in Thessalonica he never elsewhere even mentions or consoles them over.

Likewise, there are parallels between 1 Thess. 1 and 1 Thess. 2, yet the remarkable event (and its feared or actual effects) that our doubted passage purports is wholly absent even by allusion in 1 Thess. 1. No recent pagan persecution comes up there, as even a thing to console them over or respond to; not even where logically it should be mentioned: in 1:6-10, when Paul refers to their suffering, he describes only something they were struggling with before Paul converted them, which they overcame by accepting his mission in the first place; he does not describe or mention any subsequent persecution.

These positional facts do indeed pose problems for authenticity. As do some others (though with weaker force) that have been noted in the literature. Yes, I can contrive reasons why Paul “might” do things like this, so the position of these sentences in the text does not carry too much weight. But that I have to contrive excuses to get this outcome still entails reducing the probability of authenticity. Because to get the evidence to be likely, I have to assume facts not in evidence (about the surrounding events and Paul’s desires, beliefs, and intentions); and facts without evidence do not typically have a very high probability of being true (usually, at best, it’s 50/50 that any conjecture we contrive is true), so the overall improbability of such assumptions commutes to the probability of authenticity altogether. This is the problem with making excuses to “force” evidence to fit a theory. Here the excuses we can imagine are not too improbable; but they aren’t 100% certain, either. So this all should weigh at least slightly against authenticity; but to argue a fortiori I’ll mostly ignore this (though I shouldn’t).

I will likewise not count grammatical and stylistic evidence. Though there are some such oddities in verses 14-to-16 (summarized by Schmidt), they are not glaring enough to be conclusive (as outlined by Still). Just look at the stylistic and grammatical oddities in the so-called “Long Ending of Mark” for a contrasting example (I thoroughly survey that point in Chapter 16 of Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Even so, that these kinds of deviations from normal Pauline practice would exist is 100% expected on the theory of “interpolation,” but requires a stack of “excuses” to explain away on the theory of “authenticity,” none of which (much less all of which) are 100% certain, so this evidence is unavoidably less likely on the theory of authenticity (a fact apologists gloss over, ever-confusing “possible” explanations with “probable” explanations of inconvenient evidence). Nevertheless, although this does count against authenticity (see Neil Godfrey’s summary), I think it would be weak evidence at best (just in comparison with the much stronger case we have for Mark 16:9-20, for example). Thus, to argue a fortiori, I won’t bother counting this, either.

Some apologists have also quite illogically presented the following convoluted argument: since the grammar of this suspect passage in 1 Thess. 2 resembles material in 2 Thess. 2 (particularly at 2:11), and we know 2 Thessalonians was forged in response to perceived problems evoked by 1 Thessalonians (which 2 Thessalonians might even be declaring to be the forgery!), 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 would have to have been interpolated before 2 Thessalonians was forged, so as to have inspired its content, and that is “improbable.”

That’s not even true, of course. There is no particular reason why 2 Thessalonians would not have been forged in response to the redacted version of 1 Thessalonians. We have no way to determine even how much time passed between them anyway. It could have been as much as half a century. For example, if this interpolated reference to the destruction of Jerusalem was inserted shortly after that very event in 70 A.D., and 2 Thessalonians was forged in, say, the 120s (well in time to be included in Marcion’s NT decades later), that’s fifty years. Back then, that was more than an average human lifetime. More than ample.

But the more fatal problem with this reasoning is that it overlooks a far more obvious sequence of events: that 1 Thess. 2:14-16 was forged using 2 Thess. 2 as a model, not the other way around—indeed, possibly even by the forger of 2 Thessalonians, although we have no need of that hypothesis. The assembler of the late-second-century anti-Marcionite NT, or even Marcion himself in assembling his earlier NT, may have simply pulled 1 Thess. and 2 Thess. together intending to pass them both off as authentic, and then composed and inserted 1 Thess. 2:14-16, duly inspired by the language of 2 Thessalonians. Since we can’t tell either way, and we cannot base any argument on what we don’t know, there is simply no argument here for the authenticity of these verses.

Another problem is that elsewhere Paul says the authorities (which would have to mean Jewish and Roman) do not but do God’s will (Romans 13), and that the killing of Jesus was God’s will, not something to be condemned for—in fact, Paul says the enemies of God (even the killers of Jesus) would have prevented the killing of Jesus had they known what effects it would have on the universe (1 Corinthians 2:6-8). From even before Paul the Christian credo was to rejoice that Jesus was killed, not condemn it (Philippians 2:8-11; 1 Corinthians 15:1-3; Romans 3:25). Paul’s thinking in either case does not cohere with a “damn the Jews” sentiment; and such contradictions are always improbable. But, again, I’ll set this aside and “pretend” it has no effect on the probability of authenticity.

Finally, it is also peculiar that this passage makes no mention of Romans being involved in the execution of Jesus, or even the persecution of Christians anywhere—despite this all supposedly being about a Roman (i.e. pagan) persecution of the Thessalonians. Instead, the attack, and the blame, and the vitriol—even the very wrath of God—is entirely thrown at “the Jews” (Ioudaiôn) here. This is a peculiarly late Christian notion, of throwing the Jews under the bus and downplaying the role of the Roman police state in actually (or at least supposedly, if we are to believe the Gospels’ storyline) killing Jesus. As far as any evidence we have indicates, this was a tactic of distancing that was only occasioned by (and only appears in Christian writing after) the Jewish war, when being associated with the insurrectionism of the Jews became dangerous, and apologists started veering towards Antisemitism to curry favor with, and quell the suspicions of, Roman authorities.

In other words, this digression looks more like a late first century Christian political sentiment than what Paul himself would have said—if we buy into the traditional narrative of how Jesus got himself killed. Still, it could well be that the Gospels invented the role of Pilate, and that Jesus was indeed killed by the Jews (stoned and hung on a crux in accordance with Jewish law), as some lost Gospels actually claimed (see Chapter 8.1 of OHJ; and see Ibid. pp. 61-62 for the fact that Jewish executions actually did involve the hanging of corpses on posts, and Paul’s repeated vocabulary of crucifixion actually does not distinguish Roman from Jewish executions). Or again maybe Paul had “some” reason to throw all the blame on “the Jews” and conveniently “forget” that actually the Romans killed Jesus. That would all be excuse-making again. But even adding in the improbabilities of those excuses, I still think this evidence is not so improbable on the theory of authenticity as to make too much difference. It must certainly lower that probability, but as that is again only by a little, I’ll maintain my argument a fortiori and pretend this, also, has no effect.

The Major Arguments

But those are minor points. Here are the weighty reasons Paul cannot have written verses 14-16:

• Paul never blames the Jews for the death of Jesus elsewhere, despite repeated opportunities to, as well as a repeated need to. Such as when he is trying to dissuade Gentile Christians from their hostility toward Jews and explain God’s plan for them throughout Romans 3, 9-10, and 15; or when he says God forgave the Jews even after they killed former prophets, where we find exactly the opposite sentiment than is voiced in 1 Thess. 2:14-16. It is therefore improbable that Paul would say the opposite here, where it isn’t even rhetorically relevant to the argument he is making in 1 Thess. 1-2.
• Paul also never talks about the Jews as if he wasn’t one of them (cf. Galatians 2:15; 1 Corinthians 9:20; Romans 9:1-5, 11:1; Philippians 3:4-5) and to the very end of his career he preached the Jews will be saved, not damned (Romans 11:1 and 11:26; cf. 11:25-28). It is therefore extremely improbable that he would say exactly the opposite here.
• Paul never talks about God’s wrath as having come, but as coming only at the future judgment (e.g. in Romans 2:5, 3:5-6, 4:14-16; even—most relevantly of all— in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 and 5:3 and 5:9; cf. also 1 Corinthians 5:5, Galatians 6:8, Philippians 3:19). It is therefore improbable that Paul would say anything differently here.
• Paul consistently teaches the Jews will be saved, not “destroyed” by God’s wrath (e.g. Romans 11:25-28; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:24, 9:20, 10:32, 12:13; and Galatians 2:17). It is therefore improbable he would say exactly the opposite here.
• Paul was dead by the time the “wrath had come upon them to the uttermost,” a phrase that can only mean the destruction of the Jewish nation, capitol, and temple in 70 A.D. Apologists try to insist it can mean other things, but there is actually no possible way it can. This is the apologetic nonsense I’ll spend the most time on because it is the most illogical, and because this line is the most obvious and conclusive proof Paul cannot have written these verses: the probability that Paul was still alive and wrote this letter after the year 70 (or that he could edit it from beyond the grave) is vanishingly small.

These stack, making a cumulative improbability so overwhelming there is no logically valid way to evade the conclusion. So much so that attempts to defend this passage’s authenticity simply make no sense. They require us to believe too many improbable things. This passage is extremely unusual in several ways; not in any of Paul’s 20,000 words, and dozens of discussions of the Jews, is anything like it. That immediately casts it into doubt.

Paul blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus is simply unprecedented and contrary to all his rhetoric across several letters spanning his whole career. That he “changed his mind,” as apologists will try to insist, is not probable in the face of this evidence. Outside this one passage, his attitude toward the Jews is consistent from beginning (Galatians) to end (Romans). So the presumption that “he changed his mind” is possible, but improbable. And that improbability commutes to the conclusion. You can’t make it go away by inventing things (a mysterious, undocumented “change of mind”) for which you have no evidence. That just moves the improbability around in the equation. It doesn’t get rid of it.

And not only does Paul never speak of the Jews as if he wasn’t one of them, Paul even acknowledged Jews as members of his own church, and as salvageable targets of conversion thereto, so he couldn’t have damned them as a group like this, and never does (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:24, 12:13; 2 Corinthians 11:22 and 11:26; Romans 9:24, 10:12, 11:25-28). That simply bears no respectable probability by any conceivable argument. To the contrary Paul even says exactly the opposite in the last known letter of his career, outright declaring God “has not cast off his people” and “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:1 and 11:26; cf. 11:25-28).

Yes, Paul criticizes Jews a lot, as he also does Gentiles, and expects many of both groups will be damned for their sins; but that is in no way evidence that he damned them all to destruction for the supposed crime of having killed Jesus. Those are simply not the same thing. In fact they are conspicuously not the same thing: for all the criticism Paul levels at his fellow Jews across thousands and thousands of words, “they killed Jesus” never once appears—except here, the one place it isn’t even relevant to mention. That is simply grossly improbable. And by no logical argument can we escape that consequence.

Above all, there is no plausible way Paul could have imagined God’s future wrath had already come, much less upon “the Jews” as a whole. Paul never in his whole epistolary career said God’s wrath would come at any other time than the future end of the world. Until that happened, the unwavering core of his gospel was that anyone could yet be saved. So he would never voice exactly the opposite sentiment. And there is simply no event before the year 70 that even comes close to making any logical sense of such a statement even if (contrary to all extant evidence) Paul would ever have been likely to voice it (and for some reason only this one time). And really, that’s the terminal blow.

The Wrath Having Come

To make this clear I will provide my own vetted translation of these two verses (key emphasis now added):

For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Jesus Christ which are in Judaea, for you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and pleased not God, and are opposed to all men, forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, to fill up their sins for evermore—but the wrath has come upon them to the uttermost.

1 Thess. 2:14-16

In its present context, Paul is writing to pagan converts (1 Thess. 1:9), and this passage is claiming they were recently persecuted by pagans (“your own countrymen”), not by Jews. But if that were the case, why would he suddenly break into a tirade against “the Jews” here? This makes no sense rhetorically. The analogy might make sense (which is why the first half of verse 14 could be Pauline). But nothing else after that. It serves no evident purpose for Paul’s discourse; not even as an interpolation, where the Thessalonians are supposed to be awesome for having withstood a pagan persecution, not a Jewish one (a pagan persecution Paul never mentions or even addresses anywhere else in 1 Thessalonians).

It seems pretty clear that whoever composed these lines isn’t really aware of any real event in Thessalonica; they aren’t actually writing to the Thessalonians to console them over this tragedy or discuss what they went through. The author of these lines was instead just inserting a quick excuse to damn the Jews by inventing a pagan persecution to spur that digression, so as to steer the letter from its actual subject (the Thessalonians’ ready and faithful conversion from idolatry) to a completely unrelated agenda (damning the Jews). Interpolation makes far more sense of this. When we add all the other evidence just surveyed, the probability that Paul wrote either sentence plummets to as near zero as makes no odds.

The closing line about God’s wrath is just one example of that weighty evidence, although it is the weightiest. Which is why Christian apologists and other scholars who want this passage to be authentic try so hard to dismiss this. The passage as we have it says God’s wrath has come upon the Jews “to the uttermost” (eis telos, literally “to the end” / “with finality” or “completely / thoroughly”). Attempts to reinterpret this as not meaning “finally/completely” is simply trying to get a word to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means. There is literally no logical validity to that enterprise. Most of all because this clause is paired with a verb in the past tense, not the future or present tense: the passage says ἔφθασεν, “has come, has arrived” (with epi, “has come upon”), an aorist indicative, which means a singular event in the past—not a continuing event, nor a future one (more on that point shortly). Indeed, given the indicative, it means an actual event—as opposed to, say, the subjunctive, which would refer to a hypothetical or potential event.

The sentence ephthasen de ep’ autous hê orgê eis telos simply has no other translation but to say that some singular event occurred in the past (ephthasen de), which evinced “the wrath” or “anger” of God (hê orgê) upon “the Jews” (ep’ autous picking up the earlier tôn Ioudaiôn), and whatever that was, it was final and complete—permanent, eternal, thorough (eis telos). In other words, it was not some minor temporary thing that only affected a few random Jews. It was a serious, final, thorough thing that affected all Jews. There is no such event in the first century except the conclusive destruction of the temple cult. There is literally no other logically available incident such a sentence can evoke. Any attempt to deny this is simply denying what Greek words mean; which is irrational.

It’s even more obvious than that in context, as this remark unmistakably refers to something that affected the Jews in Judea: “For you became imitators of the churches … which are in Judaea” by having suffered “the same things from your own countrymen as they did of the Jews” who (a) killed Jesus (Where? in Judea) and (b) “the prophets” (Where? in Judea) and (c) “drove us out” (Out of where? Judea). So it is not logically possible that whoever wrote these verses could have meant, as some apologists have attempted to claim, a brief expulsion of Jews from Rome. That was a purely temporary and isolated event (and thus not by any stretch of the imagination “final”), and hardly anything one would call the wrath of God (unless you think God is so lame that the worst he could do to display his “ultimate wrath” is force some Jews living in pagan Rome to go back to the Holy Land), and in any case only affected Jews in Rome, not Jews in Judea (so how could God’s wrath have been visited on the Jews of Judea by punishing Jews in Rome?). So you can see how wildly illogical that apologetic interpretation is.

By all the same reasoning, “reinterpreting” this passage to mean some other event than the end of the temple cult (some random incident that resulted in only a minute fraction of Jews dying or suffering anything material; Wallace, for example, attempts the ridiculous suggestion that this could refer to “the death of the Jewish King Agrippa” or “the revolt of Theudas” or an incidental Jerusalem “riot,” or even “the famine in Judea,” even though there was no famine particular to Judea: Acts 7:11, Acts 11:27-29, and K.S. Gapp, “The Universal Famine under Claudius,” Harvard Theological Review 28.4), or even something “unobservable” and ongoing like some sort of spiritual abandonment, simply makes no sense whatever of the passage’s obvious meaning. The only thing a past “final judgment” on all “the Jews” particularly in “Judea” can possibly be is the end of Judea itself (as a province) and the end of the Jewish cult (in the destruction of the Temple and Holy City), universally recognized by Christians as God’s final abandonment of the Jews—which we must acknowledge gives this away. No other event makes any sense of this line. And Paul was dead by then. Which proves this purposeless digression to condemn “the Jews” can only be an interpolation.

Weaseling Out

This is so frightful a point to anyone who can’t abide this being an interpolation that some have even attempted to insist that only verse 16 was interpolated, so as to get at least that albatross off their neck. But that does not logically work. Not only because of all the other evidence surveyed, which argues against the whole of 14b-16 being un-Pauline, and not only because there is little point to the long rant against the Jews but the conclusion of announcing their dessert, but also because this is again simply an unevidenced “excuse.” There is no evidence that “only” verse 16 was interpolated. So to invent that story reduces, not increases, the probability of your hypothesis. Indeed, if you are admitting verse 16 was interpolated, you are admitting this passage has been meddled with. The entire passage is thereby suspect: you know it’s been doctored and don’t know how much of it has been doctored; that leaves you with no leg to stand on to assert any of this passage is authentic.

It also does not logically work to try and insist Paul is “only” damning Judeans here, not “the Jews.” And not only for the obvious reason—this text says “the Jews,” not “the Judeans,” nor even “the Jews of Judea.” It is illogical to claim a text says what it explicitly does not say. For example, Jensen claims this passage “allows for particular Jews not to be covered by [its] broad ranging statement,” but that is precisely what this passage does not do. It identifies no exceptions at all; yet the actual Paul surely would have qualified it—so it is precisely that he doesn’t that evinces he didn’t write this. It was more obviously written by someone who did not consider themselves a Jew and was not fond of Jewish Christianity altogether—neither of which describes Paul.

In addition to that, this text credits this damnation to Jewish meddling in the Gentile mission (more on that oddity below), which sweeps all Jews across the Empire into the condemnation being made here. There wasn’t much of a notable Gentile mission in Judea; it was predominately effected, and thus if at all opposed, outside Judea. But we also can’t rescue the passage this way. Because the difference between “Jews” and “Judeans” is not relevant to the problem: when Paul elsewhere says the Jews will be saved, as a generic category, and thus not damned, he necessarily must mean Judeans as well. So the contradiction remains.

An even bigger problem with this irrational apologetic is that many Christian churches were comprised of Judeans (Galatians 1:22) for decades (1:18; 2:1), and thus were not driven out. Indeed, Paul was able to come and go freely, and moreover had Christian churches and Apostles to go to there (Galatians 1:17-2:16, 1 Corinthians 16:2-4, 2 Corinthians 1:16, Romans 15:19-32), so clearly they were never expelled. And Paul never elsewhere mentions the Judean churches having been destroyed or purged—not even in his letter to the Romans, where it could hardly escape mention, since the fact of it would be the first question on his audience’s mind that he had to explain or apologize for (see even just Romans 10 for example). Such an event would otherwise be fatal to the entire rhetoric of that Epistle, without Paul directly confronting and addressing it.

Paul also never elsewhere mentions Judeans preventing his preaching to the Gentiles, even when he was in Judea preaching to Gentiles; he fears their getting in the way, but little more (Romans 15:31). Note Paul does not say where he met with Jewish violence in 2 Corinthians 11:24-27, but even there he makes clear it did not deter him. Also note he himself did not persecute Christians in Judea; much less for preaching to Gentiles, as Paul invented that mission after his conversion. Indeed, in Galatians 1:22-23 Paul says he never even appeared in Judea until long after his conversion, which means his persecutions were carried out outside Judea. And his role in that is again conspicuously absent from 1 Thess. 2:14-16, another oddity of that passage that makes it sound very un-Pauline; only a forger would forget he was condemning Paul himself with these verses.

This point is clear in Galatians 2, where it is Jewish Christians, and them only, who were making trouble for Paul in his many visits to Judea; there is no mention of the Jews generally attacking him, forbidding him or driving him out for it (indeed not even the Jewish Christians did that), or of these being problems he had to confront (to the contrary, his only obstacle there is the disapprobation of a certain faction of Christians). Were there some sort of successful expulsion of all the Apostles from Judea by the Judeans, it is literally impossible that no mention of it would be made in Paul’s letters to the Romans (with which he concluded his career by trying to reconcile Jewish and Gentile Christians) or Galatians (which scholars agree he wrote soon after 1 Thessalonians). The Paul of Romans and Galatians clearly had never heard of such a thing. So the Paul of Romans and Galatians can’t have written 1 Thess. 2:14-16.

The idea of an Apostolic expulsion from Judea was only a contrivance of the book of Acts (cf. Acts 8; although that also says it happened before Paul converted, it also falsely depicts Paul leading a persecution in Judea, which we know from Paul never happened either). Luke-Acts is also the first time we see any author explicitly condemn “the Jews” for killing Jesus, for instance having Stephen declare “you have betrayed and murdered” Jesus, meaning “you who received the law” from God, i.e. the Jews (Acts 7:52-53). Contrary to what many modern apologists have said, Mark and Matthew never credit the Jews with this crime, but always and only specific people or groups within Judaism (cf. Matthew 5 and 23:29-39; Mark 3:6 and 8:31, 11:18, 14:1; etc.). This dates 1 Thess. 2:14-16 after the publication of Luke-Acts, and well after the publication of Mark and Matthew.

Which is no surprise. Acts repeatedly contradicts a great deal of Paul’s eyewitness history in his Epistles (see Chapter 9 of OHJ). For Paul to write entirely across his whole career as if no such thing ever happened, and then the notion of it to first appear in a late apologetic treatise we have already documented fabricates stories contrary to the eyewitness reports of Paul, means P(claim of expulsion|passage is authentic) is quite low; but given its hewing to the fictions invented in Acts, P(claim of expulsion|passage was interpolated) is quite high. The difference in those probabilities weighs, and strongly, only in one direction: against Paul having ever said this. There is no way around this. “Making up excuses” to explain all this away just moves this improbability around; it doesn’t remove it.

Another weird thing carrying the point here is that the author of 1 Thess. 2:14-16 claims the Apostles were specifically expelled from Judea for “speaking to the Gentiles” to convert them, but that makes little historical sense. Judeans would not care about conversations with or even the conversion of “Gentiles.” Judeans, and Jews generally, always had a positive view of this. “God fearers,” Gentile Synagogue sympathizers, were a regular and legal thing; and Jewish law fully established procedures for Gentiles converting to Judaism, and the practice was widely known and allowed. And until they did convert, Gentiles could not violate Jewish law—as they were not subject to it. So there would be nothing to persecute. (This is not to be confused with Gentiles engaging in sacrilege, e.g. entering a sacred space like the temple, but 1 Thess. 2:14-16 does not mention that.)

Whoever wrote these verses is so far removed from pre-war Judea and Judaism that they have wholly forgotten that only Paul and a scant few others were even proposing to convert Gentiles to Christianity without converting them to Judaism—and that such people would simply remain Gentiles (at most God Fearers) in the eyes of Judean law, so there would be no plausible basis for “expelling” Jews for talking to them or persuading them into a non-Jewish relationship with the Judean God. Meanwhile, nearly all the other Apostles (e.g. Peter, James, John) were by all accounts following Jewish conversion law, and not even much involved in targeting Gentiles anyway. Hence the detente Paul worked out with them as reported in Galatians 2: he would be the Apostle to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews. So their being expelled for converting (much less even just talking to) Gentiles makes literally no historical sense at all—and in fact cannot possibly have happened. This passage is pseudohistory, based on a lazy reading of fictions invented in Acts. Which is one more way we can know Paul didn’t write it.

Other arguments that have been attempted are self-refuting. For example, Wallace suggests the fact that 1 Thess. 2:14-16 contains verbal and conceptual echoes of Matthew 24 & Mark 13 (and as we’ve already noted, Acts as well) that this argues for authenticity—because Jesus, and therefore Paul, were prophetically predicting the temple’s destruction. But there is no evidence of that. And we cannot assert what we do not know. What we do know is that the content of Mark 13 is found nowhere prior; and when something echoes a text, that entails it derives later, not earlier. 1 Thess. 2:14-16 was therefore more likely written after the Gospels (and Acts). It therefore was not written by Paul. Wallace tries to reverse the logic of this by positing a number of specious suppositions (albeit typical for Christian apologists), such as that these texts all derive from a common oral source; but that is the hypothesis being proposed, not evidence for that hypothesis. This illogical confusion between “what we are proposing” and “evidence that what we are proposing is true” is commonplace in Biblical studies. But it remains illogical everywhere. The evidence as it stands is that 1 Thess. 2:14-16 post-dates texts written after the death of Paul. There is no evidence of the contrary. And that’s that.

Likewise, apologists will attempt to insist the aorist (past) tense of the verb in verse 16 (indicating the wrath “has come” rather than “will come”) is “proleptic” (meaning “anticipatory”) and thus “actually” indicates a future event. But in so doing they only illogically abuse this grammatical concept. Rather than find any actual comparable examples, apologists just cite a bunch of examples of aorist verbs taking a future sense without actually checking if any are analogous to this verse. None ever are. In actual fact this cannot be a proleptic usage. The temporal reference of a verb in Greek follows from its temporal context. An aorist thus can only carry a future tense if it is used in a context that establishes a future event relative to which the event the aorist verb describes will occur (Smyth §1934). In other words, it still must indicate a past event, but can do so relative to a future event, which can thus in turn reside in the author’s future. But in this passage there is no future event that the “wrath” will come before. So the aorist cannot here take a future meaning.

For example, in Revelation 10:7 we find the line “But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.” Here the verb for “will be accomplished” is actually in the aorist, but that is because it is saying this will happen before the other thing that was just mentioned: the angel’s blowing of the trumpet. In English we still render that in a future tense, although a closer analog would be the future perfect (“the mystery of God will have been accomplished“). But in ancient Greek, the aorist can carry that meaning (e.g. as in Mark 11:24, where the believing of a thing precedes a future receiving of it, which thus can be indicated in the aorist tense; just as John 13:31 relates to the future event described in John 13:32; likewise Romans 8:30 vis-a-vis Romans 8:18). However it only does so because the future event it is understood to precede is clearly stated. There is no analogy here to what is written in 1 Thess. 2:16; there is no future event that God’s wrath is there said to precede. Consequently no reader of Greek would have understood the aorist here in that way.

Ineptly many scholars have even cited supposed examples of a proleptic aorist that are actually not. For example, Matthew 3:17 has God say of Jesus “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” using actually the aorist for “am well pleased.” This is not a proleptic but a perfective use of the aorist. The aorist can be used in a present tense like this when what is meant is something that already happened in the past creating a condition persisting into the present, but even then it retains its aspect of referring to a singular past event—as opposed to the past imperfect, which entails a past ongoing event, something that keeps happening, rather than something that happened, and has had its effect ever since. But resorting to such a sense here in verse 16 won’t help the apologist, as such a connotation still entails the author is referring to an event having occurred in the past; not an event yet to occur in the future.

In the same way, even the quite rare case of an actual prophetic-completed aorist (borrowed from Hebrew idiom), such as in Ephesians 2:6 where someone pretending to be Paul speaks of the future resurrection as already having happened, there must be an already-understood fact—a specific event—being referred to. In such a sense the vague statement at 1 Thess. 2:16 would be unintelligible in ancient Greek, unless the reader already knew what event it referred to, an event which will somehow specifically single out and only affect “the Jews.” This would make sense on Wallace’s contrived idea that Jesus really did predict the destruction of the temple and Paul and the Thessalonians well knew that, but as I already noted, there is no evidence of such a remarkable thing—yet there should be, as this would entail Paul had repeatedly been preaching the Jews would collectively be damned in the final judgment, and as we have seen, Paul preached exactly the opposite across his entire known career. In other words, this theory requires inventing an entire teaching of Paul for which there is no evidence and against which all evidence stands. That’s illogical—it’s apologetics, not history.

The Lüdemann Case

In the above I’ve already dispatched most of what Lüdemann himself tries to argue. He simply makes false statements about the facts or the consequences of those facts on the probability of the conclusion. We see this even in what he tries to add on to his case.

For instance, Lüdemann argues that because vv. 14-16 closely echo pagan critiques of Judaism, that this somehow makes it more likely Paul would write these words as we have them. Exactly the opposite is the case. That vv. 14-16 look far more like the words of an Antisemitic Gentile than Paul greatly reduces the probability Paul wrote them—and substantially increases the odds they were written by a second century Gentile Christian forger, as we’ve seen a lot of other evidence suggests.

Conversely, Lüdemann falsely claims vv. 14-16 closely echo the parable of the wicked tenants that Mark attributes to Jesus (Mark 12:1-12). IMO the evidence overall does not support Jesus ever having taught in parables but indicates these parables were invented by Mark to reify the teachings not of Jesus, but Paul; but I won’t press that point here. Even if we “assume” (without evidence) that this parable actually comes from Jesus (and even “was known to Paul”), what Lüdemann says about it is not merely not the case, it is conspicuously not the case.

Mark’s parable does equate Jesus with past murdered prophets and predict that those who participate in state murder God will eventually kill (neither anything remarkable to say), but it explicitly says this is about “the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders” and not “the Jews,” who were in fact the hearers and admirers of Jesus that these leaders were “afraid” of. It is precisely by not making this distinction that vv. 14-16 is impossible from the pen of Paul. There is also no mention of “the hindering of the mission” here (Lüdemann claims it is “implied” in verse 7, but that simply isn’t true), or any other peculiar features of vv. 14-16 (like the Jews “opposing all mankind” or even persecuting missionaries, much less expelling them from Judea). So vv. 14-16 appears to be an evolution beyond, and thus post-dating, Mark 12. It looks far more like sentiments we first find in Luke-Acts, where this condemnation of corrupt leaders has evolved into a condemnation of “the Jews.”

Lüdemann then argues by false analogy. He correctly observes that this passage echoes language found in the pre-Christian apocryphal text of the Testament of Levi; but then incorrectly claims this proves “Paul” was “employing a tradition that his problems with non-Christian Jews would naturally have inclined him to adopt.” This is completely, factually false. The Testament of Levi says “I slew Shechem at the first, and Simeon slew Hamor, and after this our brethren came and smote the city with the edge of the sword,” and though Levi laments at the sin of doing this, he excuses that sin by declaring he “knew that the sentence of God was for evil upon Shechem” because of their past evils (including persecutions), and therefore by Levi’s own actions “the wrath of the Lord came suddenly upon them to the uttermost.”

That last phrase in Greek reads ἔφθασε δὲ ἡ ὀργὴ κυρίου ἐπ’ αὐτοὺς εἰς τέλος, which you can compare with 1 Thess. 2:16: ἔφθασεν δὲ ἐπ’ αὐτοὺς ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος. They are nearly identical, other than a slight change in word order (which is not significant here) and omitting “the Lord,” though that is clearly enough implied in 1 Thess. 2:16 as to not require including; it might also have been dropped accidentally in scribal transmission, as the line is otherwise so nearly identical to the one in Levi that scribal error is actually a better explanation of why only that one word is missing from the Thessalonians passage. But either way, Lüdemann is quite correct the author of 1 Thess. 2:16 is clearly taking this line from the Testament of Levi. There is no evidence of even the next likely alternative (that this line was otherwise in common use), and some evidence against: we know the extant Greek of Levi is a translation (and indeed abbreviation) from an Aramaic original (see M. de Jonge, “The Testament of Levi and ‘Aramaic Levi'” in Revue de Qumrân 13.1/4 (1988), pp. 367-85), which means a verbatim match to that Greek translation is more likely to come from exactly there than from an accidentally identical translation of a common phrase.

Which makes this actually evidence against the authenticity of 1 Thess. 2:16, not for it as Lüdemann falsely avers. In Levi, the line specifically means a specific tribe of Canaanites experienced God’s wrath by being slaughtered en masse in a decisive war action, deserving that very fate by their tribal crimes. Whoever borrowed this line from Levi for Thessalonians therefore would surely have intended it, and intended it to be understood, as a reference to the military destruction of a whole people and their tribal capitol: which would mean the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, a punishment also inflicted on a whole tribe (the Jews). Moreover, in Levi this is clearly a past event already having happened; so the intended parallel in 1 Thessalonians would be of the same. The fact that the author of 1 Thess. 2:16 is copying this passage in Levi therefore rules out every apologetic attempt to rescue this verse’s authenticity: in Levi it refers to a past sack of a capitol city to punish an entire race of people; therefore in 1 Thess. 2:16 it most likely refers to a past sack of a capitol city to punish an entire race of people. That’s the only analogy likely to have been intended by so blatant an allusion.

And that’s it. That’s all Lüdemann has by way of argument: these added points, and the same ones just debunked. And yet he concludes “it appears evident beyond serious doubt that 1 Thess 2:13-16 derives from a historical Paul.” Yet before uttering this sentence he had presented no evidence whatever for this conclusion; all he did was advance a bunch of unevidenced speculations to explain away all the evidence against this conclusion, many of which speculation, as we have seen, are not merely dubious or uncertain, but factually false. Lüdemann is thus engaging in apologetics here, not valid historical argumentation. He advances no logically valid argument for his conclusion; yet concludes with outrageous certainty that he is right.

Conclusion

The consequent probability of the evidence on a theory of “interpolation” for 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is so much higher than for “authenticity” that it would far overwhelm any prior probability based on the known frequency of interpolation. There is no logical way to get any one of the several very unlikely features of this passage to be “likely” again; and all are too unlikely, collectively, to make it at all likely Paul wrote these verses. Apologists who reject this conclusion either ignore evidence, or rely on false statements about the evidence, or “make excuses” for problematic evidence without accounting for the uncertainty of those excuses being true—or all of the above. Each such maneuver is illogical, and constitutes doing apologetics, not history. You cannot ignore evidence or its effects. You cannot rely on false statements about that evidence. And you cannot make excuses for the evidence without reducing the probability of your explanation in proportion to the uncertainty of those excuses.

To logically derive the probability of anything “given the evidence,” we must employ something like a Bayesian formula (see Proving History, e.g. “Bayes’s Theorem, odds form,” p. 333). I already showed the prior probability that any passage in the NT is an interpolation is 1 in 400. So such is the prior here as well. But the probability that Paul would write the actual text of vv. 14-16 is easily millions to one against on any honest estimation. I identified at least five unlikely features of this passage, one of which (an unmistakable reference to the Jewish temple cult’s demise) is extremely unlikely (I doubt the odds are even 1 in 10,000 that Paul could somehow have accidentally, much less deliberately, written such a line), and the others very unlikely (the odds on each are no more than 1 in 10 that Paul would have written the text as we have it), which gives us a total odds against those four other features of 1 in 10,000 again (1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/10). Combined, that makes the ratio of consequent probabilities 1 in 100,000,000 (1/10,000 x 1/10,000)—that’s one in one hundred million.

When this is weighed against a prior of 1 in 400 (or even, as I egregiously allow a fortiori in OHJ, 1 in 1000) against interpolation, the odds that Paul wrote this passage come out to be less than 1 in 100,000. Because the odds of its authenticity, on the absurdly low prior probability of interpolation of 1 in 1000, are 1000/1 x 1/100,000,000 = 1/100,000; whereas on the actually realistic prior of 1 in 400, they are 400/1 x 1/100,000,000 = 1/250,000. Even if those five counts against it had odds of 1 in 100 for the least likely detail (the apparent reference to the end of temple Judaism) and 1 in 4 for the remaining four oddities apiece (so, a handsome 25% chance Paul would write each thing that way, for a combined odds of 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 = 1 in 256), making the total odds on the evidence being as it is equal to 1 in 25,600 against, with a prior of 1 in 1000 that would still leave us with final odds of less than 1 in 25 (1000/1 x 1/25,600 = 1/25.6), or about a 4% chance the passage is authentic. And on the more realistic prior of 1 in 400, the final odds would be 1/64 (400/1 x 1/25,600 = 400/25,600 = 1/64), which is less than a 2% chance.

Those latter numbers are already being unrealistically generous to the possibility of authenticity, and still they leave us with no more than a 1 in 25 chance Paul wrote 1 Thess. 2:14-16, while realistic estimates leave those odds at below a hundred thousand to one. But even given the most generous of estimates there still isn’t any honest, logical, evidence-based reason these odds should even be that favorable to authenticity, much less more so. And that is why there is no logical case to be made for this passage’s authenticity. To convince yourself this passage is authentic you have to rest on either false premises or fallacies of logic, or assign far too great a likelihood to manifestly improbable outcomes, on a basis of no evidence for any such things being that likely—rather solely on your desperate desire that they be. But wishing does not make it so.

-:-

For attempts to “prove” the authenticity of this suspect material with arguments from literary structure, see my companion article Saxton’s Weird Chiasmus Argument for 1 Thessalonians 2.