Paul wants them to stop grieving like the rest, who have no hope. “The rest” probably refers to all who do not place their hope in Jesus. As in 4:5, Paul paints with a very broad brush, describing all who do not belong to Christ as those who have no hope when a loved one dies. In fact, people in Paul’s day had a variety of different views about what happens after death and how one ought to grieve, just as they do today. Some continued to believe in the Hades of Greek myths, a dreary underworld where one might continue to exist in some form. Funerary inscriptions were frequently rather bleak, with phrases such as “No one is immortal” or “This is life”—that is, life inevitably ends in the grave. Others, however, were committed to a belief in the immortality of the soul and, like Paul, sought to curb excess grief. Famously, Socrates was supposed to have taught that the soul was immortal and, because of this, forbade expressions of grief at his death.7 Paul’s contemporary, the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, thought that a short period of grief was acceptable, but anything more was unnatural.8 So, to be fair to “the rest,” we must admit that there was a variety of beliefs about grief and hope. Why, then, would Paul, who knew more about how first-century people faced death than we do, say that everyone else is without hope? As in 4:3–5, he draws a sharp contrast between those who belong to Christ and those who do not. In a sense, pagans’ varying attitudes toward death were insignificant. For him, Christ is the only ground for hope in the face of death (5:8–10). Paul is saying, not that there is no hope for the pagan world (see 1 Tim 2:3–4), only that they have no hope apart from Christ.9
Many ancient and modern interpreters have thought that when Paul says they should not “grieve like the rest” he means that Christians should not grieve at all. According to this view, Paul was prohibiting not just excess grief or grief without hope but all grief for the dead. The New Jerusalem Bible translates verse 13 to reflect this view (“Make sure that you do not grieve for them”), as does the Knox Bible (“You are not to lament over them”). Proponents of this view note that Paul uses a similar phrase in 4:5 to reject Gentile behavior completely:
“not in lustful passion as do [kathaper] the Gentiles” (4:5)
“so that you may not grieve like [kathōs] the rest” (4:13)
This parallel suggests that Paul wanted the church to reject grief for the dead just as they rejected unchastity. The idea of forbidding all grief for the dead may sound impossible—even cruel—but many Church Fathers understood Paul in this way. St. Cyprian cites this verse to show that “no one should be saddened by death.”10 In a letter to a bereaved mother, St. Jerome chides her for her grief and adds, “This I command through my apostle, that you not grieve for those who sleep, as do the Gentiles who have no hope.”11 St. John Chrysostom cites this passage in a homily and then asks the people, “But you, who expect a resurrection, why do you mourn? To mourn, then, is for those who do not have hope.”12 Similarly, the seventh-century Spanish bishop St. Braulio cites this verse to show that “the holy Apostle does not wish us to mourn for those who sleep.”13
Some modern-day commentators argue that Paul’s later letters show that he was not opposed to all grief. In Philippians he speaks of the grief he would have experienced if his coworker Epaphroditus had died (2:27), but this hardly demonstrates that he thought that grief was acceptable. In 2 Corinthians he distinguishes between godly grief and worldly grief (7:8–12) and describes himself as “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (see 2:1–11; 6:10), but the context has nothing to do with grief for the dead. Moreover, he makes no distinction between good and bad grief in 1 Thessalonians.
LIVING TRADITION
Grief for the Dead in Christian Antiquity
Some ancient Christians believed that their faith in the resurrection of the dead required them to refrain from grieving for loved ones who died. Funerary inscriptions offer glimpses into the struggle of ordinary Christians to put this belief into practice. One funerary inscription from third-century Macedonia instructs the wife and children of the deceased to “stop crying” and “refrain from excessive lament” because it was their loved one’s “destiny” to die.a A fourth-century inscription erected by a Sicilian couple on the occasion of their baby daughter’s death concludes with these words:
While her parents bewailed her death at every moment, the voice of [God’s] majesty was heard at night, forbidding them to lament for the dead child. Her body was buried in its tomb in front of the doors of the shrine of the martyrs.b
To modern sensibilities it seems monstrous to forbid bereaved parents to grieve. Yet, their struggle to conquer grief and the child’s burial in front of a shrine of the martyrs was a powerful reminder of the ancient and modern belief that Christ has conquered death.
a. ICG 3013 (my translation).
b. Translation from Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 69. Cited by John M. G. Barclay, “‘That You May Not Grieve, like the Rest Who Have No Hope’ (1 Thess 4.13): Death and Early Christian Identity,” in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews, WUNT 275 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 217–35.
Despite the considerable support for the view that Paul opposed all grief for dead Christians, few today would seriously consider this a real possibility. St. Ambrose (339–97) wrestled with this issue after the death of his brother. After admitting that Paul’s teaching in 1 Thess 4 asks him to restrain his sorrow, he goes on to defend his tears:
But we have not committed a serious fault by our weeping. Not every display of sorrow is a sign either of a lack of trust in God or of weakness in ourselves. Natural grief is one thing, sorrow which comes from lack of hope is another. . . . Whenever a patriarch was buried, his people wept profusely. Tears are, therefore, indicators of devotedness, not inciters of grief. Hence, I frankly allow that I, too, have wept, but the Lord also wept [John 11:35].14
Jesus’s own example, along with the overwhelming evidence of experience and the other biblical examples to which Ambrose appeals, provides a powerful counterweight to the view that all grief is forbidden. Regardless of the debate regarding 1 Thess 4:13, godly people will go on lamenting the dead (Acts 8:2), just as Jesus did for Lazarus (John 11:33–35).15
[4:14]
Paul begins his instruction with a point that he and the Thessalonians already hold in common: For if we believe that Jesus died and rose . . . The NABRE’s translation “if we believe” could suggest that Paul is holding out a hypothetical possibility. A better translation would be “Since we believe that Jesus died and rose” (NRSV). Jesus’s death and resurrection were essential to Paul’s preaching, and Paul expected the Thessalonians to understand this much already (see 1:10). Most scholars suspect that Paul is quoting an early Christian creedal statement that preceded even him. The phrase is terse, pared down to essentials, and it includes features that do not match Paul’s usual way of speaking. Paul rarely refers to his Lord as “Jesus,” usually preferring “Jesus Christ” or “Christ Jesus.” Even more strikingly, apart from this verse Paul never says Jesus “rose” (anestē), usually preferring to say that Jesus was raised (egeirō) from death by God. Like those who knew Christ before he did, Paul is confident that Jesus died and rose again and uses this basic confession to instruct the Thessalonians on other points.
In the second half of verse 14, Paul applies the essential belief in Jesus’s death and resurrection to the question facing the Thessalonians. Since Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. In later letters, Paul links Jesus’s death and resurrection with the future resurrection of the dead in Christ (1 Cor 15; 2 Cor 4:14). One might expect Paul to say that since Jesus died and rose, God will raise those who have fallen asleep. Instead, he says, “God will bring [agō] . . . those who have fallen asleep” (italics added). Of course Paul thinks that the dead in Christ will rise from the dead, and he says so in verse 16. Why, then, would Paul link Jesus’s resurrection to God’s “bringing” or “l
eading” the dead? The Thessalonians do not seem to have doubted that dead Christians would rise again, but they still worried that the dead would be at some sort of disadvantage when Christ returned. Paul assures them that God would indeed gather them up on the last day.16 The description of God “bringing” or “leading” his people to salvation also recalls numerous biblical promises. The prophets frequently describe God leading (agō) the people to salvation (LXX Isa 42:16; 48:21; 49:10; 63:11–14; Jer 38:8 [ET 31:8]; Ezek 20:10). For instance, in Isa 43 God promises to gather all the exiled people of Israel, leading them home:
But now, thus says the LORD,
who created you, Jacob, and formed you, Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name: you are mine.
When you pass through waters, I will be with you;
through rivers, you shall not be swept away.
When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned,
nor will flames consume you.
For I, the LORD, am your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your savior. . . .
Fear not, for I am with you;
from the east I will bring back [Greek agō] your offspring,
from the west I will gather you.
I will say to the north: Give them up!
and to the south: Do not hold them!
Bring back my sons from afar,
and my daughters from the ends of the earth:
All who are called by my name
I created for my glory;
I formed them, made them.
Lead out [Greek exagō] the people, blind though they have eyes,
deaf though they have ears. (vv. 1–3, 5–8)
Whether Paul was thinking of passages like this or not, his point is that the faithful can trust God to gather up their deceased loved ones and bring them together with Jesus when he returns.
BIBLICAL BACKGROUND
Resurrection from the Dead according to Paul
It would not be an exaggeration to say that resurrection is the key to Paul’s theology. Like some other Jews in the first century, Paul thought that God would raise the dead at the end of history (Dan 12; 2 Macc 7). Paul and other early Christians believed that this end-time event had already begun because Jesus had risen from the dead. Jesus’s resurrection was seen not as an isolated event but as the first resurrection, which guaranteed that all of God’s people would be raised (see 1 Cor 15:12–13). For Paul, the two events—Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection of those who belong to Christ—are parts of an indissoluble whole.
Resurrection is at the very heart of Paul’s understanding of what God has done for humanity through Christ. In the present life, Christians already experience the power of the resurrection by dying to sin and walking “in newness of life” through baptism (Rom 6:1–4). Paul taught that death was unable to separate the faithful from Christ (Rom 8:35–39; 1 Thess 5:10), and he spoke occasionally of hoping to be with Christ after death (Phil 1:23; 2 Cor 5:8). Unlike many modern Christians, however, he did not pin his hopes on “going to heaven” after death. Instead, he taught his churches to look forward to the resurrection of the dead, as he does in 1 Thess 4:13–18. Belief in resurrection of the body affirms the goodness of the material world, but Paul is well aware that resurrection bodies could not be mere reconstituted versions of our current bodies. Our bodies are built to flourish for a short while and then die. Resurrection bodies, Paul says, are imperishable, built for eternal communion with God (1 Cor 15:35–57; Phil 3:21).
The phrase “through Jesus” is somewhat ambiguous in the Greek. It could be taken to modify “those who have fallen asleep.” The NIV follows this interpretation and translates “those who have fallen asleep in him” (italics added). Paul’s usual way of saying this would be “in Christ,” not “through Jesus,” and this would be an odd use of the preposition dia (“through”). It is more likely that “through Jesus” describes how God will bring the dead, which is the NABRE’s interpretation. God is the one who accomplishes this gathering, whereas Jesus is the agent through whom it is done. This sort of cooperation between God and Jesus is a recurring pattern in Paul.17 Creation is from God, but all things exist through Jesus (1 Cor 8:6), and the same is true of the new creation (1 Cor 15:21; Col 1:15–20).
[4:15]
Verse 14 argued on the basis of traditional belief in Jesus’s resurrection, which the Thessalonians already shared. Verse 15 continues the argument on the basis of new information, a word of the Lord. Here as elsewhere in the letter “the Lord” is probably Jesus. The following verses do not correspond exactly to anything in the Gospels. What is the source of this “word of the Lord”? There are two main possibilities: (1) Paul could be summarizing a traditional teaching of Jesus that doesn’t sound like anything in the Gospels because it wasn’t written down or because Paul does not cite it word for word (see Matt 24:29–33, 40–41). (2) The saying could have come through a Christian prophet who spoke “by the word of the Lord” just as some Old Testament prophets (e.g., 1 Kings 13:2) and John the Seer had done (e.g., Rev 1:9–20). It is difficult to decide between these possibilities. Fortunately, however, it makes little difference to our understanding of what Paul says. Another question about this “word of the Lord” confronts us: Which part of what follows is from Jesus, and which part is Paul’s commentary? There are no quotation marks in Paul’s text to help us decide. Many commentators argue that verse 15 is Paul’s application of the message to the Thessalonians’ situation and that the actual word of the Lord is found in verses 16–17. This latter portion contains non-Pauline vocabulary and sounds like a generic description of the †parousia, whereas 4:15 focuses on the Thessalonians’ worry that the dead would be at some disadvantage.
Verse 15 introduces the word of the Lord by drawing out the point that Paul wants the Thessalonians to take away from it. Paul emphatically denies that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will be in a better position than those who have died. His language is emphatic: the living will surely not (ou mē) precede those who have died. As noted above, the Thessalonians seem to have believed in the resurrection of the dead, but they worried that those who were not alive when the Lord returned would miss out on Jesus’s triumphant return in some way. Some first-century Jews believed that those who remained alive until the end of time would be better off. The noncanonical text 4 Ezra (late first century AD) states that those who remain until the end are more blessed than those who have died because they will be protected during the trials of the last days (13.24). It is, however, doubtful that the Thessalonian congregation would have known about inside debates of Jewish †apocalyptic expectation. Perhaps Paul’s description of the triumphant return of Jesus (1 Thess 1:9–10) impressed them so much that they assumed that those who died before it occurred would lose out. Their anxiety—like our anxieties—does not need to have been sophisticated or even sensible.
The word that Paul uses to describe the “coming” of the Lord is parousia, a word that could refer to any ordinary arrival or coming (e.g., 2 Cor 7:6) but was often used to describe the momentous arrival of a god or human dignitary. The New Testament uses the word in the latter sense to refer to the return of Jesus in glory (e.g., Matt 24:3, 27; James 5:7–8; 2 Pet 3:4; 1 John 2:28). For Paul, the parousia is synonymous with “the day of the Lord,” the time when Jesus will return to consummate the victory won in his resurrection and to gather his people (1 Thess 2:19; 3:13; 5:23). First and Second Thessalonians describe this day as a global event when the wicked will be punished and God will test the worthiness of his people (2 Thess 1:5–2:2). Parousia became a technical term in Christian piety, used without explanation to refer to Jesus’s return. For instance, a fifth- or sixth-century funerary inscription from Macedonia marks the grave of a church lector and concludes by saying that he “awaits . . . the parousia,” with no further explanation.18 The Vulgate translates parousia with adventus, which is why the liturgical season es
pecially focused on the parousia is called “advent.”
First and Second Thessalonians Page 13
