The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15

Abstract

The importance of Paul's first extant letter to the study of early Christianity has clearly been demonstrated by the attention paid to just a small part of it, the ‘dreadful text’ of 1 Thessalonians 2.14–16, a ‘passionate, generalizing, hateful’ diatribe against the Jews for having killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and for interfering with Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Or so it has seemed to most historians, theologians, and exegetes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have studied the passage. Those early, stunning verses of Paul, written probably in 50 or 51 C.E. from Corinth to his recently founded church in Thessalonica, have proved especially embarrassing to Jews and Christians who, in post-Holocaust self-examination and post-Vatican II ecumenical spirit, have been trying to exorcise the demons of antisemitism. How could Paul, a proud Jew and Pharisee, so categorically condemn his own people? And how can so early and sweeping a condemnation be explained by scholars who argue that such virulent antisemitism did not in fact develop until the latter part of the century, after the destruction of the Temple and the council at Jamnia?