The authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is challenged by some on surprising grounds – mostly because some scholars have a preconceived idea of what Paul can say and they can’t fit this into their view, and what Paul says seems historically premature. There are fundamental flaws in that. But what are those sceptical of the passage surprised by? Simply that Paul is condemning towards the Jews he is talking about, whereas he writes elsewhere more optimistically about Jews in general, and it seems premature for Paul in the 50s of the first century to talk about God's wrath having happened, if we presuppose that the only wrath that happened to the Jews in the first century is the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD. That’s the critics' argument, the “it doesn’t sound like Paul to us, and it’s premature” argument.
Here’s why it falls apart. First look at the passage:
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.
The first problem critics have to admit is that the disputed passage is actually always there, found in every ancient manuscript where it should be found. There are no manuscripts where it goes missing in action. When there are zero manuscript variations to that effect, the objection is immediately relegated to being speculative. It therefore needs stronger evidence on other counts. That is, there is no knock-out punch here, so the argument for interpolation aims to win the bout on points.
The second problem, a clear weakness for a speculative argument, is that critics have nothing else written by Paul in the same place at the same time on the same theme to compare it to. Pauline scholars sometimes stray into an error of conflating several works by Paul written several years apart at different stages of his life into one theological lump, harmonising it, turning it a single body of harmonised systematic theology. That is a heinous error in handling historical material. Paul’s definitive classic optimistic argument about the Jews being saved was written to the Roman Christians perhaps as much as a decade after his letter to the Thessalonian Christians. To prop up such historical method, you have to assume that Paul had no development in his thinking and no life experiences to affect his view at any moment over that long period. This is not true to human nature. It’s highly improbable. Every scholar in history or theology develops their views over time, and what one writes ten years apart can be substantially different in its development. In fact it almost certainly will be unless one has become a fossil. Speculation built on such method is not likely to be sound speculation.
The third problem for critics of this passage is that it doesn’t quite do what they tend to claim. It does not condemn Jews generally. It condemns the ones in Judea who have hounded Christians such as Paul.
The fourth problem for critics is that to assume that this refers to 70AD, they also have to assume that there is no other kind of wrath that Paul could be talking about. That’s a big hurdle to overcome for any speculation. To pursue that, you have to determine what divine wrath looked like theologically to Paul. (The author Paul is as vague as can be here. He refers to nothing concrete, so a scholar will widen the net for clues.) So, for a start, you have to look at what Paul means by ‘wrath’ elsewhere, and again you are making the hazardous leap into assuming that what Paul means by ‘wrath’ at different times of his life doesn’t much change. So speculation has chasms to cross. But if we were to take one example, here's one that doesn’t help the critics’ case at all. For a start, the only undisputed Pauline letter (going here only with undisputed ones) that uses the same Greek word for ‘wrath’ is, lo and behold, Romans, written probably a decade or so later. But what does this evidence base suggest? There are three uses of the word in Romans, Two of these are vague warnings of future doom, so they are of little help (Romans 2:8; 12:19). That leaves only Romans 1:18, and read in context it is clear what divine wrath is in Paul’s Jewish-Christian perspective: it looks like alienation from God and moral collapse – scholars have long known that this is how Paul thinks about wrath. God gives people over to their own rebellion against him and gives up on them. Theologically, that is divine wrath as Paul sees it in Romans. Is there anything like that in 1 Thessalonians 2:14-1?. There certainly is: it’s that some Judeans have become rebels against Jesus, against Paul, against God in his view. Paul is telling the Thessalonians that some Judeans (note, Judeans, not all Jews) who had hounded him out of Judea have fallen over a moral cliff-edge. That for Paul is precisely what divine wrath looks like in present times – your own rebellion is your own moral collapse. Speculation that the passage refers to 70AD is understandable speculation, but it ignores what wrath actually looks like to Paul: “They displease God.” To Paul, to displease God would be self-destruction, as he believed that to please God is life itself.
The fifth and related problem for critics is that to understand a passage, you can’t just look at it theologically, you have it look at it narratively. Could Paul really think such judgmental things of these Jews in Judea, and not be more optimistic for them, like he is for Jews more generally in his reflections a decade later? The narrative explanation is simple: “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out.” It is difficult to deny Paul the right to be negative towards such people, and easy to understand why he would think that their condemnation, their alienation from God, is complete. In fact, even in Romans, there is a hint of condemnation for some of the Jews: “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children.”
In conclusion, if you are going to speculate that 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is not authentic, but is an interpolation, then you have to overcome problems that collectively seem insurmountable.
The final nail in the coffin for this speculation is the undesigned coincidence between those verses and Acts 17:5-8. (See Hidden in Plain View by Lydia McGrew, Ohio: DeWard, 2017. pg 148, 152-154.)
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