1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians

Victor Paul Furnish’s 1 & 2 Thessalonians (ANTC, 2007) offers readable background material and pastoral sensitivity, but when measured against the leading technical commentaries, it reveals a consistent pattern of exegetical errors and logical weaknesses. The most serious single error is Furnish’s claim that God sending a “powerful delusion” in 2 Thess 2:11 has “no real parallel in the apostle’s own letters” — factually false, since at least five independent commentaries cite Romans 1:24, 26, 28 as direct Pauline parallels without hesitation, and most damningly so is Malherbe (AYB), Furnish’s most-cited authority, who lists those very passages in his note on 2:11. Furnish compounds this by framing the verse as God sending delusion to those “he has not chosen for salvation,” substituting divine non-election for the text’s own explicit trigger — prior human refusal of the truth (v. 10) — implicitly portraying God as arbitrary and capricious in a way Green (PNTC), Weima (BECNT), and Wanamaker (NIGTC) all explicitly warn against as a theological distortion. Furnish’s openness to the interpolation hypothesis for 1 Thess 2:13–16 is presented without engaging its decisive objection — every extant manuscript contains the passage in its present position, unlike genuine interpolations such as Romans 16:25–27 or 1 Cor 14:34–35 — a point Weima calls fatal and Furnish never addresses. On 2 Thessalonians, Furnish’s pseudonymity case rests on arguments that are individually and cumulatively weak: his formal-tone argument is self-undermining since he concedes the tone “seems cool and impersonal only in comparison with 1 Thessalonians,” and Wanamaker adds the reductio that the same criterion applied to Romans and Galatians would require rejecting those letters too; the autograph of 3:17 is more naturally explained by Weima as Paul asserting authority over rebellious idlers and by Malherbe as authenticating the letter against a potentially misread copy of 1 Thessalonians; the temple reference in 2 Thess 2:4, dismissed by Furnish as “of no help in dating,” is what Weima calls the pseudonymity argument’s “Achilles’ heel,” since a post-AD 70 forger would not predict events requiring the temple still to be standing; and Fee (NICNT) makes the telling observation that writing a verse-by-verse commentary on 2 Thessalonians — having to account for every incidental detail rather than selectively targeting suspicious features from a distance — consistently pushes scholars toward authenticity, which is why advocates of pseudonymity have “seldom written a commentary on it,” making Furnish’s rare combination of pseudonymity and full commentary a position his own exegetical labors quietly undermine. Readers seeking reliable guidance on these letters’ hardest problems will find Malherbe, Weima, and Fee consistently more trustworthy — and will regularly find that Furnish’s own most-cited authority reaches conclusions materially different from his own.

 

Nashville: Abingdon, 2007. Pp. 204. Paper. $20.00. ISBN 0687057434. Eduard Verhoef Maartensdyk, The Netherlands In 2007 Victor Paul Furnish published a commentary on both epistles to the Thessalonians in the Abingdon New Testament Commentaries series. As this series is meant especially for theological students, the authors of these commentaries do not “engage in technical academic debate” (11). This intention is restrictive ,of course, but it is at the same time the strength of these commentaries. The authors are to write a short and clear commentary on the New Testament writings. It is quite an achievement that the Furnish managed to write a lucid and rather complete commentary on both these epistles within 204 pages. Further, in spite of the rather limited number of pages, Furnish discusses several topics that are often lacking in commentaries. For example, in the introduction on 1 Thessalonians the question is considered whether the colleagues Timothy and Silvanus played some role in the writing of the letter. Rightly, in my view, Furnish states that they did not (24, 30–31). Another example Furnish gives of an often-missed topic is a paragraph about the cult of Cabirus (27) in a chapter about the city of Thessalonica. It is probably due to the restrictions of this series that no English translation is given in the commentary. [Full Review]