Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (41 page)

So too the closing of the letters:

Apart from the
, this is a nine-word sequence of verbatim agreement. Other agreements occur throughout the letters, sometimes at the simple level of phrasing. In the following instances, the wording is found only in these two letters in the entire Pauline corpus. This should not be taken to mean that the second letter is “obviously Pauline,” as some interpreters such as Robert Jewett would maintain: it is quite easy for a copyist to take over words from another letter.

•
(found only, in the Pauline corpus, in 1 Thess. 1:3 and 2 Thess. 1:11)

•
(as reference to pagans, only in 1 Thess. 4:5; 2 Thess. 1:8)

•
used with
(only 1 Thess. 3:12; 2 Thess. 1:3)

•
(only 1 Thess. 5:12; 2 Thess. 2:1; the verb occurs only two other times in the Pauline corpus, 1 Thess. 4:1 in the first person plural and Phil. 4:3, first singular)

•
(only 1 Thess. 1:4; 2 Thess. 2:13)

•
(only 1 Thess. 3:11; 2 Thess. 3:5 and as an optative, both times)

In addition,
with
is found in 1 Thess. 3:13 and 2 Thess. 2:17 (worded slightly differently, but both coming at the end of the body of the letter, in the internal benediction, before the paranesis), and only here in Paul’s letters; only in 1 Thess. 4.7 and 2 Thess. 2:13–14 are “call and sanctification” joined together; and the root
is found in 1 Thess. 5:14 and 2 Thess. 3:6, 7, and 11, and nowhere else in the entire New Testament. Most striking, and most frequently noted is the close connection of 1 Thess. 2:9 and 2 Thess. 3:8: