Introduction

A Letter Written to Correct a Rumor

Paul had told the Thessalonians he was eager to visit them; when the visit did not materialize, he sent Timothy instead, and, still unable to come in person, wrote a second time to finish in writing what he had not managed to finish by being present. That, Theophylact explains in his prefatory Argument, is why Paul wrote again so soon after the first letter, and he draws his proof of it from the letters themselves: in the first letter Paul had put off discussing the timing of the Lord’s return as not yet necessary, but here he takes the question up directly—a change, Theophylact reasons, that only makes sense because Paul still had not come and the matter had grown urgent in his absence.

What made it urgent, Theophylact explains, was deception. Certain “pestilent men” at Thessalonica were claiming that the day of the Lord had already arrived, going so far as to forge letters in Paul’s name to lend the claim his authority. Theophylact reads real menace behind the fraud: if believers could be persuaded that judgment had already come and no further reckoning remained, their hope of resurrection and of seeing wrongs finally set right would collapse, their courage under persecution would weaken, and—worse still—Christ himself would appear to have spoken falsely, since he had foretold signs that were to precede his coming and none of them had yet occurred. Paul writes, Theophylact says, to console the Thessalonians in their sufferings and to give them a means of testing which letters bearing his name were genuinely his.

The Man of Lawlessness

The letter’s center is Paul’s teaching that the day of the Lord will not come until “the apostasy come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thess. 2:3). Theophylact takes care to specify what this figure is not: not Satan himself, but a man who clothes himself with the whole of Satan’s power, opposing and exalting himself “above all that is called God”, abolishing every rival object of worship so that he alone may be worshipped, and working false signs to make the claim convincing. Paul adds that something presently “restrains” this figure from being revealed before his appointed time, and here Theophylact reports rather than settles a genuine disagreement among earlier interpreters: some held that the restraint was the grace of the Holy Spirit, others—a reading Theophylact notes that Saint John Chrysostom also favored—that it was the Roman empire itself, whose eventual dissolution would open the way for the man of lawlessness to appear. Theophylact judges the second reading the more likely, and explains Paul’s deliberate vagueness on the point as prudence: to have said plainly that Rome’s power would one day fail would have exposed Paul and the Thessalonian church to a very immediate and avoidable danger from the authorities of his own day.

Paul had written that “the mystery of iniquity already works” even in his own time (2 Thess. 2:7), and Theophylact reads this as a reference to the emperor Nero, whom he calls a type of the coming Antichrist—a man already impure and already seeking divine honors for himself, though not yet with the Antichrist’s full and open impiety. If a figure so nearly resembling the man of lawlessness had already appeared in Paul’s own day, Theophylact reasons, there is nothing strange in the apostle’s warning that the pattern was already, in a preliminary way, at work.

How to Read This Commentary

Second Thessalonians is the shortest and, in its middle chapter, the most densely eschatological of Theophylact’s Pauline commentaries, and the reader coming to it fresh should notice how carefully he distinguishes what Paul discloses from what he deliberately withholds. Paul gives signs, not a timetable, and Theophylact follows him in refusing to speculate beyond what the text supports, weighing more than one patristic reading rather than forcing a single answer where the apostle himself left room for uncertainty. The letter’s closing chapter, with its plain instruction that those unwilling to work should not expect to eat, returns from prophecy to the ordinary discipline of a congregation still waiting—a reminder, in Theophylact’s reading, that watchfulness for the Lord’s coming was never meant to excuse anyone from the patient work of the present. There Theophylact notes a change in Paul’s own tone: where the first letter had touched on idleness gently, the second speaks more severely, and Theophylact traces the reason to Paul’s own example—a man who, though under no obligation to labor with his hands while proclaiming the Gospel, worked “night and day” all the same, and so could ask nothing of the Thessalonians he had not already asked of himself.