Passage

2 Thessalonians 3.17

Book: 2 Thessalonians · ASV / WEB / KJV / YLT

Immediate context (±2 verses)

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

Setting

• Speaker: Paul the Apostle, who at this point takes the pen from his secretary and writes in his own hand.
• Audience: The church at Thessalonica, capital of the Roman province of Macedonia and a free city on the Via Egnatia. Paul had planted the congregation only months earlier (Acts 17:1-9) and left the city under duress; the believers were still under local pressure, and had been unsettled by a report that the day of the Lord had already arrived (2:2).
• Location: Most probably Corinth, where Silvanus and Timothy were with Paul (Acts 18:5), written shortly after 1 Thessalonians.
• Time period: c. AD 50-52. The date is anchored by the Gallio inscription at Delphi, which places the proconsulship of Achaia held by Gallio (Acts 18:12) at roughly AD 51-52.

Theological reading

A change of hand. Paul dictated his letters to a secretary; Tertius names himself at Romans 16:22. Here Paul takes the pen for the closing, as he does at 1 Corinthians 16:21, Galatians 6:11, and Colossians 4:18. Ancient letters commonly closed this way, so the practice itself is unremarkable. What is said about it here is not.

"This is the sign in every letter of mine; this is how I write." Paul elevates the customary closing into a mark of authenticity, and he does so in the one letter that has just mentioned a communication "as if from us" (2:2). The signature is a response to that problem: the readers now have a way to check.

What this shows about the early church and forgery. The verse is direct evidence that pseudonymous letters circulating under an apostle's name were a live concern within the apostolic generation itself, and that the response was authentication rather than indifference. That bears on modern arguments about pseudonymity in the New Testament, in both directions, and the point should be made without overstating it: the verse shows the concern existed, not by itself how any particular disputed letter should be judged.

The last line. The letter ends at verse 18 with grace, the same note on which every Pauline letter closes.

Key words

Theologically-loaded Greek or Hebrew words in this verse may have entries in the lexicon. Curated to roughly 100 contested terms across the corpus, not every word.

• TBD
• TBD
• TBD
• TBD

Quoted in

Arguments and defeaters:

• Half of Pauls Letters Are Forgeries Objection Defeater

Notes

Your annotations.

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

• ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
• WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
• KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
• YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.