Introduction to First Thessalonians: the ancient seaport, its people and culture, Paul’s hurried visit, and the hope of Christ’s return in every chapter.
Paul wrote this letter to a church that was only a few months old. He had been run out of town before he could finish teaching them, and he spent the next stretch of his life worrying about what he had left behind. When word finally came back that they were standing firm, he sat down and wrote them. What we have here is the letter of a man who loved a young congregation and could not get them off his mind.
It is generally regarded as the first letter Paul wrote, which makes it the earliest book of the New Testament to be put on paper. And in it Paul is already talking about the return of Jesus Christ. Every one of the five chapters closes with it. That ought to tell us something about how central that hope was to the gospel from the very beginning. It was not a doctrine the church added later after it ran out of other things to talk about.
The City and Its History
Thessalonica sat at the head of the Thermaic Gulf, on the northwestern rim of the Aegean Sea. There had been a settlement there for centuries called Therma, named for the hot springs nearby. In 315 B.C. Cassander, one of the generals who carved up Alexander’s empire after his death, gathered the little towns of the area into one city and named it after his wife Thessalonike, who happened to be Alexander the Great’s half-sister. The name has stuck for more than twenty-three centuries.
Rome broke Macedonian power at the Battle of Pydna in 168 B.C., and by 146 B.C. Macedonia was a Roman province with Thessalonica as its capital. In the civil war that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination, the city backed Antony and Octavian against Brutus and Cassius. It picked the winning side, and Rome paid it back handsomely. Thessalonica was made a free city. That meant it kept its own assembly, elected its own magistrates, minted its own coinage, and had no Roman garrison quartered inside the walls.
Those local magistrates carried an unusual title. They were called politarchs. When Luke describes the mob dragging Jason before the city authorities in Acts 17:6, that is the word he uses. For a long time, critics pointed to that word as proof that Luke did not know what he was talking about, since the term appears nowhere else in Greek literature. Then archaeologists began pulling inscriptions out of the ground in that region carrying the very title, including one from the old Vardar Gate. Luke was right, and the critics were wrong. He usually is, and they usually are.
Where It Is Today
The city is still there, and it is still called Thessaloniki. It is in northern Greece, in the region that still goes by the name Macedonia, roughly three hundred miles north of Athens. It is the second largest city in Greece today and remains a working seaport on the Aegean.
Its location was the whole reason for its importance. Thessalonica had a natural harbor, and it straddled the Via Egnatia, the great Roman military highway that ran from the Adriatic coast eastward across the Balkan peninsula toward Byzantium. The main street of the ancient city was a stretch of that highway. Traffic between Rome and the East came through, and anything said in Thessalonica did not stay in Thessalonica. Paul notes exactly that in chapter 1, when he tells them the report of their faith had traveled out from them in every direction. A seaport on a highway is a good place to plant a church.
How They Made a Living
This was a commercial town, and the work followed the harbor and the road. Men loaded and unloaded ships, worked the docks and the warehouses, carted goods along the Egnatian Way, and made their living off travelers and traders passing through. Others fished the gulf. Behind the city lay the Macedonian plain, some of the best farmland in the region, producing grain, olives, and wine. Inside the walls were the trades: leatherwork, metalwork, pottery, wool and textiles, and dyeing, most of it organized into guilds. A great many of the workers were slaves or freedmen.
The believers in that church were working people. Paul reminds them in chapter 2 that he labored night and day with his own hands so as not to be a burden to any of them. He was a tentmaker and leatherworker, and he sat down at a bench beside them rather than take their money. That is worth remembering when he later tells them to mind their own business and work with their hands. Some of them had quit their jobs because they expected Jesus to return any day. Paul had to tell them that looking for the Lord and holding down a job are not two different things.
How They Lived and What They Believed
Ordinary families lived in crowded quarters, often in tenement blocks with shops on the street level and rooms stacked above. Life was public. The marketplace, the baths, the theater, the forum, and the harbor front were where business and gossip and politics all got done. Society ran on households and on patronage, with the wealthy providing for those beneath them and collecting loyalty in return. The church itself met in homes. Jason’s house in Acts 17 was apparently one of them.
Religiously, the place was crowded too. There was the old Greek pantheon, the mystery cult of the Cabiri which was especially tied to the city, the worship of Dionysus, and imported Egyptian gods like Serapis and Isis. Much of it involved drunkenness and sexual immorality as an act of worship, which explains why Paul writes so bluntly in chapter 4 about God’s will being their sanctification and their abstaining from fornication. He was not scolding them for something exotic. He was telling converts to walk away from what everybody around them called religion.
Layered over all of it was the imperial cult. Thessalonica honored Rome and the emperor, and its freedom depended on staying in Rome’s good favor. Now you can see why the charge in Acts 17:7 was so dangerous. They accused Paul of proclaiming another king, one called Jesus. In that city, that was not a theological quibble. That was treason, and the politarchs took it seriously enough to make Jason post bond.
There was also a Jewish synagogue, and that is where Paul began. Acts 17 tells us he reasoned with them from the Scriptures over three sabbath days, showing that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. Some Jews believed. A large number of God-fearing Greeks believed, along with a good many prominent women. Then the trouble started, and Paul and Silas were slipped out of the city by night.
The Writing of the Letter
Paul went on to Berea, then to Athens, then to Corinth. From Athens he sent Timothy back to Thessalonica to strengthen the young believers and find out how they were holding up. Timothy caught up with Paul in Corinth carrying a good report, and out of that relief this letter was written, probably about A.D. 51. The visit to Corinth can be dated with unusual confidence because of an inscription at Delphi that places Gallio there as proconsul in the same period.
What the Letter Is About
Paul had been with them a matter of weeks. There was a great deal he had not gotten to teach. So he writes to steady them, to answer the slander being spread about his motives, to call them to a clean and quiet life, and above all to comfort them about believers who had died before the Lord returned. That last question is the heart of chapter 4, and Paul answers it with the clearest passage in Scripture on the catching away of the church.
The coming of Jesus Christ runs through every chapter, and each chapter attaches it to something practical:
- Chapter 1, the coming of Christ and salvation. They turned from idols to serve the living God and to wait for Jesus from heaven.
- Chapter 2, the coming of Christ and service. Paul calls them his hope and joy and crown at the appearing of Jesus.
- Chapter 3, the coming of Christ and stability. He prays their hearts be established blameless at the coming of Jesus with all the saints.
- Chapter 4, the coming of Christ and sorrow. The dead in Christ will rise first, and the living will be caught up together with them.
- Chapter 5, the coming of Christ and separation. The day of the Lord comes as a thief, so they are to watch and be sober and be kept blameless.
That is the letter. It is short, it is warm, and it is written to new believers who worked with their hands in a noisy port town, surrounded by a culture that had no room for a king named Jesus. They had questions about death, about their neighbors, about how to live, about whether Paul had told them the truth, and about what happens next.
Those are the same questions people are still carrying around. That is where these conversations begin.