1 Thessalonians 5:4

υμας η ημερα (in this order), ADG latt vg Ambrst; a Western deviation.

The case of (a) κλεπτας in AB cop, versus (b) κλεπτης in אDGKLP and every other witness, is one of crucial difficulty. Is -ης a conformation to 1 Thessalonians 5:2, or -ας to the foregoing υμας (cf. τυπους, for -ον, 1 Thessalonians 1:7)? The change of metaphor involved in (a) is so oddly abrupt as to amount to almost a levity of style; nor is there anything in the context to bear out the idea of Christians being, conceivably, in the position of thieves; intrinsic probability speaks strongly for (b). Yet the external attestation of (a) is weighty; the group AB cop bears a high character. κλεπτας, if not the original, is a very ancient reading.

4. ὑμεῖς δὲ, ἀδελφοί, οὐκ ἐστὲ ἐν σκότει, ἵνα ἡ ἡμέρα κ.τ.λ. But you, brothers, are not in darkness, that the day should overtake you as thieves (or as a thief). With the opening ὑμεῖς δὲ οὐκ cf. Ephesians 4:20; and for ἐν σκότει, see 2 Corinthians 6:14; Ephesians 5:8; Colossians 1:12 f. In the last of the above passages also “darkness” and “light” are conceived as two opposite regions or realms, dividing men between them; cf. John 3:19 ff.; 1 John 1:5 ff. “In darkness” one may be “surprised”—one is sure to be so if asleep, or ἐν μέθῃ (1 Thessalonians 5:7)—by the breaking in of “the day.” Ἡ ἡμέρα is “the day” whose coming was described in 1 Thessalonians 5:2; for this emphatic breviloquence, cf. Romans 13:12; 1 Corinthians 3:13; Hebrews 10:25; similarly “the wrath” in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 above.

We have preferred in the Textual Note the Received reading κλέπτης to κλέπτας, which is adopted by WH and Lightfoot. The inversion involved in κλέπτας, transforming the “thief” from the cause of the surprise (1 Thessalonians 5:2) into its object, abrupt as it is, one might admit as possible in St Paul; but it seems incongruous here, and such incongruity is un-Pauline: the subsequent context describes the “sons of night” as sleeping or drunken, quite otherwise than as thieves, who are alert and careful. Moreover, καταλάβῃ bears a stress which should have fallen upon ὡς κλέπτας in the ordo verborum, if the metaphor had been turned about and a new bearing unexpectedly given to it. It is a thief-like surprise that “the day” brings with it; not such a surprise as falls upon thieves at their night’s work. For καταλαμβάνω in this hostile sense, cf. John 12:35; Mark 9:18; in its good sense, Philippians 3:12. With the reading ὡς κλέπτας, the verb would have a shade of detection in it; cf. [Jo.] John 8:3.

The strict telic force of ἵνα might be maintained by conceiving the clause as a statement of God’s purpose “in His merciful dispensation implied in οὐκ ἐστὲ ἐν σκότει” (Ellicott); or better, according to Bornemann, as the purpose of God for the opposite class of men who are ἐν σκότει, as though the Apostle meant, “You are not in darkness,—not so placed that the day may surprise you.” “But the word is better taken here as simply expressing the result or consequence [of being in darkness], a meaning which, in the decline of the Greek language, gradually displaced the original signification of ἵνα” (Lightfoot); cf. Galatians 5:17. This conjunction in the κοινή was slipping down from the final (telic), through the eventual (ecbatic), sense into the use assigned to it in Byzantine and Modern Greek, where, in the form νά, it serves as a bare infinitive particle. See Winer-Moulton, pp. 572 ff.; A. Buttmann, pp. 235 ff. The ἵνα after παρακαλοῦμεν (1 Thessalonians 4:1) is somewhat different (see note).