2 Thessalonians 2:2

ὡς διʼ ἡμῶν, “purporting to come from us,” goes with ἐπιστολῆς alone, for, while λόγος (Lünemann) might be grouped under it, πνεῦμα cannot. A visionary would claim personal, not borrowed, authority for his revelation. If ὡς δ. ἡ. went with the preceding verbs (so Dods, Askwith, 92 f., Wohl. = “we are the true interpreters of Paul's meaning”), an active (as in 2 Thessalonians 2:3) not a passive turn might have been expected to the sentence. ἐνέστηκεν = “were already present”. The cry was, ὁ κύριος πάρεστι. The final period had already begun, and the Thessalonians were probably referred to their sufferings as a proof of this. Paul could only guess the various channels along which such a misconception had flowed into the local church; either, e.g., πνεύματος, the hallucination of some early Christian prophet at Thessalonica; or λόγου, oral statement, based in part perhaps on some calculation of contemporary history or on certain logia of Jesus; or ἐπιστολῆς, i.e., the misinterpretation of some passage in 1 Thess. or in some lost letter of Paul. Possibly Paul imagined an epistle had been forged purporting to come from him or his companions, but we have no means of knowing whether his suspicion was well-founded or not. In any case the allusion is quite credible within his lifetime. Such expectations may have been excited in a more or less innocent fashion, but Paul peremptorily (2 Thessalonians 2:3) ranks them all as dishonest; he is concerned not with their origin but with their mischievous effects upon the church (cf. Matthew 24:4). Probably his suspicions of misinterpretation were due to his recent experiences in Galatia, though the Macedonian churches seem to have escaped any infusion of the anti-Pauline propaganda which soured Corinth not long afterwards.