New Testament

Week 20: The Epistles of Paul, Part 1

1 Thessalonians & 2 Thessalonians

9 March 2023

At this point I’d like to again strongly recommend that you use a reliable modern Bible translation alongside your King James Version. It’s going to be even more important from here on because Paul’s language is more difficult and his ideas are more complicated than what we’ve encountered so far in the Gospels. The modern Bible versions I recommend are:

• WT: Thomas Wayment’s New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints (printed edition | Kindle edition)

• NRSV: New Revised Standard Version (online, no footnotes | printed edition with footnotes)

• NET: New English Translation (online, with footnotes | printed edition with footnotes)

• NASB: New American Standard Bible (online, no footnotes)

• ESV: English Standard Version (online, no footnotes)

• The KJV, NRSV, ESV, NASB, and NET in parallel columns.

• Some evangelical Christians, taking 1 Thessalonians 4:17 as their key text, believe that Christians will be taken from the earth in “the Rapture,” leaving non-believers to endure a period of war and devastation (“the Tribulation”) before Christ’s second coming. (Latter-day Saints reject this theory.) Scholar Michelle Fletcher explains how the Rapture interpretation was developed in the late 1800s, and how the scripture passages used to support it are scattered throughout the New Testament and don’t form a coherent whole: “Blending into One: The Left Behind Movie, the Book of Revelation and the Rapture,” Bible History Daily (blog), 14 October 2014.