ABSTRACT
The prescript of 2 Thessalonians has, as we saw, been borrowed from 1 Thessalonians; the author of the second letter only added a possessive pronoun, so that ‘in God the Father’ became ‘in God our Father’, and he added at the end the words ‘from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’. The former addition, a very simple one, concurs with the normal usage in both Thessalonian letters (1 Thess. 1.3; 3.11, 13; 2 Thess. 2.16). The latter addition constitutes an adaptation of the prescript of our letter to the standard form of the Pauline prescript (Rom. 1.7; 1 Cor. 1.3; 2 Cor. 1.2; Gal. 1.3; Eph. 1.2; Phil. 1.2; Philem. 3). If the author of 2 Thessalonians knew 1 Thessalonians, it is quite probable that he knew other letters of Paul as well.
