Read with Me
2 Thessalonians 3:16-18 (HCSB)
May the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always in every way. The Lord be with all of you. This greeting is in my own hand—Paul. This is a sign in every letter; this is how I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you.
Listen with Me
Paul would not return to Thessalonica for more than three years, during his third missionary journey, when he would pass through in both directions. But with his blessing in verse 16, he placed his readers firmly in God’s hands, knowing that no matter what might happen, that was the safest place for them to be.
Back in chapter two, verses one and two, Paul had referred to an unsettling letter that had supposedly come from him saying that Jesus had already returned. Now, he points the Thessalonians to this final paragraph, not written by Paul’s scribe, but written in his own distinctive hand, in letters larger than those normally used by the scribes of the day. (Compare this to Galatians 6: 11.)
In Paul’s day, the normal process when a congregation in a city received a letter from someone important, was for the letter to be read to the whole congregation in one sitting. Then the letter would be carefully copied by someone in the congregation who had scribal training or, lacking that, by someone with good handwriting. Then the copy was kept in the congregation, while the original was passed on to the leader of another congregation in the community, or ultimately in another community nearby, where the process would be repeated.
This process had two important results. The first was that, over time, each congregation would amass a collection of these letters that, together with the gospels, which received the same treatment, began to form a corpus of “Scriptures” or “ writings” that would ultimately become the New Testament.
The second result was that the precious originals from the author’s own hands, were passed around so much that they eventually disintegrated, literally fell to pieces from so much handling, and are thus lost to us today. But those faithful copies were faithfully recopied, either by those who wanted a copy for themselves, or to replace the current copies when they began to show signs of significant wear. Thus today, we have literally thousands of copies and fragments of these letters, some of them quite near the original date of writing, that are the basis for our Scriptures today.
Finally, Paul closes his letter with a very typical blessing of that day, praying the grace of Jesus Christ, the Lord of both Paul and his readers, on them all.
Pray with Me
Father, it is fascinating to me how these original writings, captured on perishable parchment or papyrus, were so faithfully preserved all the way down to our day. The writers were so highly esteemed that it didn’t occur to anyone to modify what had been written as they copied and recopied the letters. And by passing on the originals for as long as they lasted, they ensured that each congregation was able to make their copies not from a third- or fourth-generation copy, but from the original. Thank you, Lord, for putting into the hearts of those first believers a way to preserve Your words, so that we can still read them clearly even today. Amen.