Children's Lives and Deaths in 1 Thessalonians: Impacts on Interpreting Context and Text

This volume offers new insights into 1 Thessalonians by demonstrating how children and childhood are a key part of its social setting. Around one third of this first-century Macedonian society and community would be under 15 years old: a segment easily ignored by modern scholarship but essential to interpreting the social context and so Paul’s letter itself. Based on new research, David E. Bell reveals how Paul transforms common ideas about early death in his response to the Thessalonian community’s bereavement, pointing to fresh explanations for his unexpected word choices, metaphors, strategies and structural elements throughout the letter. Bell introduces the reader to a rich set of contemporary evidence, especially from epitaphs and documentary papyri; drawing on, and adding to, recent scholarship on ancient childhoods. He suggests that while patterns of ‘ordinary’ experience placed children at the heart of everyday thinking and speaking about death and bereavement; young lives are also seen to be significant for other themes in 1 Thessalonians: sexual exploitation, work and community relationships, collective identity as siblings and an ekklesia. Bell places detailed discussion of the text alongside careful attention to children and childhood even where they are not explicitly mentioned, and ultimately, argues that children’s presence is not a side issue in 1 Thessalonians but integral to interpreting the whole.