δὲ, after οὐ θέλομεν as a single expression. Affection for the living has another side, viz., unselfish solicitude for the dead. Since Paul left, some of the Thessalonian Christians had died, and the survivors were distressed by the fear that these would have to occupy a position secondary to those who lived until the advent of the Lord, or even that they had passed beyond any such participation at all. At Corinth some of the local Christians felt this anguish so keenly, on behalf of friends and relatives who had died outside the church, that they were in the habit of being baptised as their representatives, to ensure their final bliss (1 Corinthians 15:29). The concern of the Thessalonians, however, was for their fellow-Christians, in the intermediate state of Hades. As the problem had not arisen during Paul's stay at Thessalonica, he now offers the church a reasonable solution of the difficulty (13 18). οὐ θέλομεν δὲ ὑμᾶς ἀγνοεῖν, contrast the οἴδατε of 1 Thessalonians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:2, and compare the ordinary epistolary phrases of the papyri (Expos., 1908, 55) such as γεινώσκειν σε θέλω (commonly at the beginning of a letter, cf. Colossians 2:1; Philippians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 1:8, and with ὅτι, but here, as in 1 Corinthians 12:1, with περί). τῶν κοιμωμένων = the dead in Christ (16), a favourite Jewish euphemism (Kennedy, St. Paul's Conc. of Last Things, 247 f., and cf. Fries in Zeitschrift für neutest. Wiss. i. 306 f.), not unknown to Greek and Roman literature. οἱ λοιποὶ, κ. τ. λ., cf. Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, pp. 153 f., 159 f. Hope is the distinguishing note of Christians here as in Ephesians 2:12; Colossians 1:22, etc.

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Old Testament