2 Thessalonians 3:11

For we hear. — Explaining how St. Paul came to speak upon the topic at all. Hitherto he has only been giving directions, without saying why. News had been brought back, no doubt, by the bearers of the First Epistle.

Walk among you disorderly. — A verbal repetition of 2 Thessalonians 3:6. It is not quite the same as “some among you which walk disorderly,” for the words “among you” represent the vague and various directions taken by those aimless feet, going about from house to house, workshop to workshop.

Working not at all, but are busybodies. — This is what the disorderliness consists in, as we should have seen from 2 Thessalonians 3:10. There is a scornful play of words here in the Greek which is lost sight of in the English: the word for “busybodies” being merely a compound form of the word “working.” Quite literally, the compound means “working enough and to spare,” “being overbusy,” “overdoing;” then, as a man cannot possibly overdo what it is his own duty to do, it comes to signify (1) doing useless things, things which concern no one, and might as well be left alone: as, for instance, magic, which is described by this word in Acts 19:19; or natural science, which is so described in the Athenians’ accusation of Socrates! (2) Meddling with matters which do not concern the doer, but do concern other people: so used in 1 Timothy 5:13. Prof Lightfoot suggests (On a Fresh Revision, p. 59; comp. p. xviii., 2nd ed.) that the play can be kept up through the words “business” and “busy”: we might perhaps say, “not being business men, but busybodies.” But which of the two notions mentioned above is to be considered most prominent here we cannot tell for certain. (a) The Thessalonians do not seem to have been much carried away by the first class of danger — idle speculations, such as those of the Colossian or Ephesian Churches. Yet we cannot altogether exclude this meaning here. St. Paul’s readers had been overbusy in theorising about the position of the departed at Christ’s coming (1 Thessalonians 4:15, Note), and had been so eager over their idle doctrines of the Advent as to falsify, if not actually to forge, communications from St. Paul (2 Thessalonians 2:2). Such false inquisitiveness and gossiping discussions might well be described by the Greek word with which we are dealing. (b) Everything, however, points to a more practical form of the same disposition to mask idleness under cloak of work; feverish excitement, which leads men to meddle and interfere with others, perhaps to spend time in “religious” work which ought not to have been spared from every-day duties. (See 1 Thessalonians 4:11, and Notes.) There is nothing to show definitely how this busy idleness arose, but it may very probably be the shaken and troubled condition of mind spoken of in 2 Thessalonians 2:2.