• Thessalonica


• 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
• 1 Thessalonians 2:1-20
•  1 Thessalonians 2:8 A wicked translation (this page)
• 1 Thessalonians 3:1-13
• 2024-04-22: 1 Thessalonians 4:1-18 Caught up in the rapture
• 1 Thessalonians 5:1-28


• 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17 End game deceptions (updated)



More: Paul

Some languages have more cases than others. Here are some cases.

The Greek word for "case" comes from the ancient Greek word "πτώση" ≈ "fallen, dropped". A similar phrase is used in English is a reference to a "lower class" or "low life" or "culturally abused". This Greek word is related to the Greek word for "poor" or "beggar" but is a word used by Jesus to refer to those who need the "Good News".
In grammar, the word means a "case" such as nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, etc. In a logical syllogism, it can mean an arrangement of terms.

More: Matthew 5:3 The good news about being poor in spirit

More: Logic: syllogisms

More: Philippians 1:16-18 syllogism

More: Dative case in Greek

In the dative case, English often uses a word to help disambiguate the meaning of "the" such as "with the", "to the", "by the", etc. Translation issues arise when (ambiguous) pronouns are used.

What is the meaning difference, if any, in the following?

• Fairly clear: John gives his ball to Bob.
• Ambiguous his: John gives Bob his ball.
• Fairly clear: his: John gives Bob his ball back.
• Ambiguous his: John gives to Bob his ball.

What is the meaning difference, if any, in the following?

• Andrew, whom Bob shall break the stick in his hand and destroy the idea in his head.
• Andrew, whom Bob shall break with the stick in his hand and destroy with the idea in his head.



More: Dative case in Greek

Some movies use this ambiguity as humor. Some people like this humor. Some do not. Here is an example from one of the Airplane movies.

Be hospitable and not hostile!

• Person A: There's a problem at the hospital.
• Person B: What is it?
• Person A: It's a big building with patients, but that's not important now.

The pronoun "it" is somewhat ambiguous. Pronouns usually refers to the nearest noun, but not always. This is an example of one problem that makes NLP (Natural Language Processing) by computers difficult.

More: Matthew 25:38 Hosting strange and hostile guests and ghosts

More: Pronouns

Who are the "wise men"?
From where came the "wise men"?

• John saw Mary with the telescope. Who has the telescope?
• The wise men saw the star in the east. Were the wise men looking east or west?

[language ambiguity, Magi, Daniel, Parthians, Masada, Herod's army]

More: Song: We three kings of orient are

Some people think that a sentence diagram will help understand the meaning. There is no magic in a sentence diagram.
Seldom can a fixed grammar create a sentence diagram. Even then, each POS (Part of Speech), with inflections, needs to be decided.

Thus, a sentence diagram is usually created by deciding what the parse should be and then creating a visual representation as a sentence diagram.

More: Sentence diagrams and parsing

What is the value of the expression 2*3+5?

Math people tend to think in terms of text and parentheses.

Computer people tend to think in terms of trees without parentheses.

Changing the root changes the implicit parentheses.


A syntax tree, similar to a sentence diagram does not help decide the meaning since the syntax tree depicts the meaning as decided by the precedence rules. The usual mathematical rule is that multiplication is done first and then addition. Natural language does not have such default rules.

Without rules on operator precedence, the value is ambiguous. Mathematics tends to use parentheses to disambiguate. Computer science tends to use trees since trees are used internally for computational ordering. The parentheses disappear inside the computer. Here are two ways to parse 2*3+5.

More: Sentence diagrams and parsing

The "with" is added and is not in the Greek. The dative definite article pronoun "the" is used. The first is masculine, the second feminine.

• Greek can but often does not require such a disambiguating word.
• Translators will often add such a word in English that is not in the Greek and then rationalize their decision as if it were the only decision that could have been made.
• A problem arises when there are double meanings, play on words, ambiguous pronouns, etc. That appears to be the case here.

The problem here is that adding the "with" assumes that the Lord Jesus is using his mouth and brightness, etc. Without the "with" it could be the mouth, brightness, etc., of the wicked one. Many translations make an assumption without letting the reader know about the decision.

The "declarative" model of creation is before Adam and Eve were created. The exact way it happened does not matter.

It does not make sense to try to map time and space of reality as is known now to the that period.

The "historical" model of humanity started with Adam and continues to the present day. The exact dates do not matter.

This is known more precisely since the start of written records and less precisely before then.

To show that the Bible is a true message from the creator, (fault-tolerant and error correcting) authentication codes are needed.

More: Declarative models

More: The beginning and end of time

More: A recent new beginning

More: The security of flaming swords