Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church

in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll be getting started here in a little bit.

I won't say in just a minute because we're starting St. Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians, and I have to give my big overlong introduction to St. Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians before we actually start.

I kind of teased this a little last time at the end of St. Paul's epistle to the Colossians

in that there are some issues surrounding the discussion about when St. Paul's

first epistle to the Thessalonians was written, but we'll get to that in a minute. First,

to talk about when this was written and to whom it was written.

This is one of St. Paul's earlier epistles.

You'll find a lot of things saying, maybe even something sitting right in front of you right now,

saying that this was his first epistle that he wrote. Again, we're going to talk about

that in a few minutes here. Why I don't think that's necessarily the case. But it is one of his,

one of his earliest epistles. He probably wrote it around the year 50, AD 50.

And likely from at that time, if you remember back when we were talking about the Acts of the

Apostles and when we were talking about First and Second Corinthians, that St. Paul had spent a

number of years in Corinth at one point and it had become very acquainted with the community there and it's

likely that both first and second Thessalonians were written during that time period.

There's not a big time lapse between the two, at least that's apparent.

They seem to be addressing some of the same situations.

They seem to kind of iterate on one another.

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