To what does the prophets refer?

There are two main views on the meaning of the prophets. Some commentators take Paul to be referring to Christian prophets, while others understand him to be referring to the prophets of the Old Testament.

The first view claims that early Christian martyrs like Stephen and James would have been considered prophets, and that the order of Paul’s terms—Jesus and the prophets—suggests that Paul was thinking about prophets who came after Jesus. Considering that prophets were well known in the New Testament church, and that certain leaders in the church were known as prophets, this interpretation must be regarded as a possibility (see, e.g., Acts 11:27; Acts 13:1; Acts 15:32; Acts 21:10; 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 2:20; Ephesians 3:5; Ephesians 4:11). Those who hold to this view are often motivated by a desire to restrict the Jews (1 Thessalonians 2:14) to as small a group as possible, and thus to distance this passage from any sense of anti-Semitism. By interpreting the prophets as Christian prophets, people who lived before New Testament times are excluded from the Jews; the Jews are then understood as a more limited group.^1,2

Scholars who favour the second interpretation point to a biblical tradition that speaks about the persecution and killing of God’s prophets. This tradition goes as far back as the time of Elijah and is repeated numerous times in the Old Testament (1 Kings 18:4; 1 Kings 19:9–19; 2 Kings 17:13–18; 2 Chronicles 24:19–21; 2 Chronicles 36:15–16; Nehemiah 9:17; Nehemiah 9:30; Jeremiah 2:30; Jeremiah 26:8, Jeremiah 26:20–23). It is taken up by Jesus (Matthew 23:29–37) and mentioned frequently in the Gospels, as well as by Stephen just before his martyrdom (Matthew 5:12; Luke 4:24; Luke 6:23; Luke 11:47–51; Luke 13:33–34; Acts 7:52). Malherbe points out that there are some distinct similarities between the language of this tradition and the terminology used by Paul in this passage, and this makes it quite likely that Paul is drawing on the tradition at this point.³ Such an interpretation would be consistent with Paul’s earlier warnings to the Thessalonians that they would indeed suffer for their faith in Christ (1 Thessalonians 3:4), since those very warnings may also have been based (at least in part) on this tradition.

All things considered, the second interpretation seems more likely than the first, both for technical reasons (similarity of terminology, non-Pauline terms) and for contextual reasons (it helps the Thessalonians to understand that they are part of a long tradition of persecuted servants of God).^4,5 One might, however, understand the prophets to include New Testament prophets who, like the Old Testament prophets, were persecuted for their faithfulness as God’s messengers. This broadened understanding of prophets finds support from Matthew 23:34, where Jesus takes up the persecution tradition and refers to his own messengers as prophets.