But we do not want you to be uninformed, dear siblings, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.
One must wonder whom Paul refers to “others do who have no hope.” I think it is hardly possible to claim that all outside the realm of the Christian world are without hope. At least if the hope is related to an afterlife. One way to deal with the hopeless others is trying to explain that hope means something more specific or something different than hope, however I am not going there.
The other way to make sense of this is if “the others” is not an attempt by Paul to refer to everyone outside the circle of Christians. If that is the case we are left to figure out who they are this specific group of “the others” in verse 13. We can assume that they were a group known to the Congregation in Thessaloniki. I think Abraham J. Malherbe is on to something in his commentary, when he refers to De Witt, and claims that the others without hope are possibly Epicureans (Malherbe 283).
I would consider this especially intriguing in light of another reference to that group earlier in the fourth chapter where Paul seems to take their philosophy at a face value. If we accept that “the others who do not have hope” are in fact Epicureans, Paul seems to be making the argument that we should behave like them in our daily life, but when it comes to dying and grieving, we part company.
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Bibliography: Malherbe, Abraham J. The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
* This note is from an exegetical paper on I. Thess. 4.13-18