The earliest of Paul's letters-the Thessalonian correspondence-here undergoes a major reassessment in this provocative interdisciplinary and experimental study. Robert Jewett offers a combination of traditional historical-critical research, rhetorical analysis, and a comparative use of social-scientific theorizing to resolve mang dilemmas in 1 and 2 Thessalonians. He concentrates on discovering the interaction between the writer and the audience for clues. His thesis is that Paul was confronted with a millenarian radicalism in Thessalonica unparalleled elsewhere in early Christianity: "Only in Thessalonica do we encounter a group that proclaimed the actual arrival of the millennium and then proceeded to act on that assumption." In light of his detailed exegetical study, Jewett concludes that the "millenarian model" best explains the exegetical references and the historical evidence which disclose that Paul's apocalyptic gospel was misunderstood from the outset. ROBERT JEWETT is Professor of New Testament Interpretation at GarrettEvangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of A Chronology of Paul's Life (Fortress Press, 1979) and is currently completing the Hermeneia commentary on Romans.