THESMOPHOKIAZUS^. 223 THESSALONIANS. dragged to justice by women taking part in the Tlifsiuoplioria. THESPE'SIUS (Xeo-Lat., from Gk. tfeffjr^irios, divinely, sounding divine). An herbivorous ornitliopod dinosaur, allied to Hadrosaurus and Iguanodou, which it closely resembles, found fossil in the Upper Cretaceous beds of Colorado, Wyoming, and Jlontana. It was a large animal, 25" to 30 feet long and 10 to 15 feet high, with medium-sized head, small, almost useless fore limbs, and well-developed three-toed hind limbs upon which it ran in bipedal motion, using its heavy tail to balance the forward portion of the body. Another name for this creature is Clao- saurus. A complete skeleton of this animal, mounted as if in the act of running, is in the museum of Yale University. Consult: Marsh, "The Dinosaurs of North America," Annual Re- port of the United States Geological Survey, vol. xvi.. part i. (Washington, 1896) ; Beecher, "The Eeconstruction of a Cretaceous Dinosaur, Claosaurus annectans Marsh," in Transactions of the Connecticut Acadenti/ of Sciences, vol. xi. (New Haven, 1902). See Dinosauria. THES'PIJE (Lat.. from Gk. eeffireiaf^ Thes- peiai, eecririal, Thesjnai) , or TilESPlA. An an- cient town in JBoeotia, near the foot of Mount Helicon. Like Platfea, it 'was hostile to the Theban pretension to supremacy in Boeotia, and these two were the only Bceotian cities which re- fused to give earth and water to the heralds of Xerxes and did not side with the Persians at the battle of Salamis. Seven hundred Thespians joined Leonidas at Thermn]iy!:e, and were slain in defending the pass. Thespia; was burned by Xerxes, but was subsequently rebuilt. Shortly after the battle of Leuetra ' ( B.C. 371) it was again destroyed, and was afterwards a second time restored. Here was preserved a marble statue of Eros by Praxiteles. On account of the vicinity of Mount Helicon to the town, the Muses were called Thespiades. The site of the ancient town was near the modern village of Eremo- kastro. THES'PIS (Lat., from Gk. e^trTru). A na- tive of the Attic deme of Icarus in the sixth cen- tury B.C., called the father of Greek tragedy. He introduced an actor to reply to the leader of the chorus, who before had recited the adven- tures of Dionysus and had been answered by the chorus, and thus made an important step toward the drama. THESSALONIANS, Epistles to the (Gk. Trpbs ©ecro-aXowKcrs, sc. ^ttiotoXtJ, pros Thes- sulonikeis, to the Thessalonians, sc. epistole, epistle). Two letters in the New Testament, purporting in their opening passages of greeting to have been written by Paul, and generally so accepted by scholars. They were written in Corinth during Paul's first visit to that city in the year 50-51 within a few months of each other, and, if a later date for Galatians be ac- cepted, are the earliest of the preserved writings of the Apostle. They were sent to the Christian community of Thessalonica. where Paul had but recently preached the gospel, in order to comfort hii? people in the persecution they were suffering, the beginnings of which had driven Paul and his companions from the city. They are consequent- ly marked by an absence of doctrinal discussion. In fact, apart from a short apologetic passage in the first Epistle, a brief statement in the same Epistle regarding the advent of Christ, and a more elaborated one in the second Epistle as to the coming of the Day of the Lord, involving a declaration of the character and work of the 'Man of Sin,' they may be considered purely pastoral letters whose concern is with the read- ers' practical religious needs — and even in these excepted passages the spirit of the writer i3 essentially that of the pastor. Both Epistles were rejected by the Tubingen School (1845) and are disowned to-day by the radical Dutch School (1882), the force of whose criticism, however, is largelj* broken by the general negative position which they maintain toward all of Paul's writings. At the same time there is considerable critical debate regarding the Paulinity of the second Epistle — due to the difficult passage in chapter ii. regarding the 'Man of Sin' — a passage the subject of which is a most unusual one with Paul and the mean- ing of which in itself is most obscure. It is argued on the one side that the unusual char- acter of this passage in Paul's Epistles — no parallel to it being found in his writings — the agreement of the picture which it presents with any one of several situations late in the century, particularly with the situation occa- sioned by the expected return of Nero, and the evident literary dependence of the rest of the Epistle on I. Thessalonians, all show the author to have been some one after Paul's day, who, ap- parently out of a desire to quiet tendencies to disorder consequent upon expectations of the immediate coming of Christ, described the events which must necessarily precede that coming, writing in the name of Paul in order to secure authority for his statements, and modeling his prodviction on Paul's Thessalonian letter, the contents of which were more or less of an eschatological character. On the other side, it is asserted that when con- sideration is given to the fact that recent investi- gations in the field of apocalyptic literature have shown the existence among the Jews of a popular anti-Messiah legend, having its source in pre- exilic times and coming down through various stages of development to the times of the Chris- tian Church, and when it is remembered that this popular belief is made use of in various ways by Jesus Himself (e.g. in His eschatological discourse in Mark xiii. and parallels) as well as by some of the Apostolic writers (cf. e.g. I. John ii. 22), it cannot be held an unlikely thing for Paul also to make the use of it which we find in this passage, though such usage does not occur again in his writings. On such a theory it is maintained that the picture here presented would not need to be applied to any definite per- son, any more than would the corresponding pictures in the other New Testament writings. They would all refer rather to personified prin- ciples of evil hostile to Christ and His religion, or to principles impersonated generally in the enemies of Christianity. In any event, it is contended, nothing can be made out of the re- semblance of the second Epistle to the first which would show a greater dependence of the latter upon the former than would be natural for Paul in writing two letters to the same people within a few months of each other. The contention that in the second Paul has reversed his belief
