"We Who Are Alive" Is Not a Time Text

Among hyper-preterists, one of the more popular arguments for a first-century fulfillment of the resurrection is that Paul’s language in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 functions as a “time text.” The claim runs like this: when Paul wrote, “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord,” he was asserting that he personally expected to be among the living when Christ returned. Since Paul was alive in the mid-first century, the parousia must have been a mid-first-century event. Hyper-preterists Gary DeMar and Kim Burgess, among others, have pressed this reading.

At this point in time, Paul still fully expected to be alive in his earthly body at the parousia of Christ as based on the direct warrant of Christ Himself in texts like Matthew 10:23, 16:27-28, and 24:34. This is precisely why Paul deliberately used “we” language in both 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15.¹

The argument sounds intuitive on the surface. But it collapses under the weight of Greek grammar, Paul's own broader testimony, and, most critically, what Paul says in the very next verse. What we are dealing with in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 is not a prophetic time indicator at all. It is a category identification, and the difference matters enormously.

The key phrase in Greek is hemeis hoi zontes hoi perileipomenoi (ἡμεῖς οἱ ζῶντες οἱ περιλειπόμενοι). The pronoun hemeis (”we”) is followed by two articular present participles: hoi zontes (”the ones living”) and hoi perileipomenoi (”the ones remaining”). The participles function substantivally, which means they describe a class of people defined by their condition at the time of the event, not at the time of writing. Paul is saying, in effect, “those among us believers who are in the state of being alive and remaining when the Lord comes.” The present tense of the participles is relative to the main action of the sentence (the coming of the Lord), not to the moment Paul picked up his pen. This is a standard use of the articular participle in Koine Greek and there is nothing in the grammar that restricts the referent to Paul and his immediate contemporaries.

To appreciate why this matters, consider the broader context of the passage. Paul is writing to a grieving church. Believers in Thessalonica had died, and the remaining congregation was distraught, apparently worried that their departed brothers and sisters would miss out on the parousia. Paul’s entire argument is pastoral comfort:

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 ESV)

The structure of Paul’s argument is to divide all believers into two groups: the dead in Christ and the living who remain. He uses “we” because he and his readers are currently alive and naturally fall, as things presently stand, into the latter group. But the whole point of the passage is that the timing is open-ended enough for some believers to have already died. If Paul “knew” the parousia would occur within his lifetime, the Thessalonians’ grief over a few recently deceased believers would be a remarkably trivial crisis to warrant apostolic correspondence. The passage only makes full pastoral sense if the timing genuinely remains unresolved.

But here is where the “time text” reading suffers its most decisive blow, and it comes from Paul himself in the very next breath. Without skipping a beat, Paul transitions into chapter 5:

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-2 ESV)

The thief metaphor is entirely about unpredictability. A thief does not send you a letter telling you when he is coming. The whole point of the image is that the timing is unknown and unknowable. Jesus used the same metaphor in Matthew 24:43 for exactly that reason, and Peter picks it up in 2 Peter 3:10 the same way. If Paul had just planted a time text in 4:15 telling the Thessalonians that the parousia would occur within their lifetime, why would he immediately pivot to telling them the timing is as unpredictable as a break-in? You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say “I’ve just told you it will happen while we’re alive” and then say “but you have no need for me to write about the timing because it comes when no one expects it.” Those two claims work against each other if the first one is really a time indicator. But on the categorical reading, the sequence is perfectly coherent: Paul is saying that whenever this happens, the dead will not miss out, and whoever among us is alive at the time will be caught up with them. As for when that will be, you already know the answer: you don’t know, and you can’t know.

What makes this connection even more devastating to the hyper-preterist “time text” claim is the phrase Paul uses. “The times and the seasons” in 1 Thessalonians 5:1 is τῶν χρόνων καὶ τῶν καιρῶν (ton chronon kai ton kairon). This is the same word pair that Jesus himself used in Acts 1:7 when the disciples asked him about the timing of the restoration: “He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons (χρόνους ἢ καιρούς) that the Father has fixed by his own authority’” (Acts 1:7 ESV). The only differences are the grammatical case (accusative in Acts, genitive in 1 Thessalonians, because of their different syntactic positions) and the conjunction (”or” in Acts, “and” in 1 Thessalonians). But it is unmistakably the same phrase.

Paul is not just making a general point about unpredictability. He is echoing the Lord’s own words. And he is doing it immediately after the passage that hyper-preterists want to turn into a chronological marker. Jesus told the disciples that the timing of these events is not for them to know. Paul then tells the Thessalonians, using the same phrase, that they have no need for him to write about the times and seasons, because they already know the answer: it comes like a thief. They know this because Jesus already told them so. That is not what you write ten seconds after dropping a time text. That is what you write after deliberately not giving one.

The parallel passage in 1 Corinthians 15 reinforces all of this. There Paul writes: “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52 ESV). The hyper-preterist wants to read “we shall not all sleep” as a chronological prediction: “not all of us in this generation will die before Jesus returns.” But that is not what Paul is saying. He is not making a statement about the timing of anyone’s death relative to the parousia. He is making a statement about the mechanics of the resurrection event itself. “We shall not all sleep” means that not every believer will go through death, because whoever happens to be alive when Christ returns will bypass death entirely and be transformed on the spot. “But we shall all be changed” means that whether you are dead or alive at that moment, every believer receives a transformed, resurrected body. The dead get raised. The living get changed. Nobody is left out.

This is the exact same argument Paul made to the Thessalonians, just from a different angle for a different pastoral situation. In Thessalonica, the concern was that the dead would miss out or be at a disadvantage. Paul’s answer: no, the dead in Christ rise first, and then whoever is alive gets caught up with them. In Corinth, the topic is the nature of the resurrection body, so Paul approaches it differently, but the underlying logic is identical. There are two categories of believers at the time of Christ’s return: those who have died and need to be raised, and those who are still alive and need to be changed without dying. Both groups are fully accounted for. The “mystery” Paul is revealing is not when this will happen but how it will happen, specifically that the living will not need to die first but will be instantaneously transformed. The “we” in both passages functions identically: it places Paul and his readers among the living for the sake of illustration, without foreclosing the possibility that they might die before the event occurs.

Notice too the qualifier in 1 Corinthians 15:51: “not all.” If “we” is a time text asserting that Paul expected the parousia during his generation, then “we shall not all sleep” concedes that some in his generation would die before it happened. That already weakens the “time text” claim considerably, since it admits the “we” is flexible enough to include people who will die. But more than that, it confirms that the “we” is a category that encompasses believers across an indefinite period, some of whom will die and some of whom will be alive when the event occurs. The qualifier only makes sense on the categorical reading.

What makes the “time text” reading truly untenable beyond the immediate context is that Paul himself undermines it in his later writings. If “we who are alive” is a firm prophetic assertion that Paul would be personally alive at the parousia, then Paul is a failed or confused prophet, because he clearly contemplated and eventually expected his own death prior to Christ’s return.

In Philippians, written from prison, Paul is genuinely torn: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain...I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:21-23 ESV). No one who has received a prophetic guarantee of survival until the parousia speaks like this. Paul treats death as a real and even attractive possibility, not as something foreclosed by divine promise.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks of the prospect of being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8 ESV), openly contemplating the intermediate state between death and resurrection. And in 2 Timothy, written near the end of his life, Paul knows exactly what is coming: “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day” (2 Timothy 4:6-8 ESV). Paul expects to die, and he still looks forward to “that day” when the Lord will award his crown. He does not panic over the fact that he will not be among “the living who remain.” He simply shifts, quite naturally, from one side of his own earlier category to the other, because the categories were never about him personally.

It is also worth noting what genuine time texts in the New Testament actually look like. When Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28 ESV), or “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34 ESV), these are explicit temporal statements with definite subjects, definite verbs, and definite time horizons. Paul’s articular participial clause in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 is grammatically nothing like these. It describes a class of people defined by a condition (”being alive and remaining”), not a temporal prediction (”this will happen before you die”). Calling it a “time text” is a category error.

Every generation of Christians that reads 1 Thessalonians 4 is invited to place itself among the “we who are alive, who are left.” That is the whole force of the pastoral comfort Paul offers: whether you are alive or dead when Christ returns, you will be with the Lord. The passage is designed to work across centuries precisely because the “we” is not anchored to a single generation. To treat it as a time text is to flatten a beautifully open-ended pastoral assurance into a failed prediction, and to do so against the grammar, against Paul’s own usage of the identical phrase elsewhere, against his broader testimony in his later letters, against the immediate context of 1 Thessalonians 5, against the words of Jesus himself in Acts 1:7, and against the very mechanics of the resurrection event as Paul describes them in 1 Corinthians 15.

1. Kim Burgess and Gary DeMar, The Hope of Israel and the Nations: New Testament Eschatology Accomplished and Applied, vol. 2 (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2024), 129.