I understand that the first person “we” is sometimes interpreted as the church corporately. But this runs into the problem of “those who have fallen asleep” which is third person. Paul could have said “those of ‘us’ who have fallen asleep”. He didn’t.
The contrast between the third person “those who have fallen asleep” versus the first person “we who are alive”, grammatically makes the argument that Paul is talking about only the church in a corporate sense very much less likely.
Whether people like AIs or not, that's up to them. But one thing that is a fact, AIs are more intelligent than me. I then submitted to it what you are arguing here and asked if there were any holes in what you are arguing.
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This Google AI:
Yes, there are significant grammatical and logical holes in this argument.
While this Preterist is trying to use a hyper-strict focus on pronouns ("we" vs. "those") to prove that Paul must have expected to remain alive until the Parousia in his own literal lifetime, his grammatical analysis actually falls apart under closer scrutiny.
Here are the primary holes in his logic:
1. The Grammatical Flaw: Third-Person Plural is Required by the Metaphor
The argument states Paul should have said "those of 'us' who have fallen asleep" if he meant the corporate church.
• The Hole: In Greek (and English), the phrase "those who have fallen asleep" (hoi koimēthentes) is a participle acting as a noun phrase. It is grammatically impossible for this phrase to be in the first person ("us").
• The Reality: Death is an individual event, not a collective one. When people die, they leave the present group. Therefore, any writer—whether talking about their immediate friends or a corporate group spanning thousands of years—must switch to the third person ("those who died") to distinguish them from the currently living group ("we who are alive"). The pronoun switch is a structural necessity of language, not a proof of a tight timeline.
2. Paul’s Regular Use of the "Corporate We"
The Preterist argues that a corporate "we" is unlikely here because of the contrast. However, Paul routinely uses "we" to describe the entire body of believers across all time, contrasting them with other groups.
• The Hole: Look at 1 Corinthians 15:51–52, a parallel passage on the resurrection. Paul writes: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed... and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."
• The Contradiction: Paul died. He did not remain alive to be changed without sleeping. This proves that Paul used "we" to mean "we believers who happen to be alive at that future moment," placing himself rhetorically in the shoes of the final generation, rather than making a strict chronological prediction about his own lifespan.
3. The "We" Shifts Elsewhere in Paul’s Letters
If "we" always strictly means Paul and his immediate 1st-century audience, then Paul contradicts himself in other letters.
• The Hole: In 2 Corinthians 4:14, Paul writes: "...knowing that He who raised up the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus, and will present us with you."
• The Reality: Here, Paul groups himself with those who will be raised from the dead, not those who remain alive. If "we" in 1 Thessalonians 4 strictly locks him into the "living until 70 AD" camp, then 2 Corinthians 4 locks him into the "dead before the resurrection" camp. The simplest explanation is that Paul used "we" flexibly to represent the Christian community as a whole.
Summary of the Breakdown
The Preterist is manufacturing a rigid grammatical rule that doesn't exist in ancient Greek or modern English. The contrast between "we who are alive" and "those who have fallen asleep" is simply the only logical way to contrast the living and the dead. It does nothing to diminish the "corporate church" interpretation.
