<p>2:14- see on 1 Thess. 1:6-9.</p><p><em>For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea. For you also suffered the same things of your own countrymen, even as they did of the Jews</em>- This is a fairly clear statement that most of the Thessalonians were Gentiles, although they had been converted whilst involved with synagogue attendance (see on 1:9). What did Gentiles in Thessalonica know about the Jewish churches in Judea? Only what Paul had taught them. And it was he who had persecuted those very churches (Acts 9:31). Yet Paul was only three weeks at most with the Thessalonians. His teaching of them had involved personal testimony of his own shameful past, and how brave and committed those Judean Christians had been under his own persecution and torture of them. Paul would have been radically different from any other itinerant preacher; this man who worked day and night to support himself and his team (see on :9), with wheal marks on his back from a recent flogging and imprisonment in Philippi... who admitted to torturing and murdering Jewish Christians, but had changed because he had met the Lord Jesus, and was now urging Gentiles to convert to the Hope of Israel. His stories of those churches he had persecuted gripped the minds of his hearers, and they vowed to follow those brave believers. And somehow there was a credibility in Paul's accounts, a sense that really he was not making this up. They &quot;suffered&quot;, using the same word as used for Paul's sufferings and those of the Lord (see on :2). Paul and the invisible Lord he imitated became their template.</p>