They believe only the suffering is the evidence. But word order is weak evidence in Greek. The topic of Paul’s boast about the church is their “perseverance and faith.” The term evidence is best understood as being in apposition to the entire preceding phrase—faith in the midst of persecutions (Lightfoot 1957, 100; Bruce 1982, 149; Malherbe 2000, 394). This makes the most sense of Paul’s reference. But how does the Thessalonians’ endurance of suffering and persecution with faith prove that God’s