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4 Ezra describes a man rising from the sea who destroys his enemies with a stream of fire from his mouth. 2 Thessalonians uses similar apocalyptic imagery, describing how God will destroy the lawless one with the breath of his mouth.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Thessalonians 2:8
New Testament
7 For the hidden power of lawlessness is already at work. However, the one who holds him back will do so until he is taken out of the way, 8 and then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will destroy by the breath of his mouth and wipe out by the manifestation of his arrival. 9 The arrival of the lawless one will be by Satan’s working with all kinds of miracles and signs and false wonders,
4 Ezra 13:10
2 Esdras
Pseudepigrapha
9 When he saw the hordes advancing to attack, he did not so much as lift a finger against them. 10 He had no spear in his hand, no weapon at all; only, as I watched, he poured what seemed like a stream of fire out of his mouth, a reath of flame from his lips, and a storm of sparks from his tongue. 11 All of them combined into one mass - the stream of fire, the breath of flame, and the great storm. It fell on the host advancing to join battle, and burnt up every man of them; suddenly all that enormous multitude had disappeared, leaving nothing but dust and ashes and a reek of smoke. I was dumbfounded at the sight.
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Notes and References
... find testimonies not only in Revelation 19.15, 21, but also in, for instance, 4 Ezra 13.10: 'I [Ezra] saw only how he ["the man from the sea", God's agent] sent forth from his mouth as it were a stream of fire, and from his lips a flaming breath' (translated by B. M. Metzger, in Charlesworth 1983:551). Isaiah's parallelism has been contracted, in 2 Thessalonians, to 'killing with the breath of his mouth'. This phrase suggests that the lawless one will not withstand the slightest activity on the part of the Lord Jesus: the latter has only to breathe to kill the former. The contraction may have been influenced by the wording of Psalm 33.6, where it is said that God made 'the host of heavens' 'by the breath of his mouth'. If this text is in the background, then we have here again an instance of the transfer of divine predicates to Jesus ...
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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