Paul writes as though the Parousia is imminent and possibly within his own lifetime: 'we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died' (1 Thess 4:15-17); 'the appointed time has grown short... the present form of this world is passing away' (1 Cor 7:29-31); 'salvation is nearer to us now... the night is far gone, the day is near' (Rom 13:11-12). The sheet also flags this as a datable failed expectation shared by 'followers (including Paul).' 2 Thessalonians 2 is separately listed.

Concede the real point first: Paul does write with genuine temporal-proximity urgency, and 'we who are alive, who are left' is most naturally read as Paul entertaining the real possibility that he personally would be alive at the Parousia. This should not be minimized. Three things keep this from being fatal to NT reliability. First, 'the appointed time has grown short' (1 Cor 7:29) belongs to a recognizable genre: urgency-rhetoric common across Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic literature (comparable idiom appears across texts like 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, and in Qumran's eschatological self-understanding), used to reshape ethical seriousness *now* rather than to stamp a datable prediction -- see John J. Collins's treatment of apocalyptic as a genre organized around imminence-as-exhortation rather than imminence-as-timetable. Gordon Fee's NICNT commentary on 1 Corinthians reads 7:29-31 the same way: the force is 'live as people for whom ultimate reality has already reoriented ordinary attachments,' not 'calculate the calendar.' Second, and decisively: Paul himself explicitly refuses a fixed near date and corrects an over-realized-imminence panic in the very church that received 1 Thessalonians. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3: 'we beg you, brothers and sisters... not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed... to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed.' Here Paul inserts an intervening-events condition and rebukes believers for premature certainty -- flatly incompatible with a Paul who dogmatically taught a fixed, no-preconditions imminent date. This is the Pauline circle correcting a misreading of Paul's own earlier language, from within the same correspondence relationship. Third, 'we who are alive' functions as ordinary hope-language, structurally identical to how any generation speaks of a hoped-for or feared near event ('those of us alive today,' said of a hoped-for medical breakthrough) without that phrasing later being read as a falsified, timestamped guarantee if the event doesn't land within that speaker's lifetime. Hoping and thinking it possible is categorically different from teaching a fixed revealed date as settled doctrine -- and 2 Thess 2 shows the difference was live and contested even within Paul's own churches.

Paul's ethical exhortations in 1 Cor 7 and Rom 13 do not actually depend on an exact date to retain their force -- they are grounded in the certainty of Christ's return and the present reality of an already-inaugurated new creation ('the present form of this world is passing away,' a claim about trajectory, true regardless of exactly how near the terminus is). This is precisely why these texts have remained pastorally usable, rather than falsified, across every subsequent Christian generation: 'the time is short, hold possessions loosely' is exactly as true and urgent in any century, because each individual's own death is an unpredictable, near-enough horizon regardless of the cosmic timeline -- the same logic behind Jesus's own 'thief in the night' parables, which ground ethical urgency in unpredictability rather than in a fixed date.