Praying to Jesus

As part of his opening statement, in his recent debate with anti-Trinitarian Dale Tuggy, Michael Brown said the following:

That’s why Paul could pray to the Father and Son together in 1 Thessalonians 3:13, saying, “Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you,” using a singular verb for the Father and Jesus. And why else would Paul include Jesus in a prayer to the Father, let alone pray to the Father and Son using a singular verb in the Greek – unless they are one? (See also 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17, where Paul puts Jesus first in the prayer, using a singular verb again: “Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.”)

https://askdrbrown.org/library/dr-brown%E2%80%99s-opening-comments-debate-dr-dale-tuggy-january-11-2019

I've seen that challenged on Twitter. Here's what some recent, major commentators say, in support of Dr. Brown's interpretation. Notice that this is not an argument from authority. I'm not simply quoting scholarly opinion. Rather, they present exegetical arguments for their interpretation:

But in this prayer, as in 2 Thes 2:16-17, the Lord Jesus is the one to whom prayers are directed alongside God the Father. To address prayers to the Lord Jesus (so 2 Thes 3:5,16) in the same breath with God the Father implies a very high Christology. This prayer would be proper only if the apostles held to the divinity of Christ. This point is even clear in the prayer of 2 Thes 2:16, where the order of the names is reversed, "May our Lord Jesus Christ and God our Father". G. Green, The Letters to the Thessalonians (Eerdmans 2002), 176. 

This means that by comparing two similar Pauline prayers, the reader arrives at a sublet but undeniable attestation of the divinity of Christ. In both cases, God the Father and the Lord Jesus are petitioned in prayer, and one or the other might answer the prayer. What Paul explored a few times in explicit propositions (Rom 9:5; Phil 2:6; Tit 2:13) becomes clear when he turns to God and the Lord Jesus in prayer; it is in prayer that he shows who he really thinks the Lord Jesus is. G. Shogren, 1 & 2 Thessalonians (Zondervan 2012), 307. 

The second part of the prayer, the divine source, is striking not only because of the addition of the intensive pronoun "himself" but even more for the use of two subjects ("our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus") with a singular verb. The similar use of a compound subject with a singular verb occurs elsewhere in the NT (e.g., 1 Cor 15:50; Mt 5:18; Mk 4:41; Jas 5:3). These examples, however, virtually always involve a conventional word pair ("flesh and blood," "heaven and earth," "wind and sea," "gold and silver") so that the parallel with two persons mentioned in the transitional prayer of 3:11 is not exact. 

Indeed, the repetition of the definite article for both nouns suggests that Paul views God the Father and Jesus our Lord as two individual entities and so avoids the danger of a complete merging of the two figures to whom he prays. On the other hand, that these two individual figures are closely linked by a singular verb–a grammatical construction that Paul repeats (though in reverse order) in another prayer for the Thessalonians (2 Thes 2:16-17)–suggests that Paul views Jesus as sharing the deity of God and so avoids the danger of a complete separation of these two figures to whom he prays…As Marshall (1983: 100) declares, "It would be more exact to say that Paul assumes the divinity of Jesus–to call him "Son of God' in the way in which Paul uses the phrase cannot mean anything else".

As Milligan (1908: 108) observes, "We have another striking example of the equal nor ascribed to the Son with the Father throughout these epistles" J. Weima, 1-2 Thessalonians (Baker 2014), 236, 561.

The prayer itself, however, begins in a way that should catch everyone's attention. Here is a Jew, born and bred in, and deeply committed to, a monotheism where a person regularly repeated the traditional "creed" of all Judaism, the Shema of Deut 6:4: "Hear, Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is one." But a couple of centuries before Paul, Yahweh's sacred name was no longer spoken aloud, apparently so that no one would take it "in vain" and thus break the third commandment. So in the oral reading of the Hebrew text, Adonai ("Lord") came to be substituted for Yahweh. This in turn was taken up in the Septuagint, where kyrios ("lord") was consistently substituted for Yahweh, this translating the oral substitution for the written word. So the oral Shema now took the form, "Hear, Israel, kyrios your theos, kyrios is one." What Paul himself did with this most sacred tradition–and well before writing this letter–is remarkable indeed. He is now praying to the one theos as "our God and Father" and to the one kyrios as "Jesus," whom he had earlier identified as "God's Son" (1:10)…the remarkable inclusion of the on as the compound subject of the singular verb seems to exist in anticipation of the rest of the prayer, which is directed solely to Christ.

Two further matters need to be noted, both christological. First, one should observe (a) that Paul can pray to both God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ together as one (v11), (b) that he can pray to both together but single out one as the object (grammatical subject) of the concerns of prayer at a given time (vv12-13), and (c) that in these earliest two letters he can pray to either separately (for the Father see 1 Thes 1:2-3; 5:23; for Christ see 2 Thess 3:5 and 15). 

Second, even though the first emphasis in this case is on God the Father, the final focus of the prayer is altogether on the Lord Jesus…Indeed, this same phenomenon happens in reverse in 1 Thes 2:16-17, where Christ is mentioned first (including with the autos ["himself"]) while the pickup, exactly as in the present case, is with prayer addressed to the second divine person mentioned at the outset, namely God the Father….together these realities indicate the very high place Christ had in Paul's understanding of God's identity. Here is a strict monotheist praying with ease to both the Father and the Son, focussing first on the one and then on the other, and without a sense that his monotheism is being stretched or is in some kind of danger. G. Fee, The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians (Eerdmans 2009), 130-31. 

I'd mention in passing that on a unitarian interpretation, this is yet another way in which unitarianism parallels Catholicism. Just like in Catholicism, you can pray to "exalted humans" (Mary) as well as God–in unitarianism, you can pray to God and the merely human Jesus alike.