Young People's Bible Dictionary
by Barbara Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965)
Timothy, The First and Second Letters of Paul to. Two N.T. books, letters to Timothy when he was in charge of the church of Ephesus; intended to help and encourage him in his duties. A very old tradition holds that Paul wrote these letters, but the ideas and the style do not seem to be Paul's. Perhaps a later writer refashioned some letter or fragments of letters that had been written by Paul. If Paul wrote the letters to Timothy, scholars believe he must have done so sometime after his imprisonment in Rome, assuming that he was acquitted and released.
Titus, The Letter of Paul to. N.T. book, a personal letter to Titus, who was then in Crete. It is similar to the letters to Timothy, and the same questions about it authorship are raised.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary
edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990)
The Pastoral Epistles
Authorship. If Paul were the actual author of the Pastorals, the... chronological reconstruction would then need to be fitted into the full life history of the apostle. However, although there is not complete unanimity on the matter, since the early 19th century very many exegetes have argued that these letters are the pseudonymous creations of a later follower of Paul. These arguments seem quite convincing.
Although quite similar to one another in vocabulary, grammatical usage, and style, 1-2 Tim and Titus diverge sharply in all these respects from the clearly genuine letters of Paul... Numerous key theological terms used in the Pastorals do not appear in Paul..., and many words important in Paul's writings are not found in the Pastorals even where they would be expected... The collective absence of these latter terms is striking. As a group, further, the Pastorals contain a very high number of words not found elsewhere in the Pauline corpus or in the NT [New Testament]. Most important to note is the divergence between Paul and the Pastorals in the usage of various commplace and recurrent Greek adverbs, conjunctions, and particles, for such linguistic features are less subject to conscious control...
Those who defend the authenticity of the Pastorals offer various explanations of these features.
Some suggest that Paul's advancing age and his suffering in prison account for the changes. However, according to the usual reckoning adopted by the defenders of authenticity, these letters would have been composed no more than fiive years after Romans. This makes it difficult to explain all the divergencies, especially the grammatical and syntactical shifts, on the basis of such psychological determinants.
More popular, therefore, has been the hypothesis that Paul told a secretary what themes he wished covered and handed over to that individual the actual work of composing the three letters. However, when Paul did make use of secretaries (see Rom 16:22; 1 Cor 16:21; Gal 6:11-18), his own typical style remained unaltered. If a secretary composed the Pastorals -- the Pastorals themselves offer no reference to such a person -- that individual was given unusual freedom by Paul. Furthermore, Paul had to have made use of the same secretary both in the E and in Rome over the whole period of time required for the compositions of the Pastorals, for these three letters possess remarkable stylistic consistency.
This type of secretary theory, an unlikely hypthesis at best, ends up in any case quite akin to actual pseudononymous authorship.
The pastorals do not fit well into the biographical framework of Paul's life, and so are also suspect on that account... All agree that the Roman imprisonment of 2 Tim cannot be correlated with the imprisonment of Acts 28. Paul must then have been released from the earlier imprisonment, have traveled back to Crete and Ephesus (1 Tim and Titus), and then have returned to Rome where he was again put in jail (2 Tim) and finally executed. However, Paul spoke only of going to Spain and strongly implied that his work in the E was completed (Rom 15:17-19). Further, the close parallelism found in Luke-Acts between Jesus' journey to Jerusalem to undergo his crucifixion and Paul's journey to Rome seems to suppose that the latter's travels had also brought him to his death.
The Pastorals also present a much more developed church order than is found in the clearly genuine letters of Paul, a somewhat less heightened expectation of an imminent eschaton, and a christology that stressed Jesus' birth and resurrection but not, at least as much as in Paul, his crucifixion. Although developments certainly occurred within Christianity even during Paul's lifetime, changes such as these, taken together, tend to point to a later period than Paul's own age.
The Pastoral Letters
Three New Testament Letters purporting to have been written by the apostle Paul to two of his associates in Christian missions. Because of their common concerns with congregational matters, these writings are called the 'pastoral Letters' and are often read together.
Origin and Authorship: Questions concerning the origin of the Pastorals remain in debate. Are they to be ascribed to Paul directly, or were they perhaps written by a secretary? Alternatively, are they pseudonymous writings composed in the name of the great apostle and containing personal notes that are either fragments of genuine letters or are introduced to give the writer's communication a conventional 'letter' form, naming persons known to have been related to Paul's missions in one way or another? Ancient church tradition concerning the origin of the Pastorals is inconclusive. Decisions must therefore be based on internal evidence, which is, on no single point, decisive.
Two major approaches to the Pastorals proceed from different assumptions and lead to possibly different conclusions. As long as questions concerning Pauline authorship predominate, attention focuses upon the personal notes in the Pastorals, especially in 2 Timothy, and their bearing upon data concerning the course of the apostle's ministry, as such are disclosed in the acknowledged Letters of Paul and in Acts. Was Paul released from his Roman imprisonment and able to resume his missions in the provinces of Asia and Macedonia, perhaps to establish a Christian community on the isle of Crete? Was he arrested again, tried, and put to death? If the Pastorals are letters from Paul, then some such scenario would seem to be required. Moreover, it must be argued that new and different circumstances led to a 'development' in Paul's theology and ethical teaching which was needed to take the new situation into account. Nevertheless, Pauline authorship is possible.
The alternative approach assumes at the outset that there are sufficient problems relative to traditional views respecting Pauline authorship to suggest that a clarification should first be sought of the historical setting of the Pastorals, a determination of the nature of the 'heresy' to which the author constantly alludes, and some understanding of the writer's theological emphases and of the situations prompting certain household and congregational rules urged upon the readers.
Here, the conclusion reached by the great majority of scholars is that the Pastorals are to be ascribed to a pseudonymous Christian writer of the early second century, who was convinced that Paul's teaching was normative for the church, and that Paul would have addressed existing conditions in the same way, were he alive and able to guide the work of other apostolic delegates, the successors of Paul's own co-workers of an earlier period.
...The writer's concern for the various ministries of the church seems to reflect a need to clarify their respective functions, a situation similar to that disclosed in early second-century texts, such as the Didache and the Letters of Ignatius.
These and other considerations support the widely held opinion that the pastoral Letters belong to the postapostolic age and are addressed to the concerns of second-generation Christianity. No longer were Christians convinced that the world-order would soon pass away with the glorious return of the Christ. The spiritual vigor that characterized the Pauline missions was replaced by an equally serious mandate: to establish the church as 'the pillar and bulwark of the truth' (1 Tim. 3:15). To this end, true successors of Paul and his apostolic delegates had to be found who, by virtue of their offices, authority, and personal examples, would be able to defend 'the deposit' of the faith of the apostle, entrusted to them, and be ready like Paul to take their share of suffering for the gospel.
