Lecture

You'll see that this first session is an introductory one to the three letters, and we'll start right away with this introduction.

It was Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century who called the first letter to Timothy a pastoral textbook, but it was not until the eighteenth century, to be precise in the year 1703, that a certain D.N. Berdot referred to the three letters—the two to Timothy and the one to Titus —as pastoral epistles. And they are very well named thus because they're addressed to Timothy and Titus not just as individual Christian men, but as church leaders. Even I think one might be permitted to say as an Episcopalian, as embryonic bishops. They had responsibility not just to one church, but for a number of churches and their pastoral responsibility extended to other groups of churches. In Timothy's case, they were Ephesus and its surrounding churches and in the case of Titus, they were Crete and the churches on the island.

At the same time, although these letters are written to Timothy and Titus in their official capacity as church leaders, we mustn't forget that they are men—Christian men, like ourselves, and they were closely associated with the apostle Paul and his mission work, and there is a great deal here for us to learn.

There are three matters of introduction that we must consider. The first is the historical background. The second is the literary authenticity of the three letters, and the third is something about their occasion and aim.

First, then, the historical background. Who were these men, Timothy and Titus? We know a great deal more from the New Testament about Timothy than we do about Titus, and I thought we'd have a bracing bird's eye view of his career.

A. His Youth, Conversion, and Commissioning. We're told about this in the sixteenth chapter of the book of Acts in the first couple of verses. So if I could read these to you...this comes from the second missionary journey of the apostle Paul, and we're told that Paul came with Silas to Derbe and to Lystra and the disciple there was named Timothy, son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek, and he, Timothy, was well spoken of by the bretheren at Lystra and Iconium. Evidently, then, his home is in Lystra, one of the Galatian cities—the four main Galatian cities that Paul visited on his first and second missionary journeys.

Timothy was the product of a mixed marriage in that his father was a Greek and his mother Jewish. His mother's name was Eunice, we're told, and his grandmother was called Lois, and they were both godly women. According to 2 Timothy 1:5, there was a certain faith, in that case Jewish faith, which dwelt in Lois, the grandmother, and in Eunice, the mother. So they were women of faith. And long before they came to Jesus Christ, they instructed this young boy Timothy out of the Scriptures, so that Paul could say to him in 2 Timothy 3:15, “...that from childhood he had known the holy Scriptures,” for his Jewish mother and grandmother had taught him, and as Calvin rather delightfully says in both commentaries to 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy,” Timothy sucked in godliness along with his mother's milk.”

Now although his father was a Greek and evidently an unbliever, his mother, Eunice became a Christian believer, presumably, when Paul visited Lystra on the first missionary journey. And by the time Paul revisited Lystra on the second missionary journey, she's already described as a believer (Acts 16:1), meaning obviously here a Christian believer. And young Timothy is called in that same verse “a disciple,” so he has become a believer also. And we can only guess, and it's a fairly scientific conjecture, that it was in the first missionary journey when Paul visited Lystra that both Timothy and his mother had been converted. Certainly Timothy owed his conversion to the apostle Paul so that Paul could refer to him in 1 Corinthians 4:17 as “my beloved and faithful child in the Lord.” Or in 1 Timothy 1:2 as “my true child in the faith,” or in 2 Timothy 1:2, “my beloved child.” And Timothy was Paul's child in the faith. Paul had begotten him through the gospel, led him to Christ, and become his father in the gospel.

And already by the second missionary journey a couple of years later, Timothy's made such progress that we're told still in Acts 16:2 that “he was well spoken of by the brethren.” He'd made great strides, great spiritual strides in his Christian life and he had a good reputation, although he was only two or three years old by that time in Christ. And he was well-known in the neighboring town of Iconium as well.

So in the next verse, Acts 16:3, Paul invited Timothy to accompany him on his missionary labors. And he circumcised him, verse 3, in order to make his ministry acceptable to Jews, as well as to Greeks. A remarkable policy concession just after the counsel of Jerusalem in which it had been established that circumcision was not necessary for Gentile converts, but as a policy concession, now that the principle had been clearly established throughout the church, Paul was willing to circumcise him in order that Timothy's ministry might be acceptable to Jews wherever he went.

Then Paul ordained him by the laying on of hands and the local presbyters in the church in Lystra who had been ordrained during the first missionary journey, they'd joined with Paul in the laying on of hands. We're told that in 1 Timothy 4:14 and 2 Timothy 1:6. And this ordination by the laying on of hands of the apostle and of the local presbyterate was confirmed by some prophetic utterances whose nature is not described, but they're referred to 1 Timothy 1:18 and 4:14. So that's chapter 1: A. His youth, conversion, and commissioning.

B. is a chapter I'm going to call Macedonia. That is principally the towns of Philippi and Thessalonica. For it was soon after this and it's all recorded in Acts 16 that the tremendous step was taken to take the gospel into Europe, and the first town evangelized on European soil was Philippi. I meant to draw you a map on the blackboard, but I thought you probably know your map of the Greek or Roman world in those days or you can consult one at the back of your Bibles. In fact, if you want a little something to do for yourself before we meet again next week, it might be good if you drew yourself a map and got some of these towns clearly plotted if you are not clear where they are.

Anyway, Philippi was the first town evangelized on European soil. It's in Macedonia, which was the name of the northern part of the Greek peninsula, and it's not surprising therefore that when Paul later wrote to the Philippians, he associates Timothy with him in the letter. Philippians 1:1 he says, “Paul, an apostle, and Timothy our brother,” and he refers to him in chapter 2 verse 19 and following of the Philippian letter as Timothy being genuinely anxious for the welfare of these Philippians. So Timothy had been there with Paul on this great mission in Philippi.

But his special links were with the next church they visited or next town they visited which was Thessalonica. Thessalonica was the second Macedonia town to be evangelized, and Timothy was there also. When they moved on, they went to the Berea, which is about fifty miles to the west and there in Berea, Paul left Silas and Timothy behind while he continued his journey south to Athens where he was alone. It's a most moving thought of the great apostle to the Gentiles alone in Athens amid all the glories of ancient Greece. But when he arrived in Athens and was left alone, he sent a message that Timothy and Silas should join him. And as soon as Timothy came, Paul sent him back to Thessalonica, and we read about this in 1 Thessalonians 3:1 “when we could bear it no longer,” and do let us see what a human being Paul was, deeply concerned for the welfare of these Christian people, longing to hear news of the Thessalonian church, unable to bear the suspense of having no news any longer, “But when we could longer bear it, we were willing to be left behind at Athens alone, and we sent Timothy, our brother and God's servant in the gospel of Christ, to establish you in your faith and to exhort you, that no one be moved by these afflictions. That's 1 Thessalonians 3:1-3.

By the time Silas and Timothy had reached Thessalonica, found out the news they'd been sent there to discover, and returned, they found that Paul had already left Athens and he'd gone on to Corinth, and Timothy and Silas moved on to Corinth and were reunited with Paul there. We read about that in Acts 18:5. And from Corinth, he wrote his first and second letters to the Thessalonians, and again, he associated Timothy with him in both letters. 1 Thessalonians 1:1, “Paul, Silvanus (that is Silas) and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians,” and again 2 Thessalonians 1:1, “Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians.” That's chapter 2, Thessalonica.

C. Corinth. While in Corinth, Timothy joined Paul and Silas in the preaching. Paul didn't do all the preaching himself. He invited his associates to join in the proclamation of the gospel. And we're told that in 2 Corinthians 1:19 where Paul writes “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you, Silvanus and Timothy, and I.” All three of them preached Jesus Christ as the Son of God in Corinth. Actually when they left Corinth, they moved on to Ephesus and I expect you know your missionary journeys well enough to remember that during the third missionary journey, Paul spent a long time, about three years altogether, in Ephesus, and it was during this period that Timothy was sent from Ephesus to Corinth, which he knew, and he took with him our first letter to the Corinthians. I call it our first letter because it was almost certain enough the first letter to the Corinthians that Paul read, but it's the first that has survived. And Timothy was the bearer of it. 1 Corinthians 4:17, “I send Timothy to you, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ.” And chapter 16 of 1 Corinthians, verses 10 and 11, “See that you put him at ease when he comes to you. Let no one despise him.” Timothy, as we shall have cause to see later in this course, was a very shy and diffident and nervous young man and so Paul needed to ask the Corinthians to put him at ease when he arrived with this first letter.

Timothy was again associated with Paul in the writing of the second letter to the Corinthians, although it is probably the fourth that Paul wrote. So 2 Corinthians 1:1 is “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus and Timothy our brother.” Now I just wanted to go into all of that to show you how closely associated Timothy was with the apostle Paul in all these exciting days of the second and third missionary journeys. In Macedonia, in Achaia, in southern Greece, in Corinth, and in Ephesus.

Now that brings us to the next chapter D, which I'll call The Journey to Jerusalem. When the third missionary journey was over, we're told in Acts 20:4 that Timothy was in the party on its way to Jerusalem, where Paul, of course, was arrested. And then we lose sight of Timothy for a number of years. Paul was in custody for a couple of years in Caesarea and Palestine, and we don't know what Timothy was up to during those years.

But we find him next in the next chapter, I'll call E. The First Imprisonment in Rome. We've reached now the year about AD 60 or 61. Whether Timothy accompanied Paul on the ship's journey to Rome, we don't know. Presumably he did. Whether he was involved with the shipwreck with the others and Luke was certainly in the company, we don't know. But we do know that he was with Paul in Rome during his house arrest, for the first imprisonment was not in a dungeon, but it was an arrest that we nowadays would call a house arrest, in custody in his own hired house in Rome. And from this he wrote at least three of the prison epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Philippians, and in each of the three he associates Timothy with him in the greeting. So Timothy was with him in Rome.

Next, and we're coming nearer to the pastoral epistles now, the next chapter F. is Release from His First Imprisonment. Eusebius, the fourth century ecclesiastical historian says that, I'm quoting from Eusebius, “that Paul again journeyed on the ministry of preaching.” Now there's no very clear evidence in the New Testament itself that Paul was released from that first imprisonment, but he was certainly expecting to be released, and we can assume that he was. And he began his travels again, seeming have done so for a couple of years from about AD 62 to 64 until he was rearrested and re-imprisoned. He went to the island of Crete where he left Titus behind. He went on to Ephesus where he left Timothy behind. And in 1 Timothy 1:3 he refers to this fact. He wrote to Timothy a little later. He says, “I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus.” 1 Timothy 1:3. But Paul himself went on. He went on to Colossae. He saw Philemon to whom he had written a letter from his imprisonment, and he certainly went on to Macedonia, to northern Greece.

And at some point in this journey, he wrote his first letter to Timothy. He feared that he would be delayed. He wanted to come back to Ephesus and see Timothy again. He says to him in 1 Timothy 3:14, “I hope to come to you soon. I've left you at Ephesus, but I want to come back and join you there. But I'm writing these instructions to you so that if I'm delayed, you may know how to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God.” So, he wrote this first letter to Timothy during the release between the two imprisonments in case he should be delayed and be unable to visit Timothy again at Ephesus and give him all the instructions he needed.

Now whether he was able during the release to fulfill his dream of going as far as Spain, we don't know. He writes, you may recall, in the letter to the Romans, chapter 15, verses 24, 28 that he wants to visit Spain as an evangelist. Clement of Rome in his famous letter to the Corinthian church says that “Paul came to the extreme limit of the west.” And some people think that means that he did get as far as Gaul and to Spain. Although the extreme limit of the west to Clement could, of course, mean simply Italy and Rome itself. We don't know, but it's safe to assume that he did return to Ephesus, thence he went to Miletus, the port very close to Ephesus where he says in his second letter to Timothy, “He left Trophimus behind ill,” and he also went to Troas, the port for which he first sailed to Europe. And there it may be he was rearrested. That is, you may recall the verse in 2 Timothy 4:13 that he asked Timothy to come to him in Rome in his second imprisonment, and he invites him to bring with him the cloak that he left with Carpus at Troas, and also the books and the valuable parchments. And many commentators have begun to speculate “Why did Paul leave a cloak and books and parchments in the house of Carpus of Troas?” And a quite likely explanation is that it was in that very house that he was rearrested and that his arrest took him by surprise. He was unable to take his belongings with him, and he was bundled off and his journey to Rome for his second imprisonment began.

So that brings us to the next chapter, G. The Second Imprisonment. And he didn't escape from that imprisonment except by execution. The second letter to Timothy was written during this imprisonment. It was written from this dungeon, and it is in my judgment, the most moving document in the whole of the New Testament. By this time, the Neronian persecution had broken out. It's AD 64 by now. Paul urges Timothy to come before winter; that is, before the storms of winter would make navigation impossible and to come soon before it's too late.

Whether Timothy came in time, we don't know. Probably not. Paul was condemned to death, beheaded as a Roman citizen would have been beheaded on the Ostian Way, some three miles outside the city, and Eusebius tells us that Paul and Peter were martyred on the same occasion. Peter by being crucified upside down; Paul by being beheaded. And that is G.

And H. the last chapter, the only other reference to Timothy in the whole of the New Testament is at the end of the epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 23, where we read that Timothy himself, who has been a prisoner of some kind, is now released.

Well, there is a lot I know of the factual detail there, and I hope you'll look up those references, and I hope you'll get clear in your mind, as clear as you can, this biography of Timothy and his close involvement with the apostle Paul in all his missionary journeys.

Titus, we know really comparatively little about. He's not mentioned in the book of Acts at all. One tradition says he might have been Luke's brother, but there's no real evidence of that. In 2 Corinthians 8:23, Paul calls him “my partner and fellow worker.” We know he was present at the famous Jerusalem Counsel, which is described in Acts 15 and took place probably in AD 49, because according to Galatians 2:1, he came up to Jerusalem with Paul on that occasion, and Paul probably circumcised him as well, although he was not compelled to do so (Galatians 2:3).

Presumably, he was with Paul on the second missionary journey because he was sent on an errand to Corinth, and Timothy and Titus were bearers of different letters to Corinth. Timothy was the bearer of 1 Corinthians and Titus was the bearer of the lost epistle; that is, the third one, and of 2 Corinthians as well.

And thence Titus was put in charge of the famous collection. Paul was the great organizer of free-will offerings, if free-will offerings can be organized, and it was to Titus that Paul entrusted both the beginning and the completion of this work. His collection for the poor, poverty-stricken saints in Judea and Jerusalem, and Corinth was one of the chief contributors. So in 2 Corinthians 8:16,17, we read, “Thanks be to God who puts the same earnest care for you into the heart of Titus, for he not only accepted our appeal, but being himself very earnest, he's going to you of his own accord.” (Yet he is carrying 2 Corinthians.) “And with him we're sending another brother,” and so on. And he goes on to write about the collection.

Now we meet Titus again during the release from the first imprisonment, which I've already mentioned, and Paul left Titus in Crete as a kind of embryonic bishop to look after the churches on the island of Crete just as he left Timothy in Ephesus for a similar purpose. We're told during the second imprisonment that Titus went to Dalmatia (2 Timothy 4:10) on the east Adriatic coast, for there no reason for the visit is given and Eusebius says that Titus remained the bishop of Crete until he was an old man.

Well, so much for the historical background as quickly as seemed possible. Now we've got to plunge, secondly, into the question of the literary authenticity of these letters. Were they written, the two letters to Timothy and the one to Titus, were they written by Paul or not? Well the genuineness of the three pastoral epistles was almost universally accepted in the early church. Allusions to them occur possibly in the Corinthian letter of Clement of Rome to which I've already referred, and therefore be as early as AD 95, probably in the letters of bishop Ignatius and Polycarp during the first decades of the second century, but certainly there are allusions to them in the works of Iraneaus towards the end of the century.

The Muratorian Canon that is dated usually about AD 200 ascribes all three letters quite plainly to the apostle Paul. And the only exception to this universal testimony of the early church is the heretic Marcion who was excommunicated in Rome in the year AD 144, but Marcion had theological reasons for rejecting these and other New Testament letters, and Tertullian, who criticizes Marcion for himself criticizing the Scriptures with a pen knife (it's a rather delightful expression which lots of liberals and radicals are doing—cutting out of the New Testament what they don't like with the pen knife). So it's Tertullian who said that Marcion criticized the Scriptures with the pen knife and Tertullian, however, expressed surprise that Marcion had omitted the pastorals from his canon.

Eusebius in the fourth century included all three among what he called the fourteen epistles of Paul, which are manifest and clear as regards their genuineness. We believe there are only thirteen epistles and to Eusebius the fourteenth was the letter to the Hebrews, which Eusebius added “some rejected as not Pauline.”

Now this external witness to the genuineness of the pastoral epistles continued as an unbroken tradition in the Christian church until in the year 1807, Schleiermacher repudiated 1 Timothy. A few years later in 1835, F. C. Baur, one of the Tübingen critics, rejected 2 Timothy and Titus as well. And since then, scholars arrange themselves on each side of the debate and the pastorals have had powerful critics on the one hand and doubted champions on the other.

Now if you want an elaborate critique, the student should be referred to P. N. Harrison's book The Problem of the Pastorals, which was published in 1921. This, I suppose, is the ablest attack in modern years on the authenticity of the pastorals, and he sets out the evidence with great barrenness. If you want a careful defense of the traditional Pauline authorship, you could not do better than read either the commentary of William Hendriksen, published in this country, pages 4 to 33, or the commentary I'm recommending you to get and study, which is that by Donald Guthrie in the Tyndale commentaries, pages 12 to 52, and again pages 212 to 228. There is a very thorough defense of the Pauline authorship by Guthrie in those pages.

Now I here, I think can only sketch the issues very briefly for you. Now the right place to begin, although in my judgment too few critics begin here, the right place to begin is to recognize that in the first verse of each of the three letters the writer advances a clear, solemn, and unequivocal claim to be the apostle Paul. The first word of each of the three letters is the word “Paul.” And in the course of these letters, he goes on to refer to his former persecuting zeal (1 Timothy 1:12-17), to his conversion and commissioning as an apostle (1 Timothy 1:11; 2:7; and 2 Timothy 2:11), and to his sufferings for Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 1:12; 2 Timothy 2:9,10; 2 Timothy 3:10,11).

More than that, the personality of the apostle Paul, I myself believe and I've soaked myself in these letters for a number of years, the personality of the apostle Paul seems to me to permeate these letters. Bishop Handley Moule, who's written a delightful, rather devotional commentary on 2 Timothy says, “The human heart is in it everywhere and fabricators certainly of that age did not well understand the human heart.” Hence, even those who deny the Pauline authorship of these letters tend to believe that the writer has incorporated genuine Pauline fragments in his work. Well, that seems to me the place to begin, that they claim to be Pauline and there are Pauline references throughout them.

What then are the objections? Well, briefly there are four—historical, theological, literary, and ecclesiastical.

A. The Historical Objection. The first ground on which the Pauline authorship has been challenged is the whole historical background to the letters. It is argued by some that since these letters mentioned visits by Paul to Ephesus, to Macedonia, to Crete, to Nicopolis, to Troas, to Miletus, and to Rome, and I forebear to give you all of the references, but all of these are mentioned in the three letters, they cannot be reconciled with Luke's record in the book of Acts of the apostle's journeys, and there are not in the book of Acts references to any visits by the apostle Paul to these particular cities in the particular circumstances in which Paul describes them in the pastoral letters. And therefore the critics say, “These must be the fabrications of the author or at best, they are genuine visits to these cities which the author has ingeniously misplaced.

But, of course, to us there would be a very simple answer to this historical objection. That if the apostle was released from his Roman imprisonment, which is where Luke leaves him at the end of the book of Acts, and if he resumed his journeys for a couple of years, journeys which are not described in the book of Acts by Luke at all, and if he was subsequently imprisoned, rearrested and imprisoned, it is perfectly possible to reconstruct the order of events as I've tried to do a few minutes ago without any need to accuse the author of fiction or of remence. So we dispose of the historical argument.

B. Theological. There are some who claim that the God of the earlier Pauline letters, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the gospel of the earlier Pauline letters; that is, the grace, faith, salvation, good works syndrome, have become suddenly changed in the pastoral epistles and no longer ring true. That there is a different god and a different gospel. I don't believe it for a moment, and I don't accept this argument myself. There, to me, can be no doubt that the pastorals set forth the electing, redeeming initiative of God our Savior, who has given His Son to die as our ransom and to rise again and who now justifies us by His grace and regenerates us by His Spirit in order that we may live a new life of good works. And all those phrases I formed a kind of patchwork, if you like, of phrases that are taken out of these pastoral epistles. It is the same God and the same gospel.

Of course, there are those who urge of the prevalent heresy, which lies behind the pastoral epistles and to which the apostle refers on a number of occasions, it's denial of the resurrection, it's love of asceticism, it's so-called myths and genealogies. They argue this is the developed Gnosticism of the second century and perhaps it is a reference to Marcion himself. Now this was the argument of F. C. Baur at the beginning of the last century and if, of course, it could be proved that the author in the pastorals is referring to the developed Gnosticism of the second century and to Marcion, obviously they were not written by Paul himself because they were written long after Paul's death.

But this conjecture ignores the Jewish aspects of the heresy, which we shall notice as we look into the epistles. He calls them Jewish myths. He calls them fables about the law. We shall look at that in our second period today. So if they are not entirely the Greek speculations of the second century that have this Jewish flavor and there are evident similarities to the Colossian heresy, the heresy that lies behind the letter to the Colossians, to which the apostle has already addressed himself a year or two previously. So there is no need to read into the heresies that lie behind the pastoral epistles, some later developed system, so that the letters could not have been written by the apostle Paul.

That brings us C. to The Literary Argument, and P. N. Harrison divides it into four. One, that there are certain words peculiar to the pastoral epistles. Certain Greek words that are not found anywhere else in the New Testament. These are the so-called half axe legomena where to occur half axe once and for all and nowhere else in the New Testament, and some people have referred to this literary argument as the battle of the half axes.

P. N. Harrison lists as many as 175. Certainly two or three times more than any other Pauline letter. But if you look sometime at the lists he makes, a lot of them are very trivial words; in fact, the great majority are very trivial words indeed, but have no particular significance as being half axe legomena in the pastorals.

Secondly, he gives a list of words that are common to the pastorals, but absent from Paul's other ten letters. And P. N. Harrison lists 130, but then the letter to the Romans has 150 and that is commonly accepted as genuinely Pauline. Mentioned now because all these linguistic arguments are extremely precarious.

The third literary argument of Harrison is that the characteristic Pauline words that you find in the other ten letters that are absent from the pastorals. Harrison lists eighty of them, but they're not so distinctively Pauline, that their absence should be a subject of great astonishment. For example, if the word salvation or grace or faith or justification or hope have not occurred in the pastorals, then we might raise our eyebrows. But the distinctively Pauline—all those are in the pastorals­—the distinctively Pauline words that Harrison says are absent, and indeed are absent, are words that are not of such distinctively Pauline significance that their absence is noteworthy. Words like eleutheros (free), or ergansesthai (to work), or euangelisesthai (that is, to preach the gospel), or eucharistountes (to give thanks), or sochoristethai (to glory), or ouranos (heaven); pneumatikos (spiritual), sofia (wisdom), soma (body), psuche and huiós (son). These are Pauline words, but their absence, I say again, is not so very peculiar.

P. N. Harrison's fourth argument is differences of grammar and style, and he goes into such great syntactical peculiarities, that I think you must look them up yourself if you have any taste for grammar, which I haven't.

Now I would simply say that these arguments from style and vocabulary are extremely precarious. The total vocabulary of the pastoral epistles is less than two and half thousand words, much too small to be the basis of a literary judgment. And variations in subject matter and in circumstances, not to mention the passage of the years are quite sufficient to account for these differences in language and style. As E. K. Simpson justly observes in his commentary, “Great souls are not their own minds.” That is, they don't imitate themselves. They don't go on using the same thoughts and the same words. They are changing their vocabulary and their thoughts with the passage of the years.

D. is The Ecclesiastical Argument. And this is that the church structures, which are envisaged in the pastoral epistles are those of the second century AD, including, it is argued, the monocular episcopas, the structure of the church with a single bishop and a college of presbyters to which Bishop Ignatius of Antioch referred in his letters at the beginning of the second century. Now again, you will understand if it can be proved that the ecclesiastical structures envisaged in the pastorals are those of the second century, then Paul cannot have been the author of them.

Some critics go further and find the whole atmosphere of the pastorals much to churchy for the apostle Paul, and Kasemann, for example, a modern, fairly radical or certainly very liberal scholar in Germany, in his book translated into English, Jesus Means Freedom, quotes Martin Dibelius as having once said that the pastoral epistles mark the beginning of the bourgeois outlook in the church. And Kasemann adds that he cannot himself regard as Pauline letters in which the church has become “the central theme of theology.” “No,” Kasemann says, “the gospel is now domesticated and Paul's image is heavily daubed by church piety.” Well, I think Kasemann off his head, quite frankly. And I can only reply that it's an extremely subjective judgment. Again, I try to soak myself in the pastoral epistles, and I see nothing bourgeois about them and I don't find Paul's image heavily daubed by church piety. On the contrary, to me it is the same Paul who is intoxicated with Jesus Christ and with the gospel of Christ and although he writes about church and church life, he does so also in other epistles. Perhaps I need to remind you that Paul's earliest letters already give evidence of a high doctrine of the church and of the ministry of the church, and Luke tells us that it was Paul's policy to ordain elders in every church from his first missionary journey onwards. That's Acts 14:23.

So that Paul should have developed this a bit further in the pastoral epistles with instruction about the selection and the appointment of ministers, about the worship of the church, and the maintenance of doctrine, is entirely understandable. But the church and ministry that Paul describes in the pastorals are still recognizably the same, and there is no monocable episcopate in the pastoral epistles. There's no three-fold ministry yet of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, because as we shall see later bishops and presbyters are still the same office in the pastorals.

So then, and I realize this is a very sketchy account of the objections that have been raised to the authenticity of the letters, but the conclusion that I would give is that the arguments which have been advanced and still are to deny the Pauline authorship—historical, theological, literary, and ecclesiastical—are not sufficient to overthrow the evidence both external and internal, which authenticates them as genuine letters addressed by the apostle Paul to Timothy and Titus.

Well, now having looked at our first two introductory points, the historical background and the literary authenticity, we have a few minutes left in which to speak of the aim and occasion and to look at the first two verses of 1 Timothy.

Let's take the three letters very briefly and look at the major purpose of each.

1 Timothy. The major purpose of Paul's first letter to Timothy, whom he just left in Ephesus he says, you have your New Testament open, chapter 1, verse 3 is “I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, and as I urged you then, so now I repeat what I urged, remain at Ephesus, stay there. Your job isn't finished yet. And what are you to stay there for? Well you're to charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine nor to occupy themselves with myths and endless speculative genealogies, etc.”

So the main purpose of 1 Timothy is to urge Timothy to remain at his post and to counteract the false teachers whose false views were both doctrinal and ethical. They had false views about the law that we shall see in our second session this morning, and he urges Timothy to maintain sound doctrine and, in particular, to God what he called the deposit. Look at the last two verses of the whole letter. “O Timothy, guard the parathēkēn, the deposit, what has been entrusted to you.” That is, here is a certain body of doctrine that has been entrusted to Timothy by Paul. It is a deposit of sound doctrine, the faith, and Timothy is to guard it and to hold it firm against the false teachers in Ephesus.

Ethically the false teachers were teaching abstinence from foods, they were evidently vegetarians, and from marriage (4:3). They were extreme ascetics. So Paul tells Timothy to remain in Ephesus in order to counteract this false doctrinal and ethical teaching.

The next purpose of the letter is to give him instruction about the conduct of public worship (chapter 2) and the respective places of men and women in the church. He gives him instruction on the choice of men for the presbyterate and the diaconate (chapter 3), and the enrollment of widows, both for relief and for service in the Christian community. And he encourages Timothy to exercise his authority because Timothy is shy and diffident about doing so. There very briefly is the purpose of the 1 Timothy.

The purpose of the letter to Titus, not least because of the Cretan character about which the apostle Paul is very rude and in Titus 1:12, he quotes one of their own Cretan authors, that “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons.” And because of the national character of the Cretans over whom Titus has been given this quasi-Episcopal authority, Titus is to appoint elders, too, in the churches (chapter 1) and to silence the heretics, he is to teach sound doctrine and ethics (chapter 2 and 3). Very similar purposes as in 1 Timothy.

Now in 2 Timothy, the last pastoral epistle written from his dungeon in Rome, Paul's preoccupation is with the gospel. He knows that he's not going to escape except by death and the execution is steel, and his preoccupation is what is going to happen to the gospel when he's dead. So he summons Timothy to guard the gospel, not to be ashamed of it, to be willing to suffer for it, to hold it fast in spite of the widespread apostasy and heresy, and to hand it on to faithful men like the Olympic torch who will be able to hand it on to others also.

Now I've only left myself a couple of minutes for the first two verses before we break. I just want us to look at 1 Timothy 1:1, 2, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus, our hope, to Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace mercy, and peace.” Three assertions that have got to underlie our whole study of the epistle about its author, its recipient, and its message.

Its author is the apostle Paul. Its recipient is Timothy, Paul's true and genuine child in the faith, and its message concerns all the grace, mercy, and peace which are needed for Christian life and ministry and are freely available in God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

I won't say any more about the authorship except to comment for a moment on the title, “An apostle by command of God our Savior.” Paul claims for himself the very title that Jesus gave to the twelve as recorded in Luke 6:12,13. He so named them apostles. And Paul claims that title for himself. And he says that he exercises his apostleship not by his own appointment nor by commission from the church, but by command of God our Savior and katéchō pagene, that phrase “according to the command of God” was used in those days on official notices as we see them about the campus and elsewhere “by order of.” It indicated the official authority with which people did things and it suggests as Locke says in the International Critical Commentary, it suggests “a royal command, which must be obeyed.”