Part II, Week 7 - Chapter 19 - The Letters to Timothy & Titus -

I seem to have overdosed on Paul in the last three months. The problem, in my view, is that having dealt with the Gospels (pretty thoroughly) in the first term, it is Paul’s 13 letters which form the bulk of the superstructure of the “post-Gospel” New Testament. Since most of these are allocated one chapter in de Silva’s text, we have been reading Paul, and reading more of Paul, and reading still more of Paul since then. Of course, the fact that I’m doing my paper on a Pauline topic means that I’m reading even more which is focused on Paul outside of our class lectures and text. It’s fascinating – Paul is a riveting, larger-than-life character who jumps out of the New Testament as a very three-dimensional figure, and I had previously read, like, zippo about his theology and work in establishing the new church. Still, the discussion is starting to seem a bit repetitious.

These are three letters, which for several hundred years have been called “The Pastoral Epistles,” which claim to be from Paul to his companions and co-workers Timothy (1 and 2 Timothy) and Titus, at a time when Timothy had been left in charge of the church in Ephesus and Titus in charge of the churches on the island of Cypress. It is noteworthy that the Pastoral Letters did not appear in some of the earliest collections of Paul’s letters, such as that of Marcion, the 2nd. Century “Roman heretic.” Marcion, I believe, was especially antagonistic toward the Jews and was a proponent of Gnosticism in the Christian church, a battle which was ultimately lost, of course. (Marcion gave pride of place to Galatians, the letter which may be said to contain Paul’s most vehement attacks on Judaizers.) Perhaps that provides some explanation for why he may not have included the gentle Pastoral epistles in his collection of Paul’s letters.

Despite the omission from Marcion’s collection, the Pastoral Letters appeared by reference fairly early. Paraphrases of sayings in the letters to Timothy appear in the letter that Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the Philippians before 112-113 A.D. De Silva notes that they were accepted as Pauline by Irenaeus and Tertullian, as well as Eusebius in the early fourth century. De Silva concludes that if they were actually post-Pauline, they must have been composed closer to the time of Paul’s death than at the turn of the First Century.

The other books I have been reading include The First Paul by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, “The Pastoral Epistles,” by Arland J. Hultgren in The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D.G. Dunn, and The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, by Calvin J. Roetzel. Most of the other sources I have read – including the foregoing but also others since commencing our course last Fall – seem to treat the Pastoral Epistles as almost certainly “post-Pauline,” in the sense of not having actually been penned by Paul during his lifetime. Putting de Silva’s consideration of the Pastorals in that context, it appears that he has taken the most “expansive” interpretation (or narrow, depending on one’s point of view). While considering the arguments on both sides of the issue, he seems to fall in the end on the side of legitimacy, both in the sense of having written by Paul himself and in the sense of being authoritative scripture. I think his view can be fairly summarized as follows: given that they were included in the canon from a fairly early date, and given the fact that the arguments against legitimacy are not conclusive, one should accept them as the church fathers have for centuries, as inspired works of scripture. De Silva even goes so far as to say that if some new, genuine letters of Paul were by some chance discovered, they would not therefore automatically become authoritative scripture.

Here are my thoughts in a nutshell – Voltaire once said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” I think, for the infant church, “If Paul did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.” Furthermore, I think that also applies to the Pastoral Epistles, given their importance in the establishment of the earliest offices of the church, their earnest exhortations and gentle remonstrances which provided wise counsel to the early overseers, elders and bishops who followed Timothy and Titus and their proclamation of respectable moral codes, which have even been referred to as “bourgeois.” They do not preach the revolutionary message of Jesus – “The Kingdom of God is at hand!” They do not even preach the radical message of Paul, as in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.” (Gal. 3:28) But they do preach a message of upright living, with purity and restraint, a moral code which was designed at least in part to deflect as much as possible the hostility of non-Christian society and power structure. They are important for pastors even now, facing somewhat different challenges, and this argues powerfully for their continued inclusion in the canon.