1 & 2 Timothy and Titus

A Theological Commentary on the Bible

Thomas G. Long

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611646467
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Thomas G. Long's insightful commentary on the Pastoral Epistles argues that these often-neglected letters are urgently important for readers today. Some of the issues faced by New Testament churches are ours as well: the lure and peril of "spirituality" for Christians, the character of authentic worship, the qualities needed for sound leadership, and the relationship between family life and the church. Long's interpretations of these books consider contemporary exegetical and theological outlooks and are presented through his seasoned homiletical and pastoral perspectives. Pastors will be strengthened by Long's view that the Pastoral Epistles can refresh our memory about what really counts in the Christian community and how important trustworthy leaders are.

1 TIMOTHY

1 Timothy 1:1–20

1:1–2

Signing On

1 Timothy is an epistle—a letter—and the author, following the letter-writing rules in play in his own day, signs the letter in the very first line: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our savior and of Christ Jesus our hope” (1:1). In most ages and cultures, letters are patterned according to certain conventions—the address goes here, the signature goes there—and writers of letters typically follow the characteristic literary pattern in vogue. Even if they are surging with urgent emotion or simply eager to get down to the practical business at hand, they do not start writing abruptly and just let the words flow. They follow the accepted style for letters and shape what they write according to the conventional genre—first this element, then that, then the other.

These rules change from culture to culture, of course, but in the Greco-Roman world, the environment out of which 1 Timothy came, the accepted form called for a letter to begin with the signature, with the name and identity of the sender. Today, of course, we typically place the signature at the end of a letter: “Sincerely, Elizabeth;” “As always, Bill;” “With gratitude for your loyalty, Superior Car Rental.” But in the Greco-Roman world, letters opened more like our office memos¹—From: Margaret Hogue, To: Jonathan Darnell—and the recipient knew up front who was sending the missive. First Timothy is no exception.

Two aspects of this opening signature are important. First, a signature at the beginning of a letter has a slightly different function than a signature at the end. When someone today signs a letter at the end, “Cordially, Steve,” this closing signature serves as a kind of summary, drawing the strands of the letter together with a final cinch. It is Steve’s way of saying, “Whatever I wrote above, I hope to leave you here at the end on an amiable note. Regardless of how you may have received the words of this letter, whether gentle or harsh, confrontational or comforting, I want you to know that the last word is one of cordiality.” But when the signature comes at the beginning of the letter, it does not sum things up; it gets things going. It aims the letter by giving the reader a hint of what is coming, a clue to the letter’s agenda.

If a friend were to write a letter that began, unconventionally, “This is from Eleanor, your grief-stricken, heartbroken friend,” this opening identification would shape our expectation that every word to follow would be coming from Eleanor’s friendship and from the deep sorrows of her heart. Just so, when 1 Timothy begins, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our savior and of Christ Jesus our hope,” the writer is not just signing his name but setting the compass heading for how we should read what follows.

We find the same aiming feature in the signatures at the beginning of the other Pauline letters in the New Testament. For example, the Letter to the Philippians has a major accent on humility, so it begins with a suitably humble signature, “Paul and Timothy, servants (slaves) of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:1). By contrast, the more feisty Letter to the Galatians, written on the defensive because Paul’s authority and message have been challenged by adversaries, opens with a plucky signature that already has its fists up, “Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father. …” (Gal. 1:1). In Romans, a letter consumed with the question of the nature of the gospel, Paul opens by signing his name. Then, instead of saying something simple like “an apostle” or “a slave of Jesus Christ,” Paul identifies himself by means of a long and complex series of clauses that, in English translation, ramble for over a hundred words:

… a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, … (Rom. 1:1–6)

In other words, here in the Letter to the Romans, Paul identifies himself as connected to almost the whole sweep of biblical history, from the legacy of David to the incarnation of Christ to the resurrection to the mission to the Gentiles.² Taken as a whole, it signals to the readers of Romans that this is not just plain old Paul writing, but the Paul who has his whole identity bound up in the full arc of God’s salvation story and that everything in the letter should be read in this light. In sum, then, New Testament letter writers do not simply sign their letters with their names but with clues to the readers—aiming, anticipating, and framing what follows.

Second, the signature of a letter not only aims at what follows, it also puts the identity of the writer on the line. Letter writers have always known that signing their letters is an act of commitment and sometimes an act of courage. It constitutes at least a mild statement, “This is who I am, and this is where I stand.” Indeed, not to sign a letter, to send it anonymously, is more often than not an act of hiding, deception, and cowardice.

The awareness that one’s identity is at stake in a letter often prompts the writers of letters to sign their letters with more than just their bare names. Sometimes we add titles—“John Wilcox, President of the Elmwood PTA,” which indicates that Wilcox is not writing generically but out of his role as a PTA officer. Often we add indicators of relationship, such as “Gratefully, Patricia,” which signals to the reader that, of all the possible Patricias—the sad Patricia, the angry one, the affectionate Patricia, the shy Patricia, the forgetful Patricia who cannot remember where she left her glasses—this letter is coming from the Patricia filled with gratitude. The same person may sign some letters, “Barbara J. Kensington, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Oxbridge College,” and other letters, “Love, Barb,” depending on which facets of one’s identity are being put forward. We even have subtle relational codes built into the signature: “Sincerely, Mark” is somewhat reserved and formal; “Cordially, Mark” conveys a shade more warmth; “Fondly, Mark” a touch of intimacy; and “Love, Mark” a full embrace.

So, given the fact that signatures on letters both aim the letter and reveal the identity of the writer, what does it signal when the author of 1 Timothy begins his letter, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our savior and of Christ Jesus our hope”? We can get at these questions by parsing the various components of this signature:

Paul—As we noted in the introduction, although some New Testament scholars think that 1 Timothy was written by the actual apostle Paul, and probably near the end of his life, most scholars take a different position. They see this letter as written by an unknown author and as coming from late in the first century, probably after Paul was dead (which is the position taken in this commentary). So this is the signature not of the historical Paul the apostle but a literary “Paul.”

If someone other than the apostle wrote this letter, what, then, can it mean that it is boldly signed “Paul”? One possibility, of course, is that it is a kind of forgery, a form of identity theft, that someone eager to advance his own views in the church simply wrapped himself in Paul’s name and reputation to make his opinions more authoritative. But such an outright deception seems highly unlikely. Private letters in the ancient world did not arrive unannounced in the mailbox, delivered by an anonymous postal worker. They were usually carried personally by travelers, couriers, and trusted companions of the writers. They were written, delivered, and read amid a web of relationships. Moreover, if Paul was dead when this letter was written, surely the recipients (Timothy or whoever else was to read this letter) would almost certainly have known this and hardly been fooled by a letter signed “Paul.”

Some have suggested that 1 Timothy was written by a close disciple of Paul, a student of Paul’s ideas, and to sign the letter with Paul’s name was a way of saying, “This is written in the spirit of Paul.” This would place 1 Timothy in the category of the “pseudonymous letter,” a common form of letter writing in the ancient world in which a writer would assume the mantle of a respected figure, and it certainly seems closer to the truth than the idea of forgery. But if the first readers knew that this was a pseudonymous letter, one that came from a disciple of Paul and not Paul, the inclusion of biographical material and personal detail applicable only to the “real” Paul seems curious. Ideas can be “in the spirit of,” but to describe details about his call to preach and his call to be an apostle (2:7) and to announce the fact that he is about to arrive for a visit (4:13) has a more embodied and personal character than might be expected in a strictly pseudonymous letter.

Still others have proposed that 1 Timothy was written as a forgery and passed off to its first recipients as an old letter from Paul that was lost and only recently discovered. But this smacks more of contemporary sensibilities—we historically aware moderns are the ones who excavate “lost” texts—than of a likely first-century scenario.

The most likely possibility about authorship of 1 Timothy is that the writer of this letter was, as we have assumed, not the historical apostle Paul and also that the original readers of this letter almost surely knew that, but that the letter was to be received as if it were from Paul himself—the full, embodied Paul, present and speaking its words. In the Greco-Roman world, it was not uncommon for someone to write a letter in the voice of a past “hero” and to include in the letter specific personal details and even mundane references, in order to give the letter the feel of an actual letter from the hero.³ A strong possibility, then, is that the community that received 1 Timothy (and 2 Timothy as well) revered the memory of the apostle Paul and wondered, now that they were facing new challenges and problems, “What would Paul have said about these things?” Seen this way, 1 Timothy was a letter written in Paul’s voice to answer this question.

It is well-known that letters convey the quality of presence. As is not the case with other forms of literature—declarations, novels, proverbs, essays, or even e-mails—a letter makes the writer almost palpable to the reader. To open the envelope, to physically unfold the pages once folded by the writer, to run a finger across the signature in the writer’s very hand, to be greeted by name, and to find oneself personally addressed by the letter’s conversational language, is to be gathered up into a rare combination of presence and absence unique to the letter form.

The 2012 academy-award-winning film Lincoln centered on a critical moment in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln: the negotiations and political maneuverings around the passage of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery. Viewers of the movie watched as Lincoln, portrayed in the winter of 1865, discussed, argued, cajoled, and joked with his cabinet and members of Congress about such matters as “bipartisanship” in Congress, “racial equality,” and “peace talks” with the Confederate rebels. Not lost on the audience was the fact that “bipartisanship,” “racial equality,” and “peace talks” were issues very much in the news in 2012. (In fact, those phrases are anachronisms in the movie: no one spoke exactly that way in 1865. The movie had its eye as much on the present as on the past.⁴) The result was that the film was not merely a historical narrative but was also a vehicle that allowed the most revered American president of the past to speak wis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Series Introduction by William C. Placher and Amy Plantinga Pauw
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why the Pastoral Epistles? Why Now?
• 1 Timothy
• 2 Timothy
• Titus
• Final Thoughts
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects