Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters

1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus

N. T. Wright

• Editore: Westminster John Knox Press
• Anno: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781611640441
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Biblical Commentary

Enlarged print edition now available! Writing in an approachable and anecdotal style, Tom Wright helps us to see the pastoral nature of these letters. Paul is anxious to see that those who profess the faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, right down to the deepest part of their personality, and is concerned that every teacher of the faith should know how to build up the community in mutual support, rather than tearing it apart through the wrong sort of teaching and behavior.

Tom Wright has undertaken a tremendous task: to provide guides to all the books of the New Testament, and to include in them his own translation of the entire text. Each short passage is followed by a highly readable discussion with background information, useful explanations and suggestions, and thoughts as to how the text can be relevant to our lives today. A glossary is included at the back of the book. The series is suitable for group study, personal study, or daily devotions.

1 TIMOTHY

1 TIMOTHY 1.1–7

True Teaching about the Truth

¹Paul, an apostle of King Jesus according to the command of God our saviour and King Jesus our hope, ²to Timothy, my true child in faith: grace, mercy and peace from God the father and King Jesus our lord.

³This is my charge to you, just as it was when I went to Macedonia: stay in Ephesus, so that you can tell the relevant people not to teach anything different, ⁴or to cling on to myths and endless genealogies. That sort of thing breeds disputes rather than the instruction in faith that comes from God. ⁵What we aim at in our teaching is the love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience and sincere faith. ⁶Some people have wandered off from these things and turned aside to foolish talk. ⁷They want to be teachers of the law; but they don’t understand either what they’re talking about or the things about which they pronounce so confidently.

I remember with considerable embarrassment one of the very first sermons I ever preached.

In my mind’s eye I could see it so well. I knew – or thought I knew – what I wanted to say. But when I sat down to put it together, to write it out and see how it would go, it all somehow ran away from me. I remember going to one of the biblical passages that was to be read in the service and discovering to my horror that, on closer inspection, it was a lot more complicated than I had thought when I had first glanced at it. I remember trying to work in all sorts of points that I’d only just come across, and had not really thought through. And I remember my mind and imagination jumping to and fro between the mental image I had of what a great preacher ought to sound like, the texts in front of me on the desk, and the ideas, jottings and illustrations in my notebook.

Fortunately, I don’t have a clear memory of how the sermon went on the day. I suspect there is a good reason for that. By the time I stood up in the pulpit, I no longer knew what the sermon was aiming at. I knew plenty of things I wanted to say, and plenty that I thought the congregation needed to hear, but I couldn’t have told you then, and I can’t tell you now, what I wanted the sermon to achieve. I was in the state described in the classic story of the seminarian submitting a draft sermon to the college principal. He sat anxiously while the great man read it through.

‘Will it do?’ asked the student.

‘Do what?’ replied the principal.

So when I read what Paul is saying to Timothy about different types of teaching, I know from the inside, as it were, at least part of what he’s guarding against. He has in mind two basic types of teaching. One goes round and round in circles, picking up interesting ideas and theories and playing with them endlessly – though not necessarily having a very detailed understanding of what such things might really be all about. The other has a clear aim, cuts out anything that gets in the way of it, and goes straight to the point.

A good deal in this letter, and in 2 Timothy and Titus as well, is concerned with these two types of teaching, and we shall see Paul come back to the point from several different angles. The three letters, taken together, are usually called ‘the Pastoral Letters’, partly because Paul is acting as a pastor to Timothy and Titus, and partly because he is writing to instruct them in their own pastoral ministries and in the ministries that they are to establish in their various congregations. But they might equally well be called ‘the Teacher’s Manual’, because so much of what they contain is about the kind of teaching that Christian leaders should be giving – and, just as much, the kind they shouldn’t.

Before we go any further, though, are we really sure these letters were written by Paul himself? Everybody in the early church seems to have taken it for granted that they were. But in the last two hundred years many writers have pointed out several ways in which the letters sound and feel significantly different to the main letters (Romans, Galatians and so on) which we know to have come from Paul himself. Some now regard the question as settled: Paul, they say, couldn’t possibly have written them. Others see it as still open. Some still insist that they must have been written by Paul. There are, after all, some very personal details which it would be strange for anyone else to have made up.

It’s a complicated matter, and this kind of book isn’t the place to go into it in any detail. But we do need to remind ourselves that when these letters were written – that is, some time between about 50 and 100 AD – it was quite common for someone to write in someone else’s name. This didn’t necessarily mean they were (as we would say now) committing forgery. They might be genuinely following through the thought of the person whose name they were using, and applying it to a new situation. I don’t think this is a full explanation of the facts in this case, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

Equally, we should remember that Paul himself is an example, even in the letters everybody agrees really do come from him, of how the same person can write in very different styles from one situation to another. A good example is his two letters to Corinth. They are so different in style and tone that if they were the only pieces of his work we possessed we might well imagine that he could only have written one of them, and that someone else must have written the other. But it’s certain that he wrote both. The difference between the Paul of Romans and the Paul of the Pastorals is not much greater than the difference between the Paul of 1 Corinthians and the Paul of 2 Corinthians. For the purposes of this book I’m going to leave the question open, but will continue referring to the author as ‘Paul’ for the sake of ease.

One of the things we can be quite sure of is that the ‘Paul’ of these letters is every bit as keen on teaching the truth as the ‘Paul’ of Romans and the rest. And we have here a crisp, clear statement of what that teaching aims at: not just the conveying of information, but a whole way of life, summed up in verse 5 under three headings: genuine love, good conscience and sincere faith.

Underneath these we can detect two concerns which run through these letters. First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart. We know even today, with two thousand years of history, how easily things can seem to fall apart. How much more fragile must the little churches have seemed in those early days, with tiny communities facing huge problems.

But, as the opening greeting insists, they do not face those problems alone. Paul’s apostleship is rooted in God’s command to him, and he assures Timothy of God’s grace, mercy and peace. The God he invokes is the ‘saviour’ – a title often used in the first century for the Roman emperor, the Caesar of the day; and the Jesus he follows as his hope is the King, the Messiah, the world’s true Lord. Once we get that straight, there should be no need for teachers to go round and round in circles, fussing about strange old stories or ‘endless genealogies’, as some of the Jewish teachers of the day seem to have done. There is no point, either (verses 6 and 7), in people trying to teach the Jewish law to Christian congregations without really understanding, as Paul certainly did, what it actually is and how it would need to be applied. No: the teaching of the gospel itself, and of the way of life which flows from it, must not be a muddled, rambling thing, going this way and that over all kinds of complex issues. It must go straight to the point and make it clearly, so that the young Christians who so badly need building up in their faith may learn the deep, rich, basic elements because of which genuine Christianity stands out from the world around it, rather than hiding its life inside a thick outer casing of complex and impenetrable ideas.

1 TIMOTHY 1.8–11

The Purpose of the Law

⁸We know, after all, that the law is good – if someone uses it lawfully! ⁹We recognize that the law is not laid down for people who are in the right, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinners, the unholy and worldly, for people who kill their father or mother, for murderers, ¹⁰fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and those who practise any other behaviour contrary to healthy teaching, ¹¹in accordance with the gospel of the glory of God the blessed one that was entrusted to me.

We stood by the stream, looking across to the other side of the valley. It was a perfect spring day: gentle breeze, high cloud, bright sunshine, the hills around us at their best. Somewhere in the distance we could hear a sheep calling to its lamb.

‘We’ve never been across there,’ said my companion. ‘All the times we’ve walked up here, not once have we taken the southern route and seen the view from those hills.’

He knew as well as I did why we hadn’t been that way. We got the map out once more and looked at it. A mile or so to the south of us there were small block capitals in red ink. DANGER AREA, it said. The message was repeated every half mile or so. Some way to the south there was an army camp. The whole area was used as a practice ground for military manoeuvres. The frustrating thing that day was that we’d been up in the hills for hours and hadn’t heard any gunfire. The chances were that the soldiers had other things to do just then. We could probably have walked across the whole terrain and been completely safe. But when the map says DANGER there is really no sense in even thinking about it. We looked wistfully at the unexplored hills, and set off north for one of our old familiar walks.

Now imagine for a moment that you had a map which only marked danger. Supposing the only words on the whole area covered by the map were signs, not only of army firing ranges, but of sheer cliffs you might fall off, dangerous intersections where road accidents might occur, bridges that looked safe but might collapse if you tried to cross them, and so on. Suppose there were no other words or symbols – nothing to tell you the name of the towns and villages, no signs of where there were good views, picnic spots, pretty paths beside the rivers, places where you could get a meal or a drink or a bed for the night. It would be a depressing sort of map, wouldn’t it? It might make you want to stay at home and never venture out of doors. It reminds me of that teasing line in Proverbs (26.13): when someone says ‘There’s a lion in the street!’, they may be telling the truth, but they may simply be looking for an excuse not to go to work that day.

The main point of the present passage is that the Jewish law is like a map which only marks danger. Paul, having left Timothy in charge of the church in Ephesus, was aware that there were some teachers there who were very keen on the Jewish law. It was regarded, after all, as the basis not only of personal morality but of the whole Jewish way of life. Perhaps, as he suggests in the previous passage, some of the Jewish Christians in Ephesus were making the law central to their development of Christian teaching. And that, he says, is like sending people off for a walk in the country when all that the map tells them is where they should not go.

For such a purpose, he says, the law is very useful. That, in fact, is what it’s there for; using it like that is the appropriate thing to do, the ‘lawful’ way of handling it (verse 8). If you want to know what not to do, the Jewish law will give you an outline, marking several types of attitude and behaviour with the word DANGER, or perhaps ‘No Road This Way’. It won’t tell you what you should do; by itself, it won’t encourage you to think through and live out the attractive, outgoing life of love and service which was, for Paul, what being a Christian was all about. So, somewhat contemptuously we may feel, he lists the people for whom the teaching of the law ought to be useful: people who are always wandering off into danger areas, who seem bent on going too near the edge of moral cliffs or trying to cross bridges that will crumble underneath them and send them crashing into the river below. The implication throughout is: well, if they want to teach the law, that’s fine, but it presumes that their hearers are people of this sort – whereas, if they are working in a Christian community, their hearers ought not to be people of that sort!

He clearly has in mind not just the Jewish law in the sense of the first five books of the Bible (that’s one meaning ‘the law’ could have at the time), but more specifically the Ten Commandments which we find in Exodus 20.1–17. We mightn’t have noticed this with the first words in the list in verses 9 and 10 – lawless, disobedient, godless, sinners, unholy, worldly – but it becomes clear in what follows. The fifth commandment deals with the respect due to parents, the sixth with murder, the seventh with adultery, the eighth with stealing, the ninth with giving false evidence, and the tenth – often regarded as a kind of catch-all at the end of the list – with covetousness. From near the end of verse 9 and through verse 10 Paul seems to have these six commandments in mind, and is expanding their range a bit: the extreme opposite of honouring parents is killing them, the commandment against adultery should be taken to include all kinds of non-married sexual activity, the most dramatic example of stealing is when you steal an actual human being to sell as a slave. Paul, too, adds a catch-all at the end of his list: ‘any other behaviour which is against healthy teaching’. The fact that he’s following the commandments quite closely here implies that we should see those earlier terms, beginning with ‘lawless’, as a way of describing people who break the first three commandments at least – putting God first, not making idols, not taking God’s name in vain. (The fourth commandment, about keeping the sabbath, was controversial in early Christianity, as Romans 14 makes clear; but that’s a topic for another occasion.)

The point of it all seems to be, not so much to list various types of bad behaviour for their own sake, but to say: the law is fine, if you want a map of where all the dangers lie. There are indeed dangerous types of behaviour out there, and the gospel message of Jesus, through which God’s glory is truly revealed (verse 11), is just as much opposed to them as the Jewish law is. But don’t imagine that by teaching the Jewish law you will do more than put up some more signposts warning people about these dangers. What’s far more important is to explore the gospel itself, the message which was entrusted to Paul and the other apostles. When the law was given in the first place, God also revealed his glory to Moses (Exodus 32–34), despite the fact that the people had already broken the law. Here, as in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4, Paul declares that, however good the law is, it is the gospel, not the law, which reveals God’s glory.

1 TIMOTHY 1.12–17

Paul as an Example of God’s Saving Grace

¹²I thank King Jesus our Lord, who gave me strength. He regarded me as trustworthy by appointing me to his service – ¹³even though I used to say blasphemous things against him, and persecuted his people violently! But I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn’t know what I was doing. ¹⁴And the grace of our Lord was more than enough for me, with the faith and love that are in King Jesus. ¹⁵Here is a word you can trust, which deserves total approval: ‘King Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ – and I’m the worst of them! ¹⁶But this was why I received mercy: so that in me, precisely as the worst, King Jesus could demonstrate the full scale of his patience, and make me a pattern for those who were going to believe in him and so attain the life of the age to come. ¹⁷To the King of the ages, the one and only God, immortal and invisible, be honour and glory to the ages of ages, Amen!

When I was a boy, television was in its infancy. There was only one channel, and there wasn’t very much to watch on it. But, when I graduated off the programmes for little children (Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men), there was one regular serial that stands out in my mind: The Lone Ranger. I didn’t know then what I know now, that the story of the one Texas ranger left alive after the death of colleagues and family fitted into a pattern of American stories which were shaped by, and then shaped in turn, the way many Americans saw the world. Like a lot of young boys, I was excited by the exploits of this quiet, understated hero.

The Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver, became almost as famous as the man himself. Silver shared his master’s exploits, and seemed to understand exactly what he was doing and where he needed help. But when we firs...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication Page
• Introduction
• 1 Timothy
• 2 Timothy
• Titus
• Glossary