Among the sundry problems addressed by the author of 1 Timothy is the role of women in the church. In a strident passage the author indicates that women are to be submissive and not to exercise any authority over a man, for example, through teaching. They, instead, are “to keep silent.” This, for the author, is how things simply ought to be, as seen from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, when the first man, Adam, was deceived by his wife, Eve, and ate the forbidden fruit. It was all the woman’s fault. But she, the woman, can still be saved, assures the author, by “bearing children” (2:11–15). In other words, women are to be silent, submissive, and pregnant.
Even though 2 Timothy is addressed to the same person, it is written to a different situation. In this case Paul is allegedly writing from prison in Rome (we’re never told where 1 Timothy was written); he has been put on trial and is expecting a second trial soon in which he will be condemned to death. He writes Timothy to encourage him in his ongoing pastoral duties and his rooting out of the false teachers who have infiltrated the church. “Paul” expresses a good deal of love and concern for Timothy in this letter; it is far and away the most personalized of the Pastorals. And he hopes that Timothy will be able to join him in Rome soon, bringing some of his personal possessions.
The book of Titus sounds very much like the book of 1 Timothy, almost as if it is a Reader’s Digest version of the longer letter. But it is addressed by Paul to Titus, a different companion, who is allegedly the pastor of the church on the island of Crete. Paul writes to have his representative correct those who are delivering false teachings, which again involve “genealogies” and “mythologies.” He also gives instructions to various groups within the church: older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and slaves.
The First Scholarly Suspicions About the Letters
These three letters are particularly significant for our discussion, because they were the first books of Paul that, in the history of modern scholarship, were extensively argued to be forgeries. The big moment came in 1807 with the publication of a letter by the German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was one of the most important Christian theologians of the nineteenth century. He was famous for defending the Christian faith against its “cultured despisers” and for developing distinct theological views that influenced theologians well into the twentieth century. There are still scholars today who specialize in studying the works and teaching of Schleiermacher. Among his many writings is an open letter sent to a pastor in 1807 in which he tried to demonstrate that 1 Timothy was not written by Paul.
Schleiermacher argued that 1 Timothy used words and developed ideas that were at odds with those in the other letters of Paul, including 2 Timothy and Titus. Moreover the false teachings attacked in the letter do not sound like anything we know about from Paul’s day. Instead, they sound like heresies of the second century generally called “Gnostic.”
Like Marcion, Gnostic Christians maintained that this world is not the creation of the one true God. But unlike Marcion, Gnostics did not believe there were just two Gods. They maintained that there were many divine beings in the divine realm that had all come into existence at some point in eternity past, and that this world was created when one of the divine beings fell from the divine realm and came to be entrapped in this miserable world of matter.9 The Gnostic religions taught that some of us have a spark of the divine trapped in our bodies. Salvation will come to the spark only when it learns the truth of where it came from and who it really is. In other words, the inner element of the divine within us needs to acquire the true and secret “knowledge” that can set it free. In Greek, the word for “knowledge” is gnosis, and so this kind of religion is called Gnosticism. According to Gnostic Christians, Christ brings salvation by providing the secret knowledge, not, for example, by dying on the cross. And since the goal of salvation was to escape the trappings of the human body, many Gnostics were rigidly ascetic, urging their followers to treat the body severely, for example, in what was eaten and in avoiding the pleasures of sex.
Schleiermacher argued that the “myths and genealogies” opposed in 1 Timothy sound like the mythologies propounded by these later, second-century Gnostics. In connection with the other problems of the book, such as the non-Pauline vocabulary, this shows that it was a later production, forged in the name of Paul. Soon after Schleiermacher wrote his open letter-essay, other scholars came forward arguing not only that he was right about 1 Timothy, but also that the other two pastoral letters were written by the same person. All three were forged.
Current Scholarship: Are the Letters Forged?
An incredible amount of scholarship has been devoted to the pastoral letters just in the past thirty or forty years, two centuries removed from Schleiermacher. Much of it is tedious to normal human beings, but fascinating to those of us who are abnormal scholars. I can’t summarize it all here. Instead, I simply give a few reasons for thinking that all three letters were written by the same person, and that this person was not Paul.10
I should admit at the outset that some recent scholars have argued strenuously that 2 Timothy is so different from the other books that it should be considered separately, as by a different author from the others, possibly Paul himself.11 For about a year or so before I started writing this book, I myself began to be increasingly inclined to take this view. But then I did some further serious research on the matter and am now thoroughly persuaded that whoever wrote 1 Timothy must have written 2 Timothy. The reason is that they share way too many verbal connections and similarities for these to be accidental. Just consider how they begin:
1 Timothy: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus…to Timothy…grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”
2 Timothy: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus…to Timothy…grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”
They are virtually the same. And even more important, there is no other letter of Paul that begins this way. Either these are by the same author, or one author is copying the writing of another. But there are reasons for thinking it is not the work of a copyist. For one thing, there are tons of verbal agreements of a similar sort. Both letters have words and phrases in common not found in any of the other letters attributed to Paul: the “promise of life” “with a pure conscience” “from a pure heart” “guard the deposit (of faith)” Paul is an “apostle, herald, and teacher.” And on and on and on. What is striking is not only that these phrases and many others like them are found in these two letters, but that they are found only in these two letters.
That’s why one of the letters isn’t being written by a copyist using the other as his model. To do so would have required the copyist not only to know which words and phrases were important in the first letter, but also which of these words and phrases were, simultaneously, ones that Paul himself never used. I suppose it is theoretically possible that a very astute student of Paul in the first century read through all of Paul’s letters, made a list of words that occurred in them, then read 1 Timothy, made a list of important words there, compared the two lists, and decided to write another letter to Timothy using lots of words and phrases that occurred in the second list, but not the first. But it really stretches the imagination. It is much easier to believe that whoever wrote the one letter had his favorite terms and used them in the other letter as well. It’s just that those terms were not terms used by Paul.12
That is one of the reasons scholars from the nineteenth century on have been convinced that Paul did not write the letters. The vocabulary and the writing style are very different from those of the other Pauline letters. In 1921 the British scholar A. N. Harrison wrote an important study of the pastoral letters in which he gave numerous statistics about the word usage in these writings. One of his most cited set of numbers is that there are 848 different words used in the pastoral letters. Of that number 306—over one-third of them!—do not occur in any of the other Pauline letters of the New Testam
ent. That’s an inordinately high number; especially given the fact that about two-thirds of these 306 words are used by Christian authors living in the second century. That suggests that this author is using a vocabulary that was becoming more common after the days of Paul, and that he too therefore lived after Paul.13
A number of scholars have called Harrison’s use of statistics into question, since, as we all know, you can make statistics say just about anything you want them to say. But the arguments over word usage have gotten increasingly refined over the ninety years since he wrote, and in almost every study done, it is clear that the word usage of the Pastorals is different from that in Paul’s other letters.14 At the same time, probably not too much stock should be placed in mere numbers. Everyone, after all, uses different words on different occasions, and most of us have a much richer stock of vocabulary than shows up in any given letter or set of letters we write.
The problem is that a large number of factors all seem to point in the same direction, showing that this author is not Paul. For one thing, sometimes this author uses the same words as Paul, but means something different by them. The term “faith” was of supreme importance to Paul. In books such as Romans and Galatians faith refers to the trust a person has in Christ to bring about salvation through his death. In other words, the term describes a relationship with another; faith is trust “in” Christ. The author of the Pastorals also uses the term “faith.” But here it is not about a relationship with Christ; faith now means the body of teaching that makes up the Christian religion. That is “the faith” (see Titus 1:13). Same word, different meaning. So too with other key terms, such as “righteousness.”
Even more significant, some ideas and concepts in the pastoral letters stand at odds with what you find in the letters that Paul certainly wrote. For example, we have seen that Paul was highly concerned with arguing that performing the “works of the law” could not contribute to one’s right standing before God. It was not the Jewish law that could bring salvation, but the death and resurrection of Jesus. When Paul talks about “works,” that is what he means: doing the things that the Jewish law requires, such as getting circumcised, keeping kosher, and observing the Sabbath. In the Pastorals, however, the Jewish law is no longer even an issue, and the author speaks of works as “good works,” that is, doing good deeds for other people. The term occurs this way six times in 1 Timothy alone. This author is concerned to show that by being a morally good person you cannot earn your salvation. That may be true, but it is a completely different idea from Paul’s; Paul was concerned about whether you kept the Jewish law as a means to salvation (you should not), not if you did good deeds for it.
Or take a completely different idea, marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul is insistent that people who are single should try to remain single, just as he is. His reason is that the end of all things is near, and people should devote themselves to spreading the word, not to establishing their social lives. But how does that square with the view in the Pastorals? Here the author insists that the leaders of the church be married. In Paul’s letters it is better not to be married; in the Pastorals it is required that people (at least church leaders) be married.
Or think about the basic issue of how a person is “saved.” For Paul himself, only through the death and resurrection of Jesus can a person be saved. And for the Pastorals? For women, at least, we’re told in 1 Timothy 2 that they will “be saved” by bearing children. It is hard to know what that means, exactly, but it certainly doesn’t mean what Paul meant!
Probably the biggest problem with accepting the Pastorals as having come from Paul involves the historical situation that they seem to presuppose. Paul, like Jesus before him, thought he was living at the very end of time. When Jesus was raised from the dead, that was the sign that the end had already started and that the future resurrection of the dead was about to take place. According to Jewish thinking the resurrection was to arrive when this age had come to an end. That’s why Paul called Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection” in 1 Corinthians 15:20. This is an agricultural metaphor. The farmhands celebrate the first day of harvest by throwing a party that night; this commemorates the “first fruits” of the harvest. And when do they go out to get the rest of the harvest? The next day—not twenty or two thousand years later. Jesus is the first fruits, because with him the resurrection has started, and very soon everyone—all the dead—will be raised for judgment. That is why Paul thinks he himself will be alive when Jesus returns from heaven (see 1 Thess. 4:14–18).
In the meantime, though, the church has to grow and survive in the world. Paul thought that in this short interim period between the resurrection of Jesus and the end of time, the Spirit of God had been given to the church and to each individual making up the church. When a person was baptized, he or she received the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), and the Spirit gave the person a spiritual “gift.” Some of the baptized were given the gift of teaching, others of prophecy, others of healing, others of speaking in angelic tongues, others of interpreting those tongues. All of these gifts were meant to help the Christian community function together as a unit (1 Cor. 12–14). None of the gifts was paltry or insignificant. They all mattered. Everyone in the church was equally endowed with a gift, so that in the church all were equals. Slaves were on the same level as masters, women were equal with men. That’s why Paul could say, “In Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). There was equality.
When problems arose in one of Paul’s churches—for example, the church of Corinth, for which we have the best documentation—he wrote to deal with them. It is interesting to read his correspondence with the Corinthians. The church was in a mess. There were divisions and episodes of infighting, some members were taking others to civil court, the worship services were chaos, and there were harsh disagreements over major ethical issues, such as whether it was right to eat meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. Some people denied that there was to be a future resurrection, and there was gross immorality—some men were visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church, and one fellow was sleeping with his stepmother.
To address these severe problems, Paul appeals to the church as a whole and to the individuals in it. He urges them to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual good. He appeals to them to act as a unit. He exhorts them to begin behaving in an ethical fashion. He chastises them for not accepting the proper teaching, for example, about the future resurrection.
The one thing Paul does not do is write to the leaders of the church in Corinth and tell them to get their parishioners in order. Why is that? Because there were no leaders of the church in Corinth. There were no bishops or deacons. There were no pastors. There was a group of individuals, each of whom had a gift of the Spirit, in this brief time before the end came.
Contrast that with what you have in the Pastorals. Here you do not have individuals endowed by the Spirit working together to form the community. Here you have the pastors Timothy and Titus. You have the church leaders: bishops and deacons. You have hierarchy, structure, organization. That is to say, you have a different historical situation than you had in the days of Paul.
If you expect Jesus to come back soon—say, sometime this month—there is no real need for a hierarchical system of organization and leadership. You simply need to get along for the short term. But if Jesus does not return, and you need to settle in for the long haul, things will be different. You have to get organized. You have to have leadership. You have to have someone run the show. You have to have teachers who can root out the false teaching in your midst. You have to specify how people should relate to one another socially: masters to slaves, husbands to wives, parents to children. In a hierarchical system there is no equality; there is leadership. That’s what you find in the pastoral letters—churches settling in for the long haul. But that’s not what you find in the historical Paul. For the historical Paul, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon.
/> As I said at the outset of this discussion, some scholars have been willing to concede that 1 Timothy and Titus, which is closely tied to 1 Timothy, are pseudepigraphal, but that 2 Timothy may stem from Paul. I’ve tried to show that this view can’t work, because whoever wrote 1 Timothy also wrote 2 Timothy. If the one is forged, so too is the other. That doesn’t mean the two letters are addressing the same concerns or were written for the same purpose; it just means the same author wrote them. But one point sometimes raised is that there is so much personal information in 2 Timothy, it is hard to see how it could be forged. Why, for example, would a forger tell his alleged reader (who was not actually his reader!) to be sure to bring his cloak to him when he comes and also the books he left behind (2 Tim. 4:13)?
This objection has been convincingly answered by one of the great scholars of ancient forgery, Norbert Brox, who gives compelling evidence that this kind of “verisimilitude” (as I called it in Chapter 1) is typical for forgeries. Making the letter sound “homey” removes the suspicion that it’s forged. The personal notices in 2 Timothy (there are fewer in Titus and fewer still in 1 Timothy) serve, then, to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not.15 But why does an author forge letters like this?
Why Were the Pastoral Letters Forged?
The most obvious answer is that the author is someone facing new problems in a generation after Paul, problems that Paul himself never addressed, and he wants to deal with them in the name of an authority who will be listened to. And who in Paul’s churches has greater authority than Paul himself? So the author dealt with the problem of false teachings, for example, of those propounding “myths and genealogies” in 1 Timothy and of other false teachers who claimed that the resurrection “had already happened” in 2 Timothy. He also dealt with problems involving church leadership and with problems over with the roles of women in the church. He did all this by pretending to be Paul.
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