The Pastoral Letters Series

The Pastoral Letters

The pastoral epistles are a group of three books of the acknowledged New Testament: the First Epistle to Timothy (1 Timothy), the Second Epistle to Timothy (2 Timothy), and the Epistle to Titus. They are presented as letters from Paul the Apostle to Timothy and to Titus. They are generally discussed as a group (sometimes with the addition of the Epistle to Philemon). They are given the title pastoral because they are addressed to individuals with pastoral oversight of churches and discuss Christian living, doctrine, and leadership issues. The term "pastorals" was popularized in 1703 by D. N. Bardot and in 1726 by Paul Anton. Alternate nomenclature for the cluster of three letters has been proposed: "Corpus Pastorale," meant to highlight the intentional forgery of the letters as a three-part corpus (collection, compilation, body), and "Letters to Timothy and Titus," meant to emphasize the individuality of the letters.

Timothy consists mainly of counsels (directions) to Timothy regarding the church's forms of worship and organization and the responsibilities resting on its various members, including 'overseers,' traditionally translated as 'bishops'). Furthermore, diákonoi ('deacons'); and secondly exhortation to faithfulness in maintaining the truth amid surrounding errors (4:1ff)[2], presented as a prophecy of erring teachers to come. The epistle's "irregular character, abrupt connexions, and loose transitions" have led critics to distinguish later interpolations, such as the epistle-concluding 6:20–21[3], read as a reference to Marcion of Sinope, and lines that appear to be marginal glosses that have been copied into the body of the text.

2 Timothy

The author (who identifies himself as Paul the Apostle) entreats (emplores) Timothy to come to him before winter and to bring Mark with him. He was anticipating that "the time of his departure was at hand" (4:6), and he exhorts (urges) his "son Timothy" to all diligence and steadfastness in the face of false teachings, with advice about combating them concerning the teachings of the past, and to patience under persecution (1:6–15), and a faithful discharge of all the duties of his office (4:1–5), with all the solemnity of one who was about to appear before the Judge of the living and the dead.

Titus

This short letter is addressed to Titus, a Christian worker in Crete. Titus is traditionally divided into three chapters. It includes advice on the character and conduct required of Church leaders (chapter 1), a structure and hierarchy for Christian teaching within the church (chapter 2), and the kind of godly conduct and moral action required of Christians in response to God's grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit (chapter 3). It includes the line quoted by the author from a Cretan source: "Cretans are always liars, wicked beasts, and lazy gluttons" (Titus 1:12).

Authorship

Authorship of the Pauline epistles & Pastoral epistles

The letters are written in Paul's name and have traditionally been accepted as authentic. Since the 1700s, however, experts have increasingly come to see them as the work of someone writing after Paul's death.

Critical view: rejecting Pauline authorship

Based on their language, content, and other factors, the pastoral epistles are considered by many as not having been written by Paul but after his death. (The Second Epistle to Timothy is sometimes thought to be more likely than Paul's other two to have been written by him.) Beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher in a letter published in 1807, biblical textual critics and scholars examining the texts fail to find their vocabulary and literary style similar to Paul's unquestionably authentic letters and fail to fit the life situation of Paul in the epistles into Paul's reconstructed biography and identify principles of the emerging Christian church rather than those of the apostolic generation.

As an example of qualitative (of, relating to, or involving quality or kind) style arguments, in the First Epistle to Timothy, the task of preserving the tradition is entrusted to ordained presbyters; the unmistakable sense of presbýteros (lit.?'elder') as an indication of an office is a sense that to these scholars seems alien to Paul and the apostolic generation. Presbýteros is sometimes translated as an elder; via Ecclesiastical Latin, it is also the Greek root for the English word priest. (The office of a presbyter is also mentioned in James chapter 5.)

A second example would be gender roles depicted in the letters, which proscribe roles for women that deviate from Paul's more democratic teaching that there is neither male nor female in Christ. However, separate male and female roles were not foreign to the authentic Pauline epistles; the First Letter to the Corinthians (14:34–35) commands silence from women during church services, stating that "it is a shame for women to speak in the church." Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, "agrees with many other commentators on this passage over the last hundred years in recognizing it to be an interpolation by a later editor of 1 Corinthians of a passage from 1 Timothy 2:11–15 that states a similar 'women should be silent in churches". This made 1 Corinthians more widely acceptable to church leaders in later times. If verses before or after 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 are read, it is reasonably clear that verses 34 and 35 seem out of place.