Timothy and Titus, EPISTLES TO. The first and second Epistles to Timothy, along with the Epistle to Titus, make up the three so-called 'Pastoral Epistles,' whose claim to have been written by the apostle Paul has been unanimously recognised by Catholic tradition since at least the end of the 2d century. They owe the name by which they are collectively known to the fact that they purport to be addressed by the apostle in his old age to his younger companions, Timothy and Titus, with reference mainly to the discharge of the pastoral office; but even apart from this leading feature they are allied to each other in matter and style with special closeness, while at the same time they are separated from the rest of the 'Pauline' writings by their lateness of date, as well as by certain peculiarities common to all three. These peculiarities appear in their attitude alike to the doctrine and to the polity of the church. As regards doctrine, the writer has no longer, properly speaking, anything new to say; the doctrine of the church is no longer in course of discovery and delivery, but has been already exhaustively revealed and definitely fixed. The motto is 'guard the good deposit' (2 Tim. i. 14, R.V. margin), keep 'the right way,' 'the sound doctrine,' 'the sound words.' As Sabatier says: 'With the Epistle to the Philippians the living progress ceases; with the pastoral letters the conservative tradition begins. Paul's doctrine is there; but the soul which sustained and vivified it appears already to have left it. . . . We have reached a point of arrest.' Along with the rise of this conservative tradition a new conception of the function of the church as the 'pillar and stay' of the 'common faith' begins to make its appearance. The church had already of course existed as a visible society and organisation, with special officers for the functions of discipline and administration; and it seems an error to suppose (as has often been done) that even with regard to church government the pastoral epistles contain anything definitely new, such as the germs of monarchical episcopacy. Nevertheless 'the church is no longer identical with "them that are being saved" or "the elect;" it is compared to a "great house," which contains "vessels, some unto honour and some unto dishonour." It is, in other words, no longer an ideal community, the "Israel of God," but a visible society. And being such, its organisation had come to be of more importance than before,' especially in the matter of maintaining and transmitting orthodox belief. Apart from these peculiarities, which are rather to be felt than described, the pastoral epistles are separated from all the others attributed to the apostle Paul by their language and phraseology. They contain a great number of words which do not occur in the other 'Pauline' writings, though met with elsewhere in the New Testament; many of the most marked expressions of Paul are absent; his characteristic particles have disappeared and given place to others; the structure of the sentences is quite different.
External and internal evidence alike go to show that all three epistles belong to nearly the same date; and it is now agreed with practical unanimity that this date cannot have been earlier than the Neronian persecution (64 A.D.). Modern discussions have made it clearly impossible to assign them to any period covered by the book of Acts. The stay of Timothy in Ephesus postulated by 1 Tim., the captivity of the apostle after having been recently at Troas, Corinth, and Miletus, which is presupposed in 2 Tim., and his visit to Crete and proposed sojourn in Nicopolis (Epirus) which are mentioned in Titus, all require us to assume a continued activity of the apostle for an indefinite period after his first Roman imprisonment, an activity, however, of which (apart from the pastoral epistles themselves) tradition knows nothing. Assuming the genuineness of all three, the order in which they were written must have been 1 Tim., Titus, 2 Tim. Modern criticism of the pastoral epistles may be said to have begun with Schleiermacher, who accepted 2 Tim. and Titus as genuine, but thought 1 Tim. to be a non-Pauline compilation from the other two. Eichhorn on chronological and philological grounds argued that none of the three was by Paul, but did not deny that they belonged to the immediate school of the apostle. Baur's criticism was much bolder, assigning them to the middle of the 2d century, when the utility and necessity of a stricter church organisation in order to combat Gnosticism had begun to be felt. Baur detected distinct allusions to Marcion in 1 Tim. vi. 29; Titus, iii. 9. The most important item of external evidence against their genuineness is the fact that Marcion knew of only ten epistles of Paul. Marcion's information may have been defective, but so far as we know he was not wanting in candour or ingenuousness. To sum up briefly the present state of criticism, the pastoral epistles are admittedly very late; but how late is practically impossible to say with our very imperfect knowledge of the state of the church during the decades immediately following the year 64 A.D. It cannot be said to have been made out, or nearly made out, that they are so very late as Baur supposed. But on the other hand all that the apologists can say is that their Pauline authorship is not inconceivable, especially if we suppose the apostle to have lived and laboured a good while after the Roman captivity recorded in the Acts. 'Conceivability' in such matters of course depends a good deal on the individual critic's feeling for language, style, 'atmosphere,' and such like criteria. At the very least we may safely say that they contain elements of a Pauline tradition, and more or less vivid recollections of the substance of his correspondence with Timothy and Titus; possibly they embody some verbatim fragments—e.g. 2 Tim. i. 15-18; iv. 9-21.
See the commentaries of Huther (in Meyer's Commentary; Eng. trans.), Alford, Wace (in Speaker's Commentary), Weiss (new ed. of Meyer), and Soden (in Holtzmann's Handcommentary). For the criticism of the epistles the monograph of Holtzmann is the fullest (Die Pastoralbriefe kritisch u. exegetisch behandelt, 1880). Baur's work, Die sog. Pastoralbriefe des Ap. Paulus (1835), is still of value. See also the New Testament introductions of Hilgenfeld, Reuss, Salmon, Weiss (Eng. trans.), and Holtzmann; Sabatier's L'Apôtre Paul (Eng. trans., 1891), Farrar's excursus to his Life of St Paul, and Hatch's article 'Pastoral Epistles' in Ency. Brit.