2. This raises the problem of the literary origin of the epistles. Were they written by the apostle Paul himself, or in his name by some disciple who sought to convey what he believed to be his master's mind on a religious situation of later date? The Pastorals were suspected in some quarters of the early Church; they were rejected, for example, by Marcion as being private letters, as well as by Basilides and others, including Tatian, who retained only Titus. But such rejections were probably due to dislike of their teaching and cannot be held to reflect any reasoned belief in their post-Pauline origin. The reasons which have led an in creasing number of scholars to place them after the life-time of St. Paul are drawn from internal evidence of style and subject, style including diction. There are, however, differences between the vocabulary of the earlier and later Pauline letters which must be taken into account in handling the Pastorals. They remind us of no writer so much as St. Paul. Yet neither differences of sub ject-matter nor a fresh emphasis on certain topics, much less any supposed change of amanuensis, avail to weaken the inferences drawn from the language of the Pastorals, which is distinctive, and not distinctive of the Paul we otherwise know. An examina tion of the Greek vocabulary shows not only a remarkable pro portion of words used for the first time by the writer, but new compounds, an absence of characteristically Pauline terms, the substitution of one word for another used in the same or a similar sense by the apostle, and an independent use of the Greek particles, which is of much significance. The philologist Th. Naegeli, in a monograph on the language of the apostle (Der W ort schatz der Apostels Paulus, 1905, pp. 85f), deduces from such phenomena that the Pastorals cannot have been written by him— a conclusion which is all the more significant that he does not come to this conclusion about any other Pauline letter.
The theological outlook is by itself also. It is not easy to suppose that in three epistles the apostle, for example, would ignore such fundamental truths of his gospel as the fatherhood of God, the union of the believing man with Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit in the Christian experience. The only explanation of this seems to be that the epistles were written by a disciple of St. Paul who, in the name of his master, and on the basis of some authentic fragments of Pauline correspondence, wrote against tendencies which threatened the later church, de nouncing incipient forms of gnosticism, for example, roundly and indiscriminately. The writer fully believed he was giving what was his master's mind, as an historian would compose a speech in the name of a hero—perhaps as his contemporary Luke com posed some of the Pauline speeches in Acts. He felt rightly that Paul would have been anti-gnostic, and that the maintenance of the apostolic gospel was essential for the Churches. His spirit was that of the apostle himself in the prediction of Acts xx.28f. It is no longer tenable to identify the errorists with any school of second century gnostics, but it is equally impossible to find them in any party which Paul is known to have encountered in his life time. Also, the spirit in which they are attacked is not in line with St. Paul's method. His way of enforcing ethical requirements
and of insisting on organisation is different from that followed by the author of the Pastorals—a shrewd man, who writes with excellent sagacity and point, but hardly with the sustained insight and creative vigour of his master. We might say that this author possesses the intuition of authority rather than the authority of intuition.
The alternatives are (i.) to regard the epistles as genuine on the whole, containing extracts from Paul's correspondence, but largely expanded and edited, or (ii.) to read them as Pauline in toto. The latter hypothesis has to meet the difficulty of placing them in his life-time ; either they must be viewed as written after his sup posed release from the first imprisonment at Rome, or they must be somehow relegated to his career as outlined in Acts. The latter view is extremely hard to present satisfactorily, for although there are gaps in his life as it is recorded, it is almost in credible that he should have suddenly written in this strain and then dropped into the strain familiar to us in the other epistles. Furthermore, the historical setting is hard to reconstruct. That Titus went to Crete, and that Timothy had a responsible position at Ephesus, is indeed likely, for apart from such tradition the setting of the Pastorals would be incredible; even a pseudony mous author would not be likely to invent freely such a frame work. But to find any place for such activities during the life time of the apostle is not easy ! Indeed the majority of those who defend the traditional hypothesis relapse on the view that the Pastorals represent a period in the apostle's life subsequent to the career described in the Acts of the Apostles. It is a moot point whether the apostle was ever released from his imprison ment, however, and even if he was, the problem of fitting the Pastorals into this closing period of his career involves consider able historical ingenuity.
To sum up—the data of the Pastorals are so conflicting and ambiguous that they seem to justify us in supposing that "a writer, believing himself to be in accord with St. Paul's teaching, and possessing some remains of his correspondence, expanded such into these letters, in order to combat erroneous speculations in the Church by opposing to them sound teaching and an ob jective standard of belief. He probably lived at a time when ecclesiastical organisation was growing in importance, and seems to offer a safeguard against the spread of moral and intellectual error. Timothy and Titus are thus representative figures, stand ing for those whom the writer really wished to admonish and instruct" (G. W. Wade, New Testament History, 1922, p. 303). It does not follow, however, that he wrote the epistles in their canonical order. The likelihood is that 2 Timothy was the earliest ; I Timothy betrays a more advanced situation, and by the tine he had come to write it the author had used up nearly all his Pauline fragments ; in 1 Timothy he is more of an author than an editor. As the epistles had no titles, it was natural that when they were incorporated in the canon, 2 Timothy, with its richer and more detailed outlook on the last days of the apostle, should be placed second.