TIMOTHY and TITUS, EPISTLES To. Three letters of the New Testament commonly known as the Pastoral Epistles, bearing in their open ing passages the claim to have been written by Paul.
The first two are addressed to Timothy, Paul's companion and fellow worker, whom the Apostle associated with himself at Lystra, on his second missionary tour (Acts xvi. 1-3). and who con tinued with him practically through the re mainder of his active ministry. He was with Paul also in Rome, where he is named with the Apostle in the Epistles to the Colossians, Philip pians. and Philemon. The last letter is ad dressed to Titus, also one of Paul's helpers, first met with in connection with the mission work in Antioch (Gal. ii. 1-4; ef.,Aets xv. 22), and probably more or less associated with the Apos tle's later work, though lie is not mentioned again until the correspondence with the Corin thian church. All three letters have to do with the Apostle's instructions regarding the pastoral service in which the recipients were engaged at the time of writing. The second letter to Tim othy, however, contains in addition a different element of a more personal kind.
For almost a century these letters have been the subject of critical suspicion in respect of their authorship, being discredited by liberal criticism lung before the Tubingen School as signed them to the Onostie period of the second century. and standing to-day as among the most generally rejected portions of the New Testa ment. At the same time, there has liven from the first more or less disposition on the pert of such criticism to recognize in the letters certain traces of genuine Pauline material—this tend ency receiving of late large impulse. from the propaganda of the Dutch School, which seeks to resolve all New Testament critical prob lems by aid of documentary sources for the writ ings in question. Along with this the date at which the letters in their present form were composed has been gradually moved back to ward and even into the Apostolic century. The present differences in the liberal attitude to ward the Epistles are practically as to the ex tent of Pauline material allowed in the Epistles and the nearness in thought and sympathy with the Apostle of their compiler. On the other
hand, while this general negative position has been strongly combated by a conservative criti cism which has sought to defend the entire gen uineness of the letters, there is to-day a tendency to admit frankly the peculiar difficulties pre sented by the writings in the matter of their Pauline origin and a willingness to unite with all scholars in a fair and impartial study of the problems which these difficulties involve.
The question as to the Paulinity of these let ters is naturally bound up in the larger ques tion of the Apostle's second imprisonment, since it is clear that the letters disclose situations which in no way fit into the recorded life of Paul up to and including his first imprisonment. If, therefore, the Apostle was not released from the imprisonment narrated in Acts, engaging in further mission work, which ended in his be ing rearrested and brought to Rome for a second trial, these writings cannot reasonably he sup posed to have come from his hand.
But the settlement of the question of author ship on the basis of this question of imprison ment alone has proved an unsatisfactory pro cedure, as in itself a second imprisonment is not possible of sufficiently definite decision to afford a critical standing ground. Scholars conse quently have been giving of late increased at tention to the study of the Epistles themselves —their vocabulary and literary style, the his torical situations which they present, the ec elesiastieal and theological development which they betray—in order to discover whether or not they involve sufficient Pauline elements to pre suppose, on the Apostle's part, a further period of active ministry beyond the imprisonment narrated in Acts. The critical relation of the second imprisonment to the authorship of the letters is thus reversed, the latter rather than the former problem furnishing the standing ground from which the investigation proceeds.