Now that I have given an overview of each of the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, I can turn to the key question of whether Paul actually wrote them, when they were written, and why.  This will take several posts.

I have taken the information with some revision by book, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. 

To begin with, when discussing the question of the authorship of these letters, we should constantly remember that we are not asking whether Christians in the first or second century would have forged documents in Paul’s name. We know for a fact that some did: 2 Thessalonians alludes to a forged letter (2:2). Moreover, everyone agrees that some of the writings that survive in Paul’s name are Christian forgeries (e.g., the correspondence between “Paul” and the philosopher Seneca, and the apocalypse written by “Paul”). What we are asking, then, is whether any given document that claims to be written by Paul can sustain its claim.

Most scholars are reasonably convinced that all three Pastoral epistles were written by the same author. With 1 Timothy and Titus there can be little doubt. The writing style, subject matter, and specific content are altogether similar. If they were not written by the same person, we would have to suppose that one of them was used by an imitator as the model for the other; but there appears to be no reason to think that this is what happened.

The question of 2 Timothy has proven somewhat more complicated since its content is different. Yet even here, the vocabulary and writing style are closely aligned with the other two. The salutation of the letter matches that of 1 Timothy: “To Timothy, my … child …: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord” (1 Tim 1:2; 2 Tim 1:2). No other Pauline letter has the same wording. Moreover, many of the same concerns are clearly to the fore in both letters, especially the concern for the administration of the church and the weeding out of false teachers.

Assuming, then, that all three letters come from the same hand (even granting 2 Timothy’s different occasion and content), was that hand the apostle Paul’s? By pursuing this question, we can learn a good deal about these epistles, particularly about the historical situation that they presuppose. Here I will set forth the arguments that have struck most scholars as decisive in showing that Paul did not write them.

At the outset, we should consider the unusual vocabulary used throughout these letters. Before adducing the data themselves, let me first explain their significance. Suppose (to imagine a relatively bizarre situation) that someone were to uncover a letter allegedly written by Paul that urged its readers to attend mass every Saturday night, go to confession once a week, and say three Hail Marys for every unintentional sin they committed. What would you make of such a letter? Some of its words would indicate Christian practices and beliefs that developed long after Paul had died (e.g., mass, Hail Marys). Others would indicate practices and beliefs used by Paul, but not in the same way (e.g., confession). With the passage of time, significant words in any language are invested with new meanings, and new words are created, which is why Shakespearean English sounds so strange to many people today and why our language would have struck Shakespeare as peculiar. The vocabulary of this hypothetical letter alone would show you that the apostle Paul did not write it.

With the Pastoral epistles, of course, we find nothing so blatant; but we do find an inordinate number of non-Pauline words, most of which do occur in later Christian writings. Sophisticated studies of the Greek text of these books have come up with the following data: apart from personal names, there are 848 different words found in the Pastorals; of these, 306 occur nowhere else in the Pauline Corpus of the New Testament (even including the Deutero-Paulines). This means that over one-third of the vocabulary is not Pauline. Strikingly, over two-thirds of these non-Pauline words are used by Christian authors of the second century. Thus, it appears that the vocabulary represented in these letters is more developed than what we find in the other letters attributed to Paul.

Moreover, and possibly even more important, some of the words that Paul does use in his own letters take on different meanings in the Pastorals. As brief examples, Paul’s word for “having a right standing before God” (literally, “righteous”) now means “being a moral individual” (i.e., “upright”; Titus 1:8); and the term “faith,” which for Paul refers to a trusting acceptance of the death of Christ for salvation, now refers to the body of teaching that makes up the Christian religion (e.g., Titus 1:13).

Of course, the argument from vocabulary can never be decisive in itself. Everybody uses different words on different occasions, and the Christian vocabulary of Paul himself must have developed over time. The magnitude of these differences must give us pause, however, particularly since they coincide with other features of the letters that suggest they were written after Paul had passed off the scene.

To begin with, there is the nature of the problems that the letters address. If the major form of false teaching being attacked was some kind of incipient Christian Gnosticism, then one might ask when this kind of religion can be historically documented as existing. In fact, the first Christian Gnostics that we know by name lived in the early to mid-second century. To be sure, the second-century Gnostics may have had some predecessors near the end of the first century (as we discussed in chapter 11), but there is almost no evidence to suggest that they were spouting “myths and endless genealogies” that sanctioned strictly ascetic lifestyles or that they were otherwise plaguing the Christian congregations during the lifetime of Paul himself. Not even Paul’s adversaries in Corinth were this advanced.

Of even greater importance is the way in which these false teachings are attacked in the Pastorals, for the author’s basic orientation appears to be very much like what we find developing in second-century proto-orthodox circles.

I will continue with that point in my next post.