Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/1033

Rh second (cf. Luke x. 7) goes back to either Luke's gospel or its source at this particular point. The hypothesis that a saying of Jesus is loosely added here to an Old Testament citation is very forced, and the inference is that by the time the author wrote, Luke’s gospel was reckoned as . This would be explicable if Luke could be assumed to have been the author, in whole or part, of the pastorals.

TIMOTHY, SECOND EPISTLE TO. In this book of the New Testament, after a brief thanksgiving for the faith of Timothy (i. 1–5), Paul is represented as warning him against false shame (6 seq.), adducing his own example and that of Oncsiphorus. The need and the reward of endurance are then urged (ii. 1–13), and Timothy is bidden to adhere in his work to the Pauline gospel against the seductions of controversial and immoral heretics (ii. 14 seq.). The practices of the latter are pungently depicted (iii. 1–9); Paul reiterates his opening counsels (10 seq.) and then closes with a solemn charge to personal faithfulness. A note of personal matters concludes the epistle (iv. 6–22).

The last verse, with its two-fold greeting ( Trvfvuark aov, -fj \hpis fieQ' bn&p), shows unconsciously but plainly that, while the epistle professes to be a private letter to Timothy, it is in reality addressed to a wider circle, like 1 Tim. and Titus. But its composite origin is also clear. Thus iv. 6–22a, which is certainly authentic, is not homogeneous in itself, the situation of verses 6–8 hardly agreeing with that of 9 seq., while verse 11 (“Luke alone is with me”) cannot have been written at the same time as verse 21. Various schemes of analysis have been proposed to account for this and other passages of the same nature in the epistle, e.g. i. 15–18, iii. 10 seq. But the general result of such reconstructions is tentative. All that criticism has succeeded in establishing is the fact that the author had some reliquiae Paulinae at his disposal, notes written either before or during his last imprisonment in Rome, and that these have been worked up into the present letter by one who rightly believed that his master would stoutly oppose the current errors of the age.

2 Timothy, like 1 Timothy, reveals with fair precision the period and aim of the writer of the pastorals. Evidently (cf. Acts xx. 20–30) the Pauline Christianity of Ephesus was imperilled seriously during the last quarter of the 1st century. Its very growth invited attempts to weave ascetic, theosophic, semi-Jewish fancies round the faith, not unlike the attempts often made in modern India to assimilate Christian and local philosophies of religion. Against such the writer argues in Paul's name, as Luke had already done. From the composition of a speech in Paul's name (for, though the farewell in Acts goes back to first-hand tradition, it represents the author's standpoint as well as Paul's), it was but a step to compose letters in his name, especially on the basis of some of his extant notes. A genuine concern for local Christianity is the writer's justification for his work, and any idea of fraudulent aims must be dismissed at once. " To a writer of this period, it would seem as legitimate an artifice to compose a letter as to compose a speech in the name of a great man whose sentiments it was desired to reproduce and record; the question which seems so important to us, whether the words and even the sentiments are the great man's own or only his historian's, seems then hardly to" have occurred either to writer or readers " (W. H. Simcox, Writers of the New Testament, p. 38). The address at Miletus is Paul's last word to the Christian elders of Ephesus, warning them against heresies (Acts xx. 29 seq.) and solemnly bidding them exercise their disciplinary duties. The Second Epistle to Timothy carries on this line of advice. Here Paul, being dead, yet speaks through Timothy to the local Christians who are exposed to such mischievous tendencies in their environment.

Where the writer has hardly succeeded in representing Paul is in his relations to Timothy. One may admit that, strictly speaking, the latter at the age of about thirty-five or forty could still be called vim, and that Paul might conceivably have termed him still his tUvov. But the counsels addressed to him seem rather out of place when one recollects the position which he occupied. To a writer who desired a situation for such advice on church life and doctrine from the lips of Paul to his lieutenant, it was natural to think of a temporary absence. But many of the directions are much too serious and fundamental to have been given in this form; one can hardly imagine that Paul considered Timothy (or Titus) still in need of elementary advice and warning upon such matters, and_ especially on personal purity. When they are regarded as typical figures of the later episcopi of the Church, the point of this emphasis upon elementary principles and duties is at once clear; they outline graphically the qualifications for the church offices in question.

The pressing need of the Church, as the writer conceives it, is to maintain the true Pauline tradition (2 Tim. i. 13, &c.) against certain moral and speculative ideas. This maintenance takes the twofold practical form of (a) adherence to formulated statements of the "sound teaching" and (b) insistence on a succession of church officials (2 Tim. ii. 1–2) who are not merely to preside but to teach. The last point is significant in view of DidachS xv. 1. The standpoint of the author is practically that of Clemens Romanus (xlii. seq.), who asserts that the apostles preached " everywhere in country and town, appointing their first-fruits, when they had proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons." The interests of discipline and doctrine were thus to be conserved. Paul's lieutenants possess the central deposit of the apostolic faith, and have the duty as well as the right of exercising the authority with which that position invests them.

The occasional coincidences between the pastorals and Barnabas or Clemens Romanus do not prove anything more than a common milieu of thought, but the epistles were plainly familiar to Polycarp, who alludes to 1 Tim. ii. 1, vi. 7, 10, and 2 Tim. ii. 11, 25, iv. 10 (for this and the other passages from Polycarp, see The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, 1905, pp. 95 seq.). This indubitable use of the pastorals in Polycarp throws the terminus ad quern of their composition back into the first decade of the 2nd century, and additional confirmation of this would be forthcoming were the evidence for their use in Ignatius more