Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/373

 P A S P A S 351 both the Pastoral Epistles and the other &quot; Epistles of the Captivity,&quot; but also by conservative writers, such as Meyer, Ebrard, Otto, Wieseler, Thiersch, and De Pressense. (2) The second kind of historical difficulties, that of determining the state of theological opinion to which these epistles are relative, arises partly from the incidental nature of the references to false teachers in the epistles themselves and partly from the fragmentary character of our knowledge of contemporary teaching. The character istics of the false teachers are mainly the following, (i.) They once held &quot; sound doctrine &quot; but have now fallen away from it (1 Tim. i. 6, 19 ; vi. 5, 21 ; 2 Tim. ii. 18) ; and, puffed up with self-conceit (1 Tim. vi. 4) and claiming to have a special &quot; knowledge &quot; (yvwo-is, vi. 20 ; implied also in Tit. i. 16), they oppose the truth (Tit. i. 9 ; 2 Tim. ii. 25 ; iii. 8) and teach a different doctrine (1 Tim. i. 3) ; yet they remain within the church and cause factions within it (Tit. iii. 10). (ii.) They profess asceticism, &quot; forbidding to marry and commanding to abstain from meats, &quot; apparently on the ground that some &quot; creatures of God &quot; are evil (1 Tim. iv. 3), and at the same time their moral practice is perverted, they are &quot; unto every good work reprobate &quot; (1 Tim. vi. 5 ; 2 Tim. iii. 13 ; Tit. i. 16), and they make their teaching of religion a means of gain (1 Tim. vi. 5 ; Tit. i. 11). (iii.) Their teaching is concerned with &quot; fables and endless genealogies &quot; (1 Tim. i. 4 ; Tit. i. 14), with questionings and disputes of words (1 Tim. vi. 4), with empty sounds and contradictions (1 Tim. vi. 20), with &quot; profane and old wives fables &quot; (1 Tim. iv. 7), with &quot; foolish questionings and genealogies, and strifes and fightings about the law &quot; (Tit. iii. 9), and they held that the &quot; resurrection is past already &quot; (2 Tim. ii. 18). It has been sometimes held that these statements refer rather to errors of practice than errors of doctrine, and rather to tendencies than to matured systems (Reuss) ; and it has also been sometimes held that different forms of opinion are referred to in either different epistles or different parts of the same epistle (Credner, Thiersch, Hilgenfeld) ; but the majority of writers think that the reference is to a single definite form of error. The main question upon which opinions are divided is whether the basis of this false teaching was Judaistic or Gnostic, i.e., whether that teaching was a rationalizing form of Judaism or a Judaiz- ing form of Gnosticism. (1) The former of these views branches out into many forms, and is held on various grounds. It is sometimes held that the reference is to the allegorizing and rationalizing school of which Philo is the chief representative, and which was endeavouring to take root in Christian soil, the &quot; fables &quot; being the alle gorical interpretations of historical facts, the &quot; genealogies &quot; those of the Pentateuch, or possibly the Pentateuch itself, which served as the basis of philosophical speculations (Wiesinger, Hofmann). It is sometimes held that the reference is to what in later times was known as the Kabbalah, the assumption being made that the Kabbalah must be dated many centuries earlier than other testimony warrants us in believing (so Vitringa, Grotius, Schottgen, and more recently Olshausen and Baumgarten). It is sometimes held that the false teachers were not so much theosophic as thaumaturgic, allied to the Judseo-Samaritan school of which Simon Magus is the typical representative, and that this is the point of the reference to Jannes and Jambres and to &quot;jugglers .... deceiving and being deceived&quot; (2 Tim. iii. 8, 13). It is sometimes supposed that they combined Essenism with a form of Ebionism, and this view (the ablest supporter of which is Mangold, Die Irrlehrer der Pastoralbriefe, 1856) is that which now prevails among those who contend for the early date of the epistles, if not for their authenticity. (2) It is con tended on the other hand that none of these theories quite cover the facts. It is maintained that genealogies did not take the place in the Jewish speculative schools which they evidently had in the false teaching to which these epistles refer ; that even if they had done so it is difficult to account for the epithet &quot; endless &quot; which is applied to them ; that there is no sufficient proof that the Essenes held a dualistic theory of the relation of spirit to matter, or that they denied the resurrection (the testimony of Hippolytus on this point being more probable than that of Josephus), or that they taught for gain, or that they pro secuted a propaganda among women (2 Tim. iii. 6). It is further contended that all these points are generally characteristic of Gnosticism. The use of the epithet &quot; falsely so called,&quot; it is urged, shows that &quot; knowledge &quot; (yvwcris) is used in a technical sense ; in the &quot; endless genealogies &quot; writers so early as Irenasus and Tertullian recognized Gnostic systems of aeons, to which the phrase seems exactly to apply ; the abstinence from meats and from marriage belongs not to any form of Judaism but to Gnostic theories of the nature of matter ; the description of the teachers as making a gain of their teaching and as &quot; taking captive silly women laden with sins&quot; suits no one so well as the half-converted rhetoricians who brought into Christian communities the practices as well as the beliefs of the degenerate philosophical schools of the empire. It is probable that this view is substantially correct ; at the same time it may be granted that the evidence is too scanty to allow of the identification of the Gnostics to which reference is made with any particular Gnostic sect, and that the several attempts which have been made so to identify them have failed. The result of this combination of difficulties the differences between the pastoral epistles and the other Pauline epistles in respect of the character of their con tents, their philological peculiarities, the difficulty of reconciling the historical references with what is known from other sources of the life of St Paul, the difficulty of finding any known form of belief which precisely answers to the opinions which they attack, and the further difficulty of believing that so elaborate a debasement of Christianity had grown up in the brief interval between St Paul s first contact with Hellenism and his death has been to make the majority of modern critics question or deny their authenti city. The first important attacks were that of Schleier- macher, who, however, only rejected 1 Timothy, and a few years afterwards that of Eichhorn, who rejected all three ; but the modern criticism of them practically begins with Baur s treatise Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe des Apostel s Paulus in 1835. Since then the controversy has been keenly waged on both sides ; the history of it will be found in Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe (Leipsic, 1880), which is by far the ablest work on the negative side of the con troversy, and which, whether its conclusions be accepted or not, is more full of accurate information than any other. The most available works on the conservative side, for English readers, are the translation of Huther s edition of Meyer s Commentary (Edinburgh, 1881); Dr Wace s introduction to the Pastoral Epistles in the Speaker * Commentary (London, 1881); and Archdeacon Farrar s excursus on &quot; The Genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles &quot; in his St Paul (vol. ii. p. 607). (E. HA.) PASTORAL LETTER, a letter addressed, in his pastoral capacity, by a bishop to his clergy, or the laity of hi? diocese, or both. In the Church of Rome it is usual for every bishop to issue at least one pastoral annually, the Lenten Mandates or Instructions, containing exhortations relating to that fast, and enumerating the dispensations granted and devotions prescribed. Others are issued in connexion with the principal solemnities of the church, or as occasion arises.