James Moffatt

“ The objective sense of πίστις has begun to overpower the subjective. Christianity is becoming more and more a “form of sound words,” a crystallized creed, whose teaching is the vital point. The deep conceptions of Paul, viz. the fatherly love of God, the faith-mysticism of the Christian’s relation to Christ, and the inward witness of the Spirit, fall into the background, while unusual prominence is assigned to the more tangible and practical tests of Christianity.
Of all the pastorals, 1 Tim. is furthest from Paul. ”

“ After a brief greeting (i. 1, 2) , Paul assures them of his loving interest in their present attainments and future progress in the faith of the gospel (i. 3–11) , then, relieving their anxiety about his own prospects, he expresses the confident hope that he will be released and thus be able to return to them (i. 12–26) . Meantime they were to avoid any pride or fractiousness which might break their unity [1] as a church (i. 27–ii. 18) , and they are promised a visit from two of Paul's coadjutors, [2] who are well known to them (ii. 19–30) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ A passionate outburst then follows (iv. 12 f.) , and, harping still on Abraham, the apostle essays, with fresh rabbinic dialectic, to establish Christianity over legalism as the free and final religion for men, applying this to the moral situation of the Galatians themselves (v. 1-12) . This conception of freedom then leads him to define the moral responsibilities of the faith (v. 13–vi. 10) , in order to prevent misconception and to enforce the claims of the gospel upon the individual and social life of the Galatians. ”

“ Fellowship (κοινωνία) with God and man is its dominant note. After defining the essence of Christian κοινονία (i. 1–3) , [6] the writer passes on to its conditions (i. 5–ii. 17) , under the antithesis of light and darkness. These conditions are twofold: (a) a sense of sin, which leads Christians to a sense of forgiveness [7] through Jesus Christ, (b) and obedience to the supreme law of brotherly love (cf. Ignat. Ad Smyrn. 6) . If these conditions are unfulfilled, moral darkness is the issue, a darkness which spells ruin to the soul. ”

“ Paul is on the edge and eve of the great decision. Behind him (i. 12–13) lies a period during which considerable progress has been made in the local preaching and extension of the gospel, nor does the language of the apostle suggest that this fresh departure in the propaganda was stimulated by the mere novelty of his arrival. furthermore, the relations between the Philippians and himself presuppose, on any fair estimate, an interval of time which cannot be crushed into a few months. ”

“ The phenomena of style have to be viewed in a broad light. Allowance must be made for the difference of vocabulary produced lay change of subject. The evidence of ἅπαξ εὑρημένα is always to be received with caution and strict scrutiny; no hard and fast rule must be set up to judge the language of a man like Paul. Yet such considerations do not operate against the literary judgment that the pastorals did not come from Paul’s pen. ”

“ The degree of elementary Greek culture needful for the understanding of Galatians cannot be shown to have been foreign to the inhabitants of north Galatia. So far as any trustworthy evidence is available, such Hellenic notions as are presupposed in this epistle might well have been intelligible to the Galatians of the northern provinces. Still less does the acquaintance with Roman jurisprudence in iii. 15–iv. 2 imply, as Halmel contends (Über röm. Recht im Galaterbrief, 1895) , not merely that Paul must have acquired such knowledge in Italy but that he wrote the epistle there. ”

“ He makes the apostle prophesy, vaguely of course, the evil tendencies which were to come upon the church; but the internal evidence, together with the impossibility of placing the epistles later than the first ten or twenty years of the 2nd century, render it impracticable to detect anything except incipient phases of syncretistic gnosticism behind the polemical allusions. It was a gnosticism fluctuating not only in its relation to the Church but in its emphasis upon certain ethical and theosophical ideas. ”

“ But these notes imply no apostolic claim on the part of the author, and, although their author is anonymous, the likelihood is that their composition by the great Asiatic presbyter John led afterwards to their incorporation in the “instrumentum” of John the apostle’s writings, when the prestige of the latter had obscured the former. All hypotheses as to their pseudonymity or composition by different hands may be dismissed. They would never have floated down the stream of tradition except on the support of some primitive authority. ”

“ But the whole tone of the epistle suggests that Paul expected a speedy end to his case. Now at Caesarea this was out of the question. His appeal to Caesar involved a protracted process, and it is very difficult to put expressions like those e.g. of ii. 23 into such a situation. The critical outlook of Philippians does not correspond with the position of the apostle at Caesarea, nor can the latter town be said to have been a centre of vigorous Christian propaganda (i. 17) . ”

“ Nor are they John’s, if John means the son of Zebedee. The latter conclusion depends upon the particular hypothesis adopted with regard to the general Johannine problem, yet even when it is held that John the apostle (q.v.) survived to old age in Ephesus, the second and third epistles may be fairly ascribed (with Erasmus, Grotius, Credner, Bretschneider, Reuss, &c.) to John the presbyter [1] , as several circles in the early church held (“Opinio a plerisque tradita,” Jerome: De vir. ill. 18) . An apostle indeed might call himself a presbyter (cf. 1 Pet. v. 1) . ”

“ But not all of them, more especially when the characteristic conceptions and ideas of the pastorals are taken into account. Nor can it be argued that the characteristics of the pastorals are those of private letters ; they are not private, nor even semi-private as they stand; besides, the only private note from Paul’s hand (Philemon) bears no traces of the special diction exhibited in the epistles to Timothy and Titus.
Furthermore, throughout the pastorals, and especially in 1 Tim., there are traces of a wider acquaintance with Greek literature [9] than can be detected in the letters of Paul. ”

“ A number of Latinisms, unexampled in the rest of Paul’s epistles, occur within the pastorals; whole families of new words, especially composite words (often compounded with ἀ-privative, θεο-, οἰκο-, καλο-, [7] σωφρο-, φιλο-) , emerge with others, e.g. εὐσέβεια, πιστὸς ὁ λόγος, &c. ; and the very greeting is un-Pauline (1 Tim. i. 2 ; 2 Tim. i. 2) . The peculiarities of syntax corroborate the impression made by such features of the vocabulary. There is less flow than in the rest of the Pauline letters ”

“ The presbyter or elder warns a Christian community, figuratively addressed as “the elect lady” (cf. 13 with 1 Pet. i. 1; v, 13; also the plural of 6, 8, 10 and 13) , against some itinerant (cf. Didache xi. 1–2) teachers who were promulgating advanced Docetic views (7) upon the person of Christ. The note is merely designed to serve (12) until the writer arrives in person. He sends greetings to his correspondents from some community in which he is residing at present (13) , and with which they had evidently some connexion. ”

“ It is “a sensational heading” (Findlay) , but it may either refer [12] to the whole epistle (so Augustine, Chrysostom, &c., followed by Zahn) or, as most hold (with Jerome) to the postscript (vi. 11-18) . Paul commonly dictated his letters. His use of the autograph here may have been to prevent any suspicion of a forgery or to mark the personal emphasis of his message. In any case it is assumed that the Galatians knew his handwriting. ”

“ At this point the letter suddenly swerves [3] into a passionate warning against some errorists of Judaism (iii. 1–iv. 1) , after which the appeal for unity at Philippi is reiterated (iv. 2–9) , [4] and the epistle closes with some personal details (iv. 10–23) .
Paul is a prisoner when he writes, and the place of composition may therefore be Caesarea or Rome (Acts xxviii. 16, 30–31) . The evidence upon the whole seems to point to the latter. ”