James Moffatt

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) . [1] The practices of the latter are pungently depicted [2] (iii. 1–9) ; Paul reiterates his opening counsels (10 seq.) ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ They are too circumstantial and artless to be the work of a writer idealizing or creating a situation. Thus, in the present epistle, a passage like iii. 12–13 is palpably genuine. But it is another question whether other passages can be added to it (e.g. i. 1 seq., 5–6, 12–13a, 16, iii. 1–7, 15, by Hesse; i. 1, 4, iii. 15, by von Soden; i. 1–6?, iii. 1–7, by McGiffert) , in order to reconstruct a more or less independent note from Paul’s own pen.
It seems improbable that Titus or any of the pastorals is directed against any one phase of contemporary heresy. ”

“ One definite trait is its Jewish character (Titus i. 10; 2 Tim. iii. 16; 1 Tim. i. 7, &c.) . The errorists developed speculations and practical theories on the basis of the Old Testament law, which proved extremely seductive to many Christians. But it is difficult to find any homogeneity in the repeated descriptions of this semi-gnostic phase, although now and then (e.g. in 1 Tim. i. 7 seq.; Titus i. 14, iii. 9) there are suggestions of the legalism which Cerinthus advocated. ”

“ The pastorals themselves never mention any mission in Spain. Spanish tradition is silent on the fact, and the allusion to the “west” (in Clem. Rom. v.) can be interpreted at least as fairly of Rome as of Spain. The entire problem is not without its difficulties still, after all the research lavished upon it, but the probabilities seem to converge upon the conclusion that Paul was never released from his imprisonment, and consequently that he never revisited the East.
The internal criticism of the epistle starts from i. ”

“ Titus ii. 11; 1 Tim. iv. 10) . The exhaustive discussions on this point (cf. Bourquin, pp. 55 seq.) have led most scholars to the conclusion that no one system of 2nd-century gnosticism is before the writer’s mind. He is maintaining Paul’s rôle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Pauline standard of doctrine is set up (i. 3–20) as the norm of thought and practice. . This trust and tradition is to be maintained throughout the churches. It involves, the writer proceeds to argue, the proper conduct of public worship (ii. 1 seq., 8 seq.) ”

“ Elhik, pp. 378 seq.) is quite in accord with sub-apostolic practice. It is almost as un-Pauline as the assumption that every lirimarried. Cf. on this whole subject Hilgenfeld (Zeitschrift fur wiss. Theologie, 1886, pp. 456 seq.) and Schmiedel (Encycl. biblica, 31 13 seq.) ; the opposite position is stated excellently by Hort (Christian Ecclesia, 1898. 189 seq.) and Dr T. M. Lindsay (Hibbert Journal, i. 166 seq., and in The Church and the Ministry in the early Centuries, 1903, pp. 139 seq.) . ↑ The pastorals soon passed into great favour in the early Church. ”