Did Paul "Write" the Pastorals?

From an early draft of my commentary, The Pastoral Epistles, which I wrote for church leaders and pastors.

Authorship

         If we begin with the earliest evidence after the PEs we land upon Polycarp (To the Philippians 4.1; 5.2) and 1 Clement 2.7; 60.4; 61.2, and both texts know of our PEs (Polycarp knows 1 Tim 6:7, 10 and 3:8-13; Clement of Rome knows of 1 Tim 1:17; 2:7; and Titus 3:1), which means the PEs are known to them at the turn of the century into the 2d Century CE. Irenaeus stated that Paul wrote 1 Timothy (e.g., Against Heresies 1.Preface; see also 1.23.4; 2.14.7; 3.1.1; 4.16.3; 5.17.1). Clement of Alexandria refers to all three PEs (Stromateis 1.1, 9, 10; 4.7; Exhortation 1). The letters are in the Muratorian Canon. All to say that by the end of the 2d Century these letters are both Pauline and “canonical,” Marcion’s omission of them being most likely intentional.[1] Towner throws down a challenge at this point: “the evidence of early second-century reception and use (let alone the still earlier attestation possible in the case of 1 Clement ) has not been adequately accounted for by the majority, pseudonymity view.”[2] Pauline authorship, then, is not disputed in the early church.[3]

         Does this make the PEs Pauline? No, but it tightens the screws on those who deny Pauline authorship. What remains, however, to explain is how these three letters fit into the life of Paul, and their fit is anything but simple. A common explanation is that Paul was not put to death at the hands of Nero but was released, carried on the facts we find in the PEs, was then re-arrested and from Rome Paul sent these letters later in his life, say in the late 60s. Many have read 1 Clement 5:6-7 as indicating he believed Paul had gone to the far west on a mission trip, and this could indicate the anticipated trip to Spain. I translate that text as follows:

… becoming a proclaimer in both the East and the West, he received a noble honor for his faith, teaching righteousness for the whole world, coming to the end of the West and witnessing before the governors, so he was released from the world and taken up into the holy place, becoming the greatest paradigm of resilience.

The doubled use of “West,” with the second one having the “end of the West,” suggests he got to the western end of the Roman empire. If this reading is accepted, Clement of Rome at the end of the 1^st Century believed Paul had gone to Spain. This would require both a release from prison in Rome, a second arrest and second imprisonment. Eusebius knows this too (Church History 2.22.2). The church tradition, then, is consistent in both a release from Rome, a subsequent arrest and martyrdom. The evidence of movements and people in the PEs cannot be squared easily with the Book of Acts.[4] If, however, one grants a release an opening is also given to locate the movements and persons in a life of Paul. Many today are disinclined to trust the early church evidence but one must at least grant the possibility that a release would open for the details in the PEs.

         Did Paul write the PEs? Let it be said that the cluster-theory of Johnson mentioned above is eminently reasonable and indicative of a number of hands in the Pauline letters.[5] Paul did not physically “write” any of his letters. Each of his letters was the result of conversations with co-workers, with drafts and final drafts, and then – and only then – someone actually putting quill to parchment.[6] The style differences that are sketched by Johnson indicate the ones writing his letters used their own style and even vocabulary. The fundamental implication of such a conclusion is that there is no singular “Pauline style,” usually attributed to Galatians, Romans, and the Corinthian letters, against which other letters can be compared.

         This does not prove that Paul wrote the PEs but that conclusion pushes against many who assume Paul could not have written the letters. Their arguments are not only many but for many they are compelling.[7] Four basic arguments have been lodged against Pauline authorship of the PEs.[8] First, the vocabulary of the PEs varies from the other Pauline letters, the vocabulary has glaring absences of typical Pauline words, and the use of different terms for the very same ideas (e.g., epiphaneia instead of parousia). I don’t consider this argument easy or even necessary to counter though the various authors who actually wrote the letters can explain some of it.[9] Second, the church organization of the PEs shows significant development from what is found in the other Pauline letters, so much so that “early Catholicism” was at time invoked over the PEs. The assumption was the earliest churches were charismatic, unstructured, and leaders were organically formed instead of institutionally appointed. The either-or approach here has been questioned on a number of fronts, including the absence of church order in 2 Timothy and the variety of order between 1 and 2 Timothy. The ethic of the PEs, especially as we unfold it as “civilized piety” as brilliantly explained by Christopher Hoklotubbe, is more urbane and socially-conscious than the other Pauline letters.[10] Again, this is difficult and unnecessary to counter. Instead, we need to admit this significant difference, which could be explained as a later development in Paul’s own mission work as he sought to keep more under the radar of the Roman empire. We have already touched upon the fourth argument: the non-fit of these letters into the chronology of Paul’s life on the basis of either his letters or the Book of Acts, or both.

         These arguments, as Towner sketches, formed into a four-legged foundation: the PEs are pseudonymous, they are a unique cluster of letters, they are from the early 2^nd Century, and the church has now adjusted to life in the empire by learning various forms of compromise and assimilation.[11] Towner, who has spent his academic life studying and publishing about the PEs, has countered these in reasonable and respectable ways. We turn now to his rebuttals.

         It remains an important consideration that a community rooted in truthfulness, a community opposing deception and not the least deception at the level of leadership, a community that did not consider pseudonymity acceptable – I’m speaking here of nascent Christianity as is clear in 2 Thess 2:2 and Tertullian, On Baptism 17 – and that three letters with the level of incidental details we find in the PEs that are not by the author attributed in the opening line – considering these “thats”, that a letter sent in Paul’s name by someone who lived two generations after Paul would be given immediate status in the Christian community is most unlikely.[12] Early Christianity shows no acceptance of other texts written in someone else’s name.[13] For many it is impossible to distinguish deception from pseudonymity. True enough, but it is a fact that Jewish community’s standards of truth-telling were every bit as strong as earliest Christianity’s and that Jewish community’s relative common form of pseudepigraphy was not done (normally) as forgery, fraudulence, or deception but it showed respect and continuity with someone a new author sought to follow.[14] I consider pseudonymity unlikely for the PEs but dismissal of pseudonymity as necessarily fraudulent or forgery overstates the evidence.[15]

         Second, Towner offers a fair assessment of an assumption of disjunction in the events and person in Acts and Paul’s letters when compared with the PEs. He questions the disjunction on the basis of realistic gaps found both in letters and the Book of Acts. For instance, Luke does not account for all that Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:23-29 about his travels and plots and sufferings and adventures. Third, Towner questions the literary contradictions and tensions between the genuine Paulines and the PEs. I have myself argued that too many assume a genuine Pauline style in Galatians, Romans and 1-2 Corinthians and use those criteria as the standard by which they measure all other letters, and those that don’t match that style aren’t from Paul. But Paul did not write any of his letters. He had others write, and we can neither assume the same writer for each letter or that those various authors were not given freedom to express something their own way. This is not a cop-out but a measured conclusion of how writing occurred for Paul and his co-workers.[16] There is, too, a methodological flaw: what is discontinuous with the supposed genuine Paulines proves pseudonymity and what is continuous proves pseudonymity! That is, if it is discontinuous with Paul it shows he didn’t write it while if it is continuous it shows the author was fabricating.

         The logic that concludes in favor of pseudonymity is not as compelling for me as it is for many today, but I contend that there is a pseudonymity for these letters that is neither deceptive nor forgery. I doubt that is the case for these letters but the case should not be made against pseudonymity on the basis of deception. Rather, it should be rooted in clear literary and historical evidence. Which, as indicated above, presents challenges but not unchallengeable or even undefeatable. Many of the cases for Pauline authorship are erudite and informed. Howard Marshall and his student, Phil Towner, both contend for what they call “allonymity” (“another name”), which is what I have indicated above, that is, for an honest pseudonymous composing of the letters in a way that is expressing only what they thought the deceased Paul would say. I contend however that too much is made of the tension between the PEs and the artificial construct of what is called “genuine” Paulines. The voices of the Pauline letters fall naturally into clusters, and each cluster reflects a given (perhaps more than one) writer (not Paul) whose task it was to give expression to Paul’s and his co-workers ideas, as they themselves developed and interacted with various churches, and this author wrote from a location that had its own linguistic and ideological context.[17] A letter by the same author from Cenchreae would not sound in all ways like that author’s letter from Thessalonica. Towner however concedes this: “It is not possible to prove the authenticity of the letters to Timothy and Titus.”[18]

         If Paul wrote the letters,[19] they are from the 60s and the latest (2 Timothy) from probably 67 CE. If not, they can be dated between the late 60s to the first decade of the 2^nd Century CE. The order of the letters is disputed, with some today thinking Titus was the first of the PEs.[20] It is reasonable to think 1 Timothy is written from Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3), 2 Timothy from Rome (2 Tim 1:16-17), and Titus from Nicopolis to Crete (Titus 1:5).

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[1] Towner, Timothy and Titus, 5.

[2] Towner, 6.

[3] The missing seven pages in P46 can be explained in a variety of ways and so nothing certain can be inferred from the absence of the PEs in P46 (see Towner, Timothy and Titus, 6-7). That Paul’s name is not mentioned in the earliest patristic citations of the PEs is taken by some to indicate the name was attributed later. See A. Hultgren, “The Pastoral Epistles,” in James D.G. Dunn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to St Paul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141-155, here pp. 141-42. For a sketch of the early textual evidence, Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, lxiv-lxix.

[4] The “gap theory” has been posed to attribute the actions of the PEs between Acts 19:20 and 19:21 where 19:21’s “after these things” could encompass a long stretch of time. Others pose other unknown and unknowable gaps. For a summary, Towner, Timothy and Titus, 12–15.

[5] See too Michael Prior, Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy (JSNTSup 23; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989). 2 Timothy shows signs of co-authorship, a secretary is not likely, and the letter is private – these three factors deserve attention all discussions of authorship. He argues that neither the fragments hypothesis nor pseudonymity are as conclusive as some believe.

[6] E. Randolph Richards, The Secretary in the Letters of Paul, WUNT 2 42 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991); E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004). Richards has been challenged with respect to Tertius in Rom 16:22 by Alan H. Cadwallader, “Tertius in the Margins: A Critical Appraisal of the Secretary Hypothesis,” NTS 64 (2018): 378-96.

[7] The now standard study against Pauline authorship is Lewis R. Donelson, Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles (Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie 22; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986); see also James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity, Christianity in the Making 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 677–82; Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord, 612–15; Lyn M. Kidson, Persuading Shipwrecked Men: The Rhetorical Strategies of 1 Timothy 1, WUNT 2.526 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). E.P. Sanders might be alone in not only not discussing the PEs but not citing one text at all in his index. See his Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). German scholarship assumes non-Pauline authorship for the PEs. For a good example, see Oda Wischmeyer, ed., Paul: Life, Setting, Work, Letters; trans. Helen S. Heron; Dieter T. Roth (London: T&T Clark, 2012), where the PEs are covered in the “Reception of Paul” (pp. 321-328) as “Trito-Paulines.” Another is their absence in Udo Schnelle, Paulus: Leben und Denken (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003).

[8] E. Earle Ellis, “Pastoral Letters,” in DPL, 659–61. A searching criticism of the method used in adjudicating authorship is found in Johnson, 1-2 Timothy, 55-90.

[9] Extensive discussion at Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, xcix-cxviii.

[10] T. Christopher Hoklotubbe, Civilized Piety: The Rhetoric of Pietas in the Pastoral Epistles and the Roman Empire (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017). For an earlier study, see Reggie M. Kidd, Wealth and Beneficence in the Pastoral Epistles: A “Bourgeois” Form of Early Christianity?, SBLDS 122 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990). Essentially, the bourgeois nature of the PEs can be summarized as socially ascendant, culturally accommodative, and unheroically conservative (pp. 9-25). For some this implies distance from Paul who was more critical of any such bourgeois social status and ethic. Kidd concluded there was more in common with the authentic Paulines and the PEs when it came to such factors. The word “bourgeois” carries too much baggage to be historically helpful.

[11] Towner, Timothy and Titus, 15–20.

[12] This challenges the curriculum in schools of someone writing in the name of another as an assignment as proposed by Huizenga, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, xlvii-xlviii.

[13] Marshall, Pastoral Epistles, 92–93; Towner, Timothy and Titus, 20–21.

[14] This is the well-known argument of Richard Bauckham. See Richard A. Bauckham, Jude-2 Peter, rev. ed., WBC 50 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2014), 158–62. For the viability and early Christian challenges of pseudepigraphal letters and their types, see Richard Bauckham, “Pseudo-Apostolic Letters,” JBL 107 (1988): 469–94. For more, James D.G. Dunn, “Pseudepigraphy,” DLNT, 997-984. For a solid response to claims of pseudonymity, Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, 23–38.

[15] For a sophisticated approach to what happens rhetorically when an author chooses to write pseudonymously, see now Kidson, Persuading Shipwrecked Men, 37–54. An older study of the rhetoric is Mark Harding, Tradition and Rhetoric in the Pastoral Epistles (Studies in Biblical Literature 3; New York: Peter Lang, 1998).

[16] Scot McKnight, The Letter to Colossians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 5–12.

[17] More than a generation ago a reasonable case was made that Luke was the writer of the PEs; see S.G. Wilson, Luke and the Pastoral Epistles (London: SPCK, 1979). This line of thinking has been developed in Witherington, Letters and Homilies, who said “the voice is the voice of Paul, but the hand is the hand of Luke” (60).

[18] Towner, Timothy and Titus, 26.

[19] One of the more recent defenses of the traditional view is Robert Yarbrough, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Pillar New Testament Commentaries; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 67-90.

[20] Marshall, Pastoral Epistles; Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, 65–68; Hutson, 1-2 Timothy, Titus. Gorman thinks 2 Timothy may have been Paul’s last letter; cf. Apostle of the Crucified Lord, 612.