Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (101 page)

A very similar situation is assumed for Titus. Here again there is no word about Paul being in prison; on the contrary, he is hoping to meet up with Titus in Nicopolis, where he has decided to spend the winter (3:12). In the meantime, Paul has left Titus behind on the island of Crete in order to appoint presbyters in all the cities there (1:5). These presbyters are evidently meant to serve as bishops of the churches (1:7). Titus is also to bring under control false teachers who are
troubling the congregations (1:13) and to work for the social unity and appropriate behavior of the individuals, of different sorts and walks of life, who make up the churches (2:1–10). Here too Titus is envisaged as the ultimate leader of the church on Crete, so long as he is resident among them (2:15).

The direct polemic of both letters involves false teachers and “Paul’s” insistence that his appointed delegates bring them under control. This is the first and most urgent message to issue from the apostle’s pen in 1 Timothy, immediately after the letter opening: “charge certain persons not to teach anything heterodox”
And it is also the last note sounded at the end of the letter before the final farewell, “avoid the worthless empty talk and the contradictions of falsely-named gnosis”
The topic of false teaching dominates both the opening and final chapters. If that is how an author begins and ends a letter, we can be reasonably sure that it is his principle concern.

So also with Titus. Here, too, the letter begins with an attack on false teachers. Titus is to “correct what is defective,” (1:5) and appoint leaders who “hold firm to the true word that is taught”
who can deliver “sound teaching”
and refute anyone who contradicts it (1:9). The false teachers must “be silenced” (1:11). The letter, again, ends on a similar note. Titus is to avoid foolish controversies
genealogies, and dissentions, and arguments over the law, “for they are not of profit and futile” (3:9–11). Moreover, any “heretical person”
is to be admonished once or twice, and then shunned for good (3:10), since anyone like that is “perverted, sinful, and self-condemned” (3:11).

It is much harder to know what exactly it is that the false teachers were (allegedly) saying, whether or not they actually existed.
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For our purposes here, it does not much matter if the opponents were real or imagined: all we have in any event is the letters themselves, and the author has presented us with a set of false teachers that he portrays as dangerous. Although he provides more information about them in 1 Timothy, the polemical thrust of Titus is very similar. None of the characterizations in the latter is missing from the former, so that even though these are not the same false teachers attacked in 2 Timothy, they do seem to represent a single set of adversaries in these two letters.

It is clear from 1 Timothy that the opponents are imagined as coming from inside the congregation. They have “swerved away” and wandered off into “vain reasoning” (1:6), suggesting that once they had walked the straight and narrow. This is confirmed in the two cases the author mentions, “Hymenaeus” and “Alexander,”
who have made a “shipwreck of their faith” by rejecting their conscience; these were obviously members of the believing ship’s crew before disaster struck, and “Paul” had to “deliver them over to Satan” to teach them no longer to commit their blasphemies (1:20). Later “Paul” indicates that the false teachers—not just the two he has named—are those predicted to come in the end of time, when “some will depart from the faith by holding fast to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons”
He returns to the topic at the end of the letter, where he speaks of teachers from within the congregations (6:3) who do not “agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ” and the “teaching that accords with piety” (6:3). There is some hint, at least, that these teachers have gone astray from “the faith” out of love of money (6:9–10).

As so often happens in this kind of polemic, many of the accusations leveled against the false teachers reveal more about the author’s prowess in generating vituperation than about the specific teachings that he finds objectionable.
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In addition to being fond of deceitful spirits and demonic doctrines (4:1), these teachers are “puffed up with conceit,” ignorant, and morbidly passionate for controversy and verbal arguments; they are “depraved” in their minds, they lack the truth, and they are pious for the sake of material reward (6:3–7). All this may or may not be true, but it can get us nowhere if we want to know what it is, exactly, these people teach.

In several places, however, the polemic becomes more specific. We may not, at the end of the day, have a coherent picture, and certainly not a complete one, but there are a few features of the false teachings that emerge over the course of the letter. For one thing, the opponents imagine themselves to be “teachers of the Law” (
1:7), even though they do not know what they are talking about. Presumably, from the pen of “Paul,” this means that the opponents base their views on the Jewish Scriptures, or possibly the Torah exclusively. One might think that since they are characterized as ignorant, that they would be gentile Judaizers rather than Jews, but that would be pressing the polemic too hard, as it is quite easy to accuse even a qualified expert of being an ignorant dilettante.