Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (102 page)

It is also hard to know how their passion for
relates to their obsession with “myths and endless genealogies” (1:4). Are these Jewish myths and Old Testament genealogies? Or are they cosmogonies such as known from later Gnostic texts? (The latter would not rule out the possibility that the proponents were ethnically and culturally Jewish.) The author returns to the opponents’ “empty and ridiculous” myths in 4:7. If this were actually Paul speaking, it would be hard to assume that he would use such disparaging terms about the Jewish Scriptures; on the other hand, if it were Paul, it would also be hard to imagine Gnostic theogonies and cosmogonies sufficiently advanced, at such an early period, to have
caused real and present danger to Christians in Ephesus. The “falsely called gnosis” of 6:20 sounds warning bells for anyone attuned to later second-century heresiology. But that may well be an incautious knee-jerk reaction created by deep and intimate association with Irenaeus. At the end of the day, it is hard to know what the author is referring to.

What is somewhat clearer is that the author attacks his opponents for a kind of rigorous asceticism. They “forbid marriage” and “urge abstinence from foods” (4:3). The author objects that God created these foods to be received with thanks. Unfortunately, since the author does not specify which foods he has in mind, it is not clear whether he is attacking kosher food laws or general ascetic discipline involving abstention from luxuriant or otherwise all-too-desirable edibles. The comparisons and contrasts with Paul himself are intriguing at just this point. Even though Paul did not forbid marriage, he certainly discouraged it (1 Corinthians 7); and even though he allowed all foods—even those offered to idols—he did urge his Corinthian inquiring minds to abstain for the sake of the conscience of others, and, at least in one place, because of the demons (1 Corinthians 8, 10). The false teachers of 1 Timothy, in any event, whether seeing themselves as Paulinists or not (assuming the teachers’ existence, whether they are fictional or real), actually forbid marriage and the consumption of certain foods.

What then, in summary, can we say about the teachings of the opposition? Since F. C. Baur, there have been scholars all too ready to speak of them as Gnostics. Myths, genealogies, speculations, pointless asceticism, and “falsely-called” gnosis—it all adds up. On the other hand, there is obviously no full-blown Gnostic speculation here. We don’t know what the myths and genealogies are. In Titus, as we will see in a moment, the myths are specified as “Jewish.” And the genealogies could as easily be connected with Scripture as with theogonies and cosmogonies known from second-century sources, Gnostic and heresiological. It may be safest to say, then, that we know some of the characteristics of these false teachers but do not have a complete picture. They stress the Jewish Law; they focus on myths and genealogies; they urge asceticism; and they rely on gnosis. It may well be that these are forerunners of groups that eventually became Gnostic, as such are some of the characteristics that could be found among groups that were to emerge later. Possibly they are proto-Gnostics. Considered within their own time, such a designation would be anachronistic: they were who they were and are not necessarily best understood in light of what later teachers would build on the foundations they laid.

The one tie of these teachers to the opponents of 2 Timothy comes in the person of Hymenaeus (1:20; cf. 2 Tim. 2:17–18). As earlier noted, by specifying an enemy, the author distances himself from Paul, who steadfastly refused, at least in his surviving literary remains, to name names. It is also odd that what the author says here—that “Paul” has turned Hymenaeus over to Satan—stands at some tension with what he says in 2 Timothy, where Hymenaeus continues to cause a disturbance in the church. One might suppose that 1 Timothy is being imagined as having been written at a later time, when Paul finally became sufficiently vexed with the fellow to give him the apostolic boot; but that solution does not
accord well with the clear indications that the author envisages 2 Timothy as a kind of “last testament,” written near Paul’s death, making 1 Timothy, therefore, necessarily earlier. Possibly the author wanted to create another tie between the two letters and simply did not realize that he had created a certain snafu; or, if one wants to play the game of reconciliation a bit, possibly he imagined that Hymenaeus learned his lesson after spending time with Satan, returned to the fold, but then began to misbehave again later. In any event, the reference to this Pauline headache in 1 Timothy seems to suggest that Hymenaeus’ behavior is ethically problematic, and that the bad actions are connected to bad theology, since Paul needs to teach him not to “blaspheme.” In 2 Timothy the problem involves belief that the resurrection is past. Possibly the author sees the opponent as problematic on numerous fronts, all in one way or another tied together, as was the situation in a remarkably similar case many years earlier with Paul and the enthusiasts at Corinth. One stark difference, on the other hand, as already noted, involves what it means to deliver a person “over to Satan.”
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As might be expected with a briefer letter, when we move to the explicit polemic of Titus we have even less to go on. Here again there are numerous empty and stereotyped charges that are of little value for determining what the imagined or real opponents actually stood for. They allegedly stand
against
“healthy teaching” (1:9); they are “insubordinate, speakers of vain things, and deceivers” (1:10); they disrupt entire families by teaching for financial profit (1:11); as Cretans they are “liars, wicked beasts, and lazy gluttons” (as one of their own, a fellow Cretan, says; or was he, as all Cretans were, also a liar, so that in fact these charges against them are not true? 1:12); they are not “sound in the faith” (1:13); they are “loathsome, disobedient, and not fit for any good deed” (1:16); moreover, they are “heretical”
perverted, sinful, and self-condemned (3:10–11), to echo some of the polemic of 1 Timothy.

Here again, though, there are some specific identifying features of the enemy, and in many ways what is said dovetails well with 1 Timothy (though not 2 Timothy). It is striking, however, that the enemies who are particularly “insubordinate … deceivers” are especially those who “are from the circumcision” (1:10). In other words, the worst enemies, though evidently not all of them, are ethnically Jewish. This then makes sense of 1:14–15, that they pay close attention to “Jewish myths,” and “human commandments” that have to do with purity regulations.
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This is another passage, as noted earlier, that is difficult indeed to assign to Paul, who may have seen that the Law was a problem, but not that it was filled with myths and human (as opposed to divine) injunctions.
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As in 1 Timothy, the false teachers are involved with “foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and arguments over
the Law” (3:9). With the emphasis on the “members of the circumcision,” Jewish myths, purity requirements, and legal disputes, these opponents are more obviously Jewish than those of 1 Timothy; but there is nothing in the description here that runs at odds with the other book. As indicated earlier, J. Sumney may be taking the matter too far when he imagines that the two groups are presented as unrelated. There is a lot of overlap, and not just in the stereotyped polemic.

In any event, Titus is not to argue with the opponents (3:9), but to admonish them in order to return them to the truth (3:11). That is the function of the bishop as well (1:7, 9).

In addition to the direct, if frustratingly ambiguous, attack on false teaching in 1 Timothy and Titus, there are elements of indirect polemic as well, one of which—the appointment of suitable leaders—is probably connected with the explicit polemic, as we will see momentarily. The other is presented just in 1 Timothy, and involves the much debated issue of the role of women in the church.

It is not clear that all of the injunctions to and about women in 1 Timothy are to be seen as arising out of specific polemical contexts. In some instances, such as the instructions to widows in 5:3–10, the directives may simply involve situations that have arisen as the church has grown and developed. In other words, there is no need, and probably scant reason, to envision a controversy with other Christian leaders insisting that widows should be younger or not enrolled. Even here, however, the author cannot restrain his all-too-obvious opinion of women in the church, as is most evident in his comments on the “younger widows” of 3:11–15, who have, many of them, already “strayed after Satan,” who have learned to be “idle” as they make the rounds from house to house as “gossips” and “busy-bodies,” and who are inclined to “grow wanton” against Christ and get remarried. Such language is polemical not because it is directed against another set of teachings, but because it is directed against a group of people vilified as if it were in their very nature to gad about as idle busybodies.

The point comes to a head in the infamous 2:11–15, about which enough has been said over the past fifty years to require, in this context, only a few brief words. That women are instructed to be “silent and submissive” and not to “exercise authority over a man” simply cannot be reconciled with the Pauline policy, as restrictive as it was, that required women to prophesy and pray in church only while wearing head coverings (1 Cor. 11: 2–16). Either women can speak in church or they cannot; and prophecy by its very nature asserts authority.
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Moreover, the
idea that women would be saved not by faith in Christ, for example, but by having babies is, to put the most generous spin on it, un-Pauline at best.

As in the discussion of the “young widows,” this restriction, or rather curtailment, of the participation of women in the church is polemical in the sense that it is opposing an activity that almost certainly was thought to have been common: women teaching and exercising authority in the church. But can we say anything more specifically about the background to the attack? In one of the most important and interesting studies of the Pastoral epistles in recent years, Annette Merz has argued that the author is not merely on the attack against an established practice, but that he understands the practice to be rooted in a misreading, or at least an inadequate reading, of the Pauline letters themselves. In this view, the author writes the Pastorals, in part, in order to redirect the reading of a passage that Merz takes to be authentically Pauline, 1 Cor. 14:34–35.
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This argument is part of Merz’s larger project of suggesting a theoretically sophisticated intertextual approach to the Pastoral epistles. The standard approach to intertextuality appeals to the texts that a passage refers to in order to help clarify how the passage is to be interpreted: “The openness of texts to a variety of interpretations is largely due to the dialogue between those texts which are evoked in their reception.”
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As Merz points out, however, the process of interpretation can work both ways. When the concern of the interpreter involves how to interpret a passage, and its various intertexts are invoked to that end, then it is a “text-oriented” approach. But it is also significant that once the passage is interpreted, its meaning, newly established, is often applied back to the intertexts themselves in order to deepen their meaning as well. As an example that Merz draws from the Pastorals, when 1 Tim. 5:18 invokes Deut. 25:4 (“Do not muzzle an ox that is treading”) in order to support its view that church leaders deserve to be paid, Christians familiar with this interpretation who then read the passage in Deuteronomy are more inclined to take it in the sense that it is used in 1 Timothy, so that it is understood even in its original Old Testament context to refer to paying one’s minister. This inversion of the interpretative process, in which the intertext is subject to a new interpretation, is a “reference-oriented” approach to intertextuality.

Merz contends that the Pastorals are meant to provide reference-oriented strategies of interpretation for their intertexts. Or to use the terminology that has come to be in vogue, the Pastorals provide “reading instructions” for the Pauline letters to which they allude. Anyone who reads the Pastoral epistles as having
come from Paul as part of his corpus of writings interprets the various passages in the Pauline letters in light of one another. The other letters can and are, then, read through the lens of the Pastorals, just as, historically speaking, they were, and are, read by readers who naturally assume that they are orthonymous.