Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (103 page)

Normally this process of reference-oriented intertextual reading implies both an alternative way of reading a text and one or more readers who read it that way. That is to say, the process is innately polemical. And so the idea that office holders in the church should be paid may seem to stand at odds with what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9. But in fact if 1 Corinthians 9 is read in light of 1 Timothy 5, then those who oppose paying their preachers are put in a compromising position by “Paul” himself. So too the requirement that young widows remarry (1 Tim. 5:14) seems to stand at odds with what Paul, and many of his readers, thought, based on 1 Corinthians 7. Merz in particular argues that “Paul’s” instructions in 1 Tim. 6:1–5 about Christian slaves and slaveholders has close parallels (verbal and conceptual) to Philemon 16, which could be read as suggesting that slaves were to be manumitted by their Christian owners; but not for the author of the Pastorals, who insists, as a way of countering this reading of Philemon, that slaves are to remain in their subjection to their Christian masters.

With respect to the issue of women in the church, Merz argues that 1 Tim. 2:11–15 is to be understood as a guide for reading the less forthright injunctions of 1 Cor. 14:33–36. In this connection she stresses the well-known verbal parallels between the two passages, and suggests they are no accident:
Moreover, the author has shifted from the more vague
to the more precise
and has filled out the rather ambiguous “as the Law says” to the specific Torah interpretation of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3). Most striking, the author has moved from a passive
to the more explicit prohibition,

As a result, as Margaret Mitchell approvingly notes, the possible ambiguities of 1 Corinthians, which in one place appear to allow women to exercise authority (11:2–16), are overcome with an explicit directive that shows how Paul is to be read.
¹³
Contrary to the practice, possibly built on the writings of Paul (Gal. 3:28, etc.), women are not to be allowed to be actively involved in the church’s liturgy.

As insightful and potentially enlightening this interpretive move is, its difficulties reside in the obvious questions of the status of 1 Cor. 14:34–35 itself. The reference-oriented reading works only if there was a referent text in place, and there continue to be compelling reasons for thinking that the Corinthian passage is an interpolation.
¹⁴
If the Pastorals are referring to the altered form of the text
of 1 Corinthians 14, the interpolation would have had to have been made at an extremely early date. Moreover, one could just as easily maintain that the verbal and conceptual parallels exist precisely because a later copyist, familiar with the words of 1 Tim. 2:11–15, decided to reinscribe their teaching by inserting a comparable passage into the text of 1 Corinthians. If so, the author of the Pastorals is not obsessed with guiding the reading of another Pauline epistle but is simply concerned with a practice that he deems inappropriate and even dangerous, as women speak out and exercise authority over men. As we will see, this is a common anxiety for the forged church orders, which show a constant concern that the activities of women needed to be regulated in the names of the apostles.

One of the overarching concerns of both 1 Timothy and Titus is obviously the leadership of the church. As I have already observed, it is important to note that the author does not take steps toward establishing the sundry church offices. By the time of his writing, there were already bishops and deacons in the churches with which he was familiar. In other words, this writer is not advancing beyond the charismatic communities known, say, from the Corinthian correspondence to propose a more hierarchically structured organization. He was living in an age in which the hierarchy was already in place and in which church leaders were ordained to office; communities were no longer run by Spirit-filled members who received gifts at baptism. The question the author is concerned to address involves the qualifications of these leaders. The emphatic insistence that only the “right people” be allowed to occupy leadership roles may well relate to the other polemical concerns of the letters. Here only a few words need to be said about these roles.

It is clear from 1 Timothy that the
is ultimately in charge of the church, after the apostle himself and his appointed delegate, Timothy. This much is evident from 3:5: just as the bishop manages or runs his own household, so too he is to manage or run the church. Since one can “aspire to be bishop,” the leaders appear to be chosen from candidates who wish to be considered; they are not chosen completely by lot or some other divinely ordained procedure. Presumably the same applies to the deacons as well.
¹⁵
It is not clear how the
(plural) of 5:17 who “rule” relate to the bishop (singular) of 3:1–7, or to the
of 3:8–13, whether the “elders” are a separate group of men or instead are the men who inhabit the other two categories. If they are a separate group, it seems odd that the author does not spell out their qualifications, as he does for the others. In Titus they are to be “appointed” (1:5). In any event, it is somewhat unclear whether there are three offices involved here (bishop, presbyters, deacons) or just two (bishop, deacons), both of which constitute “elders.”