Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (52 page)

It should not be thought, however, that the question about the authenticity of the letters is simply a modern one. Hints and clear indications of doubt can be found among our earliest evidence. Our oldest extensive manuscript of the Pauline epistles, P
⁴⁶
, suffers a large lacuna in its missing final pages, but despite the intriguing claims of J. Duff, these have been shown by E. Epp not to have been
sufficient to have contained all three of the letters.
⁸
Whatever else they may have contained is anyone’s guess. Marcion too did not have (or know about?) the three letters, as Tertullian stresses (
Adv. Marc
. 5.21). The same may have been true of Tatian (according to Jerome;
PL
26.556). But that is not all: around 200
CE
Clement of Alexandria reports that “some heretics” rejected 1 and 2 Timothy because of their contents (
Strom
. 2.52.6) and Origen notes that some orthodox Christians reject 2 Timothy because of its approbation of the magicians Jannes and Jambres in 3:8 (
Comm. on Matthew
ser. 117).

Supporters of the authenticity of the letters occasionally point to their use in other writers of the early church, most especially Polycarp. The matter of early usage is of historical interest, but it scarcely can be counted as evidence for Pauline authorship. Someone writing, say, twenty years after the books were placed in circulation may well have assumed that they were Paul’s. After all, they claim to be Paul’s. And certainly the fact that the authorship was more or less secure for centuries, down to the 1800s, is of no relevance at all.
⁹
The unconsidered opinion of thirteenth-century monks has no evidentiary value.

As already noted, the view adopted by Eichhorn in 1812, that the Pastorals are to be differentiated from the other Pauline letters, yet seen as a “zusammengehörende Gruppe,” is still prevalent today, two centuries later. Norbert Brox states the case in these terms:

Their unity and status as a closed group is documented further in the details, including their close relationship in terms of language (style, vocabulary), content, and presupposed church-historical situation. They speak the same high Greek, live in the same theological context, combat the same heresies, know on the whole the same organization and conception of the individual churches….
¹⁰

Aspects of this view are open to dispute, as we will see. In particular, there is no reason to think that the false teachings attacked by 1 Timothy and Titus are the same as those taken on by 2 Timothy, and the church structure and organization
of the two letters is not evidenced in the third. But most scholars continue to see them as a group of three letters rather than individual, isolated productions. In its most extreme form this view is taken to mean that the three letters were produced—and are to be read—as a corpus, as stated by P. Trummer: “The pastoral epistles are not created merely as pseudepigraphal Pauline
epistles
per se, but are conceptualized also as a pseudepigraphal
pastoral corpus
.”
¹¹
And, more recently, G. Häfner.
¹²

The consensus view of the letters was represented earlier by Brox: the three letters as a group differ in significant ways from the seven undisputed Paulines, or even from all ten other letters of the Pauline corpus. As pointed out, however, there have been lively objections raised from various quarters over the past two decades, in particular over the question of whether the three letters cohere sufficiently to be thought of as a corpus to be read as a unit rather than as individual productions. Among the detractors are, notably, Michael Prior, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Luke Timothy Johnson, William A. Richards, Rüdiger Fuchs, James Aageson, and Jens Herzer
¹³
—all of whom argue, on one set of grounds or another, that the letters differ sufficiently from one another as to warrant the view (at least in theory) that they may have been written by different authors. The most extreme position is taken by W. A. Richards, who claims that the Pastoral epistles represent the work of three authors, all writing for their own purposes, in different places, and in different times, possibly as much as sixty years apart.

I plan to map out a different view in the pages that follow, a modification of the broader consensus. In my judgment all three books were in fact written by the same author. But that does not mean they are to be read as an undifferentiated corpus. Each letter has its own concerns—those of 2 Timothy not necessarily coinciding, for example, with those of 1 Timothy—any more than the concerns of the orthonymous Galatians need be those of 1 Corinthians. In particular, the polemical purposes of the letters may differ. That does not mean, however, that they were written by different authors.

Those who want to stress that the three letters do not form a corpus make a methodological error when they stress, as they invariably do, that the three letters have so many differences among themselves. On one hand, many of those typically cited are simply differences of no moment: 1 Timothy deals with widows and deacons, but Titus does not; 1 Timothy deals with wealth as a problem, but Titus does not; Timothy is called an evangelist, but Titus is not; and so on. But why should two letters deal with all of the same topics and say exactly the same things?

When trying to establish common authorship, it is not the differences of two (or three) writings that matter, but the similarities. One should think of the analogous, though not identical, situation of the Synoptic Gospels. One could easily point to difference after difference between Luke and Matthew and conclude, then, that they derive from different sources. But it is the similarities they share—verbatim agreements in telling the same stories in the same sequence—that show their literary connections. So too, by analogy, with the authorship of the Pastorals. It is all too simple to point out difference after difference among them, but so what? One could just as easily point out the differences between 1 Thessalonians and Galatians, or between Ignatius’s letters to the Smyrneans and the Romans. The question of relationship hinges on the similarities, which have to be explained, however one accounts for the differences.

It is true that taken in isolation, 2 Timothy does indeed look more like Paul than the other two letters, as I will be stressing momentarily. And for a time, I too was nearly persuaded that it might be orthonymous. But at the end of the day, the evidence is simply too overwhelming that the author of 2 Timothy must have been the author of the other two. This does not mean that we can amalgamate the three and pile up statistics based on the corpus to show how different they are, as a collection, from Paul. Each individual work has to be considered not just in relation to the other two, but also in relation to Paul. Nowhere is that more important than in considering the polemical thrusts of the letters. 1 Timothy and Titus appear to take on one set of opponents, and 2 Timothy another.

As a first step in laying out the modified consensus view it is especially important—in light of the demurrals of recent years—to establish the grounds for thinking that all three of the Pastoral epistles go back to the same author. The reason this matters for our discussions here should be patent: if 2 Timothy was written by the author of 1 Timothy, and 1 Timothy is forged, then 2 Timothy is necessarily forged. Not every egg should be set in this basket; as I will argue below, there are compelling reasons for thinking that each of the Pastorals individually, 2 Timothy included, does not go back to Paul. But the individual arguments are only strengthened by the circumstance that the same forger probably produced all three books.

1 Timothy and Titus

There has been far less disagreement over the joint authorship of 1 Timothy and Titus than over 2 Timothy in relationship to the other two.
¹⁴
There are in fact clear and compelling reasons for seeing 1 Timothy and Titus as products of the same pen, many of them being reasons for seeing all three as jointly authored (these latter reasons will be dealt with later). One of them reads very much like a kind of abridgment of the other; or the other reads like an expansion of the first. There are obvious parallels between them, for example in the instructions for the qualifications of leaders, the guidance given to “older men,” to “younger men” and so on. In particular, there are numerous clear and specific parallels and overlaps that are virtually inexplicable apart from a literary relationship of some kind, either an abject borrowing of one author by another or, far more likely in this case, joint authorship. I mean the following data to be illustrative, not comprehensive; but they are more than enough to show some of the ties between the two books.

The connections start at the outset, where the phrase
of 1 Tim. 1:1 is matched by the
of Tit. 1:3. It is virtually the same phrase, found in only these two places in the New Testament. The phrase
is itself found three times in each of these two letters, and nowhere else in the entire Pauline Corpus.

Moreover, the greeting to the addressee is far too close to be accidental, as nothing like it is found anywhere else in the New Testament, apart from 2 Timothy: