Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (56 page)

Many, many more verbatim agreements could easily be noted between the two letters, especially if we move beyond the first two chapters. But this is enough to make the point. Not only are there numerous words and phrases shared between the two books. That would be remarkable enough. But what makes the parallels particularly striking is that they are not Pauline words, found in other Pauline writings, orthonymous or forged; in fact, most of them are not words found (either at all or extensively) within the entire New Testament. There is clearly a literary relationship between these two books. And there is a good reason for thinking that it is not simply a relationship of one author borrowing the phrases of another—precisely
because
the words are distinctive to these two books (sometimes along with Titus). If one of the books served as the model for the other, the author of the second
happened to pick out as the words to be replicated an inordinate number that are not found commonly elsewhere in the New Testament or Paul.
¹⁶

And so, the different concerns expressed in 1 and 2 Timothy, problems they address, and responses they give to the problems do not require, or even suggest, that they were written by different authors, as is sometimes asserted. The linguistic parallels indicate they were written by the same author. He simply wrote the letters for different reasons.

2 Timothy and Titus

That all three letters were written by the same author should be clear from the foregoing: Titus and 1 Timothy are jointly authored, and so are 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy. This is a situation somewhat analogous to the Johannine epistles. There may be scant reason, in isolation, to think of 1 John as related to 3 John; but the reality is that whoever wrote 1 John also wrote 2 John; and the author of 2 John wrote 3 John; necessarily, then, 1 John and 3 John are jointly authored. The case of the Pastorals is even more certain because here there are so many striking similarities as well among the three, as we will see in a moment, and even between 2 Timothy and Titus, looked at by themselves.

And so, for example, 2 Tim. 3:17,
is closely tied to
of Titus 3:1; so too the virtual repetition of
in 2 Tim. 1:10 as
in Tit. 2:13. The concluding phrase “our Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 1:10; Tit. 1:4; 2:13) occurs nowhere else in the Pauline corpus (though cf. Phil. 3:20). The same can be said of the phrase
(Tit. 2:12) found in 2 Tim. as
(3:12). The phrase
in 2 Tim. 2:23 reappears precisely in Tit. 3:9, and nowhere else in the New Testament. Finally, the verb
is used only one time by Paul, in a quotation of Isa 59:20 in Rom. 11:26; but is used only twice in the New Testament with
2 Tim. 4:4 and Tit. 1:14.

The Three Letters Together

The final coup de grace comes with the unmistakable and, otherwise inexplicable, verbal parallels of all three letters vis-à-vis Paul. Here the evidence cited individually above for the greetings of all three letters can be placed together. There is nothing like this in Paul, and it is impossible to imagine that the three could exist without a literary relationship:

So too numerous other words and phrases. The phrase
is never found in Paul, but is scattered throughout the three letters (1 Tim. 1:15, 3:1, 4:9; 2 Tim. 2:11; Tit. 3:8). So too
it never is found in Paul but is in all three Pastorals (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Tim. 2:25, 3:7; Tit. 1:1). The important term
occurs never in Paul, but frequently in the pastorals (1 Tim. 2:2; 3:16; 4:7, 8; 6:3, 5, 6, 11; 2 Tim. 3:5; Tit. 1:1). The term
occurs never in Paul but does appear four times in the Pastorals (1 Tim. 1:4, 4:7; 2 Tim. 4:4; Tit. 1:14; one other time in the New Testament: 2 Pet. 1:16). As we have seen
also never occurs in Paul but in all three Pastorals ([1 Tim. 1:4,] 6:4; 2 Tim. 2:23; Tit. 3:9); the same is true of the phrase
(1 Tim. 1:10; 2 Tim. 4:3; Tit. 1:9; 2:1). The term
never occurs elsewhere in the New Testament, but four times in these books (1 Tim. 4:8 [bis], 2 Tim. 3:16; Tit. 3:8). The verb
never occurs in Paul, and never as an imperative in the New Testament, except in all three of the pastorals (1 Tim. 4:7, 5:11; 2 Tim. 2:23; Tit. 3:10).