Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (60 page)

The polemical attack on false teachers is a prominent feature of all three Pastoral letters. By Johnson’s count, 47 of the 242 verses of the books are involved with
polemic.
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As Donelson states, “all three letters are peppered with warnings about false teachers… [who] appear to be the immediate occasion for writing the letters.”
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The polemic is especially evident in 1 Timothy and Titus, as it appears at the very outset of each letter (1 Tim. 1:3; Tit. 1:9–16); and at its conclusion (1 Tim. 6:20–21; Tit. 3:9–11), with scattered references, then, throughout. 2 Timothy is also littered with polemical statements and warnings. The opening section ends with the exhortation to “guard the good deposit that comes from the Holy Spirit that dwells in you” (1:14). The author is concerned that his teachings be “entrusted to faithful ones” who can teach others as well (2:2). The heart of the body of the letter involves the specific issue of greatest concern to the author, the false teachings of those who insist that the “resurrection has already happened” (2: 14–19) to which we will return momentarily. The false teachers are to be corrected, but not engaged (2:23–26), as they promote the work of “the devil” (2:26). These opponents appear closely connected with (identical with?) the moral reprobates about to appear in the last days (3:1–9). Other eschatological warnings involve false teaching in se, as members of the congregation will not endure “healthy teaching” but follow teachings that they prefer, turning from the “truth” in order to “stray after myths.” Already the opposition is in full force, as evidenced by Alexander who “strongly opposed our words” and thus did the author “great harm” (4:14–15).

As stressed repeatedly above, the facts that the Pastorals were probably written by the same hand and that all engage in polemics should not be taken to mean that the polemical target is the same in all three letters, any more than the opponents of Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and Philippians are necessarily all the same. No one today would (or should) think of creating an amalgamation of Paul’s polemical statements in these three letters to create some kind of hybrid opponent who embodied the negative characteristics intimated in each. Why scholars have been so eager to do so with the Pastorals is a mystery. The resulting amalgam is usually some kind of otherwise unknown group of “Jewish Gnostics,” or occasionally some other interesting mixed bag, such as Spicq’s converted Jews who use rabbinic and Hellenistic modes of interpretation of Scripture and privilege the Torah.
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This passion for conflation is virtually ubiquitous in the literature, from authors as wide ranging as Robert Karris, Günter Haufe, Josef Zmijewski, I. Howard Marshall, and Lewis Donelson.
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The real problem with this approach
is not simply that the resultant composite picture does not resemble any known teacher or group; the same could be said even of unitary presentations of false teachers, such as that found in 3 Corinthians. The deeper problem is that there is in fact nothing in the letters themselves to make one think that the problems addressed in 2 Timothy are the same as those addressed in 1 Timothy and Titus, as scholars such as Johnson and Prior have recognized. As Murphy-O’Connor has stated the matter: “Nowhere has the assumption of the unity of the Pastorals been more pernicious than in treatments of the errors they oppose.”
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Jerry Sumney has performed a particularly useful service of isolating the polemic of each of the letters and seeing from a minimalist view what each one has to say about the opponents.
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Sumney can probably be faulted for being even too minimalist, in that he underreads some of the passages and does not see the close ties between 1 Timothy and Titus once the analysis is completed (every objection to the opponents of Titus can be found in 1 Timothy as well). I will later maintain that 1 Timothy and Titus are directed toward the same opponents. But nothing links them to the opponents addressed in 2 Timothy.

There are basic similarities in the unpleasant things said about the two groups. Like the opponents of the other Pastorals, those in 2 Timothy are full of vice (3:1–6); they dispute over words (2:14, 23); they are corrupted in mind and un-proven in faith (3:8); and they turn aside to myths (4:4). There is nothing to indicate that these myths are Jewish teachings about the Law, as found in 1 Timothy and Titus. All of these polemical statements in fact are stock phrases that give us no real indication of what it is, exactly, these false teachers were teaching, a matter stressed years ago in an important article of Robert Karris.
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Other statements in the course of the polemic are more targeted and can provide us with some indication of who these false teachers were and what they proclaimed. For one thing, the author, in a clear departure from Pauline practice, actually names them. They are Hymenaeus and Philetus: persons, therefore, known, if only fictionally, to both the (fictional) audience and author. But since they are named, even if fictionally, it means that the author imagines the opposition to have arisen within the community among persons who are known. Moreover, some of the polemic directed against them is not simply undifferentiated slander. Since they are said to have swerved from the truth, they, again, are being conceived of as insiders, not external threats (2:18); so too the comment that they have been ensnared by the devil, which implies they had previously led an unensnared existence (2:26). What is more, they have misled others in the community (2:18), but they still have the chance to repent and come to know the truth (2:25). Most important is that their specific error is named directly:
they maintain that “the resurrection has already happened”
(2:18).

Hints that this was to be the problem with the false teaching came earlier, though they were left unflagged, especially in the pithy summary of the “Pauline credo” in 2:11–13, with its neat repetition of future tenses at the appropriate moments: “if we died with him [aorist] we also will live with him [future]; if we endure we will also reign with him [future]; if we should deny him, even that one will deny us [future].” Paul himself could scarcely have said it better, and one is right to suspect the influence of a passage such as Rom. 6:5, 8.

As we saw earlier, this very Pauline insistence that the believer’s death with Christ, in baptism, was past, but the future resurrection with Christ is yet future, formed the heart of the polemic against Paul’s opponents in Corinth, who appear to have believed that they had already experienced the benefits of the resurrection in the present.
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The irony, as we also saw, is that the later authors of Colossians and, especially, Ephesians appear to have developed their views precisely along the lines of these opponents of Paul in Corinth. As the author of Colossians expresses it, “You who were dead in the transgressions and uncircumcision of the flesh, God made you alive with him (aorist:
2:13; cf. the future
in 2 Tim. 2:11); or, as Ephesians states the matter yet more emphatically, “Even though we were dead in transgressions, he made us alive in Christ (same word in the aorist:
), and he raised us (aorist:
) and seated us (aorist:
) in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:5–6).
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