11. Authorship of the Pastoral Epistles.— Of all the letters ■rthich profess to have come from the apostle Paul these are the most disputed. A formidable account is laid against them, to wit — {a) the false doctrine which is said to be Gnostic teaching of the end of the 1st cent. ; (6) the em- phasis placed upon the Church, its organization and worship, in which are traced the beginnings of the monarchical episcopate, a clergy in due suc- cession from the apostles with a higher standard of morality than the laity, liturgical forms and creeds ; (c) fundamental changes from earlier Pauline doctrine both in emphasis and in conception^ orthodoxy having supplanted faith, some indeed discovering the germ of the doctrine ' quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus'; good works as tlie outcome of nioralism having taken the place of the fruit of the Spirit; justification by faith being no longer vital as against legalism ; and the escliatology of the earlier days having lost its vividne-ss ; [d) a marked change of language and style, the original language coined by Paul for the expression of the facts of salvation having been displaced to a great extent by terms drawn from the current Jewisli-IIellenistic religious ter- minology, and the old vigour having yielded to smooth or loose commonplace ; (<;) the fact that Paul, speaking in old age, addresses Timothy as though he were not yet a fully matured man ; (/) the extreme difficulty of finding a place for these letters in the recorded life of Paul. As a result, many scholars suppose that
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they were written about tlio end of the Ist century.*
It has, however, been shown that the false doc- trine of these letters is most easilj' explained as the result of tendencies both .Jewish and jiagan which were at work tow ards the end of I'aul s life, and that it does not distinctively resemble what is called 'Gnosticism,' such as was prevalent at the end of the 1st century. The ecclesiastical order is not unlike that found in I'hilippians and Acts ; there is no evidence of a clergy piacliHing a higher morality and enjoying a distinctive privi- lege by transmission fnini the apostles. The view of the Church itself also and of its .sacraments is very .similar to that which is found in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and Acts. The Epistles, therefore, lit a period quite as early as Acts, and do not in- herently need to be put later than A.D. 70 or 80.
There is, however, as we have seen, much force in the arguments urged against their authenticity which are drawn from the changes in the emphasis and formulation of doctrine, as well as from the remarkable dill'erences between the early Pauline Epistles and these in style and language. Perhaps also the attitude of an old man to a youth assumed by Paul to Timothy, especially in the First E])istle, is somewhat artificial, though it may be justified by the Apostle's relation to him as given in 1 Co 4'' 16'»- ", Ph 2=»-^-. These dilficulties are most obvious in 1 Tim., less so in Tit., and many of them disappear from 2 Timothy. As has been already remarked, if 2 Tim. had stood alone, its authenticity would probably not have been ques- tioned.
Attempts have been made to discover Pauline fragments in these Epistles, but without much success, e.g. a genuine letter written towards the close of the Roman captivity, in 2 Ti P"'- "• "'* 46-19. 21-22 and in Tit P- ■• 3^'^-'» (see especially Moffatt, LNT, p. 403f. ); but, as Jiilicher remarks, 'the impression of unity given by the whole, esjiecially of the close connexion originally existing between all the parts referring to the discipline of the Church, outweighs arguments in favour of division of material among several .authors ' (Introcl. to the NT, Eng. tr., p. 199). There seem to be, however, in 1 Tim. and possibly in Tit. some interpolated passages (see under § 2).
The remarkable similarities in language and ideas, religious and ecclesiastical, that exist be- tween these Ilpistles and the writings of Luke, combined with their Pauline substance, may be best explained by supposing that Luke had a large share in their composition. He was alone with Paul at the time of his approachinjj death, and may have composed the 'second Epistle to Timothy in such circumstances during the im- prisonment of Paul tli.at it was a rejiroduction of his ideas and even of his language rather thiin the work of an amanuensis. In that case, it may be called Pauline. It was almost certainly the earliest of the three.
Some years after the Apostle's death Luke, or one of his circle, may have put together, from his notes or reminiscences and from Pauline material, the first letter to Timothy and that to Titus almost simultaneously. His purpose in doing so was to strengthen the authority of Timothy and Titus in the face of a widespread and increasing invasion of the error referred to in 2 Tim., which was undermining the churches of Ephesus and Crete. Such a theory would account for most of the features of these lipistles, as, e.g., the disorder
• 'The Pastorals sprang from the need of fixinp in literary form tlie church ordinances which had frrown up spontaneously and ornaniwilly and thereby setting forth fixed statutes for the individual life of the church. Tlie attempt is made to bring these rules under the authority of St. Paul and so to provide them with a more general validity ' (Wendland, op. cit., p. 306).