THOSE who propose to read this exposition of the Pastoral Epistles may find it convenient to be apprised at the outset of the conclusions assumed in it concerning the genuineness and integrity of the Letters. After a careful review of the arguments adduced by the traditionalists and the anti-traditionalists, and after the devotion of considerable thought to a minute study of the Epistles themselves, the present writer finds it easier to believe that St. Paul was the author of them, as they have come down to us, than that a Paulinist (assuming that there ever was a special school of Pauline thought), sometime between 90 and 120 Α.Ρ., worked up a few fragments of genuine letters of his master into 2 Timothy and Titus, and then composed 1 Timothy in imitation of his own style. This second alternative represents, broadly speaking, the theory of the anti-traditional school of critics.
The only serious difficulties which preclude an unhesitating acceptance of these letters, as they stand, as the composition of St. Paul, lie in (1), the style, which, although fundamentally not un- Pauline, presents undeniably certain obvious peculiarities which are not found in any of the ten other Pauline letters, and (2) in the writer’s outlook on religion—in particular, the relations of God and Christ respectively to man’s salvation, and the place of faith and works in the spiritual life—which seems to be that of one who had travelled on the Pauline road (assuming that there was a public highway that could be so described), further than we should have deemed it possible in the years—few at most—which separate the close of St. Paul’s life from the date of the Epistles of the first Roman captivity. The main features of the landscape are the same, but the distances are different.
On the other hand, this altered theological outlook, as well as the writer’s concern about Church institutions, is responsible for the