phrases of ordinary religious society. He is not less intelligible to Timothy, or less truly himself.
It was noticed in the beginning of this Introduction that the con- sideration of most weight against the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles is the style of the composition, which differs from that of any of the groups of the other ten Pauline letters—the genuineness of which is here assumed—by (a) the recurrence in them of certain, almost stereotyped, forms of expression, (6) by a general difference in the structure of sentences, and (c) by the absence from them of alleged characteristic Pauline words. These three sorts of variation are here enumerated in the order of tbeir importance. No fair-minded traditionalist will be disposed to minimise the gravity of the problem presented by these indisputable facts. On the other hand, these acknowledged peculiarities must not be allowed to obscure the equally undoubted fact that the Epistles present not only as many characteristic Pauline words as the writer had use for, but that, in the more significant matter of turns of expression, the style of the letters is, as has been stated before, fundamentally Pauline. This will be evident from an inspection of the references. Perhaps it is true to say that the positive stylistic peculiarities of the letters—the large number of unusual words,! the recurrent phraseology—deprive of its just weight the counter argument based on its admittedly Pauline element, just because this is normal, and does not strike the eye. It is at least a strong argument on the traditionalist side, that the un-Pauline style of the Pastorals was not commented on by the early Greek Christian critics, as was the un-Pauline style of Hebrews, and the un-Johannine style of the Apocalypse. On the other hand, the peculiarities of expression are not such asa clever imitator of St. Paul's style would introduce.
Taking up, in the first place, the recurrent words, terms and phrases, it will be convenient to divide them into three categories.
A. Terms, or phrases, of the religious life of the Christian Society. B. Polemical phraseology in reference to false teaching. C. Favourite terms, or expressions, of the author’s.
It is not pretended that this classification can be carried out con- sistently ; but it seemed to be worth attempting. In particular it
1 Dean Bernard, Past. Epp., p. xxxvi., notes that the ἅπαξ λεγόμενα amount to 176, a number “ proportionately twice as great as in any other of St. Paul’s letters.”
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