that each of the other letters which are ascribed to him arose out of special circumstances, and deals almost exclusively with those special circumstances, and that the circumstances which called forth the letters to Timothy and Titus were, confessedly, quite different from those out of which any of the other Pauline letters arose. When these obvious facts are considered, it is difficult to treat seriously an argument which assumes that St. Paul was provided with only one set of words and terms; unalterable, no matter to whom, or on what subject, he was writing.
It is not thus that non-Biblical compositions are critically examined. We do not demand that Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Cymbeline should exhibit a certain percentage of Hamlet words. And the argument becomes all the more unreasonable when one thinks how very small in extent is the extant literary work of St. Paul: less than 150 small octavo pages in Westcott and Hort’s edition, and of these the Pastorals occupy only fifteen. If we had been privileged to hear St. Paul’s sermons, or to listen to his con- versation, how many Pauline words, as shown in a concordance, should we have heard 2
Antecedently, we should not expect that an author’s favourite expressions would be distributed over the pages of his book like the spots on a wall-paper pattern; nor is this notion confirmed when we examine the list of Pauline words missing from the Pastorals, as given by Holtzmann (Pastoralbriefe, p. 98, sqq.) and less fully by von Soden (Hand-Commentar, p. 177 sqq.).
In the complete list of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs, fifty in all, as printed below, each group of cognate words, bracketed together, is for argument’s sake, treated asa unit. And the numbers indicate the number of times the word occurs in St. Paul’s Epistles. The words that are spaced are those, which after an examination of a concordance, can be plausibly claimed as characteristically Pauline; that is to say, they are of comparative frequent occurrence, and are found in at least three groups of his Epistles. It must be allowed that the absence of all of these is surprising. The simplest ex- planation is that some of them had passed out of St. Paul’s ordinary vocabulary; and that, in the case of others, the subject matter of the Pastorals did not demand their use. Some of them, obviously, belong to the vocabulary of certain theological conceptions, others to that of a writer’s temperament and temper.
For the purpose of analysis, it will be convenient to think of the. other ten epistles of St. Paul as falling into four groups, οἷς. i—