Other oiroumstanoes militate strongly against the oomposition of 2 Timothy at the time of St. Paul'1:1 first imprisonment. St. Luke's aooount of that imprisonment by no means prepares the reader for a tragic termina- tion of it (Aots xxviii. 30, 31). Nor does St. Paul's own language, in the Epistles to the Ephesians, Philippians, Coloesians, and Philemon, indicate any expectation on hie part that he would be condemned to death; rather, i:>n the contrary, he expresses the hope of a speedy deliverance (Eph. vi. 21, 22; Phil. ii. 24; Col. iv. 8 ; Philem. 22). But in 2 Timothy his strain is wholly different. He writes with the feeling that his work is done, and his departure is near at hand (2 Tim. iv. 6-8, 18); not a word of being delivered in answer to their prayers, nor of expectation of being set free. The difference is marked, and surely most significant. The necessary conclusion is that Rug's scheme is quite impraoticable. Various other hypotheses, assigning the date of the pastoral Epistles to some part of St. Paul's life unwritten by St. Luke in the Acts, of which the principal are enumerated and explained by Ruther in his 'Introduction,' are equally incompatible with one or more plain statements in the Acts of the Apostles or in the Epistles themselves, and must therefore a.like be abandoned. Moreover, they all fail to account for those peouliarities in the diction of the pastoral Epistles which are pointed out in the first part of this Intrer duction. If the difficulties in finding any place in the narrative of the Aots of the Apostles in which to fit in the pastoral Epistles with their allusions could be got over ( which they cannot), we should be landed in the no less formidable difficulty of having to account for great changes of language as compared with St. Paul's other Epistles, and a difference in the aspeot of the institutions of the Church and of the rising heresies, as reflected in these Epistles, frow what we see either in the Aots or in St. Paul's other Epistles. We are driven, therefore, to accept the hypothesis which assigns these Epistles to a time posterior to that em braced in the narrative of St. Luke. Aud we will now istate the oase for this hypothesis from its positive side. The Acts of the Apostles close with the statement that St. Paul "abode two whole years in his own hired dwP.lling, and received all that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching all things concern- ing the Lord Jesus Christ, with all boldness, none forbidding him." It ia quite as natural a sequel to this statement that, at the end of the two years, the apostle resumed his active career as "the Apostle of the Gentiles," 116 that he was led out to execution as a criminal: most people will think it is a more natural one. However, in the absenoe of any further information from Holy Scripture, we must have recourse to suoh other BOUl"Ces of infor- Jllation a~ are open to us. Eusebius, who was the great collector of history from works now lost, and of traditions cw-rent in the Church, after citing the closing words of the Acts of the Apostles, tells us(' Ecol. Hist.,' ii. xxii.) that the ourrent acoount was that the apostle, having then made his defence, INTRODUCTION TO
afterwards started again on bis work of preaching; but that, having oome to Rome a seoond time, he was made perfeot by martyrdom. At whioh time, being in prison, he wrote the Seoond Epistle t.o Timothy. Eusebius adds, after commenting somewhat confusedly upon the last chapter of 2 Timothy, that he wrote thus muoh to show that St. Paul did not 'M)C()mplish his martyrdom during that sojourn at Rome which is narrated by St. Luke. He adds that Nero was comparatively mild and clemcmt at the time of Paul's first visit, and so received his defence favourably; but that later, having fallen into monstrous crimes, he attacked the apostles along with others. From this it is evident that Eusebius, with suoh means of information as he oould command, believed the aooount which was current in his time to be true. Clement of Rome, again, in his 'Epistle t.o the Corinthians,' in the passage quoted above (p. x.), uses language which, in the light of the above traditions, certainly points strongly to the visit to Spain: TO .,.,pp.a. T'J7,; 8vu£w,;, "the utmost bound of the West,'' could not mean "Italy" in the mouth of a person living at Rome, but is a natural description of Spain. Following the order used by Clement, this visit to Spain immediately preceded his t.estimony before the rulers of the world, and his departure from this life : 'E1ri TO Ttpp.a. T'J7S 8vuiwc 0..8wv, KaL p.a.prvp~ua,; n-1 T'WV tro~ µ.ivwv, OVTWS a.1r71AA0.YTJ TOV Kouµ.ov. The Muratorian Fragment on the Canon adds another early testimony to the belief of the Church that St. Paul went to Spain after his captivity in Rome. For, though the passage is so corrupt and mutilated as to defy translation, yet the words, "profectionem Pauli ah urbe ad Spaniam pro- ficiscentis," tell us certainly, as Routh observes (' Reliq. Sao.,' vol. iv. p. 20), that St. Paul, on leaving Rome, went to Spain. If to these early testimonies we add the later one of Venantius Fortunatus, in the sixth century, who expressly asserts that St. Paul went to Cadiz (which is described by the line, "Transit et ocean um, vel qua facit insula portum "), etc.; of Theodoret (' Ps. xvi.'), who says of St. Paul that "he came to Spain;" of St. Jerome, who, following Eusebius' 'Chronicon' (A. 2083), places Paul's martyrdom in the fourteenth year of Nero (A.D. 67 or 68), three or four years after his liberation from his first confinement(' Catal. Script. Eccle sia.st.') ;-we have sufficient external testimouy on whioh to rest an attempt to assign a lai;er date to the pastoral Epistles than that which is bounded by the close of St. Luke's narrative. Assuming, then, that Paul's first con- finement at Rome terminat.ed in the spring of .&.D. 63, and that he imm~- diately, according to hie original intention (Rom. xv. 2.J.), went to Spain, we may assign two yeari, to his visit to Spain, and possibly to Britain, and place bis return to Cadiz in the early ~pring of A.D. 65. Proceeding thence toward the former scene of hie labours, he would go to Crete, and perhaps stay one ruonth there (Titus i. 3). Leaving Titus there, he sitiled to Miletus, i;ay on the 1st of April (2 Tim. iv. 20), and wrote from tl•enoe the Epistle to Titus. He may have gone to Ephesus from Miletm1, but more THE PASTORAL EPfoTLE~. xv