1 Timothy
Home > New Testament > 1 Timothy 1 Timothy At a Glance Letter Genre: (3/5) *** Reliability of Dating: (2/5) ** Length of Text: Greek Original Language: Ancient Translations: Modern Translations: English Estimated Range of Dating: 100-150 A.D. Chronological List of Early Christian Writings Discuss this text on the Early Writings forum. Text American Standard Version King James Version World English Bible Resources e-Catena: References to the New Testament in the Church Fathers Patristic References to 1st Timothy, Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 Edgar Goodspeed: The Epistles to Timothy and Titus Catholic Encyclopedia: Epistles to Timothy and Titus Offsite Links Perseus NT (English/Greek/Latin) How to Be a Leader in the Church: An EasyEnglish Commentary NAB Introduction Daniel Wallace's Introduction The Fear of Deutero-Paulinism: The Reception of Friedrich Schleiermacher's "Critical Open Letter" Concerning 1 Timothy Romancing an Oft-Neglected Stone: The Pastoral Epistles and The Epistolary Novel Explanatory Analysis of St.
Paul's First Epistle to Timothy IVP Commentary Books Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? : The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 206-207. Raymond Edward Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), pp. 653-671. Udo Schnelle, translated by M. Eugene Boring, The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 326-348. J. N. D. Kelly, The Pastoral Epistles (Hendrickson Publishers 1993). Recommended Books for the Study of Early Christian Writings Information on 1 Timothy 1 Timothy is one of the three epistles known collectively as the pastorals (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus).
They were not included in Marcion's canon of ten epistles assembled c. 140 CE. Against Wallace, there is no certain quotation of these epistles before Irenaeus c. 170 CE. Norman Perrin summarises four reasons that have lead critical scholarship to regard the pastorals as inauthentic (The New Testament: An Introduction, pp. 264-5): Vocabulary. While statistics are not always as meaningful as they may seem, of 848 words (excluding proper names) found in the Pastorals, 306 are not in the remainder of the Pauline corpus, even including the deutero-Pauline 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. Of these 306 words, 175 do not occur elsewhere in the New Testament, while 211 are part of the general vocabulary of Christian writers of the second century.
Indeed, the vocabulary of the Pastorals is closer to that of popular Hellenistic philosophy than it is to the vocabulary of Paul or the deutero-Pauline letters. Furthermore, the Pastorals use Pauline words ina non-Pauline sense: dikaios in Paul means "righteous" and here means "upright"; pistis, "faith," has become "the body of Christian faith"; and so on. Literary style. Paul writes a characteristically dynamic Greek, with dramatic arguments, emotional outbursts, and the introduction of real or imaginary opponents and partners in dialogue. The Pastorals are in a quiet meditative style, far more characteristic of Hebrews or 1 Peter, or even of literary Hellenistic Greek in general, than of the Corinthian correspondence or of Romans, to say nothing of Galatians.
The situation of the apostle implied in the letters. Paul's situation as envisaged in the Pastorals can in no way be fitted into any reconstruction of Paul's life and work as we know it from the other letters or can deduce it from the Acts of the Apostles. If Paul wrote these letters, then he must have been released from his first Roman imprisonment and have traveled in the West. But such meager tradition as we have seems to be more a deduction of what must have happened from his plans as detailed in Romans than a reflection of known historical reality. The letters as reflecting the characteristics of emergent Catholocism. The arguments presented above are forceful, but a last consideration is overwhelming, namely that, together with 2 Peter, the Pastorals are of all the texts in the New Testament the most distinctive representatives of the emphases of emergent Catholocism.