I don't feel up to the challenge of having something interesting to say about II Timothy, a letter like dreary weather that can muster only a drizzle. When watching football on TV, you do not see, as a team lines up to try for the extra point, a fan behind the goal posts holding up a placard with the inscription II Timothy 3:1--which, alas, is as viable a candidate as any in this letter and reads (Revised Standard Version), "The saying is sure: If any one aspires to the office of bishop, he desires a noble task." The bleak quality is conveyed by the New Testament scholar Martin Dibelius, who argued that II Timothy, and the pastoral epistles in general, promote "bourgeois Christianity." Do not think that I have studied the works of Dibelius. I am, however, reading Paul and his impersonators in the Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul, edited by Wayne Meeks, who, in his introduction to the pastoral epistles, writes:
The eschatological tension of Paul's authentic letters is almost dissolved here. We see a "bourgeois Christianity" (Dibelius) making itself at home in the world, equating "faith" with "sound teaching," which is expected to produce a rather conservative and commonplace morality as the mark of "piety" or "religiosity." If this is the work of Paul, then it is of an aging Paul with the fire gone out.
Besides describing the gray weather, this brings us back to the question of authorship, whether the pastoral epistles are from the hand of Paul or a later pseudonymous writer, a topic I've already exploited in order to work up approximately a thousand words on I Timothy, here. Though there's a scholarly consensus for the pseudonymous author, certain curiosities of II Timothy are the source of a hypothesis concerning how there may be fragments of genuinely Pauline material embedded in the text. See if you can detect anything unusual in the following passage (4:6-14):
For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.
Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you; for he is very useful in serving me. Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus. When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm; the Lord will requite him for his deeds.
I don't know that there's any reason to read II Timothy if you haven't set yourself the odd task of wading through the whole Bible, eyes passing over every word, and, in that case, you are likely under the general anesthetic by the midway point of the pastoral epistles and won't notice that the valedictory tone of the first paragraph is a poor fit with, "Come and see me and bring the coat I forgot, as well as the books, and for god's sake don't forget my parchments." The author of the first paragraph says he's finished the race, but in the very next paragraph he's preparing for the rest of it. What could account for this? Well, the second paragraph could bear no literary relationship at all to the first. It might be just a fragment from some other letter, dropped in without warning and with no transitional material to create the illusion of a seamless flow of words. The justification for this paste job might be that the fragment had status on account of being from the hand of the master, and call outs to acquaintances is indeed a hallmark of the known letters of Paul. I don't have an opinion on this, I'm just reporting the scholarly suppositions. The strength of the theory is that it does account for the otherwise unaccountable shift in tone, but who knows? My attention is attracted to poor Alexander, the coppersmith who's done wrong, obscurely preserved through the ages because of a chance reference in a fragment that by chance was not lost and, just because it existed, got inserted in an unrelated letter that was by chance canonized: this coppersmith is the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern of the New Testament.
A theme of these articles is the unreality of the fundamentalist view of the Bible. If every word is the inerrant and infallible word of God, it would seem to follow that it is all equally sublime--a view impossible to reconcile with any honest reading. When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, he wrote prefaces for some of the books, most famously for Romans, which begins:
This Epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament and the very purest Gospel, and is worthy not only that every Christian should know it word for word, by heart, but occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul. It can never be read or pondered too much, and the more it is dealt with the more precious it becomes, and the better it tastes.
Therefore, I, too, will do my best, so far as God has given me power, to open the way into it through this preface . . . .
And he then proceeds for fifteen pages or so. During Luther's time, of course, the pastoral epistles were attributed to the author of Romans, so he could not altogether ignore them, and II Timothy receives a preface of two brief paragraphs, 120 of the most forgettable words he ever wrote. There will be more to say on this topic if I ever get to the letter of James.
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