Dr Jennifer Bashaw teaches New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, Ministry, and Homiletics at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.

Dr Bashaw has contributed a piece to Pete Enns’ blog entitled, ‘Did Paul Write the Pastoral Letters? Well, It’s Complicated…’

I think the piece is unfortunate and misleading in a number of ways.

Dr Bashaw begins:

Evangelical (read: fundamentalist) Christians have all sorts of litmus tests for determining if a person is Bible-believing enough for them.

The “do you use the word ‘inerrant’ to describe the Word of God?” is a foundational test, but there are others like the “do you believe in a literal Adam and Eve?” test and the “do you think that Jonah was swallowed by a real whale?” test. But when you get into conversations with the most educated and sophisticated of conservative Christians, inevitably this question arises:

“Do you believe that Paul wrote the pastoral letters?”

And if you don’t, then surely you are a heathen liberal who has no regard for the sanctity of Scripture.

This opening shot needed one simple word: ‘Some…’

I’m a card-carrying evangelical Christian, but

• I don’t use the word ‘inerrant’ to describe the Word of God.
• I accept that there are various ways of understanding the story of Adam and Eve (some of which are non-literal).
• I doubt that Jonah was swallowed by a real whale (or even a real fish).

But few, if any, of my fellow-evangelicals regard me as ‘a heathen liberal who has no regard for the sanctity of Scripture.’

I agree that some evangelicals would make the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals a ‘litmus test’ of faithfulness, but it is quite wrong to generalise about this, as Dr Bashaw does.

Dr Bashaw continues by listing some of the reasons why ‘Scholars describe the pastoral epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) as disputed or deutero-Pauline’:

1. Use of secretaries (amanuenses).  The degree of input such scribes had into the actual composition varied widely, and we canot be sure how much of the content of a given letter can be ascribed to the individual in whose name it was written.
2. Genre.  A letter is, by its very nature, an occasional piece of literature.  It addresses particular people and situations.  Therefore generalisation to other people and other situations (especially at a distance of many centuries) becomes problemmatic.
3. Authorship.  In our own day, we have generally agreed rules about authors, co-authors, ghost writers and so on.  We have reasonally clear guidelines about what constitutes plagiarism.  In NT times, it would have been regarded as quite normal for a disciple of a noted individual to write in the name of that individual.  It might be a case of: ‘This is what the Master would have said if he were still around to say it.’
4. Clues and uncertainty.  Those who affirm Pauline authorship of the Pastorals point out people, places and ideas that some to belong to Paul’s world.  Those who doubt such authorship say that the church situation envisaged in the Pastorals seems to match a period later than that of Paul.  Conviction is not possible on either side.
5. Canonisation.  One of the criteria for including a book in the NT canon was its link back to the apostles.  But we already have a problem in this regard with the book of Hebrews, the authorship of which is unknown.  It may be that the Pastorals found their way into the canon, not because it was known that Paul wrote them, but because he is named in them.

Conclusion: we just can’t be sure about the authorship of the Pastorals.

I think that Dr Bashaw’s brief discussion is heavily weighted against the possibility that the Pastorals come, in some meangingful way from Paul.

Since we are dealing with content that has been written for someone’s blog (and not for an academic journal) it would be unreasonable to expect Dr Bashaw to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.

So let me refer to another blog post for a contrasting view of the authorship of the Pastorals.

Gerald Bray, who has written a recent commentary on 1 and 2 Timothy, makes a number of points, including:

1. The fact that the Pastorals differ in style from other known Pauline writings may be due to the use of an amanuensis, or, indeed, the reverse of this (that he used an amanuensis in other writings but not in the Pastorals.
2. A pseudepigrapher would take care to sound as ‘Pauline’ as possible. And it is difficult to see why a pseudepigrapher would write to individuals, when the ‘real’ Paul usually wrote to churches.
3. It is difficult to see why a pseudepigrapher would write three letters, and why such a person would engage in the amount of repetition we see within them.
4. The church situation assumed in the Pastorals is that of the immediate apostolic period.  If they had been written at a later date their anachonisms would have been obvious to their recipients.

Dr Bashaw gives the impression that modern scholarship is pretty much agreed in doubting or denying Pauline authorship of the Pastorals.  But, as Dr Bray points out, this is to neglect the work of serious scholars such as A. Schlatter, J. Jeremias, J.N.D. Kelly, C. Spicq, Donald Guthrie, G.W.Knight III, William Mounce, Luke Timothy Johnson, Philip Towner and others who affirm it.

But where Dr Bashaw’s argument really falls apart is in her concluding pair of comments:

‘We should never make Pauline authorship of the pastorals a litmus test for faithfulness.

‘What we should do is admit the limitations of our knowledge and focus on what we can know about the pastoral letters—that they are a witness to some of the issues that a handful of churches were likely facing in the first century. They provide a narrow but fascinating glimpse into the diverse and developing tradition that would later become Christianity. And that makes them valuable—whether Paul wrote them or not.’

I would be more willing to deny what she denies (that we should not make Pauline authorship a litmus test for faithfulness) if I could accept what she affirms (which I have put in bold).  But there is no hint in this latter statement of any sense that these documents are holy scripture, are God-breathed, have any authority for us today in terms of belief and behaviour.

If that’s the price to be paid for doubting Pauline authorship of the Pastorals, then I’m not willing to part with my money.