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.

The issue is of a writing seeming to bear a claim to have been written by a given author but commonly understood to have been written by someone else.  This practise was not uncommon in antiquity.  An apocalyptic writing, for example, might bear the name of some great individual from the past, such as Moses.  It is not known if the original readers of such a writing would have taken it as having come from the hand of the stated author.  Such pseudonymity occurred in Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian writings.

Among Jews and Christians, pseudepigraphic letters are very rare.  For Jews, the absence of any epistolary writing in the OT gave no authoritative precedent to follow.  As for Christians, 2 Thess 2:2 suggests that pseudonymous letters were not unknown, but also shows that the apostle does not regard the practise as acceptable (cf. 2 Thess 3:17).  Some scholars give the impression that pseudonymous letter-writing was common amongst early Christians, and, moreover, that their readers would recognise the genre and would be aware that the writings did not come from, say, Paul or Peter.  But the evidence is that Christians produced few pseudonymous letters (M.R. James cites just six, and these mostly date from the 4th-13th century).  There were gospels and acts, but few letters; and there is not one known pseudonymous Christian letter from anywhere near NT times.

The early Christians do not seemed to have been concerned to attach famous names to their writings.  Many NT books do not bear the names of their writers (all four Gospels, Acts, Hebrews, 1 John, etc).

One comparatively early pseudonymous letter is referred to in the apocryphal Acts of Paul (cAD 160).  This letter was supposed to have been written by Paul to the church at Corinth (‘3 Corinthians’).  The letter was so highly esteemed that it was for a time included in the canon of the Syrian and Armenian churches, evidently on the supposition that Paul was the genuine author.  Elswhere, however, it was recognised to be pseudonymous, and for that reason excluded from the canon, notwithstanding its edifying contents.  Tertullian speaks of writings ‘which wrongly go under Paul’s name’, and reports that ‘the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office.’

The Muratorian Canon mentions a letter to the Laodiceans (evidently composed to fill the gap left by the loss of the letter referred to in Col 4:14) and one to the Alexandrians, ‘both forged in Paul’s name’, and rejected from the canon on that account.

Towards the end of the 2nd century Seraption, bishop of Antioch, forbad the use of a book purporting to come from the hand of Peter, saying, ‘For out part, brethren, we receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but the writings which falsely bear their names we reject, as men of experience, knowing that such were not handed down to us.’  Here again (though the case refers to a false gospel, not a false epistle, a sharp distinction is made between the writings of the apostles and those ‘falsely bear their names’.

There is, then, no evidence that a New Testament Christian could write something in the name of an apostle and expect the writing to be welcomed.  There is no evidence to support the opinion of, for example, P.N. Harrison, to the effect that the pseudo-Paul who wrote the Pastorals ‘was no conscious of misrepresenting the Apostle in any way; he was not consciously deceiving anybody; it is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that he did deceive anybody.  It is far more preferable that those to whom, in the first instance, he showed the result of his efforts, must have been perfectly well aware of what he had done.’

With regard to the Pastoral epistles, there is the added point that they contain warnings about deceivers, 1 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 3:13; Tit 1:10 (cf Tit 3:3; 1 Tim 2:7).

The early church was considerably exercised over questions of canonicity, and the issue of authorship was of major concern.  In the case of 2 Peter, for example, there question was whether the book was written by Peter: if it was, then it was accepted, if was not, then it was rejected.  There is no known example of anyone accepting a book as canonical while denying that it was written by the person whose names it bears.  Eusebius, for example, was prepared to accept the Revelation as canonical if it could be shown that the author was the apostle John, but was prepared to wholeheartedly rejected if it was not apostolic.

See Carson, et al, An Introduction to the New Testament, 367-371.

The Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles (the letters to Timothy and Titus) is often doubted in scholarly circles.  Andrew Wilson notes some ‘probing questions’ from Gerald Bray:

1. Who would have been sufficiently motivated to impersonate Paul, and why?
2. Why did the pseudepigrapher(s) produce three letters when one would have been enough?
3. If (as many claim) the recipients of the Epistles were not deceived, why was their knowledge so easily lost in the next generation? On what basis did they accept the authority of the true author(s), and was his or their identity known to them? If it was, why did he (or they) resort to pseudepigraphy?
4. Why did the pseudepigrapher(s) include personal details of the apostle, including requests from him, if they and the recipients both knew that he was dead? What would have been the point of that, other than to deceive?
5. Were Timothy and Titus still alive when the letters were written, and if so, what did they make of them?
6. Why did the pseudepigrapher(s) decide to address their letters to Paul’s co-workers when the genuine Paul apparently never did that? Would it not have been more convincing if the letters had been sent to churches instead of to individuals?
7. Why did the early church accept the Epistles as genuinely Pauline without dissent, when it is known that they debated the authenticity of several other New Testament books?

Unless and until adequate answers can be given to these questions, the claim that the Pastoral Epistles are the work of the apostle Paul himself, and not of a pseudepigrapher, or even of a close disciple writing after his death, must be allowed to stand as a valid position based on proper scholarly criteria.

– Gerald Bray, The Pastoral Epistles (ITC)