Second Epistle to Timothy

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The Second Epistle to Timothy is a short letter in the New Testament, the second of two addressed to Timothy and one of the three works known collectively as the Pastoral Epistles. It is written in the voice of the apostle Paul, near the end of his life and apparently from prison, to a younger associate he calls his child in the faith. Of all the letters in the Pauline corpus it is the most intimate: less an argument than a charge, handed on by a man who expects to die. The other two Pastorals — the First Epistle to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus — read as manuals of church order, directives on overseers and widows and the ordering of a congregation. Second Timothy is built on a different pattern. It belongs to the ancient form of the testament, the deathbed discourse in which a leader about to die gathers his reflections and binds his successor to carry the work on. The model reaches back through the farewell of Moses, the charge of the dying David to Solomon, and the patriarchal blessings of Genesis; in the apostolic age it is matched by the speech Paul makes to the elders of Ephesus, kneeling on the shore before a parting he says they will not survive to reverse. The letter to Timothy is that speech turned into a letter — the last will of an apostle, addressed to the man meant to inherit what he leaves.

Rembrandt, “St. Paul in Prison” (1627): the apostle writing in confinement, the sword beside him marking his coming martyrdom — the scene Second Timothy fixes in the imagination. — Rembrandt, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The addressee and the corpus

The Timothy of the address is a figure who recurs across the Pauline writings: a younger co-worker from Lystra, son of a believing mother and a Greek father, taken up by Paul early and made his trusted envoy. He is named as co-sender of several of the undisputed letters — among them the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians and the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Epistle to the Philippians and the Epistle to the Colossians — and he is dispatched in the Corinthian and Thessalonian correspondence to steady communities Paul could not reach in person. The two letters that bear his name as recipient turn that working relationship into a literary frame: the apostle instructing the protege. Where the great undisputed letters — the Epistle to the Romans, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the Epistle to the Ephesians — argue doctrine to whole congregations, the Pastorals address a single named successor, and Second Timothy presses that narrowing furthest. It is a letter from one man to one man, and the church reading over Timothy’s shoulder is meant to feel itself addressed in him.

The end of First Timothy and the beginning of Second Timothy in the Codex Sinaiticus, a Greek Bible of the fourth century. — Codex Sinaiticus, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The setting: chains and grief

The Paul of this letter writes from confinement, in bonds he names without softening, and the register throughout is one of exposure rather than command. He is cold; he is short of companions; he reaches back across distance toward the one face he still trusts. The opening already carries the wound: he tells Timothy that all who are in Asia — the Roman province of western Asia Minor, the heartland of his own missionary labor — have turned away from him, and he names two of them, Phygelus and Hermogenes, as though to fix the desertion in particular faces. This is not the buoyant Paul of the earlier correspondence, certain of vindication. It is a man at the end of his reach, asking his successor to come, and to come before winter.

The fourth chapter sharpens that loneliness into a roll-call of who has gone and who remains. Demas, once a co-worker, has forsaken him — having loved this present world, the letter says, and departed to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia; the dispersal reads less as betrayal than as the ordinary scattering of a movement whose center has been taken away. Only Luke is with him. He asks Timothy to take Mark and bring him, for Mark is profitable to him for the ministry — a quiet reconciliation, since an earlier account in the Acts of the Apostles had the two men part company over this same Mark. And there is the human detail that has fixed the scene in the imagination of readers ever since: the request that Timothy bring the cloak left behind at Troas with Carpus, and the books, and especially the parchments. A man preparing to die still wants his coat against the cold and his writings to hand. Against this come the few who wounded: Alexander the coppersmith, who did him much evil, left to the Lord’s reckoning; and the memory of his first defense, when no one stood with him and all forsook him, which he meets not with curse but with a prayer that it not be charged against them.

The charge: guard the deposit

Running through the personal notes is a single sustained exhortation, and it turns on the image of a trust handed over for safekeeping. Timothy is to guard the deposit — the body of sound teaching received from Paul — and to commit it in turn to faithful men who will be able to teach others, so that the chain of transmission outlasts any single life. He is to endure hardship as a soldier endures it, to compete as an athlete who keeps the rules, to labor as a farmer who works before he eats. He is to rightly handle the word of truth, to avoid the quarrels over words that ruin the hearers, to be ready in season and out. The emphasis falls everywhere on continuity: the teaching is not Timothy’s to revise but to keep, and the keeping is itself the work. This is the concern that gives the Pastorals their distinctive cast — a generation thinking past its own death, asking how a revelation entrusted to apostles survives the death of the apostles, and answering: by deposit, by succession, by the steady custody of the next faithful hand.

It is here that the letter sets down the verse that would become the load-bearing proof-text for the Christian doctrine of inspired scripture. All scripture, it declares, is given by inspiration of God — God-breathed, in the Greek — and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. In its own setting the words point to the Jewish scriptures Timothy has known from childhood; in their long afterlife they were extended to the Christian canon entire and made the cornerstone of arguments for biblical authority across centuries of theology. Few single sentences in the Pauline corpus have carried so much later weight, or been pressed into the service of so many later quarrels.

“Saint Paul Writing His Epistles,” attributed to Valentin de Boulogne (c. 1618-1620): the apostle at work on the letters whose authority Second Timothy’s “God-breathed” verse would later anchor. — Probably Valentin de Boulogne, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The runner’s signature and the last days

Near the close comes the passage the letter is most remembered for. Paul writes that he is now ready to be offered, that the time of his departure is at hand — the verb is the one used for a libation poured out, and for the loosing of a ship’s moorings — and then sets down the line that has served as an epitaph for the dying ever since: I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. The metaphors are drawn from the stadium and the arena, the contest run to its end and the prize awaited; henceforth, he says, there is laid up for him a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give him at that day — and not to him only, but to all who love the appearing. The looking-forward opens onto the wider hope of Christian eschatology: the crown is held in reserve against a coming day of judgment, the same horizon of expectation that runs through the letters to Thessalonica.

A second strand looks not back over a finished life but forward into a darkening future. In the last days, the letter warns, difficult times will come; people will hold a form of godliness while denying its power. The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine but, after their own desires, heap up teachers to themselves — having itching ears, in the phrase that has outlived its context to become proverbial for the appetite that seeks only what flatters it. The warning belongs to the same broad current of expectation as the Epistle of Jude and the apocalyptic strain elsewhere in the Epistle to the Romans and the Thessalonian letters: a sense that the founding clarity will be assailed from within, by teachers who keep the shape of devotion and empty it of substance. It is the dark side of the deposit-charge — the teaching must be guarded precisely because there will be those who corrupt it.

The afterlife of the verses

Few short letters have left so many phrases lodged in the common speech of later Christianity. The declaration that all scripture is God-breathed became, over the centuries, the single most cited warrant for the doctrine of biblical inspiration, invoked in patristic, medieval, and Reformation argument alike and made a touchstone in modern debates over the authority and inerrancy of the canon — a weight the verse acquired in reception far beyond anything its original sentence, pointed at the Jewish scriptures of Timothy’s upbringing, set out to carry. The charge to rightly divide, or rightly handle, the word of truth was taken up in the twentieth century as the slogan of dispensationalist hermeneutics, read as a mandate to distinguish the eras of God’s dealing with the world; the phrase itself, an image from a workman cutting straight, was bent to a meaning its author would not have recognized. Itching ears passed out of the letter altogether into ordinary idiom, a stock figure for the appetite that prefers flattery to truth. And the runner’s signature — the good fight fought, the course finished, the faith kept — became the epitaph of the Christian dead, carved on tombs and spoken over deathbeds, the standard against which a finished life of faith measured itself. The crown of righteousness laid up for the faithful joined the other crowns of the New Testament in the vocabulary of Christian reward, and the figure of Paul writing his last words in chains — set down by painters from the Baroque onward — fixed the image of the apostle as the model of the witness who keeps faith to the sword.

Authorship: the testament and the question of its hand

Christian tradition received the letter as Paul’s genuine farewell, composed during a final Roman imprisonment that ended in his execution, and read it as a testament — the founding generation handing the church to the next. The chronology that frames this reading is itself a tradition: the Acts narrative ends with Paul under a milder house arrest, and the second, harsher imprisonment the letter presupposes is supplied by later sources, among them the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, who records that Paul was beheaded at Rome under Nero, a martyrdom also reported by Clement of Rome, Tertullian, and Dionysius of Corinth. On the traditional reckoning Second Timothy is the last surviving word of the apostle, written within sight of the sword. Early Christian writers cited the Pastorals as Pauline from the second century — echoes appear in Polycarp around the 120s, explicit attribution in Irenaeus near 180, and a place in the Muratorian list of accepted writings; the one notable second-century figure to exclude them was Marcion, whose truncated canon left them out.

Jacopo Tintoretto, “The Martyrdom of St Paul”: the execution at Rome under Nero that tradition places after the final imprisonment Second Timothy presupposes. — Jacopo Tintoretto, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Much modern scholarship reads the letter otherwise, and the case is worth setting out fairly, because both sides marshal real evidence. The three Pastorals share a vocabulary, a tone, and a model of church order that a large body of critics judges later than Paul’s undisputed letters: the three contain hundreds of words found nowhere else in the Pauline corpus, with a markedly high proportion of terms unique to them, and the offices they presuppose — settled overseers, elders, an institutional memory to be defended — look to many readers like the church of the generation after Paul rather than the volatile communities of his own. On these grounds a sizeable body of opinion holds the Pastorals pseudonymous, written after Paul’s death in his name to bring his authority to bear on a younger church’s problems. Bart Ehrman has pressed the strongest form of this case (Ehrman 2013), arguing that ancient readers regarded false attribution as deception and that the Pastorals are best classed, in his terms, as forgeries. Against the bare statistics, defenders note that vocabulary shifts with subject and age, that a writer near death on a personal theme will not sound like the same writer dictating a public argument about justification, and that Paul’s known use of a secretary could account for much of the difference in style. I. Howard Marshall, in his major critical commentary of 1999, declined the simple alternatives: persuaded that the letters are not directly from Paul’s hand yet unwilling to call them forgeries, he proposed the term allonymity — composition by a close associate writing in the apostle’s name and spirit without intent to deceive — as a middle reading the evidence might better support.

The modern study of the letter divides along these lines. The pseudonymity case in its sharpest form is set out by Bart Ehrman, who in Forgery and Counterforgery (2013) argues that the Pastorals were composed after Paul’s death and that ancient authors and readers alike understood false attribution as deception, so that the letters belong, on his accounting, to the category of forgery rather than to any softer notion of accepted convention. The genre that gives Second Timothy its distinctive shape — the deathbed testament, set apart from the church-order manuals that are First Timothy and Titus — has been studied in detail; the runner’s-signature passage in particular has been read as a paradigm of Paul’s constructed legacy in Kampotela Luc Bulundwe’s analysis of 2 Timothy 4:6-8 (Athens Journal of Social Sciences, 2017), which places the verses within the farewell-discourse tradition and shows how the figure of the dying apostle is built through them. For the structural contrast among the three Pastorals — two as directives on congregational order, Second Timothy as a personal last will — together with a survey of the dating range and the patristic citations, a compact overview is given in Felix Just’s reference treatment of the Pastoral Epistles. The defense of authenticity, with its appeal to vocabulary-shift, the secretary hypothesis, and the personal detail, is argued at length in I. Howard Marshall’s International Critical Commentary (1999), whose allonymity proposal has set much of the terms of the later conversation; the linguistic statistics on which the whole debate partly rests — the hundreds of words unique to the Pastorals and their elevated rate of single-occurrence terms — are weighed by Stanley E. Porter (Bulletin for Biblical Research 5, 1995).

What keeps the question genuinely open is the very feature that sets Second Timothy apart from its two companions: its biographical density. The cloak at Troas, the named deserters, the request about Mark, the books and the parchments — these are not the furniture of a doctrinal forgery, and even critics who reject Pauline authorship of First Timothy and Titus often grant that Second Timothy preserves authentic Pauline fragments, or hesitate longest over it. Of the three, it is the one whose attribution is least easily dismissed.

The dispute over the hand does not touch the work the letter performs. A testament binds whether or not the heir can prove the signature; its force lies in the transfer it enacts, not in the identity of the one who set it down. So the deposit changes custodians, the race passes from a runner who has finished it to one who has not, and the charge — guard, endure, teach — fastens onto the man addressed and, through him, onto whoever next stands in Timothy’s place. The crown is laid up; the course is run; the books are still wanted against the dark. What the letter asks of its reader is the single thing a last will asks of an heir: not to settle whose hand wrote it, but to take up what it leaves and keep it until the appearing it was written to await.

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