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The Pastoral Epistles among Ancient Letter Collections
®Angela Standhartinger ([email protected])
“The proconsul Saturinus said: Quae sunt res in capsa vestra [What things are in your bookcase]? Speratus said: ‘Libri et epistulae Pauli viri iusti’ [Books and letters of Paul, a just man].”1
The quotation comes from the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs. One would love to get a glance into this cylindrical case for book rolls, which the martyrs carried with them into the courtroom, and find out which Pauline letters exactly the seven men and five women carried with them and what readings of them sustained their hope and faith to face this fatal trial on that day. Yet proconsul Saturninus seems not to be interested at all in their answer, whether there were any, and carries on without any comment on the content of the capsa.
How far these Acts report the actual court hearings and whether this is indeed a text of the second century must remain open. Yet, if so, then the capsa of the Scillitan martyrs would be one of three pieces of explicit evidence for a collection of Paul’s letters in the second half of the second century, besides 2 Peter 3:16 and Marcion’s Apostolos. Only in the latter collection do we get a list of nine Pauline letters, yet without the Pastoral Epistles.
The Muratorian Fragment, one of the earliest canon lists that mentioned the three letters, group them with Philemon as a subcorpus of letters to individuals.2 Paul Anton’s 1726/27 coined the popular name “Pastoral Epistles.”3 Especially those who, since the nineteenth century, argue that these letters are authored by a second-century writer in Paul’s name start with the observation that the common label Pastoral Epistles is justified by “a common content and the common tendency” and that by their shared ideas and common non-Pauline wording, the letters prove themselves as “inseparable triplets” (unzertrennliche Drillinge).4
Yet one question remained open? Would it not have been easier to “guard what has been entrusted” (1 Tim 6:20) against all unworthy teaching by a single letter of significant length? Whoever wrote these letters, why did she, or he, or the group choose to write three short closely connected but individual letters instead? In the following, I will summarize briefly three answers to this question. Second, I will add some observations from recent research on ancient letter collections. 2
Unity and Diversity of the Three Pastoral Epistles
Currently, three sets of answers are given to the question why there are three and not only one single Pastoral Epistle.
Peter Trummer explained the existence as a corpus by the fact that the Pastoral Epistles presupposed a collection of Paul’s letters.5 More recently, Annette Merz and Michael Theobald argued that the Pastoral Epistles introduced a new edition of Paul’s letters by rewriting Paul life, theology, and ethic.6 The inventory of historical settings, conflicts, and travel routes are therefore not totally fictitious but anchored in the genuine letters of Paul, Titus in 2 Cor 7–8 and Timothy in 1 Cor 16:5–11.7 Avoiding any mention of Paul’s travels to Jerusalem and affirming the Roman emperor and his institutions, the Pastoral Epistles lead the theology of the historical Paul into new directions.
John Chrysostom’s most influential commentaries and homilies on Paul demonstrate how he and his many successors indeed used the Pastoral Epistles as the hermeneutical key to Paul’s legend and message for centuries. Yet in the end, the corpus-revision thesis cannot explain why the Pastoral Epistles in themselves represent a small collection. And the at least 250 years of scholarly debate on the place of the Pastoral Epistles in Paul’s elsewhere attested biography reveal that the three letters can be read both as an alternative version of Paul’s biography and as its last part. Revision, rivalry, or addition to Paul’s epistles are all options.
The existence of three similar yet not identical letters that only in part fit into what is otherwise known of Paul’s biography is the starting point for Richard I. Pervo’s and Timo Glaser’s hypothesis that the corpus shares features with the ancient epistolary novel.8 Pervo highlights six characteristics of the epistolary novel: 1) pseudonymous by nature, 2) historical in setting, 3) characterological in orientation, 4) moral in aim, and most crucial, 5) a coherence as a body, and 6) a narrative – telling “or showing” by various means a story that is integral to their function. For Pervo, at the core of the Pastoral Epistles is the moral development of young men, represented in the similar but different characters of the new convert Titus, in a new mission field, and Timothy, offspring of devout believers governing an established metropolitan church. In his more extensive comparison of the Pastoral Epistles among other examples of the epistolary novel, Timo Glaser determines the genre as “a collection of letters which are linked in such a way that the reader can discern a plot running through the letters which points to the story ‘behind’ the letters.”9 Crucial for Glaser is the narrative plot.10 Therefore, he argues, with Theobald and Pervo, for an original sequence of 3
the letters starting with Titus and ending with 2 Timothy. First Timothy bridges the narrative gap between the other two. Similar to other ancient epistolary novels, like the letters of Chion, Aischynes, and Themistocles, the prooemium of Titus 1:1–4 summarizes the leitmotif of the novel, while the last letter has a last and apologetic farewell.11 In this chronological order, a “detect reader,” who collects “all possible traces in order to understand the case,” can observe Paul’s positions on Roman rulers or on the teaching of women.12
Yet contrary to six of seven letter collections that Holzberg counts to the epistolary novels, the relationship between the letter writer and a ruler cannot count as “the dominant theme running through the accounts and reflections.”13 The genre thesis can explain why there are three letters and not only one, why they concur and not concur at the same time with Paul’s otherwise known biography, and why there are within all similarities between the three letters also some differences. Yet, while the Muratorian Fragment and Codex Claromontanus attest the sequence Titus, 1 Timothy, and 2 Timothy, other canon lists and manuscripts testify other arrangements. Moreover, Pervo and Glaser differ on the question with whom the reader might identify, with the delegates Titus and Timothy or with Paul. And while the relationship between the philosopher and a tyrannic ruler might be present, it is not the only theme of the corpus.
A third position questions the basic observation of the former two, namely, that the three letters share enough common characteristics in language, style, and content to form a uniform Corpus Pastorale. Instead, Jens Herzer argues “that each letter must be interpreted in itself and not in a complementary manner together with the other two.”14 William Richards finds three pseudepigraphic authors who, between the second half of the first century and the middle of the second century, wrote on leadership, to strengthen a persecuted and divided community and to fight a threat by gnostic heretics.15 Michaela Engelmann argues that 1 Timothy is literarily dependent on 2 Timothy and Titus. By comparing theological and ethical concepts in the use of specific terms, like σώτηρ, επιφάνεια, εὐσέβεια, μῦθος, γεναλογία, παραθήκη, she concludes that the letters are so different that they cannot have been written by a single author.16 For Joram Luttenberger, otherwise known information about Paul in 1 Timothy is dependent on the other two letters, while the Personalnotizen (personal information) in Titus and 2 Timothy match what is known from undisputed Pauline epistles and Acts and therefore are historically plausible.17 Yet, as Lewis R. Donelson and more recent research on letter collections and epistolary novels have demonstrated, letters naturally include personalia and not obviously important details. By their very nature, letters read not 4
by their intended readers – for the Pastoral Epistles that would have been exclusively Timothy and Titus – but by others convey private information. Any later reader is in the position of an eavesdropper, a reader of other people’s mail. Yet the letter collector or “the pseudonymous author can thereby ‘reveal’ to the external readers things which canonical writing by the historical author do not.”18 Whatever details are given, they demonstrate agreement or disagreement of teaching and life and thereby the letter writer’s personal and philosophical integrity.19 Indeed, the presentation of the distinctive character of a particular personality seems to be one of the major intentions behind collecting and publishing letters in antiquity.
Collecting Letters in Antiquity
In the light of the then recently discovered papyri, Adolf Deissmann established his influential distinction between nonliterary letters and epistles.20 For Deissmann, letters are personal in nature, written only for their direct addressees, protected from the public by the secrecy of correspondence, and not intended for public reading. The epistle, on the other hand, “has nothing in common with the letter except its form” and is “a species of literature” intended for publicity.21 This distinction, based on a romantic hierarchy of “original” and “natural” versus “secondary” and “artificial,” has been questioned since the 1960s by William Doty and Stan Stowers.22 Yet the revival of modern research on the genre of the letter was heralded by Michael Trapp’s anthology of Greek and Latin letters.23 Trapp observes that
no letter is a simple, direct transcript of reality. . . . Consciously or unconsciously, letter- writers select what they are going to say and what they are not going to say, and choose how they are going to slant what they do say, and thus construct a personalized version of the reality they are referring to.24
This is even more the case with a letter collection. Whether the editor of a given letter collection is identical with its author or from a later generation, she or he never only published what was at hand but selected, edited, and deliberately organized the collection(s) to contribute to writers’ and addressees’ literary legacy.25
Almost all ancient letters are preserved as part of a collection. Even most of papyrus letters owe their preservation to the fact that they had been included in an archive.26 Senders might have copied and preserved letters in papyrus-rolls of sent letters. Recipients archive received letters, sometimes by gluing the original copies together (τόμος συγκολλήσιμος).27 As with 5
most literary letter collections, “[t]hey are usually arranged according to some logical order, e.g. chronological, alphabetical, topological.”28
Letter collections demonstrate the popularity of the genre of letters from famous politicians, philosophers, and artists in Roman imperial times – for example, the letters of Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, and Fronto from the first century BCE to the first century CE, the unfortunately mostly lost collections of letters from Caesar and Augustus and other emperors, as well as several bodies of likely pseudepigraphic letters that form an epistolary novel, like letters of Alexander, Plato, Socrates and the Socratics, the Seven Sages, Themistocles, Hippocrates, Chion Euripides, and Aeschylus.29 In a seminal article, Roy Gibson showed how in most ancient collections of literary letters, “chronological arrangement is the exception not the rule.”30 Some books of Cicero’s letters to Atticus might count as such an exception, at least according to a statement of Cornelius Nepos, yet not in the form we know them today.31 Cicero or his freedman Tiro might have intended but never managed to publish some of his letters.32 What we know of Cicero’s letters comes from late antique or even modern editions. The modern collections of letters to Atticus, Quintus, Brutus, and friends prove their redaction in many forms. Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus pauses irregularly, sometimes for more than two years, a fact that cannot be explained just as a pause in writing.33 It is impossible that Cicero corresponded only with members from the senatorial class – besides only one knight (Atticus) and one freedman (Tiro).34 Moreover, Peter White gathers more than forty traces of missing or obviously shortened letters and letters that originate as postscripts to other letters.35 Modern editors continue to “manipulate” the design of individual letters when they include in their editions between 846 and 966 letters, while (re)arranging them according the editor’s reconstruction of their historical sequence.36
Seneca’s 124 letters to his fictitious student Lucilius mostly avoid reference to external events that might allow a dating and thereby create a kind of “time-free zone.”37 Yet the increasing length and complexity in thought seem to reflect intellectual and moral progress.38 So this collection follows a kind of chronological order. And Seneca obviously intended the publication of his letter collection, because it provides a perfect medium to explain and at the same time to demonstrate his Stoic-Epicurean ethics by his own example, as well as by his master models Socrates and Cato. Repeatedly he summons Lucilius to exercise what he has learned.39
In all other ancient collections, letters are arranged either “by addressees alone, by loose topics alone, or by addressees and loose topics in combination” or “for the sake of artistic 6
variety.”40 Pliny, who also published his own letters, opens the dedicatory letter to his friend Septicus by stating that he has not kept a chronological order but published the writings “as they came in his hand.”41 Modern interpreters revealed this as a literary deceit and demonstrated instead an artful poetic arrangement with intertextual allusion throughout the collection.42 The artistic model has stylistic verity, literary allusions, and significant juxtaposition, which are the ideals of Latin poetry.
Cicero’s letters to his friends (Ad familiaris) include many examples of letters arranged by addressees and topics. The thirteenth book of Ad familiaris contains only letters of recommendation. To modern readers, this is so boring that the German translations do not translate any of these letters.43 Yet in this thirteenth book of Ad familiaris, Cicero recommends mostly members of senatorial class and thereby demonstrates his own power and prestige on which the state’s elite is depending. Book sixteen of the same collections “to his friends” centers on the health of his manumitted slave and secretary Tiro. Yet it places the manumission in the middle of the collection, unless it might narrate an incident that happened three years earlier than his writing of the rest of the letters in this collection. Some interpreters read the book as an allegorical allusion to Cicero’s own willing death that manumitted him from his life.44
In sum, almost all ancient letters reached us only in collections and that means in an edited form. Biography or moral progress can serve as leading principles of arrangement. Yet more often “address” or “topic” or both structure the collection. This is also true for at least some epistolary novels, like Plato’s epistles.45 And even not all manuscripts agree on the sequence of Chion’s letters, the epistolary novel that seems to follow its narrative sequence most like a modern autobiographical model.46
As Gibson has shown, letter collections serve, on the one hand, as a didactic medium insofar as they provide master models and examples of letter forms, like letters of recommendation for various circumstances, and in the case of Pliny and Fronto, letters to emperors, congratulations, thanks or request, and so forth.47 On the other hand, they provide aretalogies. Except for early years and death, the subject is introduced under common themes.48 Like Suetonius’s lives of the emperors, letter collections show the writers’ virtues, successes and failures, styles of administration, but also private habits in thematic blocks. The character of a given writer is illustrated by his or her relationship to slaves and freedmen, courtesans and wives, peers and ancestors, and so forth. Attention is also payed to literary tastes, style in 7
writing and speaking, and opinions of the subjects. Some of these features can be observed in the Pastoral Epistles as well.
The Pastoral Epistles among Ancient Letter Collections
The Pastoral Epistles form a corpus of Pauline letters to close coworkers or delegates. As in all ancient letter collections, the corpus may preserve authentic and fictious letters side by side. However, as the two letters to Timothy and the one to Titus resemble each other as much as they distinguish themselves from all other Pauline and deutero-Pauline letters, it is most likely that they originated in the same context of the second century. Variations in content, tone, and levels of intimacy are typical according to respective situation and correspondence partner.
In accordance with many other letter collections and epistolary novels, manuscripts vary in sequence and arrangement of letters. Few codices start with Titus, a majority with 1 Timothy. Both sequences are reasonable. Titus 1:1–4 has the longest prescript, while 1 Tim 1:12–17 starts with Paul’s autobiographical account of his pre-Christian life and conversion. One could even start with 2 Timothy, given the fact that also this letter has a short biographical retrospect (1:3) in slight contradiction to 1 Timothy 1:12–17. The sequence Titus, 1 Timothy, and 2 Timothy represents an order by topics, the sequence 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus an arrangement by addressees.
In whatever sequence the letters are arranged, they prove themselves as a didactic medium. Above all, the three letters serve as an aretalogy that demonstrates Paul’s virtues and struggles, administrative skills and habits; or in short, they show his character in action. Therefore, spectacular and nonspectacular details are mentioned side by side. A person who worries about a lost cloak would no less worry about a lost friend. As one can observe in some epistolary novels, illustrative effects are important, even when some details might contradict each other. From Rome, Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, and Claudia, three men and a woman with Latin names, send greetings, when “only Luke” stays with the apostle who is “deserted by all” when defending his life before the Roman emperor.49 Better to hurry, when it becomes winter and, more important, Paul’s “time of my departure has come” (2 Tim 4:6, 21). Paul does not teach but admonishes his most intimate friends, Timothy and Titus, how to teach and to administer.50 Timothy and Titus serve as models for the life practice of the church. They are contrasted by false teachers. Again readers are informed not about their teachings but their names. The two characters that appear twice, Hymenaeus and Alexander, 8
illustrate the wide range of attacks – from the personal strikes of Alexander to the wrong teachings of Hymenaeus.51 Yet the sovereign apostle governs their blasphemies and already had turned them over to Satan (1 Tim 1:20). Between individual letters, some information triggered phantasies, like the relationship of the two destinations of Titus: Dalmatia and Crete (2 Tim 4:10; Titus 1:5). The controversy between Pervo and Glaser on whether the reader should identify with Timothy and Titus or with Paul cannot be solved. In all letter collections, more than one reading is possible. Even in the letters of Chion, one can detect a critical layer that blames Platonic philosopher for a pointless act of murder that led nobody into freedom.52 Likewise, the Pastoral Epistles can be studied with affirmation and admiration, yet not all readers did, as the Acts of Thecla proves by its telling of a quite different story with similar personnel.53
I agree with Pervo and Glaser that the Pastoral Epistles are to be compared to ancient epistolary novels. Yet like all other letter collections, the Pastoral Epistles narrate not only one but many possible stories. Cornelius Nepos (110–24 BCE) reads the collection of eleven books of letters to Atticus he had in his hand because they replace a history of the Roman Civil War and even surpass it by their given details, character studies, and political advice.54 Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) chooses Cicero’s letters as a master model to be surpassed by his own letter collection, which introduces his fictive student Lucilius into philosophy.55 Antoninus Pius asks Fronto (113–176 CE) to send him a collection of Cicero’s letters so that he can “improve his command of language.”56 Likewise, some read the Pastoral Epistles to be moved by the fortitude of an abandoned hero. Others might seek for advisement in administration. Others might miss a letter to Ephesus or to more remote areas like Crete – perhaps not by incidence – an island famous for its political institutions with a leading body of elders, a predecessor of the Roman senate. Some readers might just admire Paul and seek information about his early or later years, or about Timothy or Titus. Or they might be curious about other people’s correspondence, or are just looking for some entertainment. Like most ancient letter collections, the Pastoral Epistles have something to offer for these and other interests.