suitably from a later Paulinist than from Paul himself, and Paul would never have said it. For him faith was not "the faith," something to be scrupulously preserved against adulteration; it was the controlling inner experience of his life. The whole outlook of the Pastorals, planning the organization of the officers of the church and its charities, faces a long future, quite unlike that before the author of I Cor. 7:26-31, with his immediate apocalyptic expectation. To quote the gospels (Luke 10:7) as Scripture side by side with Deut. 25:4 (I Tim. 5:18) is hardly possible much before A.D. 150. And, finally, the historical background, disclosed by the letters, of rampant sectarian movements with strange doctrinal perversions cannot be matched until a hundred years after Paul wrote his first extant letter in A.D. 50.

But about 150 every element falls into place.

1. The vague polemic against heresy and schism, which is on every page of the Pastorals, is fully satisfied by the ravages of the Marcionite and Gnostic sects. "Endless genealogies," I Tim. 1:4, sounds like the aeon speculations of the Valentinian Gnostics (Irenaeus Refutation i. 11; cf. Titus 3:9). But it would be difficult to refer to Marcionism and Gnosticism more explicitly than is done in the last lines of I Timothy, "Keep away from the worldly, empty phrases and contradictions [Antitheses] of what they falsely call Knowledge [Gnosis]." Gnosis was the name of the chief prevalent heresy, and The Antitheses was the name of Marcion's one book. These alone would not prove the point, but taken in conjunction

with all the evidence of date and occasion supplied by the letters themselves, they must be given more decisive weight than has hitherto been allowed them.

2. The need of standardization in church organization is met in the Pastorals by the recognition of a twofold ministry—overseers (or presbyters) and deacons, for each of which definite qualifications are laid down. Against the ascetic sects, marriage is recognized, but there must be no remarriage for those who are to serve as officers or to be enrolled as widows and provided for by the church. It is true that Ignatius of Antioch, in A.D. 107-17, advocated a threefold ministry, but that did not become standard procedure until the founding of the Catholic church, toward 180. It is the absence of this fully developed polity in the Pastorals that shows us that they are earlier than the founding of the Catholic church.

3. Marcion's repudiation of the Jewish scripture, which had long been the Bible of the church, leads to the reassertion of its authority; the consecrating effect of its use in prayer, I Tim. 4:5; the duty of reading it publicly before the church, 4:13; and above all the great assertion of II Tim. 3:16: "All scripture is divinely inspired, and useful in teaching, in reproof, in correcting faults, and in training in uprightness." This is a denial of one of Marcion's most emphatic tenets, and much more; it is the extension to the whole of the Greek Old Testament of the doctrine of verbal inspiration, which Palestinian Judaism had applied only to the five books of the Law—a step that brought allegorical interpretation in its wake.

4. Most important of all, the danger that the influence of Paul's letters would be reduced and even destroyed by their appropriation by Marcion gives us the explanation of the otherwise inexplicable composition of this group of letters in the name of Paul. Marcion had made himself the champion of Paulinism, as he understood it, and had elevated Paul's letters to the position of Scripture. He was clearly the first to do this. They had been collected and published perhaps fifty years before his time, but there is no recognition of them as a part of Scripture before Marcion, A.D. 140-50. Justin (about 150) does not recognize them as Scripture; it is only "the memoirs of the apostles [the gospels] or the writings of the prophets" that are read in Christian meetings, "as long as time permits," Apology lxvii. 3. Indeed, as we have seen, he does not mention Paul or his letters though he shows no little familiarity with them.

The writer of the Pastorals grasps the situation boldly. For the people of his day, as someone has pointed out, it was as natural to write a letter in the name of Paul as it was to compose a speech or a sermon and put it in his mouth. Paul is being made a tool of Marcionism, and he must be rescued, and recovered for the uses of the church. The Pastoral Letters accomplish this. They disown Marcion and his chief positions in the name of Paul; "There is but one God," I Tim. 2:5; "All scripture is divinely inspired," II Tim. 3:16. "Keep away from the .... contradictions [Antitheses]," I Tim. 6:20. In this way Paul himself is made to disclaim Marcion.

This is effected not by a single letter but by a corpus of letters. It is a mistake to approach the Pastorals atomistically and seek to determine which is earlier and which later. They are to be understood as a unit. The same situation and the same purposes run through them all. The same errors are again and again attacked and denounced. The same reforms of organization are set forth. It was as a corpus that they were produced and put forth, for they mutually buttress and support one another. In fact, as we have seen, Titus is made to intervene chronologically between I and II Timothy, thus integrating the three inseparably. They are personal in form, though not in purpose, for it was too late to offer another church letter of Paul's. And by this time Titus and Timothy belonged to everybody and had become suitable symbols of the Christian minister of the Pauline type. Through them the contemporary Christian ministry could be addressed and guided.

The new corpus is no independent unit, however; it is to be a supplement to the existing Pauline literature. That is just what it became, as Irenaeus' use of it a generation later shows, Refutation, Preface. It effected just the recovery of Paul for standard Christianity that was intended; indeed, its influence upon polity was less than its effect upon canonization, for it swept not only Paul but itself into Christian scripture. When the first New Testament was organized some twenty-five years later, it included thirteen letters of Paul (just the number of Plato's letters), and thenceforth no Christian canon contained less.

The Pastoral corpus met a critical situation and met it with signal success. It reflects an attitude like Justin's as to the demonic inspiration of the schismatics; it successfully opposes the rising disposition to let women teach in church, evidenced by the Acts of Paul a dozen or twenty years later [1] and the Montanist movement a little later still. [2] Like Justin (Apology lxvii. 3), it recognizes the gospels as Scripture, for in I Tim. 5:18, "The workman deserves his wages" (from Luke 10:7) is quoted as Scripture side by side with Deut. 25:4, "You must not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain." The mention of Pontius Pilate, I Tim. 6:13, also suggests Lucan influence, for he alone gives Pilate's nomen, or gentilic name. Luke 3:1; Acts 4:27.

Efforts have been made to identify scraps of genuine Pauline material in the Pastorals, but these invariably include just the things that Paul can hardly be imagined to have written, such as his own great epitaph, II Tim. 4:7. The idea that "many of the details, e.g., the references to Paul's cloak and books (II Tim. 4:12, 13), are too circumstantial and concrete to be explained" on the hypothesis "that these writings were nothing more than the products of a later Paulinist's inventive imagination and reverence" [3] shatters upon the fact that just such details characterize the Acts

[1] M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), pp. 270-99.

[2] Eusebius Church History v. 14. Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla were the chief prophets of Montanism.

[3] Moffatt, Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament (New York, 1911), p. 399.

of Paul, written a dozen or twenty years later. For example, the description of Paul—"a small-sized man with thin hair and crooked legs, of vigorous physique, with eyebrows meeting and a hooked nose, but full of grace"—is quite as circumstantial and concrete as the reference to Paul's cloak and books but can hardly be accepted on that account as an authentic portrait of Paul. Such touches really belong, of course, to the very rudiments of fiction. Both are simply attempts at verisimilitude.

But the chief point in the art of the Pastorals lies in this—that instead of being encyclicals they are focused upon individuals. Their author means them for the whole church (the encyclical intention shows itself for an instant in the "everywhere" of I Tim. 2:8), but he addresses them to Timothy and Titus, two individuals often mentioned by Paul, but really little known apart from him. The pseudonymity is, as it were, double; both author and recipient are assumed. The result of this was greatly to enhance the interest and effect of the letters. Not only did they gain in probability, for private letters were much more likely to have lain long unnoticed than church letters, but they possessed the interest of private and, as it were, confidential letters, so much greater than that of semi- public communications to a body of people. This is a trait in the art of the Pastorals that has not been fully appreciated.

Not only did the letters gain in interest but they actually gained in authority from this personal address in each of them. They seemed to come with the

authority not only of Paul but of his chief lieutenants, the men closest to him in his missionary travels. These men became the medium through which he could speak to the pastors and teachers of the later day. They were like an inheritance not only from Paul the apostle but from my brother Titus (II Cor. 2:13) and our brother Timothy (Col. 1:1). An author capable of such a brilliant reversal of the familiar encyclical technique may certainly be credited with such small literary details as the cloak and books left at Troas.

The influence of the Pauline corpus is, of course, strong in the Pastorals (all ten letters are reflected [1]), as is that of the Acts, II Tim. 1:5, compare Acts 16:1;

II Tim. 3:11, compare Acts 13:13-14:28; 16:1. Of ten places mentioned in the Pastorals nine are spoken of in the Acts—all but Nicopolis. The four provinces or countries mentioned—Asia, Galatia, Crete, Dalmatia—all appear in Paul or the Acts, the last under the name of Illyricum of which it was really the southern part. Of twenty-seven persons named, ten are known to us from Paul's letters. Pudens, Linus, and Claudia are appropriately located at Rome, where Linus was afterward recognized as the first bishop (Irenaeus Refutation iii. 3. 3).

The regulative tone of the letters with their definite statements of the requisite qualifications for church superintendents, assistants, assistants' wives, I Tim. 3:11, and dependent widows suggests the atmosphere

[1] A. E. Barnett, "The Use of the Pauline Letters in Pre-Catholic Christian Literature," p. 612; University of Chicago Abstracts of Theses ("Humanistic Series'"), IX, 509.

of Rome rather than that of Ephesus. The conflict with the sects seems to have been hottest at Rome. Cerdo, Marcion, and Valentinus appeared there in person, no doubt seeking to dominate the Roman church as the strategic center of the Christian movement. There, too, the feminism which was advancing in the province of Asia (cf. Thecla in the Acts of Paul, ca. A.D. 160-70, and the high position of Priscilla and Maximilla in Montanism not long after) would be sternly repressed, I Tim. 2:12. The fact that feminism went on to such lengths in Asia long after the Pastorals were written makes it less likely that they were written there than in Rome, which was definitely antifeminist (as Tertullian reflects) and was soon to take other steps against Marcion and the contemporary sects in the development of its great baptismal symbol—the Apostles' Creed, almost every clause of which denies some heretical doctrine. Perhaps the words "Everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me," II Tim. 1:15, refers to Asian laxity about the place of women in the church, or to the general neglect of Paul on the part of Christians of the nonsectarian type there.

We may therefore suppose these letters to have been written in Rome, about the middle of the second century or soon after, and made a part of a new edition of the Pauline letters for the use of Christians of the non-schismatic type, who followed neither Marcion nor the Gnostics. Our first real witness to them [1] is

[1] Unless their influence be detected in the Acts of Paul in the common assumption that he was released from prison and resumed his missionary travels; that work also mentions Demas and Onesiphorus but can hardly have approved the Pastorals' denial of woman's right to teach. Perhaps it was written, among other things, to correct their reactionary attitude on that point.

Irenaeus of Lyons who grew up in the neighborhood of Smyrna and went to Gaul probably well after 150. The supposed use of the Pastorals in Ignatius and Polycarp must be interpreted the other way, in view of the historical situation so clearly reflected in the Pastorals themselves.