Reflections on church order in the Pastoral Epistles, with further reflection on the hermeneutics of ad hoc documents

Abstract

"An old saw says, "Give a dog an ill name and hang him." The same can also be true of a complimentary name. When Paul Anton of Halle (1726) first called Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus the Pastoral Epistles (PE), and it stuck, they have been forever thereafter read and understood as consisting "mostly of ad- vice to younger ministers."' However one may feel about the question of author- ship ,2 the view as to their occasion and purpose has been basically singular. Whether in Paul's lifetime or later, the letters are seen as responses to the en- croachment of alien ideas in some Pauline churches with a view to setting the churches in order as the proper antidote to heresy. Hence they are read and consulted as "church manuals," whose basic intent was to give the ongoing Church instructions on church order in light of Paul's advanced age and impend- ing death (or the decline of his influence at the end of the first century, for those who consider the letters pseudepigraphic). Indeed, so fixed is this view in the Church that I recently taught a course on the exegesis of these letters in a semi- nary where the students by taking my course could receive credit for their pasto- ral ministry requirement."