Pastoral Epistles

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NoelFitz

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I have been studying the Pastoral Epistles for some time and have a number of queries.
  1. What is the best commentary/book for studying the PEs?
  2. Did St Paul write them?
  3. How can they be inspired if they are pseudonymous, and hence essentially untruthful?
I would appreciate comment on these queries and any suggestions about studying these books of the Bible.

Thanks!
 
Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture has a good commentary on Timothy and Titus. George Montague is the author of this book.

I think St. Paul is the author, although he may have dictated it to someone else to write. But I’m highly confident that the Holy Spirit moved Paul to compose these letters.

I’m not sure about your pseudonymous comment however. It seems that there were additions to the Gospels of John (ch 21) and Mark (ch 16) by disciples (most likely) of these authors. The Church recognizes this possibility and affirms that even the additions were Divinely Inspired.
 
NotWorthy,

Many thanks for your thoughtful reply to my query.
  1. I have the book by George T Montague SM you recommend. However I am not too happy with it. I am not sure why. I think it is because he wanders from the text to discuss later developments in theology.
  2. I agree with you that St Paul was probably the author of the PEs. We know he did use secretaries, so I have no problem with this.
  3. We know that the Bible is inspired and that God is truly the author. It is a case of faith seeking understanding. I believe the PEs are inspired, but what does this mean? This is another question, which I do not want to consider in detail. I am happy enough believing that the PEs are inspired, whether Paul wrote them or not. But if Paul was not the author is someone telling lies?
  4. You say even additions are inspired. But what version of the Bible is the inspired version? Jerome’s Vulgate is a translation and we do not have original texts.
In summary: I do not want to get obsessed with the problems of inspiration, but want to get on with trying to understand the PEs themselves.

So any further help would be appreciated.
 
Pseudonymity is not the equivalent of untruthfulness. It wasn’t that the writer was trying to pretend to be someone else. or to deceive the reader. It was common to ascribe a text to a teacher, leader, or even a bygone figure - this was a form of humility, rather than claiming authority for oneself. It was also common for a teacher’s disciples to commit to writing the lessons they had heard him teach after he died, and those written forms would be considered to be “by” that teacher, since they were his thoughts.

Dei Verbum says
the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.
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We (Catholics) are not literalists. We do not believe that each individual word choice was dictated by God, nor do our beliefs rest on the placement of vowels that didn’t exist in the original Hebrew or commas that weren’t in the Greek. We can acknowledge the presence of multiple versions of a story, as the Jews did before us, because we understand that God teaches through stories and events. So the question of translations vs original texts is moot. We have what the Holy Spirit intended for us to have, and what He guided the Magesterium to define as inspired.

I rather like the Commentaries on Sacred Scripture series from Baker, and the volume on the PE, by George Montague, looks to be nicely done.
 
NoelFitz said:
I have been studying the Pastoral Epistles for some time and have a number of queries.
  1. What is the best commentary/book for studying the PEs?
  2. Did St Paul write them?
  3. How can they be inspired if they are pseudonymous, and hence essentially untruthful?
I would appreciate comment on these queries and any suggestions about studying these books of the Bible.

Thanks!
Click to expand...
  1. New Jerome Biblical Commentary
  2. Probably not, but opinions differ. No matter.
  3. God is free to inspire anyone. A writing being pseudonymous is completely different than a writing being untruthful. As Catholics, we believe all Scripture is true, regardless of the human authorship involved, because it’s inspired by God.
 
NoelFitz said:
NotWorthy,

Many thanks for your thoughtful reply to my query.
  1. Code: 
    I have the book by George T Montague SM you recommend.  However I am not too happy with it.  I am not sure why.  I think it is because he wanders from the text to discuss later developments in theology.
Click to expand...
You know, I have all the first four books of the Catholic Commentary series and yes, this is the one I like the least.

But its still far and away better than anything else I’ve read, including the Navarre.
NoelFitz said:
  1. You say even additions are inspired. But what version of the Bible is the inspired version? Jerome’s Vulgate is a translation and we do not have original texts.
Click to expand...
Jerome’s translation is NOT inspired. The only thing that is inspired is the original text and the additions in their original text. No translations, or for that matter copies, are inspired. I know some King James Version readers that will disagree ;), but that’s their problem, not mine.
 
Catechism:

II. INSPIRATION AND TRUTH OF SACRED SCRIPTURE

105 God is the author of Sacred Scripture. "The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit."69

"For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself."70

106 God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. "To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more."71

107 The inspired books teach the truth. "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."72

108 Still, the Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living”.73 If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures."74

vatican.va/archive/catechism/p1s1c2a3.htm#II
 
Bookcat,

thank you for your reply. Even though recently I went to confession to a member of the Editorial Committee for the English Edition of the Navarre Bible, I have questions about it. It is more devotional than exegetical.
 
NHInsider,

I am grateful for all the replies here.

You quote Dei Verbum
“The books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures”.

That is fine but what are these books. How can I get a version of the NT that is inspired. We only have translations or manuscripts after c. 200 AD,

The Letter to Titus starts as follows “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth that is in accordance with godliness,”

So if Paul is not the author, someone is telling a lie.

I accept that secretaries can be used.
 
Vince 1022,
You recommend the NJBC. On page 892 Robert A Wild SJ suggests Paul is not the author of the PEs. I am inclined to think he is. Suggesting Paul is not the author makes the PEs a collection of lies.

You claim it is “no matter” if Paul is the author or not. It is a matter. Are we being fed a collection of lies or not?

Was Jerome inspired? Are all translations of the Bible inspired?
 
NotWorthy,

Thanks for your continuing contributions to this discussion.

Two basic commentaries are the NJBC and Brown’s Introduction to the NT. Neither of these support Pauline authorship of the PEs strongly.

Commentaries I have supporting Paul as author are Knight (Protestant), Luke Timothy Johnson for 1 & 2 Tim (Catholic) and Donald Guthrie, my favorite at present, (Protestant).

Commentaries supporting pseudonymity are Benjamin Fiore (Catholic), Raymond E Collins (Catholic) and Dibelius and Conzelmann (Protestants).

So unfortunately the commentary I am studying at present is Protestant.
 
Noel-

unfortunately, you are bringing your own standard of “honesty” to an ancient document written under a different set of standards, and insisting that if the document doesn’t meet your criteria, it must be “lying.”

Incidentally, I do ascribe to the position that the books in question are Pauline. But my acceptance of the books as inspired is based on the teaching of the Magesterium, NOT on the authorship, so if it could be conclusively proven that the Pastorals were written by someone else who chose to honor Paul by pseudonymity, that would not change my understanding of them as Scripture. I think that is probably what was meant by the “it doesn’t matter” statement above. Just as, if someone were to produce and authenticate a copy of the missing letter to the Corinthians, I would not immediately consider it inspired.

But I think what you are saying wrt commentaries is that you aren’t comfortable with a commentary that does not support your opinion that the books were in fact written by Paul. That’s fine, in the same way that it is fine for someone to select only OT commentaries that support a literal reading of Genesis or Job. You are not required to submit yourself to a challenge to your beliefs as part of your study (unless you are taking a degree in Biblical Studies).

What is not fine is for you to build your faith on the premise that if every word in the Bible is not literally “true” in the modern, western sense of the concept of “factual,” then the Bible cannot be trusted. Our trust in the Bible is based on the promise of Jesus to the Apostles, not on happenstances of history, manuscript copying, and other human activity.
 
NHInsider,

Many thanks for your replies to my queries on the PEs.

I am studying them at present and I hope to submit queries as they occur.

When I first started studying Paul I accepted the current view of seven authentic Letters of Paul. Now I am not so sure.

As a Catholic one accepts that the Bible is inspired, so the problem is to understand what this means – *Faith seeking understanding./I

But I find it hard to read these letters as a collection of lies. I read in Titus “I left you behind in Crete”. If Paul did not leave Titus behind in Crete, someone is not telling the truth.

I realize Moses did not write all of the Pentateuch, but this is not the issue here. In fact we know very little about Paul, so to claim he did not write the PEs demands proof, and the proof does not exist.

You seem to imply that I am a fundamentalist. I would not agree with this. You conclude by writing “Our trust in the Bible is based on the promise of Jesus to the Apostles, not on happenstances of history, manuscript copying, and other human activity.”

I am not sure what this means. To me the Bible is inspired, even though all the books in the NT may be forgeries, as Bart Ehrman has claimed, except Apocalypse/Revelation, Romans, 1 & 2 Cor and Galatians. If one claims this, I ask for proof.

I would presume those taking a degree in Biblical Studies would need to provide evidence that the PEs were not written by Paul. It is not enough to say Harrison says so.*
 
NoelFitz said:
You seem to imply that I am a fundamentalist. I would not agree with this. You conclude by writing “Our trust in the Bible is based on the promise of Jesus to the Apostles, not on happenstances of history, manuscript copying, and other human activity.”

I am not sure what this means.
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I guess what I am suggesting is less precise rather than more so. I am saying that our confidence in the status of the Scriptures as inspired is based not on their authorship but on the authority of the Church. So (to put an extreme edge on the statement, which I do not actually defend) even IF the texts as we have them contain factual errors, we can be sure that the information they convey is inspired and “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” (2 Tim 4:16).
 
NHInsider,

many thanks for all your posts to me.

I agree with you. The Bible is inspired, that is what I believe as a Catholics.

But a problem remains. What does inspired mean?

But with various pressures at present I do not want to go down this avenue.
 
NoelFitz said:
Vince 1022,
You recommend the NJBC. On page 892 Robert A Wild SJ suggests Paul is not the author of the PEs. I am inclined to think he is. Suggesting Paul is not the author makes the PEs a collection of lies.

You claim it is “no matter” if Paul is the author or not. It is a matter. Are we being fed a collection of lies or not?

Was Jerome inspired? Are all translations of the Bible inspired?
Click to expand...
Whether or not Paul is the actual author (he wrote them himself) or not is debated among scholars. It’s not a matter essential to faith for Catholics.

Accepting Paul as author or not does not make the PEs a collection of lies, no more than accepting Moses or not as the author of the Pentateuch does.

Yes, Jerome was inspired. Perfect? No.

Yes, the Bible is inspired. All translations equally so? No.
 
NoelFitz said:
NHInsider,

many thanks for all your posts to me.

I agree with you. The Bible is inspired, that is what I believe as a Catholics.

But a problem remains. What does inspired mean?

But with various pressures at present I do not want to go down this avenue.
Click to expand...
The Jerome Biblical Commentary (both original and New) has an excellent chapter on inspiration. I’d highly recommend it.
 
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