IN INTRODUCTION. TESTIMONY OF THE FATHERS. N ascertaining the genuineness of any Epistle which claims to be written by an Apostle, we have first of all to look to the testimony of the Church, which is the keeper and expounder of Holy Writ. If any Gospel or Epistle has from the first been quoted or appealed to as the writing of such a man as St. Paul, such a testimony must outweigh a thousand times over the conjectures or surmises of those who, living nearly 1,800 years later, appeal to certain features which they for the first time in the history of Christendom have discovered, as proving the writing in question to be a forgery. Now this is the case with the Pastoral Epistles. They were accepted as genuine, and appealed to, in the same way as he appealed to the acknowledged books of Scripture, by a writer of the first century, Clemens Romanus. 66 Thus (ch. xxix), "Let us draw near to him with holiness of Spirit, lifting up pure and undefiled hands unto him." So 1 Tim. ii. 8, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting;" also "ready to every good work," from Titus iii. 1. Again, ch. xxi., " without preferring one before another” (1 Tim. v. 21). Again, Polycarp in the beginning of the second century, in his Epistle, ch. iv. "But the love of money is the root of all evil. Knowing, therefore, that we brought nothing into the world, so we can carry nothing out" (1 Tim. vi. 7, 10). Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, flourishing at the end of the first century, quote these Epistles far more frequently than most modern writers do, the former about one hundred, the latter more than fifty times. But the most striking testimony is that of Irenæus. He begins his great work, "Against Heresies," with a quotation from the first Epistle to Timothy, "Inasmuch as certain men have set the truth aside, and bring in lying words, and vain genealogies, which, as the Apostle says, minister questions rather than 'Godly edifying which is in faith,""&c. But this is by no means all the testimony of Irenæus. It appears that Eusebius gives the full title of Irenæus's work as "Refutation and subversion of knowledge falsely so called,' so that Irenæus incorporates a phrase or short sentence from 1 Timothy, vi. 20, into the title of his work. Let the reader consider the significance of this. Here is a writer whose memory of Church matters (for he was a Christian by birth) extended to at the least A.D. 130, so that he could have conversed with men not very old who were contemporaries of St. Paul in his last years. Is it to be supposed that he could have accepted as St. Paul's writing a forgery of A.D. 110 or 120, or even later? He came from the East, and his birthplace was supposed to be Smyrna, or some neighbouring city. If then any one as early as even A.D. 100, had published a spurious Epistle as one written by such a man as St. Paul to such a man as Timothy, would he not have been cognizant of the fact—was there nobody to tell him that the Church was deceived in receiving certain letters as St. Paul's which never saw the light till perhaps half a century after St. Paul's death, so that he should be saved from the mistake of beginning his great work with a citation from an Epistle which a very little examination would show was not written by St. Paul? If there had been the smallest doubt about the matter of their Pauline origin, a man who devoted so much of his time to the history of contemporary religious thought, could not have been so deceived. DATE OF WRITING. It is difficult to understand how there can have been two opinions upon this matter. The history of the Acts closes with the account of St. Paul in Rome, dwelling "two whole years in his own hired house, and receiving all that came in unto him, preaching the Kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus, with all confidence, no man forbidding him." Now it is impossible to suppose that the close of these two years 1 Ἐλέγχου καὶ ἀνατροπῆς τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως. (Eus. v. 7.) INTRODUCTION. 171 was the close of St. Paul's life by martyrdom. All history, both that of the New Testament, and that of the earliest Church historians is against it. Before the conclusion of this imprisonment and from his place of detention, St. Paul writes two letters, one to the Philippian Church, in which he expresses his confidence that "he shall abide and continue with them all" (i. 25, 26), and that he will come to them shortly (ii. 24); the other to Philemon, in which he asks him to prepare him a lodging (22). That his expectation was fulfilled, the three Pastoral letters are a proof, and this whether they be genuine or whether they be forged. If they be genuine, then there is an end of the matter, for one of them was written on the eve of his martyrdom, at the conclusion of a second imprisonment, and the other (1st Epistle) contains certain references which show that he was taking journeys for which no ingenuity can make room (as regards time) in the period covered by the narrative of the Acts. If, on the contrary, they are forgeries, then the forger must have believed that St. Paul's life did not end with his first imprisonment, that he must have been imprisoned twice, and this because he makes St. Paul write a letter in which he daily expected martyrdom, a letter in the greatest contrast with the letters written during his first imprisonment, when he daily expected deliverance. Now why does the supposed forger assume that St. Paul was liberated after the detention of two years in his hired house? Because it was a well-known fact, upon which there could be no difference of opinion in the first century, for St. Paul's life was not that of a man who lived in a corner. He was the best known man, the best loved man, and the most hated man of his day. The fact, then, that the forger placed his two forgeries after the first imprisonment is, because he had no other time in which to put them, and he could not have assigned them to the period after this first imprisonment, had not the whole Christian world known that it existed. 66 His liberation from his first imprisonment is referred to by Clement of Rome, in the words: Owing to envy, Paul, who obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity (2 Cor. xii. 23, 'in prisons more frequent') compelled to flee, and stoned. After preaching both in the East and West, he gained the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world, and come to the |