PastoralEpistles.com

It seems to me that the authorship question will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.  What is interesting is how scholarly fashions change.  It was not that long ago that commentators could confidently claim "scholarly consensus" on the pseudepigraphical nature of the PE.  The current scholarly climate makes that consensus far less secure.  It seems to me, regardless of authorship, that there is a genuine move to date the Pastorals much earlier than the previous generation of PE scholarship.  An early date, of course, has always been held by those accepting Pauline authorship but there are now others such as Howard Marshall, Richard Bauckham and myself who, although unpersuaded by Pauline authorship, accept that the letters are first century, probably second-generation, documents.

Posted by Lloyd Pietersen