Michael Gilleland, at the Laudator Temporis Acti blog, has a post on The Root of All Evil where he quotes Sophocles, Antigone 295-301, in Greek and English.

Here's the English. Be sure to check his site for the Greek.

There is no institution so ruinous for men as money; money sacks cities, money drives men from their homes! Money by its teaching perverts men's good minds so that they take to evil actions! Money has shown men how to practise villainy, and taught them impiousness in every action! (Sophocles, Antigone 295-301)

Rob Bradshaw, at the ever-helpful BiblicalStudies.org.uk, has uploaded the following article:

Oskar Skarsaune, "Heresy and the Pastoral Epistles," Themelios 20.1 (1994): 9-14.

You really should be a regular reader of Rob's blog as he announces new articles he posts with frequency.

Thanks, Rob!

Alan Bandy of Cafe Apocalypsis posts a link to note and updated version of Andreas Kostenberger's web site, BiblicalFoundations.org.

Of most interest to me are the essays and the articles, many of which have PDF editions supplied. A fair proportion of the stuff relates either directly or indirectly to the Pastoral Epistles.

In the past I mentioned a book called The Christian Ecclesia by Fenton John Anthony Hort. It deals with the idea of church as described by use of the word ἐκκλησία.

I've recently become aware that Hort's book is available online from the ever-helpful CCEL.

If you're studying the Pastoral Epistles, particularly chapter 3 (see 1Ti 3.5 and 1Ti 3.15) then you need to consult The Christian Ecclesia.

While you're there, make sure to take a peek at the other stuff from Hort that the CCEL have digitised and placed online.

Rob Bradshaw (BiblicalStudies.org.uk) points to a few articles on the topic One of the articles Rob points to is the intro to a review of the updated edition of Andreas Kostenberger's study on 1Ti 2.9-15. I've read and have a very short description of the first edition of Women in the Church on PastoralEpistles.com.

Check 'em out. Kostenberger's book is well worth reading. I had borrowed a copy of the first edition from a friend; I'm happy to have my own copy now — and an updated edition at that!

In working through the Pastoral Epistles, one runs across 1Ti 4.16:

Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

This sort of phrasing is also seen in some writings of the Apostolic Fathers:

I do not think that I have given trivial advice about self-restraint. And whoever takes my advice will have no regrets, but will instead save both himself and me, the one who has given the advice. There is no small reward for the one who converts a person who is going astray toward destruction, that he may be saved. (2Cl 15.1, Ehrman)

Do not be deceived, my brothers; those who corrupt their households will not inherit the kingdom of God. If then those who do such things according to the flesh die, how much more the one who corrupts the faith of God through an evil teaching, the faith for which Jesus Christ was crucified? Such a person is filthy and will depart into the unquenchable fire; so too the one who listens to him. (IEph 16.1-2, Ehrman)

There are others, of course, and they're listed in the article. What I've done is create a few very general patterns (based on morphology of portions of the phrase in 1Ti 4.16) and searched other corpora for that pattern. The PDF article simply lists semi-relevant instances that I culled from the 100+ hits located in corpora such as the Apostolic Fathers, OT Pseudepigrapha, Works of Philo and Works of Josephus.

Thomas Naef (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the recent SBL conference in Philadelphia) has sent me notice of the BiBIL project, of which I was largely unaware.

Please check it out and play with the searches. I think you'll see that it could be a valuable resource in doing preliminary work to identify sources relevant to a particular text or topic in Biblical studies.

They currently have 178 resources relevant to the Pastoral Epistles catalogued. You can see the full list here.

Thanks, Thomas!

I just came across this article in the online version of Biblica. The summary is as follows:

The distinctive way of honoring gods or God was to celebrate what is unique about them, that is, praise of persons who were the "first", "only", or "one of a few" to do something. Rhetoric from Aristotle to Quintilian expounded the theory of "uniqueness", which the authors of Greek hymns and prayers employed. One finds a Semitic counterpart in the "principle of incomparability" describing Israelite kings. "Uniqueness" pervades the New Testament, especially its doxologies. In them, "uniqueness" was richly expressed in rhetorical mode, as well as by predicates of negative theology which elevated the deity above those praising.

The article is available as HTML or PDF.

Searching through Technorati for other things, I happened across a blog post on a blog called Parableman about the use of αυθεντειν in 1Ti 2.12.

The comments for the post list a paper by Franklin Pyles, An Exegetical Study of 1 Timothy 2.11-15. I know nothing about Dr. Pyles or about the gent who posted the reference to Dr. Pyles' paper. I've not yet read Dr. Pyles' paper, but I have printed out a copy and hope to get to it sometime in the next few weeks. Based on the comments on the original blog post, though, I'd guess I won't be too convinced by anything in Dr. Pyles' paper. We'll see though.

I was browsing through the Hosted Articles at BiblicalStudies.org.uk and came across the following:

Robert H. Gundry, "The Form, Meaning and Background of the Hymn Quoted in 1 Timothy 3:16," W. Ward Gasque & Ralph P. Martin, eds., Apostolic History and the Gospel. Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce. Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1970. Hbk. ISBN: 085364098X. pp.203-222.

The article is available as a PDF file. The site has scads of other content as well, be sure to check it out to see if there is anything else there that interests you.

I stumbled across the website of Andreas Kostenberger (http://biblicalfoundations.org/) while browsing around for other things. Included on the site are PDF editions of several reviews he has written.

• Reviews on Paul the Apostle, including reviews of the ICC Pastoral Epistles volume by I. Howard Marshall and the WBC Pastoral Epistles volume by William Mounce.
• Reviews on the Roles of Women in the Church, along with other articles and some dictionary articles he has written on the topic.

Upon reading the site front page, I'm also led to believe that a second updated edition of his book Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1Ti 2.9-15 will be released in 2005 under the title Women in the Church: An Analysis and Application of 1Ti 2.9-15. Also, apparently Dr. Kostenberger is the author of the upcoming New Expositor's Bible Commentary volume (published by Zondervan) on the Pastoral Epistles. This volume as well is currently scheduled for a 2005 release.

I've blogged about this one before, but it seems to be coming closer to reality. Perry L. Stepp posts a graphic of the cover of his upcoming book, Leadership Succession in the World of the Pauline Circle.

The book is to be published by Sheffield Phoenix press. You can view more information or perhaps take advantage of Sheffield's "Scholar's Price" and purchase a copy.

I'm looking forward to reading this one. Hopefully it's off the press soon!

The ever-helpful Review of Biblical Literature has a review of The Polemic of the Pastorals: A Sociological Examination of the Development of Pauline Christianity by by Lloyd K. Petersen.

The reviewer, David Downs, opens his review with this paragraph:

This volume is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, directed by Loveday Alexander at the University of Sheffield. Utilizing insights from modern sociological studies, Pietersen contends that the polemic of the Pastoral Epistles is directed against Jewish-Christian enthusiasts and visionaries who had successfully attracted members of the Pauline churches, particularly women, with a message of realized eschatology, asceticism, and thaumaturgy.

I've not read the book and I don't know that I will, though the review was enlightening on some points.

This series of essays dealing with the Pauline Canon, edited by Stanley E. Porter, is of interest to those who study the Pastoral Epistles. Essays that specifically deal with the Pastoral Epistles are:

• James W. Aageson. The Pastoral Epistles, Apostolic Authority, and the Development of the Pauline Scriptures.
• Robert W. Wall. The Function of the Pastoral Letters within the Pauline Canon of the New Testament: A Canonical Approach.
• Mark Harding. Disputed and Undisputed Letters of Paul.

The other essays, however, are worth reading as well. Note that this volume was reviewed in Review of Biblical Literature.

Note the following from Porter's introduction:

No collection of essays can attempt to cover all of the relevant issues in a given debate, but this volume is surprisingly wide-ranging, and even includes discussion on a number of topics that have not been as part of the mainstream of debate as the issues perhaps merit. Of course, the Pastoral Epistles come under scrutiny in this volume, as one might well expect in a discussion of the Pauline canon. The Pastoral Epistles have traditionally been the focus of much of the discussion of the Pauine canon, because they raise issues about authorship, theology, transmission and canonical process, among others. The essays by James Aageson and Rob Wall address several issues connected with the Pastorals.

The Pastorals do come under scrutiny, but I am a bit surprised that the viewpoint of a non-Pauline source for authorship is basically assumed; it is the ramifications of this assumption that are scrutinised.

The excellent Review of Biblical Literature has a review of The Pauline Canon, the first volume in Brill's Pauline Studies series. The volume is edited by Stanley Porter.

According to the reviewer (Ron Fay of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) there are a few essays in the book that directly deal with the Pastoral Epistles. Other essays may be helpful to read as well.

I've gotta find a cheap source for these books — my tax return is going to run out quickly at this rate!

I've mentioned Miller's book before. Miller's analysis of the Pastoral Epistles attempts to show that the documents that we know as the "Pastoral Epistles" are really products edited, expanded and redacted over time. He posits a few fragments of Paul were their basis originally, and that a Pauline community added traditional content that it deemed was worthy of preserving.

Straight up, I've got to say that I don't agree with Miller's analysis. Every single transistion seems to be, for Miller, an opportunity to see lack of cohesion in the documents. Everything seems to be a reason for discounting a unified source.

But that doesn't mean that Miller's work shouldn't be read. Those who think the Pastoral Epistles are cohesive (whether or not one would adhere to Pauline authorship) need to read and interact with Miller's work. He asks questions that should be answered.

For instance, I fully agree that there is some "traditional" material that has made its way into the Pastoral Epistles. The content in 1Ti 2.3-6 comes to mind, as does 1Ti 3.16. Miller may have convinced me that the corpus has more traditional materials that I'd previously thought. But he didn't convince me that one author couldn't have assembled the material. The gospels assemble material from various sources for use within their specific narratives. Acts cites letters from the Jerusalem council. Several of the NT books cite content from either the LXX or Hebrew Bible. Why is it out of the question for the Pastoral Epistles cite traditional material yet still be cohesive?

The other overall problem that I had with Miller's thesis is the timing. The Pastoral Epistles have been included in the NT canon from an early date. There are allusions to content of the Pastorals (cf. Peter Kirby's e-Catena for some possibilities). I'm confused as to how the supposed process of expanding and redacting the content of the Pastorals occurred if allusions to the material in the Pastorals can be easily found in early writings of the Church. If Ignatius or Polycarp may have had it in a form that could be alluded to, when did the expansion/redaction actually take place and how quickly did it happen?

But I like Miller's book because it challenges me. It makes me think. It's like that guy you debate who always seems to have one more rebuttal to your primary point. Because he's done such an incredibly good job of presenting his argument, it has to be dealt with in a serious way. And that's good.

I'm now in the process of reading Ray Van Neste's book, Cohesion and Structure in the Pastoral Epistles, which directly responds to Miller's position. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, you really need to read these books as a pair, and you really need to read Miller's first.

Miller's book takes an interesting perspective on the age-old "who wrote 'em?" question. Dr. Miller doesn't think Paul wrote the Pastorals, but he's not ready to simply chalk it up as pseudepigrapha either.

So I don't mess it up, I'll quote from the jacket description:

Dr. Miller argues that the evidence demands a third solution, and suggests that no single author can be held responsible for much of this material. He presents a wide-ranging review of Jewish and early Christian literature, focusing on the compositional histories of these documents. This is the environment out of which the Pastorals emerged. ... Miller's conclusion is that the Pastorals are composite documents based upon brief, but genuine, Pauline notes written to Timothy and Titus. The notes were preserved within the community's archives and later became that literary vehicle upon which other traditional material sacred to the community was loaded.

So, there you go. I haven't read the whole book yet (it's only 200 pages, though, so it should be a quickie) but from what I have taken in it seems like he's building off of the basics of Harrison's fragmentary hypothesis and positing that a group and not a single person is responsible for the resultant 'editing' of the material into the form that we today call the "Pastoral Epistles".

Even though I realize I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to authorship and the Pastorals in that I still think that Pauline authorship makes the most sense (not that it isn't problematic, only that it makes the most sense to me — it is the least worst alternative, in my mind); I'm interested in this book because I want to see where Dr. Miller places this editing period in the timeline of the development of the Pastorals. Such work would, I'd think, have to be very early in order for these epistles to gain the traction they had so early in the history of the church.

I'll post more as I'm able to grok Dr. Miller's work.

Also note that this is #93 in the Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series (SNTS 93).

Sheffield Phoenix Press have scheduled an April release for a book titled Leadership Succession in the World of the Pauline Circle by Perry L. Stepp.

This sounds like it will be a good resource for those studying how leadership in the Christian community worked in those early years. Here's a excerpt from the book blurb:

This book undertakes, for the first time, a thoroughgoing analysis of the evidence, deftly laying out the data from a wide range of Greek and Roman writers. The question then becomes how the early readers of the New Testament, conditioned by prior knowledge of such epistolary and other literary conventions, would have interpreted Paul’s relationship with his delegates like Timothy and Titus, and how they would have conceived the ministry portrayed in the Pastorals as passing from a leader to a successor.

I'll add this to the bibliography after I'm able to peruse it. Good thing the tax return should be a-comin' soon ...

One topic that crops up in a few different places in the Pastoral Epistles is that of what are apparently judaizing believers. This is seen in references to the geneaologies, to myths, and things of this nature.

This book, a series of lectures from F.J.A. Hort that was edited and posthumously published, discusses the "Judaistic" influence on Christianity. Though the entire book is valuable to read, chapter 7 (pp. 130-146) discusses this subject as it applies to the Pastoral Epistles.

From Hort's introductory lecture:

The subject onwhich I propose to lecture this term is the History of Judaistic Christianity in the Apostolic and following Ages. The phrase 'Judaistic Christianity' is more ambiguous than might be wished; but it is difficult to find another more precise. To prevent any misunderstanding as to the sense in which I propose to use it, it will be well to begin with explaining what are the senses which might not unnatrually be attributed to this phrase, but which lie outside the purpose of these lectures.

The edition cited here is a 1980 reprint of the 1894 edition of this volume. It was originally published by MacMillan.

This book is a compilation of a series of lectures prepared by F.J.A. Hort. It was published posthumously. The book is about the notion of the Christian church as described in the New Testament.

As 1Ti 3.5 and 1Ti 3.15 use the word ἐκκλησία, this is important material to cover. Indeed, a few commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles reference this work by Hort in the discussion of "church" (Mounce's WBC volume, Fee's NIBC volume and probably others).

The Pastoral Epistles themselves are specifically discussed in chapter 11, from pp. 171-188. Other sections of the book deal with portions of the Pastoral Epistles as well.

Below is Hort's opening paragraph from the first lecture:

The subject on which I propose to lecture this term is The early conceptions and early history of the Christian Ecclesia. The reason why I have chosen the term Ecclesia is simply to avoid ambiguity. The English term church, now the most familiar representative of ecclesia to mostof us, carries with it associations derived from the institutions and doctrines of later times, and thus cannot at present without a constant mental effort be made to convey the full and exact force which originally belonged to ecclesia. There would moreover be a second ambiguity in the phrase the early history of the Christian Church arising out of the vague comprehensiveness with which the phrase 'History of the Church' is conventionally employed.

Stanley Porter's collection of essays concerning various NT passages includes, as its final chapter, an essay on 1Ti 2.15 and being "saved by childbirth". The essay is titled What Does it Mean to be "Saved By Childbirth" (1 Timothy 2:15)". It runs from pp. 255-268.

Porter doesn't have any silver bullets stashed away, but he does take a serious look at the Greek of this verse to determine what it does — and does not — say. This is strictly a look at the Greek, it is not exegesis or interpretation.

Porter's opening paragraph closes with:

The major lexical and grammatical questions raised in this single verse include determining (a) the subject of the verb σωθήσεται with respect to "the woman" of v. 14, (b) the sense of the verb σῴζω, (c) the denotation of the term τεκνογονία, (d) the function of the preposition δία with the genitive case, (e) the shift in number of the verbs from singular to plural, and (f) the use of the third class conditional construction. In themselves, each of these issues may not be particularly complex, but their composite understanding is necessary to avoid irresponsible interpretation. (pp. 255-256)

This book is volume 6 in Peter Lang's excellent Studies in Biblical Greek series.

Köstenberger and his fellow-contributors have put together a solid resource on a tough passage. This is a series of essays examining this difficult-to-interpret passage (1Ti 2.9-15) from a number of different angles.

One essay is on Ephesus and its background, and the degree to which worship of the goddess Diana may have allowed women to play a larger role in the Ephesian society.

H. Scott Baldwin has an excellent essay on the known usages of the word αὐθεντέω from 1Ti 2.12. He discusses everything he can get his hands on and ends up with a solid lexical study of this word and what it can and cannot mean in certain contexts.

Köstenberger follows Baldwin's essay, discussing syntactical issues of 1Ti 2.12 and comparing the syntax with similar spots in the New Testament and other classical literature in an effort to determine the proper way to handle the text.

There is also a survey of other modern literature that interprets these verses and works through them in light of the essays of Baldwin, Köstenberger and others.

There are other essays too — these are simply the ones I remember (I borrowed the book from a friend). If you are looking at this question in 1Ti 2.9-15, then Köstenberger's book is worth looking into.

Marc Goodacre of the NT Gateway Weblog posted his normal link to the latest reviews from Review of Biblical Literature.

There's a review of a book that sounds very interesting as it relates to the Pastoral Epistles:

Treblico, Paul. The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. pp. xxi + 826

The book is 800+ pages, published by Mohr-Siebeck. Unfortunately it is also EUR 149.00. Too much for this bibliophile's book budget. I couldn't find any info on their web page about non-library purchasers.

But read the review anyway. I may add this to the bibliography section later, I need to first consider if I want to treat books I haven't read or personally examined differently than books that I am familiar with.

This book is a Festschrift in honor of Bruce. W. Winter. As such, not every essay in the book applies directly to the Pastoral Epistles, but there are a few that do:

• 'For the Husband Is Head of the Wife': Paul's Use of Head and Body Language, by I. Howard Marshall (pp. 165-177).
• A Saviour for the Cities of Crete: The Roman Background to the Epistle of Titus, by David W.J. Gill (pp. 220-230).

The essay by Marshall, while not directly referencing the Pastoral Epistles does touch on a much-debated subject that the Pastoral Epistles do deal with (e.g. 1Ti 2.11-15).

Of course, the Roman background to Titus is directly pertinent to the setting of the epistle, and should be examined. Gill's introductory paragraph is below:

Paul's comission to Titus in Crete was that he 'might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town (κατὰ πόλιν) as I directed you' (Titus 1.5, ESV). The issue is what would these πόλεις on Crete have been like in mid-first century AD. Πόλις is rarely used in the New Testament epistles and would appear to be here identifying the urban, political units of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica, which is how the term was used in the Greek world.