None of the essays in New Testament Greek and Exegesis directly concern the Pastoral Epistles, but at least one of the essays may be helpful in a specific area. One image used twice in the Pastoral Epistles is that of the "snare of the devil" (παγίδα τοῦ διαβόλου .

The essay in question is Finding the Devil in the Details: Onomastic Exegesis and the Naming of Evil in the World of the New Testament by Douglas L. Penney. In discussing how adjectives describing things at times end up becoming names (particularly in the realm of angels and demons), Penney discusses Ps 91.3-6, which mentions "the snare of the fowler". Penny refers to Akkadian magical texts that discuss "net-demons":

The phrase "snare of the fowler," although admittedly cumberson in the Hebrew poetry, nevertheless reflects a well-attested Mesopotamian belief in net demons. (p. 48)

After about a page of this discussion, Penny continues:

The words, phrases, and images employed in the magical literature are very long-lived. In spite of the dearth of Semitic magical texts from the Roman period and especially from Second Temple Palestine, many words, phrases, and motifs appear in Aramaic magical texts from the Islamic period almost unchanged from their antecedents in the Akkadian texts. This longevity points to a continuous surviving tradition of magical texts in spite of the paucity of archaeological finds. The concept of nets and net demons also follows this pattern. Later Aramaic and Greek magical texts continue this tradition, speaking of nets as demonic weapons. The same concept lies behind the NT metaphor "snare of the devil." [cf. 1Ti 3.7; 2Ti 2.26] The invisible demonic nets may cause physical or intellectual stumbling. Even in relatively recent times the net as a metaphor for the devil's tool or agent continues. (pp. 49-50)

This book is a re-working of Holmes' PhD thesis. Holmes considers traditional interpretations of 1Ti 2.9-15 and their reliance on passages such as Ge 2-3; Gal 2.28; 1Co 11.3-16; 1Co 14.34-35 and finds them all exhibiting some degree of inadequacy. Holmes writes in his preface:

The research had its genesis in the painfully slow realization that my understanding of 1Ti 2.9-15 was more the result of supposition than of what the Greek text and context actually specify. As I explored the literature, I discovered that, generally speaking, the syntactical peculairities and semantic ambiguities of the passage are not so much explained as explained away. That is to say they are interpreted by some combination of: other problematic passages ... not always convincing historical backgrounds; speculation; and unsubstantiated assertion. No interpretation I was able to find struck me as altogether compelling.

When I heard about this book from a friend (who let me borrow his copy) my initial reaction was "Hoo-boy, yet another book and perspective on 1Ti 2.9-15 ... ". But after reading the preface and introduction, I'm encouraged. Even if I don't end up agreeing with Holmes' perspective, I think I'll appreciate his argument.

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.

Van Neste's book examines the Pastoral Epistles to see if these three documents lack cohesion, as others (such as Miller's The Pastoral Letters as Composite Documents) state.

In his introduction, Van Neste writes:

This thesis, then, will seek to analyze the way in which language is used to create connections within 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. In doing so, it is expected that this work will add to the previous work done on the coherence of the Pastorals. This work will respond to Miller, but move beyond his challenges to an attempt to see what sort of literary structure might be present.

Most interesting is the appendix, Appendix: Cohesion Shift Analysis of the Pastoral Epistles. This is a huge table (pp. 288-315) that lists each and every verb in the Pastorals, in order, and provides morphological information along with participant, genre and topic information.

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).

John Lee's A History of New Testament Lexicography surveys the development of New Testament lexicography. Lee's survey includes case studies on several words.

One of the words is οἰκονομία, which occurs in 1Ti 1.3-4. Lee discusses this on pp. 305-310 of his book.

Lee calls into question Bauer's sense of training in his definition of οἰκονομία, working through some citations to show that Bauer's examples may not merit this conclusion.

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.

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.

The phrase "The saying is trustworthy" occurs five times in the Pastoral Epistles and nowhere else in the New Testament. Knight's study examines each of these instances in depth and attempts to identify the "sayings" regarded as "faithful", and then discusses the sayings in light of their prominence.

From the introduction:

The phrase "Faithful is the saying" (πιστὸς ὁ λόγος) elicits one's attention by virtue of its five-fold occurrence in the Pastoral Letters. This repeated phenomenon in the Pastorals is all the more striking because of the absence of this exact phrase, or anything closely approximating it, anywhere else in Paul or for that matter in the N.T. Equally striking is the addition "and worthy of all acceptation" (καὶ πάσας ἀποδοχῆς ἄξιος) in two of the five occurrences but not at the other three. Coupled with this striking phrase are the sometimes more evident, sometimes less evident, sayings to which it refers. Here indeed is a fascinating situation worthy of serious investigation. And strangely enough here is a situation which has received virtually no intensive and comprehensive study. Thus this dissertation is an attempt to provide at least a beginning in investigating with some measure of care the phenomenon of the faithful sayings in the Pastoral Letters.

Knight also notes the article by H.B. Swete in Journal of Theological Studies xvii (published in 1917) on the subject The Faithful Sayings (click on "Articles and Papers", look for article #44), which should be examined in conjunction with Knight's work.

George W. Knight's NIGTC volume is, as far as I am concerned, the best available critical commentary available that seriously interacts with the Greek text.

Mounce (WBC) is good. Knight is better. Knight deals directly with morphological and syntactical issues when necessary and doesn't have the broad structure of WBC to bog him down. He doesn't get into the contemporary citations so much, but again the focus helps him. If you plan to work through the Greek text, then Knight (combined with SIL's Exegetical Summaries) is your friend.

This volume of the Hermeneia series is valuable for its citations of the Apostlic Fathers and other early Christian materials. But it is handy for other things too.

The Greek text is interacted with to great detail and several other works are cited. In many instances, English translations of cited Greek are provided, which is helpful if one's Greek skills are not as sharp as they once were.

After one has done his initial study of the text, if his study is serious he should next interact with Dibelius and Conzelmann.

Ellicott's commentary hails from the late 19th century, but don't let that scare you away. The commentary is on the Greek directly. I'm not sure of the Greek edition, though. I'd thought it was Tischendorf's editio octava maior, but I can't confirm that at present. Perhaps it is Textus Receptus.

Either way, Ellicott's work is worth examining, primarily because he really is commenting critically on the language. He also brings in readings from Latin, Syriac and Gothic and examines them along with the Greek where he deems appropriate. He references readings from various uncial texts frequently. There are several references to classical Greek works as well.

His Revised Translation is his attempt to update the KJV. Most helpful in this translation is his apparatus of alternate English readings, with several English versions represented.

I have only consulted the first edition of this book (published 1957). A second edition is currently available.

Guthrie's work is accessible and clear. This commentary should be near the top of the list for those embarking on a study of the Pastorals, particularly if a technical commentary (e.g. WBC, Hermeneia, NIGTC) is seen as overkill.

From the preface:

I have been conscious of many difficulties in approaching my task of commenting upon these letters. Over a considerable period serious doubts have been cast upon their authenticity by many scholars and this has tended to decrease their authority. I have felt obliged to make a thorough investigation of these objections, and the results are given as fully as space will permit in the Introduction. A special examination has been mde of the linguistic problem. Because of the technical nature of this study, the conclusions reached are gien in an Appendix.

Gordon Fee's NIBC volume is a solid entry in the list of commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles. The text is readable and clear yet not condescending.

Fee doesn't comment on the original language, but he's obviously done the homework in that area. If you're someone who doesn't get into Greek but wants a serious, in-depth look at the Pastoral Epistles, then Fee's commentary may be what you're looking for.

From the preface:

The basic concern throughout is with exegesis, an exposition of Paul's intent in writing these letters to Timothy and Titus in their historical context.

I have not read much of this commentary. I do know that Houlden does not hold to Pauline authorship. In most issues, the commentary appears to be concise and to the point. The overall perspective seems similar to the perspective of Dibelius and Conzelman in the Hermeneia volume on the Pastoral Epistles.

Jacket Copy:

The author of these letters, I Timothy, II Timothy and Titus, seeks through pastoral advice to protect the heritage of Paul from partisan distortions. This commentary situates the letters int he period after Paul's death, when the church was divided by problems of identity and doctrine. Professor Houlden employs careful, exacting scholarship as he demonstrates how these are also problems which trouble the church today.

This book is part of SIL's Exegetical Summary series. It works throught the text, phrase by phrase, pointing to different lexicons and translations of the phrase at hand. It also points to the opinion of different commentaries.

The book is extremely helpful for one who is working through the text at the phrase level. It serves as an index to both commentaries and lexicons. In addition, the text asks (and answers) several questions along the way.

This book is part of SIL's Exegetical Summary series. It works throught the text, phrase by phrase, pointing to different lexicons and translations of the phrase at hand. It also points to the opinion of different commentaries.

The book is extremely helpful for one who is working through the text at the phrase level. It serves as an index to both commentaries and lexicons. In addition, the text asks (and answers) several questions along the way.

This monograph (it is 44 pages) is Donald Guthrie's response to P.N. Harrison's The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles. Guthrie describes his approach:

Our plan of procedure, therefore, will be to demonstrate, not only the psychological 'possibility' or 'probability' of the Paul presented by the thirteen letters, but also to show the psychological problems involved in the pseudonymous explanation of the Pastoral Epistles.

Guthrie uses Harrison's own word counts and statistics in an effort to cast doubt on Harrison's conclusions. If you're looking at the authorship question, you should consult both Harrison and Guthrie's work.

Though the problem of authorship of the Pastoral Epistles has been debated since the 18th century (and perhaps a little before), P.N. Harrison launched the attack against Pauline authorship in the modern era. His studies of word frequency in the Pastorals are exhaustive.

Harrison's thesis is the Fragmentary Hypothesis. He thinks there are some bits of "genuine" Paul in the Pastorals, just not much. He ascribes their authorship to what he calls a "dedicated Paulinist" who had access to Paul's letters, plus some heretofore unknown fragments, that he merged into three different pseudepigraphal letters.

Harrison is worth reading simply because he states his point so well. However, one must realize that (on my reading of it) Harrison isn't writing to explore an idea, he's writing to prove a point. The polemic is tough to get through at times, but keep at it. It's worth the read.