The Epistle: Its Date and Circumstances

Let us read together the Second Epistle of St. Paul Our Method to Timothy. The method of our study shall be the of Study. simplest possible. After some brief introductory

views of the Epistle and of the probable conditions

of its production we will take it up verse by verse,

passage by passage, for examination first of the

language, then of the messages carried by means of

it to the soul and to the Church.

The reader will not find, here in the introductions Certain Asor later in the comments, anything like elaborate SY™PHons. criticism of the purely literary sort. Whatever be the place for that (and abundant occasion for it has been found in modern times in connexion with the Letters to Timothy and Titus), that place is not here, where we meet in spiritual companionship for believing meditation. I approach this precious ‘dying Letter’ with certain formed and settled convictions about it, and these I shall treat in our present study as assumed to be true. For example, I am entirely convinced, and I shall assume this asa fact in my comments, that the Letter is the genuine production of St. Paul. Lam convinced that it was written by him, or more precisely dictated by him to the faithful rare (iv. 11), in a Roman prison, not very long before the death of the author as a martyr for his Lord. This took place

The Date. at a time, so I feel amply assured, some few years later than that last mention of St. Paul at the close of the Acts (xxviii. 30, 31) where we see him ‘in his own hired house,’ or rather lodging; spending ‘two whole years’ there, in captivity indeed, but able all the time to be busy about the beloved work of his life as a missionary of Jesus Christ. I take it to be certain that he was permitted at the end of that time to quit Rome a free man; that he traversed seas and lands again as of old, perhaps even as far as distant Spain; that he laboured almost to the last in evangelization and in the arrangement and settlement of the mission-churches around the Mediterranean shores; and that at length he was again arrested, somewhere in Asia Minor, perhaps at Troas; carried to Rome, rigorously imprisoned, and finally, after a public trial, condemned and put to death.

Partly traditions old enough and sober enough to command our confidence, partly the internal evidences afforded by these three Pastoral Epistles, or Letters to Pastors, and by this Letter in particular, seem to me to put this general conclusion upon a safe footing.

As to the date more precisely when our Letter was written, we may reasonably place it within the years 66 or 67. The time, so the contents clearly indicate, was a time of terror and danger; persecution was in the air. ‘AI] men forsook’ the lonely Apostle (iv. 16); far different from that earlier day when ‘no man forbade him’ to ‘receive all that came unto him’ to

hear the message of life. His temporary respite from

sentence (iv. 17) is described as a ‘deliverance out of the lion’s mouth.’ One faithful friend, and

The Epistle: Date and Circumstances

only one, was always at his side (iv. 11). Everything speaks of the shadows of danger and of death, everything indicates that he was used with a severity unknown before. We can scarcely err therefore in assigning the Letter to some time within the last dreadful years of the reign (54-68) of Nero, perhaps soon after that outburst of cruel warfare upon Christianity which began when (66) the wretched Emperor set fire to the City and then turned the popular anger against the suspected and hated Christians.

If so, we may in some measure illustrate the then The Church feeling of the public towards the converts and their (> towers Apostle by what in our times would be felt by society Pagans. in its alarm towards some real or supposed nihilist plot against existing institutions, and particularly towards its suspected leader. It was very much as a nihilistic secret community that the Christian Church was actually viewed by credulous and frightened pagan opinion in Rome; so we know from the Latin historians. Allegiance to the Lord Jesus was taken to mean high treason to the State, and the ‘conversation in heaven’ was represented as a ‘hatred of the human race.’

To realize this is to appreciate, however weakly, the awfulness of the cloud which, from the human point of view, brooded, full of sullen thunders, over the head of St. Paul when he wrote this dying Letter. With that realization present we shall read its utterances of sadness with the more reverent sympathy, and we shall wonder and worship the more over its words of ‘everlasting comfort and good hope through grace.’

Timothy,