⚠ This is the first of the three PASTORAL letters — and the first book in the library whose Pauline authorship the majority of scholars doubt. 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus stand together, addressed to individuals rather than congregations, sharing a vocabulary and a set of concerns (church order, “sound teaching,” qualified officers) that mark them off from the ten letters written to churches. The case against Paul is cumulative: roughly a third of their words appear nowhere else in his letters and many of his most characteristic words are absent; the church they picture, with its overseers and deacons and enrolled widows, looks more settled than the one in the undisputed letters; and the movements they describe cannot be fitted into the career Acts records. The case for Paul: a different secretary, a different subject and an older man will write differently; the personal touches are hard to forge; and the early church received all three as his without recorded dispute. ⚠ The library’s practice holds here as everywhere — it lays out the arguments and casts no vote — and the book intro sets them out in full. What the notes below do is read the Greek as it stands, whoever holds the pen.

“An apostle by the COMMAND of God.” Kat’ epitagēn — not “by the will of God,” his usual phrase, but “by God’s order,” a stronger and more official word. It is a curious note to strike in a letter to a trusted lieutenant who needs no convincing, and it is one reason many read 1 Timothy as written past Timothy to a congregation meant to overhear the instructions and treat them as commands.

⚠ “God our SAVIOUR.” Sōtēr applied to God the Father — six times across the Pastorals, and rare elsewhere in Paul, who reserves the title mostly for Christ. It was a live political word: the Greek cities and the imperial cult hailed Caesar as sōtēr, “saviour,” and to plant it on the God of Israel was not a neutral choice. And Christ Jesus is “our HOPE” — not the one who gives hope but the hope itself, a compression the letter does not pause to unpack.

⚠ “Grace, MERCY, peace.” Paul’s standing greeting is “grace and peace”; here a third term, eleos, “mercy,” is wedged into the middle — and this three-part form appears in the greetings only of the Pastorals (again at 2 Timothy 1:2). Set beside the four bare words that open 1 Thessalonians, it is a small measure of how far the convention has travelled: the letter-formulas have hardened and grown. “My true child” is gnēsios, legitimate, genuine — a son by right, not adoption of convenience.

“Command certain persons not to teach a DIFFERENT DOCTRINE.” Heterodidaskalein — “to teach otherwise,” a compound coined for the Pastorals (only here and at 6:3) and the letter’s whole occasion. The letter never quite names the error, because Timothy already knows it; we see it only in the rebuttal. Its features here: myths and endless genealogies (mythoi, genealogiai), a taste for speculation dressed as learning, and an ambition to be law-teachers.

⚠ “God’s STEWARDSHIP” — and the versions divide because the manuscripts do. The earliest text reads oikonomian theou, “God’s stewardship,” the management of a household — God’s ordered plan, received in faith — over against speculation that builds nothing. But a large part of the later tradition reads oikodomian, “edifying,” one letter different, which is why KJV has “godly edifying” and Geneva the same. ASV “a dispensation of God”; NIV “God’s work”; NWT “a stewardship of God.” We follow the earliest text.

⚠ “The GOAL of the charge is love.” Telos — the aim, the point it is all driving at, not the “end” in the sense of its finish. KJV “the end of the commandment is charity,” which the modern ear mishears as termination; NIV “the goal of this command is love.” And the love is specified — “out of a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith” (anypokritos, un-hypocritical, without the actor’s mask). ⚠ Note the move: against teachers who prize esoteric knowledge, the letter answers not with rival knowledge but with a moral aim.

“Having missed the mark.” Astocheō is to miss a target, and ma­taiologia is “empty talk,” words that go nowhere. The picture is of people who aimed at being nomodidaskaloi, teachers of the law, and overshot into noise — “understanding neither what they are saying nor the things about which they make their confident assertions.” The last verb, diabebaiountai, is the strong self-assurance of a man certain in exact proportion to his ignorance.

“The law is good, if one uses it LAWFULLY.” A deliberate turn — nomos used nomimōs, the law used law-fully. The point is not the law’s content but its use: it is not laid down for “a righteous person” (who needs no restraint) but as a curb on the lawless, and the list that follows is what the law is for.

The vice-list tracks the second table of the Ten Commandments. After six general terms for the godless, the specific sins line up with the commandments in order: those who strike their fathers and mothers (the fifth, honour your parents, here at its violent breach), murderers (the sixth), the sexually immoral and the next word (the seventh), slave-traders (the eighth, theft — of persons), liars and perjurers (the ninth, false witness). The frame is deliberate: the law the false teachers want to expound is doing its proper work all along, naming sins.

⚠ Arsenokoitais — a rare word, and one the versions render across a very wide range. The compound joins arsēn, “male,” to koitē, “bed, lying,” and both halves stand together in the Greek of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (meta arsenos ou koimēthēsē koitēn gynaikos, “you shall not lie with a male as with a woman”) — so the term is very probably minted from that text. ⚠ It is all but unattested before Paul, which makes its precise reference genuinely uncertain, and its history in English is a spread rather than a consensus: KJV “them that defile themselves with mankind,” Geneva “buggerers,” ASV “abusers of themselves with men,” Douay “them who defile themselves with mankind,” NIV “those practicing homosexuality,” TLB “homosexuals,” NWT “men who lie with men.” ⚠ It also stands next in the list to andrapodistais, “slave-dealers, kidnappers” — those who seize people to sell them — and some argue the neighbourhood tilts it toward coercion and exploitation, while others read the two as separate items. We keep “men who lie with males,” the closest representation of the compound’s own two parts, precisely because it does not import a modern category the Greek does not settle. The library sets out the philology and the range of renderings and does not adjudicate the contemporary application, which turns on questions well beyond the lexicon.

⚠ “The SOUND teaching.” Hygiainousē didaskalia — literally “healthy” teaching, from the verb that gives English “hygiene.” It is one of the signature metaphors of the Pastorals, which recur to it again and again: right doctrine is health, and error is a sickness that spreads (2 Timothy 2:17 calls it gangrene). The image belongs to the medical language a physician would use, and it is part of what makes these three letters sound like one voice.

“A blasphemer and a persecutor and a VIOLENT man.” Three self-accusations, rising. Hybristēs — the last and worst — is not merely violent but insolent, one who inflicts outrage and enjoys the humiliation of it; the noun behind it, hybris, is the pride the Greeks thought the gods punished. It is a heavy word to turn on oneself. The library has met this Paul from the outside — “I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it” (Galatians 1:13); here he says it in the vocabulary of shame.

⚠ “I was shown mercy, because I acted IGNORANTLY in unbelief.” The ground of the mercy is ignorance — he did not know what he did — which echoes an old distinction in the law between sins of ignorance and sins “with a high hand,” and which readers have long weighed against Paul’s own insistence elsewhere that ignorance excuses no one. The letter does not soften it: the persecutor was spared because he was blind, not because the wrong was small.

“Grace OVERFLOWED beyond all measure.” Hyperepleonasen — another of the hyper- compounds this stratum of the New Testament loves, occurring only here: grace not merely abounding but super-abounding, breaking its banks, “with faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” KJV “was exceeding abundant”; NWT “abounded exceedingly.”

⚠ “FAITHFUL is the saying.” Pistos ho logos — the first of five such formulas found only in the Pastorals (also 3:1; 4:9; 2 Timothy 2:11; Titus 3:8), each flagging what looks like an already-current Christian saying the writer is quoting and endorsing. This one — “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” — is as compact a statement of the gospel as the New Testament contains, and “worthy of full acceptance” (pasēs apodochēs axios) is the language of a saying being commended for adoption.

“Of whom I am FOREMOST.” Prōtos, first, chief — and the verb is present, “I am,” not “I was.” He does not date his sin to the past and step clear of it; he keeps the title in the present tense. And then the logic turns the shame into a demonstration: “so that in me foremost” — the worst case — Christ might display “all his patience” (makrothymia, long-temperedness, the slowness to anger), “as a pattern (hypotypōsis, a sketch, an outline to be copied) for those about to believe.” The chief of sinners is offered as the proof of concept.

⚠ The doxology, and a famous addition the King James kept. The sentence cannot hold the gratitude and breaks into praise: “to the King of the ages (basileus tōn aiōnōn), immortal (aphthartos), invisible (aoratos), the only God.” ⚠ The Received Text added a word — monō sophō theō, “the only wise God” — which is why KJV and Geneva print “wise,” probably carried in from Romans 16:27; the earliest witnesses read simply “the only God.” ASV, NIV and NWT drop it, and so do we.

“Wage the good WARFARE.” Strateuē tēn kalēn strateian — a soldiering image the Pastorals return to (2 Timothy 2:3, “a good soldier of Christ Jesus”), and the charge is tied to “the prophecies previously made about you,” a glimpse of Timothy’s commissioning, when words were spoken over him that this letter now asks him to live up to.

⚠ “Made SHIPWRECK of their faith.” Nauageō — to be wrecked at sea, a total loss on the rocks; the metaphor is exact and grim. What is wrecked follows from what was “thrust away” (apōtheō, pushed off deliberately): not faith first but “a good conscience.” The order is the letter’s point — conscience abandoned, and belief goes down with it.

“Whom I HANDED OVER to Satan.” Paredōka tō Satana — the same phrase Paul uses of a disciplinary exclusion at 1 Corinthians 5:5, and it is a corrective measure, not a curse: the purpose clause says so — “so that they may be taught (paideuō, disciplined as a child is) not to blaspheme.” Hymenaeus surfaces again at 2 Timothy 2:17, still teaching that the resurrection is already past; Alexander, if he is the same man, at 2 Timothy 4:14. The handing-over aims at their repair, not their ruin.