The Second Letter to Timothy — Paul's Last Words and a Disputed Letter's Road to Canon

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

Of all the letters that bear Paul’s name, this one reads most like a last will. The apostle writes from a Roman prison, in chains “like a criminal,” abandoned by nearly everyone, expecting to die: “I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand.”⁠¹ He asks his young co-worker Timothy to hurry to him before winter, and to bring the cloak he left behind at Troas, and the books, “especially the parchments.”⁠² These are the last recorded words of the man who wrote more of the New Testament than any other apostle, and they close not with a doctrine but with a request for a coat.

There is an irony here that runs opposite to the one that hangs over First Timothy. That letter, the one that builds the Church’s offices, was the letter ancient orthodoxy scarcely doubted and modern criticism suspects most. Second Timothy is the other way around. It, too, is one of the three Pastoral Epistles that the majority of critical scholars assign to a later hand writing in Paul’s name.⁠³ Yet it is also the Pastoral that the doubters doubt least — the one whose crowded personal notes and prison-cell intimacy have struck even the architects of the pseudonymity theory as the genuine voice of Paul. Some scholars who deny that Paul wrote First Timothy and Titus make an exception for this letter. It is the death-row letter that reads least like a forgery.

This post examines what Second Timothy says and does — how it grounds the Catholic doctrine of inspired Scripture in its most quoted verse, how it commands the guarding and handing on of the apostolic “deposit,” how it roots ordination in the laying on of hands, and how it turns Paul’s own martyrdom into a charge to the next generation — and then turns to the modern debate over authorship, where this letter occupies a peculiar and interesting place, and to its quiet reception into the canon.

A letter from a Roman prison

Second Timothy presents itself as a letter from Paul to Timothy, written not to organize a church but to steady a man. The apostle is in prison — the letter says so plainly, and takes the imprisonment to be his last: “everyone in Asia deserted me”; “at my first defense no one appeared on my behalf”; “the time of my departure is at hand.”⁠⁴ Where First Timothy reads like a manual of church order, this letter reads like a farewell. The New American Bible describes it as “purportedly written from prison in Rome … shortly before the writer’s death,” recalling an earlier, tearful parting and longing to see Timothy once more.⁠⁵

The letter’s final chapter is a torrent of names and small human details that give it its testamentary force. Demas, “enamored of the present world,” has deserted him and gone to Thessalonica; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia; only Luke remains.⁠⁶ Timothy is to collect Mark and bring him along, and to retrieve the cloak and the parchments from Troas, and to arrive “before winter.”⁠⁷ Alexander the coppersmith “did me a great deal of harm.” A last greeting names Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, and Claudia.⁠⁸ Nothing in the letter is more moving, and, as we will see, nothing in it has weighed more heavily in the argument over who wrote it: these are not the flourishes a forger invents but the debris of an actual life, and they read like the last letter of a man who knows he is about to die.

When was it written? On the traditional reconstruction, Paul was released from the Roman imprisonment with which the Acts of the Apostles ends, traveled further, and was arrested a second time and executed under Nero — placing this letter, the last he wrote, around A.D. 64–67. On the pseudonymity view it belongs, with the other two Pastorals, to the last decades of the first century or the early second, cast in the well-known ancient form of a dying man’s farewell address.⁠⁹ Either way, the letter’s shape is the same: a charge from a father in the faith to a son, to hold the line after he is gone.

“Guard this rich trust”: the deposit and its handing on

The charge at the heart of the letter is the charge to guard something and to pass it on. Twice Paul uses the language of a deposit — in Greek parathēkē, a treasure entrusted to another for safekeeping. “I know him in whom I have believed,” he writes, “and am confident that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day.” And then he turns the image on Timothy: “Guard this rich trust with the help of the holy Spirit that dwells within us.”⁠¹⁰ The faith is not Timothy’s to revise; it is a trust he holds and must hand on intact.

The mechanism of that handing-on is stated a chapter later, in a verse that reads almost like a diagram of apostolic succession: “And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well.”⁠¹¹ Four generations stand in that single sentence — Paul, Timothy, the “faithful people,” and the “others” they will teach — and the content passes down the line unchanged. This is the biblical seed of the Catholic conviction that revelation is transmitted not only by a text but by a living chain of witnesses. The Catechism gathers exactly these verses under the heading of the “deposit of faith,” setting Paul’s charge to “guard what has been entrusted to you” beside the Second Vatican Council’s teaching that “sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church.”⁠¹²

A Protestant reader will grant the language of the deposit and locate its content in the apostolic preaching that Scripture now records — and that reading is not wrong so far as it goes. What the Catholic sees in the verse is something the letter itself supplies: the deposit is handed on through persons, “faithful people who will have the ability to teach others,” an unbroken succession of teachers, and not by a text left to interpret itself. The Council put the point in words that could serve as a gloss on Second Timothy: the apostles “left bishops as their successors, ‘handing over’ to them ‘the authority to teach in their own place,’” so that the gospel might be “preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time.”⁠¹³ The letter that talks most about guarding the truth talks about guarding it through people.

“Stir into flame the gift”: the laying on of hands

Those people are made by a rite. Near the opening of the letter Paul reminds Timothy where his ministry came from: “I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that you have through the imposition of my hands.”⁠¹⁴ The “gift” — in Greek charisma — is, in the words of the New American Bible’s note, “the grace resulting from the conferral of an ecclesiastical office,” and it came through a physical gesture, the apostle’s hands laid on Timothy’s head.⁠¹⁵ First Timothy had described the same rite from the other side, rooting Timothy’s charism in “the imposition of hands of the presbyterate”; here Paul locates it in his own hands.⁠¹⁶ Together the two verses gave the Church a text for the theology of ordination as the conferral of a permanent grace of office through the laying on of hands. When the Second Vatican Council taught that the apostles “passed on this spiritual gift to their helpers by the imposition of hands, and it has been transmitted down to us in Episcopal consecration,” it cited these very verses; the Catechism quotes Second Timothy’s line directly in its treatment of holy orders.⁠¹⁷

What follows the command is a note about fear, and it is one of the reasons the letter has always been loved: “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.”⁠¹⁸ John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, drew from the image of the gift as fire the whole logic of grace and freedom. “It requires much zeal to stir up the gift of God,” he told his people. “As fire requires fuel, so grace requires our alacrity, that it may be ever fervent.” The grace is real and prior; it is God’s gift, “and yet not merely of grace, but when we have first performed our own parts.”⁠¹⁹ The ordained gift is not a possession to sit on but a flame to be tended — a point that turns out to be the whole letter’s theme.

“All Scripture is inspired by God”

The most consequential sentence in the letter, and one of the most consequential in the New Testament, comes in the third chapter. Paul reminds Timothy that “from infancy you have known [the] sacred scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation,” and then states the ground of their authority: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”⁠²⁰ The word rendered “inspired by God” is a single Greek term, theopneustos — literally “God-breathed” — and it appears nowhere else in the Bible. This is the New Testament’s most explicit statement that Scripture has God for its author.

Catholic teaching has made the verse a cornerstone. The Second Vatican Council, in its Constitution on Divine Revelation, quotes it as the charter of the doctrine of inspiration: the Church, “relying on the belief of the Apostles,” and citing this verse by name, “holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author.” The books therefore teach “without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,” and the Council rounds off the paragraph by quoting Second Timothy in full.⁠²¹ The Catechism carries the same teaching, and with it the same verse, into its account of why the Church venerates Scripture as she venerates the Body of the Lord.⁠²² On the fact that Scripture is God-breathed, Catholic and Protestant stand together, and this is the verse they both quote.

They part company over what the verse proves. For the Reformers and their heirs, Second Timothy 3:16–17 is the great proof-text for the sufficiency of Scripture — sola scriptura — and it is not hard to see the appeal: Scripture is “God-breathed” and makes the man of God “competent, equipped for every good work.” What more, the argument runs, could be needed? The Catholic reply does not deny a word of the verse; it denies the inference. Two points carry most of the weight. The first is that the word translated “useful” (Greek ōphelimos) means exactly that — profitable, beneficial — and a thing can be profitable, even indispensable, without being the whole of what is required; the verse asserts Scripture’s God-given profitability, not its formal sufficiency against Tradition and the Church’s teaching office. The second is that the “sacred scriptures” Timothy had known “from infancy” (3:15) are the Old Testament — the only Scriptures a Jewish boy could have known from childhood — so that the “all Scripture” of the next verse points first of all to the very books that no one on either side thinks are sufficient by themselves.⁠²³ There is a further irony worth naming. The same letter that calls Scripture God-breathed also commands Timothy to guard an oral deposit and to hand it to living teachers, and the Council that quotes the verse on inspiration teaches in the same breath that “it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed.”⁠²⁴ The verse settles that Scripture is inspired. It does not, by itself, settle that Scripture is alone.

The good fight and the crown

If the letter’s doctrine peaks at inspiration, its emotion peaks at the end, in the passage that has comforted the dying for nineteen centuries. Paul looks back on his life as a soldier looks back on a campaign and an athlete on a race: “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.” The older translation is the one most people know by heart: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”⁠²⁵ He has already told Timothy what it will cost — “bear your share of hardship along with me like a good soldier of Christ Jesus” — and now he pays it.⁠²⁶ His death he describes as a sacrifice: “I am already being poured out like a libation,” an image the New American Bible glosses as “an act of worship in which his blood will be poured out in sacrifice.”⁠²⁷

And then the hope: “From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.”⁠²⁸ The Douay-Rheims calls it a “crown of justice,” and the wording matters, because the verse has long served the Catholic theology of merit and reward. Paul expects to be crowned, and the crown is spoken of as something “the just judge will render” — language of desert, not merely of gift. The Catholic reading holds the two together without embarrassment: the crown is real reward, and it is entirely God’s grace, because the very works that earn it were themselves the fruit of grace. Augustine put the paradox in a sentence the tradition never tired of quoting — when God crowns our merits, he crowns nothing but his own gifts.⁠²⁹ The apostle who insisted more fiercely than anyone that salvation is “not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus” is the same apostle who expects, at the end, a crown.⁠³⁰ The letter holds grace and reward in one hand.

A hymn of dying and rising

Earlier in the letter, in the middle of an exhortation to endure, Paul breaks into verse. He introduces it with the formula the Pastorals reserve for a settled piece of tradition — “This saying is trustworthy” — and then quotes what most scholars take to be a fragment of an early Christian hymn:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him; / if we persevere, we shall also reign with him. / But if we deny him, he will deny us. / If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.⁠³¹

The four rhythmic couplets compress the whole shape of the Christian life: dying and rising with Christ in baptism, persevering under trial toward the promised reign, the sober warning that denial has consequences, and, at the last, the note that outruns the warning — even our faithlessness cannot exhaust his faithfulness, “for he cannot deny himself.”⁠³² The New American Bible reads the lines as baptismal: “through baptism Christians die spiritually with Christ and hope to live with him and reign with him forever,” a life that “includes endurance, witness, and even suffering.”⁠³³ The Catechism lists this passage among the hymn-fragments the first Christians composed “in the light of the unheard-of event” of Christ’s death and resurrection — a scrap of the Church’s earliest worship, preserved by accident in a letter about how to suffer well.⁠³⁴

Jannes, Jambres, and a borrowed tradition

One small verse in the third chapter opens a window on how the New Testament used the literature around it. Warning Timothy about the deceivers of the last days, Paul writes: “Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so they also oppose the truth.”⁠³⁵ The two names belong to the magicians of Pharaoh who matched Moses’ signs with their own — except that the book of Exodus never names those magicians. Paul is drawing the names from Jewish tradition outside the Old Testament, where they had become fixed: they appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Aramaic paraphrases of the Torah, in a lost Jewish work called the Book of Jannes and Jambres, and even in the pagan writers Pliny and Apuleius, who list “Jannes” among the famous magicians of antiquity.⁠³⁶ The New American Bible’s note puts it plainly: Exodus does not name the magicians, “but the two names are widely found in much later Jewish, Christian, and even pagan writings. Their origins are legendary.”⁠³⁷

This is worth pausing over, because it parallels a phenomenon that troubled the ancient Church elsewhere. The Epistle of Jude quotes the apocryphal Book of 1 Enoch by name, and its use of a non-canonical source was one of the things that slowed Jude’s own acceptance into the canon. Paul’s use of the Jannes-and-Jambres tradition is the milder cousin of that maneuver: an inspired writer reaching for a name or a story current in his culture, without thereby stamping the source as Scripture. Origen already understood the verse this way, tracing the names to an apocryphal book while never treating that book as canonical.⁠³⁸ The lesson the Church drew is a general one: that the biblical authors could quote, allude to, and build on the wider literature of their world, and that an allusion is not an endorsement. Scripture may use a tradition without canonizing it.

Did Paul write it?

Now to the question the modern reader has been waiting for — and here Second Timothy occupies a more interesting position than its two companions. The three Pastoral Epistles (First and Second Timothy and Titus) sit together at the most-doubted end of the Pauline corpus; a large majority of critical scholars regard them as the work of a later admirer writing in the apostle’s name, on the grounds of their distinctive vocabulary, their developed church offices, a set of travels that will not fit the framework of Acts, and a false teaching that some read as second-century.⁠³⁹ I have set out that fourfold case, and the answers to it, in the companion post on First Timothy; the arguments are largely shared across the three letters, and there is no need to rehearse them here.

What is distinctive is that Second Timothy is the letter on which the pseudonymity case presses least hard. Its Greek stands closer to the undisputed letters than the Greek of the other two; it carries almost none of the church-order material that makes First Timothy and Titus look institutional; and its final chapter is crowded with the concrete personalia — the cloak, the parchments, the names of friends and deserters, the loneliness of the cell — that read least like the invention of a forger.⁠⁴⁰ The result is a scholarship in which Second Timothy repeatedly gets an exemption. Even P. N. Harrison, whose 1921 study gave the pseudonymity case its classic statistical form, could not treat the whole of it as a fiction: his “fragment hypothesis” held that a later Paulinist had woven genuine Pauline notes into his composition, and the notes he identified as authentic cluster precisely here, in the personal remarks of Second Timothy.⁠⁴¹ Anthony Kenny’s stylometric study of 1986 placed Second Timothy comfortably within the Pauline range, with only Titus standing out as the anomaly; and a series of scholars have gone further, arguing for the full authenticity of this letter in particular.⁠⁴²

The most striking of these is Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, no conservative, who argued that Second Timothy is Paul’s own while First Timothy and Titus are not — that a later writer, in fact, composed the other two Pastorals on the model of this authentic one.⁠⁴³ Michael Prior devoted a whole monograph to defending Second Timothy as a genuine, single, personal letter of Paul, stressing how many of the apostle’s letters were co-authored or dictated to a secretary.⁠⁴⁴ And the secretary is the hinge of the most durable defense. If the stylistic distance of the Pastorals from the undisputed letters is owed to an amanuensis given a free hand, the differences cease to prove a later author — and the leading candidate for that secretary is named in this very letter: “Luke is the only one with me.”⁠⁴⁵ Irenaeus had already made Luke Paul’s inseparable companion on the strength of that line, quoting it to prove that “this Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow-labourer in the Gospel.”⁠⁴⁶ What the second-century bishop used to defend the authority of Luke’s Gospel, the modern defender of the Pastorals uses to explain their style.

Where does that leave the reader? With a genuinely open question — and, for the Catholic, an open question that touches nothing essential. The Church holds room for the whole range, from Pauline authorship to the theory that a faithful disciple wrote in the apostle’s name; the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s early affirmation of Pauline authorship was later understood to bind only where faith and morals are at stake, and the Second Vatican Council located the inerrancy of Scripture in what God wished to affirm “for the sake of our salvation,” not in the identity of the human hand.⁠⁴⁷ I have laid out that Catholic freedom at greater length in the post on First Timothy. A letter may be canonical, inspired, and apostolic in authority whether Paul held the pen himself, dictated it to Luke, or a disciple wrote in his name and under his charge. The question is real. It is simply not a crisis.

The journey to canon

For all the modern argument, the ancient reception of Second Timothy is, like that of its companions, remarkably placid — and it need not be retold in full here, since the Pastorals traveled into the canon together, and I have followed that road in the post on First Timothy. The essential shape is quickly drawn. Around 144 the heretic Marcion built the first Christian canon out of one Gospel and ten letters of Paul, and left all three Pastorals out; Tertullian, refuting him near the turn of the third century, professed astonishment that Marcion “rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline.”⁠⁴⁸ Against that single striking exception stands a chorus. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, counts “two to Timothy” among Paul’s letters; and by the early fourth century Eusebius could record without hesitation that “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed,” the fourteen including, without comment, both letters to Timothy.⁠⁴⁹

Two threads, though, are worth drawing out for Second Timothy in particular. The first is that the Fathers who use the letter often use its most personal verse. Irenaeus quotes the roll call of the fourth chapter — “Demas has forsaken me … Only Luke is with me” — and Eusebius seizes on its closing greeting, in which “Linus” sends his regards, to identify the man whom Western tradition remembered as the first bishop of Rome after Peter.⁠⁵⁰ A letter that the critics read as a late fiction was, for the ancient Church, a source of hard biographical fact about Paul’s last days and the earliest Roman succession.

The second thread is the thinness of the manuscript record, which here is thinner than for almost any other Pauline letter and yet, in the end, decides nothing. Second Timothy is missing from Papyrus 46, the great early codex of Paul’s letters copied around A.D. 200 — but the codex has lost its final leaves, and whether it ever contained the Pastorals is a genuinely open question rather than a verdict against them.⁠⁵¹ It is likewise absent from Codex Vaticanus, one of the two great fourth-century Bibles, whose original hand breaks off in the middle of Hebrews, before it reaches the Pastorals at all.⁠⁵² In fact no Greek papyrus of Second Timothy survives; the earliest continuous witness to the letter is the other great fourth-century codex, Sinaiticus.⁠⁵³ Thin as that thread is, the canon lists more than compensate: the Muratorian Fragment, the councils of Hippo and Carthage, and Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 — the first to name exactly our twenty-seven books — all count the letters to Timothy among Paul’s.⁠⁵⁴ A letter this early, this widely used, and this uniformly received was never seriously in danger.

What the Catholic Church makes of 2 Timothy

Set the authorship question aside — which, as we have seen, the Church can hold lightly — and what remains is a letter that has left its fingerprints across Catholic doctrine and Catholic devotion alike. Its “all Scripture is inspired by God” is the charter text for the Church’s teaching that God is the author of the Bible.⁠⁵⁵ Its “guard this rich trust” and its “entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others” anchor the theology of the apostolic deposit handed on through a living succession.⁠⁵⁶ Its “stir into flame the gift … through the imposition of my hands” still describes what happens at every ordination.⁠⁵⁷ Its “crown of righteousness” feeds the Catholic understanding of reward as grace crowning grace. And the letter keeps its place in the Church’s prayer, supplying readings across the lectionary and drawing her expositors: John Chrysostom preached ten homilies on it, and Thomas Aquinas lectured through it verse by verse.⁠⁵⁸

There is a fittingness in the fact that the letter which reads most like a deathbed is the one that speaks most about handing things on — the deposit, the office, the faith, the flame. Paul writes as a man clearing his desk before a journey, and what he is most anxious to secure is that the trust he received should pass, undiminished, to the next hands. Whether the apostle held the pen himself or dictated it to Luke in a Roman cell, that is what the letter did. Its author’s race was nearly run; the thing he handed on is running still.

Further reading

The major critical commentaries carry the authorship debate in full. For a robust defense of authenticity by a leading critical scholar, see Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Anchor Bible 35A (New York: Doubleday, 2001); for the amanuensis position, William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, Word Biblical Commentary 46 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000); and for the mediating “allonymity” view, I. Howard Marshall with Philip H. Towner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). The case for Second Timothy’s authenticity in particular is argued by Michael Prior, Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), and by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The classic statistical case for pseudonymity is Percy Neale Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (London: Oxford University Press, 1921); the stylometric assessment is Anthony Kenny, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). For the letter’s place in Paul’s corpus, Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997); and on the canon, Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Paul write 2 Timothy?

The question is contested, but Second Timothy is the Pastoral Epistle most often defended as authentic. A majority of critical scholars assign all three Pastorals (First and Second Timothy and Titus) to a later writer in Paul’s name, chiefly on grounds of vocabulary, church order, and chronology. Second Timothy, however, stands closest in style to the undisputed letters and is full of concrete personal detail; some scholars, including Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, hold that Paul wrote this letter even if he did not write the other two, and defenders often invoke a secretary such as Luke to explain the style. No ancient writer doubted its authorship. For Catholics the point is not decisive either way: the Church holds the letter inspired and canonical whether Paul held the pen himself or a disciple wrote under his authority.

What does “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16) mean?

The phrase renders a single Greek word, theopneustos, “God-breathed,” and it is the New Testament’s clearest statement that Scripture has God for its author. The Second Vatican Council quotes the verse as the basis for the Church’s teaching that the biblical books were “written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” and so “have God as their author.” Catholic and Protestant agree that the verse teaches inspiration. They disagree about whether it also teaches that Scripture is the Church’s only rule of faith — the Catholic reply being that “useful for teaching” asserts Scripture’s profitability, not its sufficiency, and that the “sacred scriptures” Timothy knew from childhood (3:15) were the Old Testament.

Does 2 Timothy 3:16 prove sola scriptura?

Not by itself, on the Catholic reading. The verse says Scripture is “inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” That Scripture is God-breathed and profitable is common ground. What the verse does not say is that Scripture is the sole rule of faith, or that it is complete apart from the Church’s Tradition; “useful” (Greek ōphelimos) is not the same as “sufficient.” The same letter commands Timothy to guard an oral “deposit” (1:14) and to entrust it to reliable teachers who will teach others (2:2) — a chain of living transmission alongside the text.

Why is 2 Timothy called Paul’s “last letter”?

Because it presents itself as written from prison shortly before Paul’s death, and reads like a farewell. Paul says he is “already being poured out like a libation” and that “the time of my departure is at hand” (4:6); he reviews his life — “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (4:7) — and fills the final chapter with personal requests and goodbyes: bring the cloak and the parchments from Troas, come before winter, only Luke is with me. On the traditional reconstruction it is the last of Paul’s letters, written around A.D. 64–67 during a second Roman imprisonment that ended in his martyrdom.

Who were Jannes and Jambres in 2 Timothy 3:8?

They are the magicians of Pharaoh who opposed Moses (cf. Exodus 7–9), named here by Paul even though the book of Exodus leaves them unnamed. The names come from Jewish tradition outside the Old Testament — they appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Torah, a lost Book of Jannes and Jambres, and even pagan authors. Paul’s use of the tradition is a standard example of a biblical writer drawing on the literature of his world without treating that literature as Scripture — much as the Epistle of Jude quotes 1 Enoch. An allusion is not an endorsement.

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This post is part of an ongoing series covering every book in the New Testament canon and the early Christian texts that nearly joined them. See the full series at The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet.

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Footnotes

1. 1. 2 Tm 4:6 (New American Bible, Revised Edition; hereafter NABRE), bible.usccb.org; on being "in chains as a criminal," 2 Tm 2:9. Unless noted, Scripture quotations follow the NABRE.

2. 2. 2 Tm 4:13, 21 (NABRE): "When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus in Troas, the papyrus rolls, and especially the parchments . . . Try to get here before winter." The Douay-Rheims reads "the cloak that I left at Troas . . . and the books, especially the parchments."

3. 3. On the majority critical view that the three Pastoral Epistles are the work of a later "Paulinist," and the substantial minority defending authenticity, see the fuller treatment in [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/) and Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 662–680. On 2 Timothy as the least-doubted of the three, see nn. 40–44 below.

4. 4. 2 Tm 1:15; 4:16; 4:6 (NABRE). The letter's prison setting is explicit at 1:8 ("nor of me, a prisoner for his sake"), 1:16–17 (Onesiphorus "was not ashamed of my chains . . . when he came to Rome"), and 2:9.

5. 5. NABRE note on 2 Tm 1:4–5, bible.usccb.org: "Purportedly written from prison in Rome (2 Tm 1:8, 17; 4:6–8) shortly before the writer's death, the letter recalls the earlier sorrowful parting from Timothy, commending him for his faith and expressing the longing to see him again."

6. 6. 2 Tm 4:10–11 (NABRE): "Demas, enamored of the present world, deserted me and went to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Luke is the only one with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is helpful to me in the ministry."

7. 7. 2 Tm 4:11, 13, 21 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2 Tm 4:9–13 observes that Mark, "once rejected by Paul (Acts 13:13; 15:39), is now to render him a great service."

8. 8. 2 Tm 4:14–15, 21 (NABRE). Alexander the coppersmith may be the figure "handed over to Satan" at 1 Tm 1:20 (so the NABRE note on 4:14–18).

9. 9. On the "second imprisonment" reconstruction — Paul released after the imprisonment that ends Acts, then re-arrested and martyred under Nero, placing 2 Timothy c. A.D. 64–67 — and the alternative late-first-/early-second-century dating on the pseudonymity view, see Brown, *Introduction*, 662–668, and [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/). The grounding verses for the reconstruction are 2 Tm 1:16–17; 2:9; 4:6–8, 16–18. Scholars on both sides of the authenticity question commonly classify 2 Timothy in the genre of the testament or farewell discourse.

10. 10. 2 Tm 1:12, 14 (NABRE). The Greek *parathēkē* ("deposit," "trust") also stands behind 1 Tm 6:20 ("guard what has been entrusted to you"). The NABRE note on 1:12 records the studied ambiguity of the phrase, which "can also be translated 'what I have entrusted to him' . . . as well as 'what has been entrusted to me' (i.e., the faith)."

11. 11. 2 Tm 2:2 (NABRE). The NABRE note on 2:1–7 identifies the passage's "characteristic deep concern for safeguarding the faith and faithfully transmitting it through trustworthy people" (citing 2 Tm 2:1–2; 1:14; 1 Tm 6:20; Ti 1:9).

12. 12. CCC 84 gathers the "deposit of faith" (*depositum fidei*), citing 1 Tm 6:20 and 2 Tm 1:12–14, scborromeo.org; Second Vatican Council, *Dei Verbum* (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 1965), no. 10: "Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church," vatican.va.

13. 13. *Dei Verbum* 7–8: the apostles "left bishops as their successors, 'handing over' to them 'the authority to teach in their own place,'" and the apostolic preaching "was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time"; the same section cites 2 Thes 2:15 and Jude 3, vatican.va. On apostolic succession generally, CCC 77, 861–862.

14. 14. 2 Tm 1:6 (NABRE). Cf. the parallel at 1 Tm 4:14, which locates the same gift in "the imposition of hands of the presbyterate."

15. 15. NABRE note on 2 Tm 1:6, bible.usccb.org: "The gift of God: the grace resulting from the conferral of an ecclesiastical office. The imposition of my hands: see note on 1 Tm 4:14." The Greek term for the gift is *charisma*.

16. 16. 1 Tm 4:14 (NABRE); see [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/). First Timothy attributes the imposition of hands to "the presbyterate," 2 Timothy to Paul's own hands; the standard harmonization is that Paul presided while the presbyters joined in the gesture.

17. 17. Second Vatican Council, *Lumen Gentium* (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 1964), no. 21, which grounds episcopal consecration in the imposition of hands and cites 1 Tm 4:14 together with 2 Tm 1:6–7, vatican.va. The Catechism quotes 2 Tm 1:6 directly at CCC 1590, and treats ordination as the conferral of a grace of office at CCC 1556–1558, 1573.

18. 18. 2 Tm 1:7 (NABRE). The Douay-Rheims reads "the spirit . . . of power, and of love, and of sobriety."

19. 19. John Chrysostom, *Homily 1 on Second Timothy* (on 2 Tm 1:6), in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13, trans. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889), newadvent.org: "For it requires much zeal to stir up the gift of God. As fire requires fuel, so grace requires our alacrity, that it may be ever fervent . . . This, then, is of grace, and yet not merely of grace, but when we have first performed our own parts."

20. 20. 2 Tm 3:15–17 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE note on 3:16 observes that the verse "could possibly also be translated, 'All scripture inspired by God is useful for . . .'" and that "God is its principal author, with the writer as the human collaborator." The Greek *theopneustos* ("God-breathed") is a New Testament hapax legomenon.

21. 21. *Dei Verbum* 11 (quoting and citing 2 Tm 3:16–17), vatican.va: the Church, "relying on the belief of the Apostles (see John 20:31; 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19–20, 3:15–16), holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author"; the books teach "without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation."

22. 22. On inspiration, CCC 105–107, which quote *Dei Verbum* 11 (the biblical citation of 2 Tm 3:16 lies within DV 11 rather than in a separate Catechism footnote), vatican.va; on venerating the Scriptures "as she venerates the Body of the Lord," *Dei Verbum* 21.

23. 23. On the two points — that *ōphelimos* ("useful, profitable") does not assert formal sufficiency, and that the "sacred scriptures" known to Timothy "from infancy" (2 Tm 3:15) are the Old Testament, the New Testament canon not yet being closed — see the standard Catholic treatments (e.g., the discussions at catholic.com) and the critical commentaries on the Pastorals (Marshall; Johnson). The NABRE note on 3:16–17 reads the verse as affirming that Scripture, "as God's word," shares his authority, "exercised through those who are ministers of the word."

24. 24. *Dei Verbum* 9: "it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed"; on Scripture and Tradition as one deposit, *Dei Verbum* 10; on Scripture as "the supreme rule of faith," *Dei Verbum* 21, vatican.va. The internal Second Timothy texts are 1:13–14 and 2:2.

25. 25. 2 Tm 4:7: "I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith" (NABRE); "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith" (Douay-Rheims), drbo.org. The Greek uses the imagery of the games (*agōn*, "contest") and, in the following verse, of the victor's wreath.

26. 26. 2 Tm 2:3 (NABRE): "Bear your share of hardship along with me like a good soldier of Christ Jesus"; cf. 1:8 and 2:9.

27. 27. 2 Tm 4:6 (NABRE), with the note: "He regards it as an act of worship in which his blood will be poured out in sacrifice; cf. Ex 29:38–40; Phil 2:17," bible.usccb.org.

28. 28. 2 Tm 4:8 (NABRE): "the crown of righteousness . . . which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day." The Douay-Rheims reads "a crown of justice, which the Lord the just judge will render to me in that day." The NABRE note compares the crown to "the laurel wreath placed on the heads of victorious athletes and conquerors in war."

29. 29. Augustine's dictum that in crowning our merits God crowns his own gifts (*cum Deus coronat merita nostra, nihil aliud coronat quam munera sua*) appears in *Epistle* 194 and is echoed by the Council of Trent, Session 6 (1547), Decree on Justification, ch. 16, and at CCC 2006–2011 on merit. The point is that meritorious works are themselves the fruit of grace.

30. 30. 2 Tm 1:9 (NABRE): God "saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began"; the NABRE note observes that redemption and holiness "are not won by personal deeds but are freely and graciously bestowed."

31. 31. 2 Tm 2:11–13 (NABRE), introduced by the "trustworthy saying" formula (*pistos ho logos*) that recurs in the Pastorals (cf. 1 Tm 1:15; 3:1; 4:9; Ti 3:8). The lines are set as verse in the NABRE.

32. 32. 2 Tm 2:13 (NABRE): "If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself." The NABRE note on 2:12–13 reads the couplet as promising that Christ "will be true to those who are faithful and will disown those who deny him."

33. 33. NABRE note on 2 Tm 2:8–13, bible.usccb.org: the section "concludes with what may be part of an early Christian hymn," whose "poetic lines suggest that through baptism Christians die spiritually with Christ and hope to live with him and reign with him forever."

34. 34. CCC 2641 lists 2 Tm 2:11–13 among the New Testament hymn-fragments (with Phil 2:6–11; Col 1:15–20; Eph 5:14; 1 Tm 3:16; 6:15–16) composed by the first Christians "in the light of the unheard-of event" of the resurrection, scborromeo.org.

35. 35. 2 Tm 3:8 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The magicians of Pharaoh are unnamed in Ex 7:11–12, 22.

36. 36. The names occur in the Damascus Document (CD 5:17–19) among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (on Ex 1:15; 7:11), in the fragmentary *Book of Jannes and Jambres*, and in pagan writers — Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 30.2.11, and Apuleius, *Apology* 90 — who list Moses and "Jannes" among the celebrated magicians of antiquity. See the surveys in the standard reference works (e.g., the *International Standard Bible Encyclopedia*, s.v. "Jannes and Jambres").

37. 37. NABRE note on 2 Tm 3:1–9, bible.usccb.org: "Exodus does not name the magicians, but the two names are widely found in much later Jewish, Christian, and even pagan writings. Their origins are legendary."

38. 38. Origen, *Commentary on Matthew* (on Mt 27:9), traces the Jannes-and-Jambres tradition of 2 Tm 3:8 to an apocryphal book of that name, without treating the book as canonical. On [Jude](/epistle-of-jude/)'s explicit quotation of 1 Enoch (Jude 14–15) and the unease it caused, see the post on Jude. The principle — that an inspired author may use a non-canonical source without canonizing it — is standard in Catholic and mainstream commentary.

39. 39. The four standard arguments (vocabulary, church order, chronology, and the character of the false teaching) are set out, with the answers to them, in [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/); see Brown, *Introduction*, 662–668. The figure commonly cited for the critical majority is on the order of eighty to ninety percent, though it should be taken as a rough estimate of scholarly opinion rather than a measurement.

40. 40. On 2 Timothy's language standing closer to the undisputed letters, its lightness of church-order material, and the weight of its personal notes, see Brown, *Introduction*, 672–680, and the commentaries. Even on the pseudonymity view, 2 Timothy is generally read in the genre of the testament or farewell discourse.

41. 41. Percy Neale Harrison, *The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles* (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), argued that the Pastorals took their present form "at the hands . . . of a Paulinist" in the early second century, but that he had incorporated genuine Pauline note-fragments; the passages Harrison identified as authentic cluster in the personalia of 2 Timothy (notably the material in chapters 1 and 4). The precise reconstruction of the fragments varied in Harrison's own hands (he first proposed five, later three) and is disputed in the secondary literature.

42. 42. Anthony Kenny, *A Stylometric Study of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), found "no reason to reject the hypothesis that twelve of the [thirteen] Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author," with Titus the lone stylistic outlier and 2 Timothy ranking high among the letters that sit comfortably within the corpus.

43. 43. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, *Paul: A Critical Life* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 356–359, argues that Paul wrote 2 Timothy, while 1 Timothy and Titus were composed by a later writer who used 2 Timothy as his model.

44. 44. Michael Prior, *Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy*, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 23 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), defends 2 Timothy as a genuine, single, personal letter of Paul, stressing the co-authorship and secretarial composition of many Pauline letters.

45. 45. 2 Tm 4:11 (NABRE). On the amanuensis argument — that a secretary given latitude would account for the Pastorals' style while preserving Pauline substance, with Luke the leading candidate — see William D. Mounce, *Pastoral Epistles*, Word Biblical Commentary 46 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), and the discussion in [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/) (C. F. D. Moule's Lukan proposal).

46. 46. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.14.1 (quoting 2 Tm 4:10–11), in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, newadvent.org: "that this Luke was inseparable from Paul, and his fellow-labourer in the Gospel, he himself clearly evinces . . . 'Demas has forsaken me . . . Only Luke is with me.' From this he shows that he was always attached to and inseparable from him."

47. 47. On the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 1913 affirmation of Pauline authorship of the Pastorals, the 1955 clarification that its early decrees bind only where faith and morals are at stake, and *Dei Verbum* 11's location of inerrancy in what God wished affirmed "for the sake of our salvation," see [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/) and *Dei Verbum* 11.

48. 48. Tertullian, *Against Marcion* 5.21, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 3, trans. Peter Holmes (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), newadvent.org: "I wonder . . . that he rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline." On Marcion's canon of c. 144, see [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/) and Bruce M. Metzger, *The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 90–99.

49. 49. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 59–63, in Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, 305–307 (Paul wrote "one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy"); Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.3.5, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, newadvent.org: "Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed." At HE 3.25.2 the epistles of Paul stand among the acknowledged books (*homologoumena*).

50. 50. Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* 3.14.1 (see n. 46); Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.2 and 3.4.9, which identify the Linus of 2 Tm 4:21 with the first bishop of Rome after the apostles, newadvent.org. The NABRE note on 2 Tm 4:21 records the same Western tradition.

51. 51. Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II, c. A.D. 200) has lost its final leaves; whether it ever contained the Pastorals is contested (Kenyon calculated insufficient room; Jeremy Duff argued the scribe was compressing his text to include them; Brent Nongbri concludes the contents of the lost leaves cannot be determined). See the fuller note in [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/).

52. 52. Codex Vaticanus (B, 4th c.) breaks off in Hebrews (at 9:14); its original hand therefore lacks the Pastorals, Philemon, and Revelation, and it is not a witness to 2 Timothy.

53. 53. No Greek papyrus of 2 Timothy survives; the earliest continuous-text witness to the letter is Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ, 4th c.). The earliest papyrus of any Pastoral is P32 (a fragment of Titus, c. 175–200). (A Coptic papyrus fragment of 2 Timothy, later in date, is known.)

54. 54. The Pastorals appear in the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170–200), the synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), and Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter (367), the first surviving list matching the modern twenty-seven-book New Testament exactly; see Metzger, *Canon of the New Testament*, 209–238, 305–315.

55. 55. 2 Tm 3:16; *Dei Verbum* 11; CCC 105–107; see nn. 20–22 above.

56. 56. 2 Tm 1:14; 2:2; CCC 84; *Dei Verbum* 7–10; see nn. 10–13 above.

57. 57. 2 Tm 1:6; *Lumen Gentium* 21; CCC 1556–1558, 1590; see n. 17 above.

58. 58. John Chrysostom's ten *Homilies on Second Timothy* are in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13; Thomas Aquinas, *Super II ad Timotheum* (Commentary on the Second Letter to Timothy), is available in translation at aquinas.cc. Second Timothy supplies both Sunday readings (in Year C) and weekday readings in Ordinary Time.