The Letter to Titus — A Gentile on Crete, the Great God and Savior, and a Disputed Letter's Road to Canon

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

The shortest of the three Pastoral Epistles opens onto a paradox that has amused logicians for two thousand years. Warning Titus about the unruly island where Paul has left him, the letter reaches for a line of local verse: “One of them, a prophet of their own, once said, ‘Cretans have always been liars, vicious beasts, and lazy gluttons.’” And then, without a flicker of irony, Paul adds: “That testimony is true.”⁠¹ A Cretan says all Cretans lie, and the apostle agrees. The “prophet of their own” was Epimenides, a Cretan poet of the sixth century before Christ, and the sentence Paul quotes is the ancestor of the famous liar’s paradox.⁠² It is a strange thing to find in Scripture: an inspired writer quoting a pagan seer against the pagan’s own countrymen, and pronouncing the slander true.

There is a second paradox, less ancient, that hangs over the letter as a whole. Of the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name, the Letter to Titus is the one that modern statistical study singles out as least like the rest — the lone stylistic outlier, the letter a computer would drop from the corpus first.⁠³ Yet it is also the letter that a second-century heretic went out of his way to defend as Paul’s when he doubted others, and the one Pastoral for which the earliest surviving papyrus of the whole group happens to be a scrap.⁠⁴ The letter the statisticians trust least is, on the physical evidence, the best-attested of the three. Titus keeps turning the expected picture inside out.

This post takes up the letter on both fronts. It follows Titus the man — a Greek, an uncircumcised Gentile, the living test case of Paul’s law-free gospel — and the church he was left to build on Crete; it reads the two verses that have carried the most doctrinal weight, the one that calls Jesus “our great God and savior” and the one that names baptism “the bath of rebirth”; it weighs the letter’s insistent theme of good works against its equally insistent grace; and it turns, at the last, to the modern doubt about who wrote it and the ancient, contested, finally untroubled road by which it reached the canon.

Titus the Gentile: Paul’s uncircumcised test case

Before the letter, there is the man — and the man is a puzzle. Titus never appears by name in the Acts of the Apostles, the book that narrates Paul’s missions; everything we know of him comes from the letters themselves.⁠⁵ What they show is one of Paul’s most trusted lieutenants. When the collection for Jerusalem needed organizing and the fractured church at Corinth needed mending, it was Titus whom Paul sent, and Titus whose safe return relieved him: “God, who encourages the downcast, encouraged us by the arrival of Titus.”⁠⁶ The Second Letter to the Corinthians is, in part, a letter about waiting for Titus.

But his first and most consequential appearance is in the Letter to the Galatians, and there he is less a person than a proof. Recounting the conference at Jerusalem where the terms of the Gentile mission were thrashed out, Paul plays his trump card: “not even Titus, who was with me, although he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised.”⁠⁷ Titus was Exhibit A. He was a real, uncircumcised, Greek convert whom Paul had brought into the very citadel of Jewish Christianity, and the pillars of the Jerusalem church had not required him to be circumcised. The whole case for a law-free gospel to the nations stood, in that moment, on one man’s body. That the letter bearing his name would turn out to be one of the most insistent in the New Testament on “good works” is an irony worth holding onto: the Christian whose uncircumcision proved that salvation is not by the works of the Law is the addressee of the letter that will not stop talking about works.

Tradition fills in what the letters leave bare. Titus, it holds, was left by Paul to shepherd the Cretan churches and became their first bishop; Eusebius records it flatly — “Titus of the churches in Crete” — setting him beside Timothy at Ephesus as one of the two great disciples given a see by the apostle.⁠⁸ He is venerated as the patron of Crete to this day. The letter to him, whoever finally shaped it, preserves the memory of that mission.

A letter left on Crete

The occasion is stated in a single sentence near the top: “For this reason I left you in Crete so that you might set right what remains to be done and appoint presbyters in every town, as I directed you.”⁠⁹ The letter is a set of marching orders for a man building a church from scratch across a whole island. Its concerns are almost entirely practical — whom to ordain, how to teach, what to do about troublemakers — and in that it is the near-twin of the First Letter to Timothy, whose charge to Ephesus it echoes almost point for point.

The heart of the charge is the appointment of elders, and the qualifications Titus is given read like a shortened form of the list in First Timothy: a candidate must be “blameless, married only once, with believing children,” and then, of the same man now called a “bishop,” “not arrogant, not irritable, not a drunkard, not aggressive, not greedy for sordid gain,” but “hospitable, a lover of goodness, temperate, just, holy, and self-controlled.”⁠¹⁰ One detail of the vocabulary repays attention, because it bears on how old the letter’s church order really is. Within four verses the same men are called “presbyters” and then “a bishop”; the two words, presbyteros (elder) and episkopos (overseer), are used interchangeably, and deacons — prominent in First Timothy — are not mentioned at all.⁠¹¹ This is the fluid, two-term ministry of the earliest decades, before the fixed threefold pattern of one bishop over a college of presbyters had hardened into the language. The Catholic reading holds that the sacramental office is present and apostolic even where its titles are still settling; the letter shows the Church acquiring its order in real time, on a difficult island, one town at a time.

The trouble on Crete had a specific shape. The errorists Titus must silence are “rebels, idle talkers and deceivers, especially the Jewish Christians” — literally, in the Greek, “those of the circumcision” — who peddle “Jewish myths” and “genealogies” for “sordid gain.”⁠¹² It is against these that the letter deploys its most quotable line, the Cretan slander of Epimenides. Paul’s use of a pagan poet is not a lapse but a habit: the same apostle quotes the Greek poet Aratus on the Areopagus — “for we too are his offspring” — and the Second Letter to Timothy names Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Pharaoh, from a Jewish tradition found nowhere in the Old Testament.⁠¹³ The principle the Church drew from such moments is a general one, and it governs harder cases too, such as the Epistle of Jude’s quotation of the apocryphal book of Enoch: an inspired writer may reach for a line current in his culture, pagan or apocryphal, without thereby canonizing its source. An allusion is not an endorsement. That a Cretan seer told the truth about Cretans does not make him a prophet of God; it makes him, for one verse, a useful witness.

“Our great God and savior”: the divinity of Christ

The letter’s second chapter climbs, without warning, from household advice to one of the loftiest confessions of Christ in the New Testament. The Christian is to live soberly, Paul writes, “as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ.”⁠¹⁴ The sentence has been the site of a long and consequential grammatical argument, because on its most natural reading it does not distinguish “the great God” from “our savior Jesus Christ” at all — it identifies them. It calls Jesus God.

The argument turns on a single missing word. In the Greek, one article governs both nouns: “the great God and savior of us, Jesus Christ.” In 1798 the English abolitionist and self-taught grammarian Granville Sharp published a study of exactly this construction, and formulated the rule that bears his name: when a single article governs two singular, personal, common nouns joined by “and,” the two refer to the same person.⁠¹⁵ By that rule — which modern grammarians have refined and, in its careful form, sustained — “the great God and our savior Jesus Christ” is one person, and Titus 2:13 is a flat assertion of the deity of Christ, alongside its twin at 2 Peter 1:1.⁠¹⁶ This is not a Catholic peculiarity read into the text. The New American Bible’s own footnote records that the single article “strongly suggests” the one-person reading and offers “our great God and savior Jesus Christ” as an alternative translation; the grammar carries a broad consensus of Catholic and critical commentators alike.⁠¹⁷

The context reinforces what the grammar suggests. The verse speaks of an appearing — in Greek epiphaneia, the shining-forth of divine glory — and it is the second of two such appearings in the space of three verses. “The grace of God has appeared, saving all,” the passage begins, of the first coming; “we await … the appearance of the glory,” it ends, of the second.⁠¹⁸ The grace that appeared at Bethlehem and the glory that will appear at the end are the two epiphanies of the one Lord, and the glory to come is the glory of God. It is fitting, then, that the Church reads this very passage at the Mass of Christmas night, when the first epiphany is celebrated: the God whose glory Titus awaits is the child whose birth the Church keeps.⁠¹⁹

“The bath of rebirth”: baptism and its power

If the second chapter gives the letter its highest Christology, the third gives it its deepest sacramental theology, and again the Church reads it at Christmas — this time at the Mass of dawn. The passage is a small creed of salvation:

But when the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life.⁠²⁰

The load-bearing phrase is “the bath of rebirth” — in Greek loutron palingenesias, the washing that makes new. It is the language of baptism, and the Church has always read it so; the New American Bible’s note calls the passage a description of the “gift of baptism.”⁠²¹ What the verse claims about that washing is precisely what divides the Catholic understanding of baptism from a merely symbolic one. Baptism does not, on Paul’s account, signify a rebirth that happened elsewhere; it is the means through which God “saved us.” The Catechism quotes the verse to make the point exactly: baptism “is also called ‘the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit,’ for it signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit without which no one ‘can enter the kingdom of God.’”⁠²² The two verbs matter — it signifies and it actually brings about. The Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration, so contested since the Reformation, rests in large part on this single Cretan sentence, which does not say that God saved us and then we were washed, but that he saved us through the washing.

There is a further weight in the passage, and it points the opposite way from where a careless reader might expect. The letter that talks endlessly of good works here insists, in the same breath as its baptismal theology, that salvation came “not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.” The initiative is entirely God’s; the washing is grace, not wage. Which brings us to the tension that runs through the whole letter.

Grace and good works

For its length, no letter in the New Testament repeats the phrase “good works” more insistently than this one. It sounds through every chapter: the false teachers are “unqualified for any good deed”; Titus is to show himself “a model of good deeds”; Christ gave himself to purify “a people as his own, eager to do what is good”; the faithful are to “devote themselves to good works,” and to do so again, so that “they may not be unproductive.”⁠²³ A reader who came to Titus expecting the Paul of Romans and Galatians — the Paul who thunders that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the Law — might feel the ground shift.

The shift is real, but it is not a contradiction, and the letter itself supplies the resolution within a few verses. The same third chapter that commands good works grounds salvation in mercy “not because of any righteous deeds we had done.”⁠²⁴ Here, in miniature, is the Catholic synthesis of grace and works that the Council of Trent would spell out at length. Initial salvation is sheer unmerited gift — no righteous deed of ours earns the bath of rebirth. Yet the life that flows from that washing is meant to be productive of good, and those works, themselves the fruit of grace, are not decorative but genuinely part of the Christian’s calling and, in the end, of his reward.⁠²⁵ Titus holds the two poles together in three verses: mercy, not works, at the root; good works, in earnest, as the fruit. The Paul who insisted that we are not saved by works is the same Paul — or the same tradition writing in his name — who insisted that we are saved for them. The letter that most alarms a “faith alone” reading is, read whole, the letter that shows why the alarm is misplaced.

Did Paul write it?

Now to the question the modern reader has been waiting for — and here Titus holds a distinctive place, for it is the most doubted of an already doubted group. Of the thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name, scholars set apart seven as essentially undisputed — Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon — from six that are contested; and the three Pastorals sit at the far, most-doubted end, with a critical majority commonly estimated at something like eighty to ninety percent regarding them as the work of a later hand.⁠²⁶ The fourfold case against them — their distinctive vocabulary, their developed church offices, a set of travels that will not fit the framework of Acts, and a false teaching some read as second-century — I have set out, with the answers to it, in the companion post on First Timothy; the arguments are shared across the three letters, and there is no need to rehearse them here.⁠²⁷

What is distinctive is that Titus is the letter on which the statistical case presses hardest. When Anthony Kenny subjected the corpus to a stylometric study in 1986, measuring each letter against the profile of the whole, Titus emerged as the single anomaly: “I see no reason to reject the hypothesis,” Kenny concluded, “that twelve of the Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author” — the twelve being all of them except Titus.⁠²⁸ Where Second Timothy ranked among the most Pauline letters of all and First Timothy sat comfortably enough inside the corpus, Titus stood alone at the far end. The same isolation appears in the work of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, no conservative, who argued that Paul wrote Second Timothy but that First Timothy and Titus were composed by a later writer working from that authentic model.⁠²⁹ The two scholars keep different letters and drop different ones, but they agree on Titus: whatever else is Paul’s, this is the one to doubt.

Yet even here the picture will not stay simple, and honesty requires three qualifications. The first is that the doubt is method-dependent. Kenny’s own numbers made Titus the outlier; a more recent stylometric run using a different technique reversed the result entirely, placing Titus back inside the authentic range and pushing the two letters to Timothy out.⁠³⁰ Stylometry, in other words, has not spoken with one voice on Titus; it has spoken with several, and they disagree. The second qualification is that even the theory’s own architects salvaged a piece of Titus as genuine. P. N. Harrison, whose 1921 study gave the pseudonymity case its classic statistical form, held that a later Paulinist had woven authentic Pauline note-fragments into his composition — and the one fragment he identified in Titus was its closing personal note, the instructions about wintering at Nicopolis and helping Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their way.⁠³¹ Those concrete, unglamorous details — a coat, a town, two travelers — read less like invention than like the debris of an actual life.

The third qualification is chronological, and it is the sharpest of the four standard arguments as applied to Titus. The letter presupposes a Pauline mission to Crete — Paul there, leaving Titus behind — and a plan to winter at Nicopolis in western Greece; but the Acts of the Apostles records no such mission, its only contact between Paul and Crete being the storm-driven prisoner voyage that never allowed for founding a church, let alone appointing elders in every town.⁠³² On the critical reading, this un-placeable itinerary is itself evidence of a later author reconstructing a Pauline world he did not inhabit. On the traditional reading, it is evidence of the opposite: that Paul was released after the imprisonment with which Acts ends, traveled further — to Crete, among other places — and was arrested a second time and martyred under Nero, so that Titus belongs to those un-narrated final years.⁠³³ The Cretan data, like so much else in this letter, cut both ways depending on what one already believes.

The leading defense of authenticity has always leaned on the secretary. If Paul dictated his letters to an amanuensis and gave him latitude, the stylistic distance of the Pastorals from the undisputed letters ceases to prove a later author — and defenders apply that explanation to all three Pastorals as a bloc, which is why it does not, by itself, account for Titus’s peculiar isolation in the statistics.⁠³⁴ Where does that leave the reader? With a genuinely open question — and, for the Catholic, an open question that touches nothing essential. 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.⁠³⁵ 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 a secretary, 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 doubt, the ancient reception of Titus is a study in inversions, and the first is the sharpest. The heretic Marcion, who around the year 144 built the first Christian canon out of one Gospel and ten letters of Paul, left all three Pastorals out; Tertullian, refuting him near the turn of the third century, professed astonishment that Marcion, having admitted the tiny letter to Philemon, “rejected the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, which all treat of ecclesiastical discipline.”⁠³⁶ Yet where one heretic spurned Titus, another singled it out for defense. Jerome, in the preface to his commentary on the letter, records that Tatian — the second-century Encratite, himself no friend of parts of the Pauline corpus — nevertheless held this letter above all to be genuinely the apostle’s.⁠³⁷ That a heresiarch who rejected some of Paul’s letters made a point of keeping Titus is a curious and telling datum: the letter’s authority was strong enough to command assent even from a quarter inclined to doubt.

Against Marcion’s single exclusion stands the ordinary chorus of the Church. The Muratorian Fragment, the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, counts Titus among Paul’s letters — “one to Philemon, one to Titus, and two to Timothy” — held sacred “for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline”; and by the early fourth century Eusebius could record without hesitation that “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed,” the fourteen silently including Titus.⁠³⁸ The Fathers used it as freely as they listed it. Irenaeus, refuting the Gnostics around 180, twice invokes the letter’s command to have done with a heretic “after a first and second admonition”; the line became a standard weapon of the Church’s discipline against schism.⁠³⁹

The manuscript record supplies the last and most satisfying inversion. Titus is the shortest of the Pastorals and, by the statisticians’ reckoning, the least Pauline — and yet it has the best early physical attestation of the three. The earliest surviving papyrus of any Pastoral epistle is a fragment of Titus: Papyrus 32, a scrap of a codex in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, copied around A.D. 175–200 and preserving parts of the letter’s first and second chapters.⁠⁴⁰ Set that beside its companions and the irony sharpens. Second Timothy survives in no Greek papyrus at all; First Timothy in only one, and that a later fragment identified only recently.⁠⁴¹ The great fourth-century codices tell a similar story of accident: Codex Vaticanus breaks off in the middle of Hebrews and never reaches the Pastorals, so that the earliest complete witness to Titus is its companion, Codex Sinaiticus.⁠⁴² Thin as any single thread is, the canon lists more than compensate: the Muratorian Fragment, the synods of Hippo and Carthage, and Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 — the first to name exactly our twenty-seven books — all count Titus among Paul’s without a murmur.⁠⁴³ The letter the critics most suspect was, for the ancient Church, among the least in doubt.

What the Catholic Church makes of Titus

Set the authorship question aside — which, as we have seen, the Church can hold lightly — and what remains is a short letter that has left long marks. Its “great God and savior” is one of the New Testament’s plainest confessions of the divinity of Christ, a text the tradition has cited from the Arian controversy onward for the deity of the Son.⁠⁴⁴ Its “bath of rebirth” is a charter text for the Catholic theology of baptism as the washing that truly regenerates, quoted by the Catechism in its opening account of what the sacrament is and does.⁠⁴⁵ Its qualifications for presbyters still stand behind the Church’s discipline for choosing her ministers, and its balance of mercy and good works still describes the shape of the Christian life.⁠⁴⁶ The letter keeps its place in the Church’s prayer as well: both of its “epiphany” passages are proclaimed at Christmas, and the Church honors Titus, with Timothy, on the day after the Conversion of Saint Paul — the two disciples remembered together, just behind their master.⁠⁴⁷ It has drawn her expositors, too: John Chrysostom preached six homilies on it, and Thomas Aquinas lectured through it verse by verse.⁠⁴⁸

There is a fittingness in the fact that the letter addressed to a Gentile — the man whose uncircumcision proved that grace does not run through the Law — should be the letter that grounds the Church’s doctrine of the grace that saves “not because of any righteous deeds we had done.” Titus of Crete was living proof that God’s mercy reaches past every human qualification; the letter that bears his name says the same thing in doctrine that his own body said in fact. Whether Paul held the pen or a disciple wrote in his name, the letter carried that truth into the Church’s Scripture, and there it has done its work ever since.

Further reading

The major critical commentaries carry the authorship debate in full and treat Titus alongside its companions. 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), and, for Titus itself, his Letters to Paul’s Delegates (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996); 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 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); and the case that Titus is a later imitation of an authentic Second Timothy is made by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). On the Granville Sharp construction of Titus 2:13, see Daniel B. Wallace, Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). 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 the Letter to Titus?

The question is contested, and Titus is in fact the most doubted of the three Pastoral Epistles. A majority of critical scholars assign all three (First and Second Timothy and Titus) to a later writer in Paul’s name, on grounds of vocabulary, church order, and a chronology that does not fit the book of Acts. Titus draws the sharpest doubt: Anthony Kenny’s stylometric study made it the single letter he would exclude from the Pauline corpus, and Jerome Murphy-O’Connor held that Paul wrote Second Timothy but that Titus and First Timothy were later imitations of it. Defenders answer with the ancient practice of the secretary, and note that even the pseudonymity theory’s founder salvaged the letter’s personal closing as genuinely Pauline; a more recent stylometric study reversed Kenny’s result. 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 “the bath of rebirth” (Titus 3:5) mean?

It is the letter’s phrase for baptism — in Greek loutron palingenesias, “the washing of regeneration.” Titus 3:5 says that God “saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the holy Spirit,” and the Catholic Church reads it as one of the clearest New Testament statements that baptism does not merely symbolize a new birth but actually effects it. The Catechism quotes the verse (CCC 1215) to teach that baptism “signifies and actually brings about” rebirth by water and the Spirit. The same verse also anchors salvation in mercy “not because of any righteous deeds we had done,” so the washing is understood as pure grace, not a reward for works.

Does Titus 2:13 call Jesus God?

On its most natural reading, yes. The verse awaits “the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ,” and in the Greek a single article governs both “God” and “savior,” which by a well-established grammatical principle (the Granville Sharp rule, named for the scholar who formulated it in 1798) means the two titles refer to one person — Jesus is “the great God and savior.” The New American Bible’s own footnote acknowledges the single article and offers “our great God and savior Jesus Christ” as an alternative translation. Titus 2:13, with 2 Peter 1:1, is thus one of the New Testament’s most direct assertions of the divinity of Christ.

Who were the Cretans Paul called liars?

In Titus 1:12 Paul quotes “a prophet of their own”: “Cretans have always been liars, vicious beasts, and lazy gluttons,” and adds, “That testimony is true.” The prophet was Epimenides, a Cretan poet of the sixth century before Christ, and the saying is an ancient form of the liar’s paradox (a Cretan asserting that all Cretans lie). Paul deploys the line against certain Cretan false teachers, not against the island as such. His willingness to quote a pagan poet is characteristic: he cites the Greek poet Aratus in Acts 17 and draws on extra-biblical Jewish tradition in Second Timothy. The principle is that an inspired writer may use a line from the surrounding culture without endorsing its source — an allusion is not a canonization.

Why was Titus left on Crete?

According to the letter, Paul left Titus on Crete “so that you might set right what remains to be done and appoint presbyters in every town” (Titus 1:5). Titus was to organize the young Cretan churches, ordain their elders, teach sound doctrine, and silence a group of mostly Jewish-Christian troublemakers. The whole letter is a set of instructions for that task, closely parallel to First Timothy’s charge for Ephesus. Early tradition, recorded by Eusebius, remembered Titus as the first bishop of the churches of Crete, and he is venerated as the island’s patron.

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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. Ti 1:12–13 (New American Bible, Revised Edition; hereafter NABRE), bible.usccb.org. Unless noted, Scripture quotations follow the NABRE.

2. 2. NABRE note on Ti 1:12: "Cretans . . . gluttons: quoted from Epimenides, a Cretan poet of the sixth century B.C." The saying — a Cretan declaring that all Cretans are liars — is the classical ancestor of the "liar's paradox" or "Epimenides paradox." The same hexameter line was known in antiquity and is echoed by later Greek writers; Paul cites only its opening clause.

3. 3. Anthony Kenny, *A Stylometric Study of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), whose analysis of the thirteen Pauline letters isolated Titus as the single stylistic outlier; see nn. 28, 30 below.

4. 4. On Tatian's defense of Titus, see n. 37; on Papyrus 32, the earliest surviving papyrus of any Pastoral epistle, see nn. 40–41.

5. 5. Titus is named only in the Pauline letters (2 Cor, Gal, 2 Tm 4:10, and the letter that bears his name); he is absent from the Acts of the Apostles, a long-noted puzzle. The reconstruction of his career therefore depends wholly on the epistles.

6. 6. 2 Cor 7:6 (NABRE); on Titus as Paul's emissary to Corinth and organizer of the collection for Jerusalem, see 2 Cor 2:13; 7:6–7, 13–15; 8:6, 16–23.

7. 7. Gal 2:3 (NABRE), biblegateway.com; see the fuller treatment in [The Epistle to the Galatians](/epistle-to-the-galatians/). The NABRE note on Gal 2:3 reads: "Not even a Gentile Christian like Titus was compelled to receive the rite of circumcision."

8. 8. Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.4.6, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, Second Series, vol. 1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, newadvent.org: "Timothy, so it is recorded, was the first to receive the episcopate of the parish in Ephesus, Titus of the churches in Crete." The tradition rests on Ti 1:5; Titus is venerated as the first bishop and patron of Crete.

9. 9. Ti 1:5 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

10. 10. Ti 1:6–8 (NABRE). The NABRE note on Ti 1:5–9 observes that the instruction "on the selection and appointment of presbyters" is "substantially identical with that in 1 Tm 3:1–7 on a bishop"; see [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/).

11. 11. Ti 1:5, 7 (NABRE). The NABRE note on Ti 1:5–9 states: "In Ti 1:5, 7 and Acts 20:17, 28, the terms *episkopos* and *presbyteros* ('bishop' and 'presbyter') refer to the same persons. Deacons are not mentioned in Titus." On the later crystallization of the threefold ministry (one bishop, presbyters, deacons) in Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110), see [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/).

12. 12. Ti 1:10–12 (NABRE), with the NABRE note on Ti 1:10: "Jewish Christians: literally, 'those of the circumcision.'" The NABRE note on Ti 1:10–16 identifies the errorists as "certain Jewish Christians, who busy themselves with useless speculations over persons mentioned in the Old Testament, insist on the observance of Jewish ritual purity regulations."

13. 13. Acts 17:28 (Paul quoting Aratus, *Phaenomena* 5, on the Areopagus); 2 Tm 3:8 (Jannes and Jambres, the unnamed magicians of Ex 7:11–12, drawn from Jewish tradition outside the Old Testament); see [The Second Letter to Timothy](/2-timothy/).

14. 14. Ti 2:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

15. 15. Granville Sharp, *Remarks on the Uses of the Definitive Article in the Greek Text of the New Testament: Containing Many New Proofs of the Divinity of Christ* (1798). Sharp (1735–1813), the English abolitionist, formulated the rule that when the Greek article precedes the first of two singular, personal, common nouns joined by *kai* ("and") and is not repeated before the second, both nouns denote the same person.

16. 16. The strict, defensible form of the rule (limited to singular, personal, non-proper nouns) is defended at length by Daniel B. Wallace, *Granville Sharp's Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance* (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), and *Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics* (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 270–277. Titus 2:13 (*tou megalou theou kai sōtēros hēmōn Iēsou Christou*) and 2 Pt 1:1 (*tou theou hēmōn kai sōtēros Iēsou Christou*) are the two christologically decisive undisputed Sharp constructions.

17. 17. NABRE note on Ti 2:13, bible.usccb.org: "The blessed hope, the appearance: literally, 'the blessed hope and appearance,' but the use of a single article in Greek strongly suggests an epexegetical, i.e., explanatory sense. Of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ: another possible translation is 'of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.'"

18. 18. Ti 2:11, 13 (NABRE). The Greek pairs the past appearing of grace (*epephanē*, 2:11) with the awaited appearing of glory (*epiphaneia*, 2:13); the NABRE heads the section "Transformation of Life" and notes that its moral admonitions rest on "the constant appeal to God's revelation of salvation in Christ."

19. 19. Ti 2:11–14 is the second reading at the Mass of Christmas during the Night, and Ti 3:4–7 (see n. 20) the second reading at the Mass at Dawn, in the Roman Lectionary; see the readings for the Nativity of the Lord at bible.usccb.org.

20. 20. Ti 3:4–7 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The lines are set as verse in the NABRE and are widely taken to draw on an early liturgical or baptismal formula; v. 8 introduces them with the Pastorals' "trustworthy saying" formula (*pistos ho logos*).

21. 21. Ti 3:5 (NABRE); the Greek *loutron palingenesias* means "washing/bath of regeneration." The NABRE note on Ti 3:1–8 speaks of "the spiritual renewal of the Cretans, signified in God's merciful gift of baptism (Ti 3:4–7)."

22. 22. CCC 1215, quoting Ti 3:5 and Jn 3:5, vatican.va: "This sacrament is also called 'the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit,' for it signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit without which no one 'can enter the kingdom of God.'" The NABRE's "bath of rebirth" is a rendering of the same phrase; the Catechism gathers the baptismal names, including "bath of rebirth," at CCC 1214–1216. On hope, CCC 1817 cites Ti 3:6–7.

23. 23. Ti 1:16; 2:7, 14; 3:8, 14 (NABRE). The theme of "good works" (*kala erga* / *erga agatha*) recurs in every chapter and is a structural refrain of the letter.

24. 24. Ti 3:5 (NABRE); cf. 2 Tm 1:9 ("not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus"), on which see [The Second Letter to Timothy](/2-timothy/).

25. 25. Council of Trent, Session 6 (1547), Decree on Justification, esp. chs. 7–8 and 16 and cann. 1, 24, 32, which teach that initial justification is unmerited grace received through baptism, that good works truly increase justification, and that the good works of the justified are both gifts of God and genuinely meritorious; cf. CCC 1987–2011 on grace, justification, and merit.

26. 26. On the seven undisputed and six disputed letters, and the Pastorals at the most-doubted end, see Raymond E. Brown, *An Introduction to the New Testament* (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 585–680, and [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/). The figure of roughly eighty to ninety percent for the critical majority is a rough estimate of scholarly opinion rather than a measured statistic.

27. 27. 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.

28. 28. Anthony Kenny, *A Stylometric Study of the New Testament* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986): "I see no reason to reject the hypothesis that twelve of the Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author," with Titus the lone stylistic outlier. In Kenny's ranking of the thirteen letters by their fit with the corpus, 2 Timothy ranked high (more Pauline than several undisputed letters) and 1 Timothy remained inside the retained group, while Titus alone fell outside it.

29. 29. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, *Paul: A Critical Life* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), argues that Paul wrote 2 Timothy, while 1 Timothy and Titus were composed by a later writer who used 2 Timothy as his model; see also [The Second Letter to Timothy](/2-timothy/). Kenny and Murphy-O'Connor reach their conclusions by different routes and retain different letters, but both place Titus on the doubtful side.

30. 30. The method-dependence of the result is worth stressing: a stylometric analysis using the "Burrows's Delta" measure has placed Titus (with 2 Thessalonians) within the authentic-Pauline range while pushing 1 and 2 Timothy farther out — the reverse of Kenny's ordering. Stylometric verdicts on Titus shift with the features and metric chosen, which is a caution against treating any single statistical result as decisive.

31. 31. Percy Neale Harrison, *The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles* (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), held that a later Paulinist incorporated genuine Pauline note-fragments into the Pastorals; the one fragment he identified within Titus was its closing personal note, Ti 3:12–15 (Nicopolis, Artemas, Tychicus, Zenas, Apollos). The precise reconstruction of the fragments varied in Harrison's own hands and is disputed in the secondary literature.

32. 32. Ti 1:5; 3:12 (Nicopolis, in Epirus on the western coast of Greece, per the NABRE note on Ti 3:12–15). Acts records no Pauline mission to Crete; its only contact between Paul and the island is the storm-driven prisoner voyage of Acts 27:7–13, which allowed for no founding of churches.

33. 33. On the "second imprisonment" reconstruction — Paul released after the imprisonment that ends Acts, traveling further (including to Crete), then re-arrested and martyred under Nero — see Brown, *Introduction*, 662–668, and [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/). On this view Titus belongs to Paul's un-narrated final years, c. A.D. 63–66.

34. 34. On the amanuensis argument — that a secretary given latitude would account for the Pastorals' style while preserving Pauline substance — see C. F. D. Moule's Lukan proposal, discussed in [The First Letter to Timothy](/1-timothy/), and William D. Mounce, *Pastoral Epistles*, Word Biblical Commentary 46 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000). Defenders apply the argument to the three Pastorals as a group, which is why it does not, by itself, explain Titus's peculiar isolation in the stylometric data.

35. 35. 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 Second Vatican Council, *Dei Verbum* (1965), no. 11, vatican.va.

36. 36. 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.

37. 37. Jerome, *Commentary on Titus*, preface (*Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Titum*, Migne, *Patrologia Latina* 26): Tatian, "patriarch of the Encratites," who himself rejected some of Paul's epistles, believed this one above all — that is, the letter to Titus — ought to be declared the apostle's. Jerome names only that Tatian rejected "some" (*nonnullas*) of Paul's letters; the later identification of these as the letters to Timothy is an inference, not Jerome's own statement. English translation in Thomas P. Scheck, *St. Jerome's Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon* (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

38. 38. 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 . . . held sacred in the esteem of the Church catholic for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline"); Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.3.5, 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*).

39. 39. Ti 3:10 (NABRE): "After a first and second warning, break off contact with a heretic." Irenaeus quotes the verse against the Gnostics at *Against Heresies* 1.16.3 and 3.3.4, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, newadvent.org.

40. 40. Papyrus 32 (P. Rylands Greek 5), John Rylands Library, Manchester, c. A.D. 175–200, preserving Ti 1:11–15 (recto) and 2:3–8 (verso) — the earliest surviving papyrus of any of the Pastoral Epistles. See Kurt and Barbara Aland, *The Text of the New Testament*, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), and A. S. Hunt, *Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the John Rylands Library*, vol. 1 (1911), 10–11.

41. 41. No Greek papyrus of 2 Timothy survives; the earliest continuous-text witness to that letter is Codex Sinaiticus. First Timothy has a single papyrus, P133 (P.Oxy. 5259), a third-century fragment identified only recently — considerably later than P32. Titus thus has, comfortably, the earliest papyrus witness of the three Pastorals.

42. 42. Codex Vaticanus (B, 4th c.) breaks off in Hebrews (at Heb 9:14); its original hand therefore lacks the Pastorals, Philemon, and Revelation, and it is not a witness to Titus. The earliest complete witness to the letter is Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ, 4th c.). Papyrus 46 (c. A.D. 200), the great early codex of Paul's letters, has lost its final leaves; whether it ever contained the Pastorals is contested.

43. 43. Titus appears 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.

44. 44. Ti 2:13; see nn. 15–17 above. The verse was cited in the christological debates of the fourth century for the true divinity of the Son, and it remains among the New Testament's clearest attributions of the title "God" (*theos*) to Jesus.

45. 45. Ti 3:5; CCC 1215; see nn. 20–22 above.

46. 46. Ti 1:5–9 (qualifications for presbyters); Ti 3:5, 8 (mercy and good works); see nn. 10–11, 23–25 above.

47. 47. Ti 2:11–14 and 3:4–7 are read at the Christmas Masses during the Night and at Dawn (n. 19). In the General Roman Calendar, Saints Timothy and Titus, bishops, are commemorated together with an obligatory memorial on January 26, the day after the Conversion of Saint Paul; in the pre-1970 calendar Titus was kept on February 6 (and Timothy on January 24) before the two were joined in 1969.

48. 48. John Chrysostom's six *Homilies on Titus* are in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, First Series, vol. 13; Thomas Aquinas, *Super Titum* (Commentary on the Letter to Titus), is available in translation at aquinas.cc.