I & II Timothy and Titus: A Commentary

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2003 by Couser, Greg A

I & II Timothy and Titus: A Commentary. By Raymond F. Collins. New Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002, 408 pp., $34.95.

Raymond Collins's commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (hereafter, PE) is the lead volume in the New Testament Library series. Since it is the lead volume in the series and many readers may not be familiar with it, it may be worthwhile to give a brief introduction. According to the editors (C. Black and B. Gaventa from Princeton with J. Carroll from Union Theological Seminary) this series attempts to offer "authoritative commentary" on "every book and major aspect of the New Testament." Thus, it is intended that the series will eventually encompass both commentaries on NT books as well as monographs dealing with topics related to NT study. Some examples of the latter are a forthcoming treatment of Pauline theology by V. P. Furnish and a forthcoming volume on the use of the OT in the New by J. R. Wagner. With regard to the commentaries on the NT letters, as in the case of the particular volume under review, "authoritative commentary" translates into an attempt to provide fresh translations, critical reconstructions of the historical background, consideration of matters of literary design, and "theologically perceptive exposition," all gathered together with a diverse audience in mind ("a commentary for the student and the professional scholar, for the pastor and the serious lay reader").

The intended audience of the series provides a convenient jumping off point for an evaluation of the particular volume under review. The impossibly wide target audience sets Collins's work up for disappointment. His easy-to-read style, careful explanation of the text, wide grasp of primary sources, and affable tone certainly invite readers. But what type of readers would be satisfied with the fare on offer is another question. This is not to impugn Collins's work in and of itself, only to point out that it is impossible to satisfy such a wide gambit of readership. For students being encouraged to enter into the scholarly debate over a disputed text, both to become informed and to observe a model of proper engagement, for a professional scholar looking for straightforward, explicit, and careful engagement with scholarship on key passages (as opposed to sleuthing one's way through a passage in order to detect who has influenced/stands behind the author's views), or for a pastor wanting to look further into a particular issue raised in the commentary- these will very likely not be satisfied with the design plan of this series. While including an exhaustive index of primary sources, a limited subject index, as well as a representative bibliography, the volume contains no author index, undoubtedly due to the fact that so few authors are explicitly mentioned in the commentary (a few authors are parenthetically referenced in the text while some appear in the infrequent footnotes-averaging less than one per page). The approach also offers little by way of argumentation. Collins walks the reader carefully through the book explaining passages with hardly a mention of the issues swirling around his explanations or without argumentation showing how he arrived at his interpretations over against competing options. This assessment is not so much to fault Collins as it is to suggest that the target audience of the series is narrower and that the text takes a particular tack toward addressing that narrower slice, so that the commentary may not be wholly satisfactory for classroom or study use, especially for those not necessarily in agreement with Collins's explanations. Or, at the least, Collins's volume would be a complement to an already robust library of resources on the Pastorals, but not a likely purchase for the single or primary resource for study in these letters.

The contents of the commentary are divided into an introduction to the corpus, an introduction to each book, section introductions, verse-by-verse commentary, and nine excurses on various topics (e.g. "Excursus 6: Debate on Marriage and Food"). The interpretation of the letters is set within the framework of double-pseudepigraphy-both author, "Paul," and recipients, "Timothy" and "Titus," are literary creations put forward by an unknown author, "the pastor," somewhere around 80 CE. (That the author is someone other than Paul "is beyond reasonable doubt" [p. 7], The reader is further assured that pseudepigraphy was an accepted mode of writing by the early Church and carries no opprobrium.) The "pastor" is attempting to bring Pauline tradition into meaningful contact with the Hellenistic world of the late first century to help the Church find its niche in the Greco-Roman world now that the parousia is no longer imminent. Although he may be over-accommodating at times with regard to the development of his ethic (e.g. he fails to assert the "radical equality of men and women in Christ" that Collins sees in the real Paul [p. 73]), the "pastor" does not engage completely uncritically with his culture and attempts to provide a faith-based anchor to his paraenesis. The opponents he battles are another pseudepigraphical device since he addresses no identifiable group. He simply wants to "put the community on guard against various kinds of error, no matter the source" (p. 12). On the literary level, there is a similarity of 1 Timothy and Titus to early documents on church order (e.g. Didache) and of 2 Timothy to testamentary texts (e.g. Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs). These literary categories help to explain the disparate nature of their material as well as contribute to Collins's case for their inauthenticity (since neither genre is associated with truly original compositions).