Ancient Biblical Letters Stamped with Century-Spanning Cultural Impact

For Jay Twomey, there's a world of modern-day meaning to be culled from New Testament correspondence with centuries-old, worldwide influence.

He explores the legacy of the letters to Timothy and Titus, known collectively as the Pastoral Epistles, in "The Pastoral Epistles Through the Centuries." The book is due out in December.

Twomey, a Massachusetts native, earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He developed some of his most important professional interests, he says, as a graduate student teaching in the religious studies department.

"The Blackwell Bible Commentary series concerns the reception history of biblical texts, whereas a traditional commentary focuses on issues of language, history, context and original audience," says the assistant professor, who joined McMicken's Department of English and Comparative Literatures in 2002.

"Not being a New Testament scholar, I would not presume to write a commentary on the Pastorals themselves. But as someone with a broad education in literary studies, and an ease with comparative methodologies, I really enjoyed tracing the many ways in which the Pastorals have been read by writers, thinkers, politicians and others across the centuries."

Q) Explain why the Pastoral Epistles were so crucial in the development of early Christianity – when and how was the importance of the works realized?

A) The Pastoral Epistles are a collection of three letters (1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus), allegedly by Paul, to co-workers in Ephesus and on Crete. Most scholars agree that these documents are post-Pauline, written by an anonymous author in Paul's name sometime toward the end of the first or the start of the second century CE. We refer to this anonymous author as the Pastor simply because these three letters consist mainly of pastoral advice to church leaders.

The letters were important for early readers for a number of reasons, principally because they appeared to legitimize Pauline thought (especially with regard to the social and political organization of the early church) for the next generation of believers. Paul had established communities that were, in comparison with much of the surrounding world, radically egalitarian and, most importantly, eschatological – that is, they believed that the end was nigh. Later generations couldn't very easily sustain this eschatological focus, and some Christian leaders were likely unhappy with the relative equality Paul's letters granted to women. So, the author we call the Pastor penned these non-eschatological, fully patriarchal documents in Paul's name at least in part as a way of establishing a future for the church as a respectable, traditional institution in the wider Greco-Roman context.

Q) When did you become interested in the Pastorals' history and impact?

A) I became interested in the Pastorals when, as a TA in grad school, I taught a text by the 17th century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.  This text, a letter actually, called the Reply to Sor Filotea, executes some brilliantly subversive exegetical maneuvers on the Pastorals – documents which very strictly limit women's religious agency – in defense of a woman's right to engage actively the religious issues of her time.  I wanted, from that point on, to work a bit more on this material. It turns out, by the way, that many other women have similarly read the Pastor against the grain. When the opportunity to write this book came along I knew that I wanted to emphasize precisely this sort of politically astute interpretive response.

Q) It's truly mind-boggling to imagine all the ways the language from the Pastorals still permeate, as the press release says, our cultural vernacular – such as using the expression "fight the good fight." What does that say about the power of the Pastorals?

A) To the Pastoral Epistles we owe the language of the good fight and also the idea that money is the root of all evil (or, more properly, the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil), as well as phrases that may be less familiar now but were for a good long time nearly colloquial in a variety of contexts: the idea of suffering "shipwreck in the faith"; or references to excessive disputatiousness as a "vain jangling"; or the notion that people who are eager to hear about new (perhaps unorthodox) ideas have "itching ears."

The Pastor, writing in Paul's voice, calls himself the "chief of sinners" – a phrase borrowed by John Bunyan for the title of one of his works. And although readers of the "Left Behind" series may not know it, the title of the 12th installment, "Glorious Appearing," comes from the Pastorals as well.

There's even a family of mutual funds called The Timothy Plan that, according to the Web site, invests with biblical principles, and cites the Pastor in its literature. I just checked their latest reports and they've taken a major hit recently like everyone else. So much for biblical principles. Or maybe, so much for the Pastor, who unconscionably restricts the number of elderly women who can be on the dole, who doesn't encourage the wealthy in his community to divest (as Jesus does in the Gospels), and who calls the teachings Paul passes on to his generation a deposit, or treasure.