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PHILIP H. TOWNER, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006). Pp. xlviii + 886. $52.
There is a sharp scholarly divide between those who believe that Paul did not write the letters to Timothy and Titus and those who believe he did. Different stances on authorship generate such different hermeneutics that it is problematic for someone on one side of the divide to review the work of someone on the other. Yet here we are: Towner has written a substantive commentary based on the assumption of authenticity, but I am a card-carrying member of the other party.
Towner begins, as he must, with authorship. He identifies what he regards as weaknesses and flaws in "the intractable and monolithic (and yet unproven) scholarly consensus" (p. xv) of pseudonymity. This consensus, he suggests, overlooks the long period prior to the nineteenth century when authenticity was unchallenged [a period not notable for critical scholarship] (p. 10). He continues: the criteria subsequently used by critical scholarship are "questionable" (p. 22), and "historical disjunctions" that the dominant paradigm finds between the letters to Timothy and Titus and the undisputed letters have been overblown. There are enough gaps in the historical record of the Pauline mission to accommodate letters to Ephesus and Crete. T. also finds flawed the use of stylistic difference to support pseudonymity. Use of amanuenses could account for some stylistic differences [though these letters mention no amanuenses], and the concept of a uniform Pauline "style" is "simplistic"...