Epistle to Titus

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Epistle to Titus

Codex Sinaiticus - Titus.jpg

Titus in the Codex Sinaiticus, c. 350 CE.

Author Anonymous
Type Ancient writing
Genre Epistle
Themes Religion
Age Group Adult

The Epistle to Titus, often written as simply, Titus, is the seventeenth book in the New Testament. It is a letter written in ancient Greek around 80-190 CE to a man named Titus. The author identified himself as Paul, but few historians believe it was actually written by Paul. The epistle is often grouped with the First Epistle to Timothy and the Second Epistle to Timothy as the Pastoral Epistles. This letter is in the public domain.

Personal

Own?Several translations.
Read?NIV translation.
Finished2016-04-21.

I read this letter to increase my understanding of Christianity.

Authorship and Dating

The author identifies himself as Paul, and, according to Christian tradition, this letter was written by Paul the Apostle to his disciple Titus around 67 CE. However, like much of the New Testament, both the authorship and date are in dispute and most scholars suggest an unknown author writing from 80 CE to as late as 190 CE, long after Paul was dead.

There are no known original manuscripts. The oldest fragment is Papyrus 32, dated to around 220–225 CE.

Content

The author tells the recipient to avoid evil, do good, and be extremely obedient (and demand obedience from their slaves), and also greatly disparages women.

Review

Overall:

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Good

  • Nothing.

Bad

  • Like most of the epistles, the author writes the obvious: do good things and avoid doing bad things. He puts forth a black and white dichotomy where everything that is bad is horribly evil, and everything that is good is pure and divine. This is a childish outlook on morality.
  • Humorously, the author describes genealogies as unprofitable and useless (3:9), but old testament books are filled with long genealogies, and even the gospels of Matthew and Luke begin with them to establish Jesus's lineage, which really is useless since Joseph wasn't his father.

Ugly

  • The author has a very horrifying idea of what "good" means. To him, it's "good" if women are chaste, busy at home, and subject to their husbands (2:3) and when slaves are obedient and faithful to their masters (2:9).

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