Theopedia

Second Epistle to Timothy

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

— 2 Timothy 4:7 (ESV)

Overview

Second Timothy is the last of Paul’s three pastoral epistles, written to his younger colleague Timothy near the close of Paul’s own life and ministry.1 Paul names himself as author in the opening verse (2 Tim. 1:1). Unlike 1 Timothy and Titus, which give church-order instructions to two men overseeing local congregations, 2 Timothy is personal rather than official: Paul, a prisoner awaiting execution in Rome, writes to call Timothy to his side and to leave him a final charge.1

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Author and Date

Paul identifies himself as the letter’s author and addresses Timothy as his “beloved child” (2 Tim. 1:1-2). The letter places its own writing in a Roman imprisonment harsher than Paul’s first: he writes as a prisoner (1:8, 16-17; 2:9), expecting soon to seal his testimony with his blood (4:6).1 Barrows dates this second imprisonment, and Paul’s death, to the last years of Nero’s reign, “about A.D. 67 or 68.”2

The early church received the letter as Paul’s own without dispute. Barrows notes that the pastoral epistles’ “genuineness … is sustained by the unanimous testimony of the ancient church,” with doubt arising “only in modern times” and resting “wholly on alleged internal evidence.”3 That modern doubt persists in critical scholarship, which classes 2 Timothy among several New Testament letters judged pseudonymous: written later, in Paul’s name, rather than by Paul himself.4

Historical and Literary Context

Paul wrote to summon Timothy to Rome, urging him to come “before winter” (2 Tim. 4:21), when sea travel would close for the year. Timothy was probably at or near Ephesus: Paul’s greeting to “the household of Onesiphorus,” a family tied to that city, fits this setting (4:19; compare 1:16-18).1 Paul asks him to bring Mark, “very useful to me for ministry” (4:11), along with the cloak and the scrolls and parchments left behind at Troas (4:13). His circumstances were bleak: “at my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me” (4:16), and Demas had forsaken him, “in love with this present world” (4:10). Because Paul is calling Timothy away from his post rather than instructing him in it, the letter’s exhortations run more general and more personal than the specific directions for church government in 1 Timothy and Titus.1

The false teachers Paul warns against throughout the pastoral epistles were largely of Jewish background, corrupt in practice as well as doctrine, with a speculative bent that resembled, without actually being, the Gnosticism of the following century.5

Structure

  1. A charge to faithfulness and endurance (chaps. 1-2). Paul urges Timothy not to be ashamed of the gospel or of Paul’s chains, but to share in suffering for the gospel (1:8), to guard “the good deposit entrusted to you” (1:14), to endure hardship “as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2:3), and to entrust what he has heard from Paul to other faithful teachers able to teach others also (2:2).
  2. A warning about the last days and perilous times (chap. 3). Paul describes the moral decay of “the last days” (3:1-9) and reminds Timothy that the sacred writings he has known from childhood are able to make him wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (3:14-17).
  3. A final charge to preach the word (chap. 4). Paul charges Timothy to “preach the word,” ready in season and out of season (4:2), reports that his own death is near (4:6-8), and closes with personal requests and greetings (4:9-22).

Major Themes

All Scripture is breathed out by God (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Paul grounds Timothy’s ministry in the divine origin of “all Scripture,” useful “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (3:16). Scripture’s own testimony to this God-breathed character, Bavinck writes, is not a formulated dogma so much as a witness Scripture itself supplies the material for: “Holy Scripture nowhere offers a clearly formulated dogma on inspiration but confronts us with the witness of its God-breathed character, and it furnishes us all the components needed for construction of the dogma.”6 See Inspiration of the Bible for the doctrine in full.

Enduring hardship as a good soldier of Christ (2 Tim. 2:3-4; compare 1:8). Paul tells Timothy to “share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2:3), the same charge his own imprisonment embodies. Calvin frames this kind of suffering as an honor rather than a misfortune: “How high the honour which God bestows upon us in distinguishing us by the special badge of his soldiers.”7

Guarding the deposit of sound doctrine (2 Tim. 1:13-14; 2:2). Timothy is to “follow the pattern of the sound words” he has heard from Paul and, by the Holy Spirit, “guard the good deposit entrusted to you” (1:13-14), then pass it to others qualified to teach it in turn (2:2). The charge answers a real threat: the false teachers active in Ephesus and the other churches under Timothy’s care were already corrupting both doctrine and practice.5

Paul’s own confidence facing death (2 Tim. 4:6-8). Paul closes his ministry with the declaration “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (4:7), and looks ahead to “the crown of righteousness” the Lord will award him and all who love Christ’s appearing (4:8). Calvin reads this confidence as the pattern for every believer facing death: “amid all our conflicts let us exult after the example of Paul, that he who has promised us future life ‘is able to keep that’ which ‘is committed unto him,’ and thus glory that there is laid up for us ‘a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give.’”8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 481-482. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Barrows, 477. ↩

  3. Barrows, 478. ↩

  4. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon”: “Much of critical scholarship is convinced that many of these writings are pseudonymous, including the Pastoral Epistles, Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Peter, Jude, and others.” ↩

  5. Barrows, 477-478. ↩ ↩2

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 8, “Of Bearing the Cross, One Branch of Self-Denial,” 16-24. ↩

  8. Calvin, Institutes, book 3, chap. 25, “Of the Last Resurrection,” 259-276. ↩