Vocabulary
Vocabulary
A strong argument is produced from the vocabulary differences between the three Pastoral epistles and the ten Pauline epistles. P. N. Harrison built on the work of scholars who preceded him and compiled some impressive statistics. 4He pointed out that the three Pastorals make use of 902 words, of which 54 are proper names. Of the remaining 848 words, 306 do not occur in the other ten Pauline letters (more than a third of the total). Of the 306, no fewer than 175 occur nowhere else in the New Testament. The argument is then developed in two ways.
First, it is pointed out that this leaves 542 words shared by the Pauline letters and the Pastorals, of which no more than 50 are characteristic Pauline words in the sense that they are not used by other writers in the New Testament. Of the 492 words that are found in all three bodies—the Pastorals, the rest of Paul, and the rest of the New Testament—there are, of course, the basic words without which it would be impossible to write at all, and words that every Christian writer would necessarily use (e.g., "brother,” "love,” "faith”). Again, some words have different meanings from book to book. Paul, for example, uses αντέχομαι (antechomai, from αντέχω, G504) with the sense "to support,” "to aid” (1 Thess. 5:14), the Pastorals with the meaning "to hold fast” (Titus 1:9); κοινος (koinos, G3123) means "Levitically unclean” in Paul (Rom. 14:14) and "common” (as in "the common faith”) in the Pastorals (Titus 1:4).
Second, it is argued that many of the words in question are found in the apostolic fathers and the Apologists in the early second century. Of the 306 words in the Pastorals that are not in the Pauline Epistles, 211 are found in these second-century writings. 5This kind of reasoning leads many to the conclusion that the author of the Pastorals was not Paul but probably a writer living in the early second century. It is held to be unreasonable to think that in his old age Paul would suddenly produce a wealth of new words, words moreover that are found in a later period.
The argument sounds impressive, but it is not as convincing as it seems at first sight. Those who put it forward do not usually notice, for example, that most of the words shared by the Pastorals and the second-century writers are also found in other writings prior to A.D. 50. 6It cannot be argued that Paul would not have known them, nor can it be argued that Paul’s total vocabulary is the number of words in the ten letters (2,177 words). It is not necessary to argue that Paul produced hundreds of new words in his old age, for if he could use 2,177 words, there is no reason for supposing that he could not use another 306 words, most of which are known to have been current in his day. That some of the words are used with different meanings signifies no more than that the contexts are different. Paul uses words with different meanings in different contexts in the ten letters.
It is misleading simply to say that the Pastorals have 306 words that do not occur in the ten Paulines. On Harrison’s own figures, of the 306 there are 127 that occur in 1 Timothy alone, 81 in 2 Timothy alone, and 45 in Titus alone. 7This means that the vast majority are found in only one of the Pastorals and that the three differ from one another as much as (or more than) they differ from Paul. Are we to say that there were three pseudonymous writers? The statistics constitute no impressive argument for a single author. Or, to put the argument in a different way, if the figures show that the three Pastorals were written by one author, they also show that that author may well have been Paul.
This is to be borne in mind when related arguments are put forward. For example, it is pointed out that there are no more than half a dozen references to the Holy Spirit in the Pastorals, whereas Paul refers to him ninety times. This raises the question whether there are places in these letters where Paul must speak of the Spirit. He refers to him on those six occasions when it was appropriate, and we are not in a position to say that the Paul of the ten letters would have referred to him more often. We must be on our guard against taking up a position of omniscience about what went on in Paul’s mind.