Destination
Destination
The letter purports to have been written to Timothy (2 Tim. 1:1-2), and the contents bear this out. Personal touches such as the references to Lois and Eunice (1:5) are very natural in such a letter and hard to explain otherwise. So with Timothy’s tears (1:4) and Paul’s laying hands on him (1:6) and with the references to Paul’s being deserted (1:15; 4:10). The prayers for Onesiphorus together with the information that he made a hard but successful search for Paul and the reference to his previous activities in Ephesus (1:16-18) are the kind of thing we might expect in a private letter. The same is true of personal admonitions to Timothy (2:1-2, 22-26; 3:14; 4:2, 5) and the little chatty section at the end when Paul gives news of friends and some information about himself (4:922). The letter is throughout so personal that it is probably the hardest of the three Pastorals to claim as pseudonymous.
Those who deny that it was a letter written to Timothy point to the plural in the grace at the end (2 Tim. 4:22). But this surely means no more than that Paul extends his greetings to the Christians who were with Timothy at the time he wrote. There does not seem anything else on which to base a theory of other recipients than Timothy, unless we go along with the whole theory of pseudonymity, in which case we must say that we do not know to whom the letter was written.