Date
Date
Robinson reminds us that Titus was in Corinth, busy about the collection (2 Cor. 8; 12:17-18), and that he was probably not with Paul when Romans was written, since he is not mentioned in the greetings of Romans 16:21-23, as Timothy is. Paul was finishing off the collection himself (Rom. 15:28), and he may at this point have sent Titus to Crete and left him there while he himself set off for Jerusalem. The letter to Titus, Robinson thinks, may have been written while Paul was on the way to Jerusalem, which gives a date of A.D. 57. 49 If we date this letter during Paul’s ministry as described in Acts, this is as good a suggestion as any. It is perhaps supported by the fact that the church in Crete was a very young church, lacking even elders (Titus 1:5).
But to most scholars such a date seems very improbable. Acts puts Paul neither in Crete nor in Nicopolis, so it seems better to think of this letter, like the other Pastorals, as coming from a time after Paul’s release from a first Roman imprisonment. In that case, it was written before 2 Timothy, and somewhere around the same period as 1 Timothy—that is, in the middle 60s.
Those who see the letter as pseudonymous, usually date it some time in the second century (see on 1 Timothy).