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Bible Encyclopedias
Second Epistle to Timothy
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or In this book of the New Testament, after a brief thanksgiving for the faith of Timothy (i. 1-5), Paul is represented as warning him against false shame (6 seq.), adducing his own example and that of Onesiphorus. The need and the reward of endurance are then urged (ii. 1-13), and Timothy is bidden to adhere in his work to the Pauline gospel against the seductions of controversial and immoral heretics (ii. 14 seq.). 1 The practices of the latter are pungently depicted 2 (iii. 1-9); Paul reiterates his opening counsels (lo seq.) and then closes with a solemn charge to personal faithfulness. A note of personal matters concludes the epistle (iv. 6-22).
The last verse, with its two-fold greeting (6 14:nos ,uera Tou 7rveuµar6s co y, 7) x6.pcs AO' upL ' v), shows unconsciously but plainly that, while the epistle professes to be a private letter to Timothy, it is in reality addressed to a wider circle, like 1 Tim. and Titus. But its composite origin is also clear. 3 Thus iv. 6-22a, which is certainly authentic, is not homogeneous in itself, the situation of verses 6-8 hardly agreeing with that of 9 seq., while verse i i ("Luke alone is with me") cannot have been written at the same time as verse 21. Various schemes of analysis have been proposed to account for this and other passages of the same nature in the epistle, e.g. i. 15-18, iii. io seq. But the general result of such reconstructions is tentative. All that criticism has succeeded in establishing is the fact that the author had some reliquiae Paulinae at his disposal, notes written either before or during his last imprisonment in Rome, 4 and that these have been worked up into the present letter by one who rightly believed that his master would stoutly oppose the current errors of the age.
2 Timothy, like i Timothy, reveals with fair precision the period and aim of the writer of the pastorals. Evidently (cf. Acts xx. 29-30) the Pauline Christianity of Ephesus was imperilled seriously during the last quarter of the ist century. Its very growth invited attempts to weave ascetic, theosophic, semi-Jewish fancies round the faith, not unlike the attempts often made in modern India to assimilate Christian and local philosophies of religion. Against such the writer argues in Paul's name, as Luke had already done. From the composition of a speech in Paul's name (for, though the farewell in Acts goes back to first-hand tradition, it represents the author's standpoint as well as Paul's), it was but a step to compose letters in his name, especially on the basis of some of his extant notes. A genuine concern for local Christianity is the writer's justification for his work, and any idea of fraudulent aims must be dismissed at once.' "To a writer of this period, it would seem as legitimate an artifice to compose a letter as to compose a speech in the 1 Bahnsen gives an ingenious analysis of this section in the epistle. In ii. 8-13, ii. 6 is developed; in ii. 54-26, ii. 4; and in iii. 1 -4 (8), ii. 5. But this is as artificial as Otto's attempt to classify the contents of the epistle under the three notes of the Iry 13 a in i. 7.
2 On iii. 6 see the fragment from Philo quoted in Euseb. Praep. Evang. viii.
" If the epistle was an integral as we have it, its genuineness could scarcely be maintained "(Laughlin, p. 26).
4 Bacon (Story of St Paul, p. 198) and Clemen both assign part of the epistle to the Caesarean imprisonment, the former disentangling iv. 9, 11-18, 20-21a, 22b, the latter iv. 9-18. Hitzig had already found a Caesarean letter in i. 15, iv. 13-16, 20-22a. One great point in favour of such theories is that they give a natural sense to iv. 16, Paul's first defence being that before the Jews or before Felix.
Cf. the present writer's Historical New Testament (2nd ed., 1901, pp. 619 seq.), where the relevant literature is cited. An adequate monograph on ancient pseudonymous literature remains to be written; meantime, further reference may be made to the older essays of Mosheim ( Dissertatio de caussis suppositorum librorum inter Christianos saeculi primi et secundi, 1 733); Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris, pp. 80 seq.; K. R. KOstlin's article in Theol. Jahrbiicher (1851), pp. 149-221, on" Der pseud. Litteratur der altesten Kirche "; and A. Giidemann, in Classical Studies in Honour of H. Drissler, pp. 52-74 (New York, 5894).
5894).
XXVI. 32 name of a great man whose sentiments it was desired to reproduce and record; the question which seems so important to us, whether the words and even the sentiments are the great man's own or only his historian's, seems then hardly to have occurred either to writer or readers" (W. H. Simcox, Writers of the New Testament, p. 38). The address at Miletus is Paul's last word to the Christian elders of Ephesus, warning them against heresies (Acts xx. 29 seq.) and solemnly bidding them exercise their disciplinary duties. The Second Epistle to Timothy carries on this line of advice. Here Paul, being dead, yet speaks through Timothy to the local Christians who are exposed to such mischievous tendencies in their environment.
Where the writer has hardly succeeded - in representing Paul is in his relations to Timothy. One may admit that, strictly speaking, the latter at the age of about thirty-five or forty could still be called and that Paul might conceivably have termed him still his But the counsels addressed to him seem rather out of place when one recollects the position which he occupied. To a writer who desired a situation for such advice on church life and doctrine from the lips of Paul to his lieutenant, it was natural to think of a temporary absence.' But many of the directions are much too serious and fundamental to have been given in this form; one can hardly imagine that Paul considered Timothy (or Titus) still in need of elementary advice and warning upon such matters, and especially on personal purity. When they are regarded as typical figures of the later episcopi of the Church, the point of this emphasis upon elementary principles and duties is at once clear; they outline graphically the qualifications for the church offices in question.
The pressing need of the Church, as the writer conceives it, is to maintain the true Pauline tradition (2 Tim. i. 13, &c.) against certain moral and speculative ideas. This maintenance takes the twofold practical form of (a) adherence to formulated statements of the "sound teaching" and (b ) insistence on a succession of church officials (2 Tim. ii. 5-2) who are not merely to preside but to teach. The last point is significant in view of Didache xv. 1. The standpoint of the author is practically that of Clemens Romanus (xlii. seq.), who asserts that the apostles preached "everywhere in country and town, appointing their first-fruits, when they had proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons." The interests of discipline and doctrine were thus to be conserved.? Paul's lieutenants possess the central deposit of the apostolic faith, and have the duty as well as the right of exercising the authority with which that position invests them.
The occasional coincidences between the pastorals and Barnabas or Clemens Romanus do not prove anything more than a common milieu of thought, but the epistles were plainly familiar to Polycarp, who alludes to i Tim. ii. I, vi. 7, i o, and 2 Tim. ii. ' 1,25, iv. io (for this and the other passages from Polycarp, see The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, 5905, pp. 95 seq.). This indubitable use of the pastorals in Polycarp 8 throws the terminus ad quern of their composition back into the first decade of the 2nd century, 'and additional confirmation of this would be forthcoming were the evidence for their use in Ignatius more 6 The drawback was that, if Paul was soon to see his colleagues again (Titus i. 5; I Tim. i. 3), such detailed advice was hardly necessary; but this imperfection was inevitable.
' The post-Pauline atmosphere of the ecclesiastical regulations is felt most plainly in the references to such sub-apostolic features as the organized register of "widows." The E the Bta, ovos and the are also forbidden to contract a second marriage. Such, at any rate, seems the fairest interpretation of 1 Tim. iii. 2 in the light of early Christian tradition, for although the phrase "husband of one wife" might conceivably be intended as a prohibition of polygamy or vice (=faithful husband, or sober, married man), the antipathy to second marriages (cf. Jacoby, Neutest. Ethik, pp. 378 seq.) is quite in accord with sub-apostolic practice. It is almost as un-Pauline as the assumption that every must be married. Cf. on this whole subject Hilgenfeld ( Zeitschrift fur wiss. Theologie, 1886, pp. 456 seq.) and Schmiedel ( Encycl. Biblica, 3113 seq.); the opposite position is stated excellently by Hort ( Christian Ecclesia, 1898, 189 seq.) and Dr T. M. Lindsay ( Hibbert Journal, i. 166 seq., and in The Church and the Ministry in the early Centuries, 1903, pp. 139 seq.).
8 The pastorals soon passed into great favour in the early Church. Their method and aim were entirely congenial to the rising Catholic Church, and one is not surprised to find from writers in the East (Theophilus of Antioch, Justin Martyr) and West (Irenaeus, Tertullian and the author of 2 Clement) that they were widely read and valued. Absent from Marcion's canon, they were included in the Muratorian, where they appear as private letters ("pro affectu et dilectione"). See, on the external evidence in general, Zahn's Geschichte der neutest. Kanons, i. 634 seq.
secure. The occasional similarities of thought and expression between them and the Lucan writings suggest that the period of their origin lies within a quarter of a century after Paul's death, and, when one or two later accretions are admitted, the internal evidence, either upon the organization of the church 1 or upon the errors controverted, tallies with this hypothesis.
Literature. - Special monographs on this epistle by Leo (1850)(1850) and Bahnsen (Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, I., der 2 Tim., 1876) are to be noted. For a textual discussion of ii. 19, cf. Resch's Paulinismus, pp. 258-259. The allusion to the f3113Xia, AaX«Ta Tas pqu3pavas (iv. 13) has produced a wealth of discussion; the latter were probably pugillares membranei, sheets for private memoranda. The books may have included the Logia or Evangeli Scriptures from which I Tim. v. 18 is quoted (so Resch), but this is a mere conjecture. Cf., on the whole question, Birt's Das antike Buchwesen, pp. 50 seq., 65, 88 seq., and Nestle's Einfilhrung in das griechische N. T. (1899), pp. 39 seq. (J. MT.) Timur ( Timur i Leng, the lame Timur), commonly known as Tamerlane, the renowned Oriental conqueror, was born in 1336 at Kesh, better known as Shahr-i-Sabz, "the green city," situated some 50 m. south of Samarkand in Transoxiana. His father Teragai was head of the tribe of Berlas. Great-grandson of Karachar Nevian (minister of Jagatai, son of Jenghiz Khan, and commander-in-chief of his forces), and distinguished among his fellow-clansmen as the first convert to Islamism, Teragai might have assumed the high military rank which fell to him by right of inheritance; but like his father Burkul he preferred a life of retirement and study. Under the paternal eye the education of young Timur was such that at the age of twenty he had not only become an adept in manly outdoor exercises but had earned the reputation of being an attentive reader of the Koran. At this period, if we may credit the Memoirs (MalfuVit ), he exhibited proofs of a tender and sympathetic nature.
About 1358, however, he came before the world as a leader of armies. His career for the next ten or eleven years may be thus briefly summarized from the Memoirs. Allying himself both in cause and by family connexion with Kurgan, the dethroner and destroyer of Kazan, chief of the western Jagatai, he was deputed to invade Khorasan at the head of a thousand horse. This was the second warlike expedition in which he was the chief actor, and the accomplishment of its objects led to further operations, among them the subjection of Khwarizm and Urganj. After the murder of Kurgan the contentions which arose among the many claimants to sovereign power were arrested by the invasion of Toghluk Timur of Kashgar, a descendant of Jenghiz. Timur was despatched on a mission to the invader's camp, the result of which was his own appointment to the government of Mawara- 'lnahr (Transoxiana). By the death of his father he was also left hereditary head of the Berlas. The exigencies of his quasi-sovereign position compelled him to have recourse to his formidable patron, whose reappearance on the banks of the Sihon created a consternation not easily allayed. Mawara'lnahr was taken from Timur and entrusted to a son of Toghluk; but he was defeated in battle by the bold warrior he had replaced at the head of a numerically far inferior force. Toghluk's death facilitated the work of reconquest, and a few years of perseverance and energy sufficed for its accomplishment, as well as for the addition of a vast extent of territory. During this period Timur and his brother-in-law, Hosain - at first fellowfugitives and wanderers in joint adventures full of interest and romance - became rivals and antagonists. At the close of 1369 Hosain was assassinated and Timur, having been formally proclaimed sovereign at Balkh, mounted the throne at Samarkand, the capital of his dominions.
The next thirty years or so were spent in various wars and expeditions. Timur not only consolidated his rule at home by the subjection of intestine foes, but sought extension of territory by encroachments upon the lands of foreign potentates. His conquests to the west and north-west led him among the Mongols of the Caspian and to the banks of the Ural and the Volga; 1 The pastorals in this aspect are closer to Clemens Romanus than to Ignatius.
those to the south and south-west comprehended almost every province in Persia, including Bagdad, Kerbela and Kurdistan. One of the most formidable of his opponents was Toktamish, who after having been a refugee at the court of Timur became ruler both of the eastern Kipchak and the Golden Horde, and quarrelled with Timur over the possession of Khwarizm. It was not until 1395 that the power of Toktamish was finally broken (see Mongols; Golden Horde).
In 1398, when Timur was more than sixty years of age, Farishta tells us that, "informed of the commotions and civil wars of India," he "began his expedition into that country," and on the 12th of September "arrived on the banks of the Indus." His passage of the river and upward march along the left bank, the reinforcement he provided for his grandson Pir Mahommed (who was invested in Multan), the capture of towns or villages accompanied, it might be, with destruction of the houses and the massacre of the inhabitants, the battle before Delhi and the easy victory, the triumphal entry into the doomed city, with its outcome of horrors-all these circumstances belong to the annals of India. In April 1399, some three months after quitting the capital of Mahmud Toghluk, Timur was back in his own capital beyond the Oxus. It need scarcely be added that an immense quantity of spoil was conveyed away. According to Clavijo, ninety captured elephants were employed merely to carry stones from certain quarries to enable the conqueror to erect a mosque at Samarkand. The war with the Turks and Egyptians which succeeded the return from India was rendered notable by the capture of Aleppo and Damascus, and especially by the defeat and imprisonment of Sultan Bayezid I. (see Turkey: History, and Egypt: History, Mahommedan period). This was Timur's last campaign. Another was projected against China, but the old warrior was attacked by fever and ague when encamped on the farther side of the Sihon (Syr-Daria) and died at Atrar (Otrar) on the 17th of February 1405. Markham, in his introduction to the narrative of Clavijo's embassy, states that his body "was embalmed with musk and rose water, wrapped in linen, laid in an ebony coffin and sent to Samarkand, where it was buried." Timur had carried his victorious arms on one side from the Irtish and the Volga to the Persian Gulf and on the other from the Hellespont to the Ganges.
Timur's generally recognized biographers are - `Ali Yazdi, commonly called Sharifu 'd-Din, author of the Persian Zafarnama, translated by Petis de la Croix in 1722, and from French into English by J. Darby in the following year; and Ahmad ibn Mohammed ibn Abdallah, al Dimashki, al `Ajmi, commonly called Ibn 'Arabshah, author of the Arabic `Ajaibu '1 Makhlnkat, translated by the Dutch Orientalist Golius in 1636. In the work of the former, as Sir William Jones remarks, "the Tartarian conqueror is represented as a liberal, benevolent and illustrious prince"; in that of the latter he is "deformed and impious, of a low birth and detestable principles." But the favourable account was written under the personal supervision of Timur's grandson, Ibrahim, while the other was the production of his direst enemy. Few indeed, if any, original annals of this class are written otherwise than to order, under patronage, or to serve a purpose to which truth is secondary. Among less reputed biographies or materials for biography may be mentioned a second Zafarnama, by Maulana Nizamu 'd-Din Shanab Ghazani (Nizam Shami), stated to be "the earliest known history of Timur, and the only one written in his lifetime"; and vol. i. of the Matla`u's-Sa'dain - a choice Persian MS. work of 1495 - introduced to Orientalists in Europe by Hammer, Jahrbucher, Dorn and (notably) Quatremere. There are also the Memoirs (Malfuzat ) and Institutes (Tuzukat ), of which an important section is styled Designs and Enterprises (Tadbirat wa Kangashaha). Upon the genuineness of these doubt has been thrown. The circumstance of their alleged discovery and presentation to Shah Jahan in 1637 was of itself open to suspicion. Alhazen, quoted by Purchas in his quaint notice of Timur and referred to by Sir John Malcolm, can hardly be accepted as a serious authority. His assumed memoir was printed for English readers in 1597 by William Ponsonby under the title of a Historie of the Great Emperor Tamerlan, drawn from the ancient monuments by Messire Jean du Bec, Abbot of Mortimer; and another version of the same book is to be found in the Histoire du Grand Tamerlan, by De Sainctyon, published at Amsterdam in 1678. But, although the existence of this Alhazen of Jean de Bec has been believed by many, the more trustworthy critics consider the history and historian to be equally fictitious.
Reference may be made to two more sources of information (I) Supposed likenesses of Timur are to be found in books and in the splendid collection of Oriental manuscripts and drawings in the British Museum. One contained in the Shah Jahan Nama - a gorgeous specimen of illuminated Persian manuscript and exquisite calligraphy - represents a most ordinary, middle-aged Oriental, with narrow black whisker fringing the cheek and meeting the tip of the chin in a scanty, pointed beard; a thin moustache sweeps in a semicircle from above the upper lip; the eyebrow over the almond-shaped eye is marked but not bushy. But it were vain to seek for an expression of genius in the countenance. Another portrait is included in a set of sketches by native artists, some of which, taken probably from life, show great care and cleverness. Timur is here displayed as a stoutish, long-bodied man, below the middle-height, in age and feature not unlike the first portrait, but with thicker and more straggling hair, and distincter, though not more agreeable character in the facial expression, yet not a sign of power, genius, or any elements of grandeur or celebrity. The uncomfortable figure in the Bodleian Library does not give much help. Sir John Malcolm has been at some pains to invest his portrait of Timur with individuality. But an analysis of his results leaves the reader in more perplexity than satisfaction at the kind of information imparted, and he reverts insensibly to the sources from which his instructor has himself been instructed. (2) As regards plays, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine Timur is described as tall of stature, straightly fashioned, large of limb, having joints strongly knit, long and sinewy arms, a breadth of shoulders to "bear old Atlas's burden," pale of complexion, and with "amber hair wrapp'd in curls." The outline of this description might be from Sharifu 'd-Din, while the colours are the poet's own. A Latin memoir of Tamerlane by Perondinus, printed in 1600, entitled Magni Tamerlanis scytharum imperatoris vita, describes Timur as tall and bearded, broad-chested and broadshouldered, well-built but lame, of a fierce countenance and with receding eyes, which express cruelty and strike terror into the lookers-on. But Jean du Bec's account of Timur's appearance is quite different. Now Tamburlaine was written in 1586. The first English translation of Jean du Bec is dated in 1595, the Life by Perondinus in 1600, and Petis de la Croix did not introduce Sharifu 'd-Din or 'Ali Yazdi to European readers till .1722. The dramatist must have heard of Timur in other quarters, equally reliable it may be with those available in the present stage of Oriental research. At the beginning of the 18th century Timur was represented in Rowe's Tamerlane as a model of valour and virtue. The plot, however, has little to do with history, and is improbable and void of interest. By Matthew Gregory Lewis again "Timour" is depicted as the conventional tyrant of a gorgeous melodrama, slaying, burning, slaughtering and committing every possible atrocity until checked by a violent death and a poetical climax.
Apart from modern European savants and historians, and the more strictly Oriental chroniclers who have written in Persian, Turkish or Arabic, the following authorities may be cited - Laonicus Chalcondylas, Joannes Leunclavius, Joachimus Camerarius, Petrus Perondinus, Lazaro Soranzo, Simon Mairlus, Matthew Michiovius. A score or so of other names are given by Samuel Purchas. See also Sir Clements Markham's Clavijo, in the Hakluyt Society's publications; White's edition of Davy's translation of the Institutes (1783); Stewart's translation of the Malfug,t; Malcolm's History of Persia; and Trans. Roy. Soc. (1885); Horn, "Gesch. Ians in islam. Zeit," in Geiger and Kuhn, Grundr. der iranisch. Philol. (1904); works quoted, s.v. MONGOLS. (F. J. G.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Second Epistle to Timothy'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/s/second-epistle-to-timothy.html. 1910.
