1–2 Timothy, Titus

Pao’s commentary is one of the most original and substantial recent contributions to the Pastoral Epistles. Its distinctive strength is the integration of textual criticism, close grammatical and discourse analysis, historical background, and theological interpretation, with particularly innovative use of sociolinguistics and register theory. Pao challenges the influential view that the Pastorals represent an increasingly domesticated Christianity accommodating itself to respectable Greco-Roman society, arguing instead that apparently conventional language concerning household, godliness, benefaction, and public conduct can carry a deliberately subversive gospel message. His discussions of Artemis and imperial ideology, Pauline authorship, Jewish and Septuagintal backgrounds, benefaction, and the distinctive rhetorical purposes of the three letters repeatedly generate fresh insights. Some of the proposed Artemis and imperial resonances remain necessarily suggestive rather than demonstrable, and his contextual reading of 1 Timothy 2 will remain debated, but Pao generally distinguishes carefully between what the linguistic evidence establishes and what historical reconstruction merely makes plausible. An exceptionally rich, independent, and technically sophisticated commentary that deserves to stand alongside Towner and Yarbrough among the very best contemporary treatments of the Pastorals.