The First and Second Letters to Timothy

Quinn’s massive treatment of 1 and 2 Timothy, completed after his death by William Wacker and intended to be read alongside his earlier commentary on Titus, is one of the most distinctive and underused resources on the Pastorals. Its breadth of ancient evidence is exceptional, ranging across Greek and Jewish literature, inscriptions, papyri, early Christian writings, liturgy, church order, and textual history. Quinn develops highly original proposals concerning sources and redaction, early church orders, ministerial structures, women ministers, Pauline succession, and the transmission of apostolic teaching; his treatment of 2 Timothy 2:2, for example, sees the passage as describing the institutional continuation of Pauline ministry and asks whether later notions of apostolic succession grew from precisely this pattern. The weakness is the reverse side of its originality: Quinn frequently reconstructs underlying sources, Roman church orders, or Lukan redaction with a confidence that exceeds what the surviving evidence can prove. Even when those hypotheses are unconvincing, however, the philological and historical investigation surrounding them is immensely valuable. It is not the commentary I would recommend first, but it is one of the best commentaries to consult when the standard explanations have begun to sound too similar.

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