A Text centred rhetorical analysis of Paul's Letter to Titus

Lumping or clustering apparent opposition
According to Young (1995:276), the opposition constitutes a group of teachers of “gnosis falsely so
called”. The problem is that this description is only mentioned in 1 Timothy.
Heresy or Heresies?
Bailey (1994:335) speaks of the heresy as a single indistinguishable entity identical in all three letters.
However, 2 Timothy has very little information on the heresy. In Titus, the description is comparatively
vague. This does not leave much room for anything but conjecture.
God: Sovereign Creator and Sustainer
Another example of the cumulative contrastive reading principle is found in Bailey (1994:341). In a
subsection that deals with God’s involvement in his works, the following sentence occurs, clearly
illustrative of the assumptions of the author: “Three times in these letters Paul credited God with being
the Creator and Sustainer of everything (1 Tim. 4:4; 6:13, 15)”. Notice how the author refers to three
letters, when in actuality he only cites three instances from one of the three letters! This is another
example of the operation of the cumulative-complimentary reading fallacy by a scholar who supports
Pauline authorship of this corpus.
The above suffice as examples of the cumulative-complimentary reading principle (fallacy?). Today,
there are increasing calls among New Testament scholarship to acknowledge the individuality of the
letters. Thus, according to Mounce (2000:cxx), the three are “so significantly different that apart from a
few verses on church structure and the opponents, there is little overlap of content”. This recognition of
the distinctiveness of the three and exhortations to appreciate the individuality of the three letters are
gaining momentum. A detailed critique of “grouping” can be consulted in Johnson’s commentary
(1996:8-18).
Individualistic-contrastive principle
An emerging trend, among scholars in the Pastoral Letters, favours an approach that prioritises the
study of each letter apart from and prior to comparison with the rest of the corpus (Van Neste,
2002:120; Johnson, 1996:7, 19, 22). The most vociferous proponent of this approach is Luke Timothy
Johnson. In his commentary, he summarises his approach stating that he will pay careful attention to
the “literary form of each letter … individually and in particular rather than in general and as a group”
(1996:32). A host of scholars have recently made significant contributions to the study of the letter to
Titus. These include contributions by Harris (1980), Hagner (1998), Thurston (1999), Kidd (1999),
Classen (2002), Van Neste (2002), Van Neste (2003) and Faber (2005). My rhetorical analysis of the
Letter to Titus is motivated in part by the recognition that the letter has its own voice and can stand on
its own. Like Johnson, I too believe that if scholars evaluated the letters individually first, and then
compared them with the rest of the Pauline corpus, the conclusions on pseudonymity would stand on
shaky ground (Johnson, 1996:7; Carson and Moo, 2005:555).
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