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An Introduction to the Study of the New Testament
An Introduction to the Study of the New Testament Author:Samuel Davidson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIEST EPISTLE TO TIMOTHY. TIME OF WRITING. It Will be shown hereafter that the epistle was not written soon after Paul had left Ephesus (Acts xviii. 19... more ») in Phrygia or Galatia ; nor on the way to Macedonia, or at some place in it (Acts xx. 1, 2) ; nor in Macedonia during a visit not recorded in the Acts, which took place after his second arrival at Ephesus ; nor while he was in captivity at Ca;sarea ; nor in a supposed second imprisonment at Rome. The difficulties of these hypotheses have proved great to such as assume the authenticity of the epistle ; and are likely to remain barriers to it. A comparison of the letter with the acknowledged Pauline ones, either with the earlier to the Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians ; or the later to the Philippians, shows a different condition of the Christian Church. In the one case we see its nascent form ; in the other a more settled order. In the one, the Church was still in a transition state ; in the other it had ' the form of- sound words ' and a developed ecclesiastical organisation. Hence most critics incline to a late date. To get an early one by inserting the work somewhere in the history of the Acts seems to clash with the general tone of the letter, which is historically intelligible only in case of a late date, because the polemic directed against the false teachers shows that they had appeared as open advocates of erroneous tenets for some time. The state of the Ephesian church as seen from the epistle, with its well-developed organisation, indicates the lapse of a considerable period since its origin. Emoluments were attached to offices ; and false teachers, different from the Judaisers with whom Paul contended, errorists who held Gnostic views, had made an impression on the church. In the first epistle, the s...« less