2 Timothy: A Last Letter in His Name

At a Glance

Who wrote it: It says Paul, chained in prison in Rome and expecting to die, writing to Timothy. Many scholars think a follower wrote it along with 1 Timothy and Titus. Some who doubt those two think this one may be Paul’s own, or may preserve pieces of his last notes.

When: If Paul wrote it, shortly before his death in the mid-60s. If not, most likely around 100.

Written for: Timothy, as the letter tells it, and the churches he served. It answers the fear of what comes after Paul: suffering, false teachers, and how to hold on to what he taught.

What it remembers of me: Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, of the offspring of David (2:8). It also has a little hymn whose line If we deny him, he also will deny us (2:12) sounds like something I said.

How close it stays to me: Close on forgiving and gentleness. Far where it says Alexander will be repaid.

If you only read three chapters: 2 Timothy 1, 2 Timothy 3 and 2 Timothy 4. It has four.

Words to Know

Testament — in the ancient world, a famous man’s farewell speech, giving his last instructions before he died. Many were written by other people in his name.

God-breathed — in Greek, theopneustos. The word appears only once in the whole Bible, in this letter. Many Bibles translate it inspired.

The parchments — scrolls or notebooks made of animal skin, which the letter asks Timothy to bring.

The Book in Brief

Paul writes from prison to Timothy, his beloved child. He recalls the faith of Timothy’s grandmother Lois and mother Eunice. In chapter 1 he tells Timothy not to be ashamed of the good news or of Paul in chains, and to guard what he was given. Everyone in Asia has turned away from Paul, but Onesiphorus found him in Rome and was not ashamed.

Chapter 2 compares Timothy to a soldier, an athlete and a farmer, and tells him to pass on what he has heard to faithful people who can teach others. Paul warns against quarrels over words, names two men who have gone wrong about the resurrection, and says the Lord’s servant must be gentle.

Chapter 3 warns of hard times ahead and tells Timothy to hold to the scriptures he has known since childhood.

Chapter 4 is Paul’s farewell. He charges Timothy to preach the word and says his own time to leave has come. He asks Timothy to come before winter and to bring his cloak and his books. Friends have left, only Luke is with him, and no one stood by him at his first defense, though the Lord did. He ends with greetings.

Of the three Pastoral Letters, this one is the most personal. Paul is in chains. Almost everyone has left him. He knows the end is near, and he says so: For I am already being offered, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith (2 Timothy 4:6–7).

People have read those words at funerals for centuries. They are worth reading slowly. Then it is worth asking who wrote them.

The cloak and the books

Here is the strongest reason some scholars think this letter really is Paul’s.

Near the end, the writer asks Timothy to come before winter, and to bring a few things: Bring the cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus when you come, and the books, especially the parchments (2 Timothy 4:13). He mentions who has left and who has stayed. Demas left me, having loved this present world … Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with you, for he is useful to me (2 Timothy 4:10–11). He left a man named Trophimus sick at Miletus.

Who would invent a cloak? It reads like a real man in a real cell, cold, missing his things.

The other side answers that writers of letters in a famous person’s name did exactly this. Small, homely details made a letter feel genuine, and the ancient world had many such letters. The names here also match names in Paul’s real letters, where Demas, Luke and Mark send greetings together (Philemon 24), so a later writer could have taken them from there.¹

A middle view is that a follower of Paul built this letter around a few genuine notes from the end of Paul’s life. Nobody can prove it either way. The language and the setting are close to 1 Timothy and Titus, and most critical scholars think all three came from the same later hand.

Go deeperWhat a prisoner needed from his friends

Paul asks for a cloak and for books. That is less odd than it sounds, because a prisoner in the Roman world could not count on the state to look after him.

Roman prisons were mainly places to hold a person until trial or punishment. The jurist Ulpian, writing in the early 200s, said plainly that a prison is for keeping people, not for punishing them.² Prisoners usually relied on friends and family for food, clothing, bedding and news.³

That is why abandonment hurt so much. A prisoner with no visitors could go cold and hungry. It is also why the letter remembers Onesiphorus so warmly. In Rome he sought me diligently and found me (2 Timothy 1:17). Finding a prisoner in a large city took effort.

It also took nerve. Chains marked a man as a criminal, and friends could be shamed, or worse, by being seen with him. The letter says Onesiphorus was not ashamed of my chain (2 Timothy 1:16). Scholars who study Roman custody point to this shame as one reason prisoners were so often left alone.³

So the cloak is not a small detail. It is what a man in a cold cell needs from someone brave enough to come.

A last testament

Whoever wrote it, the letter belongs to a kind of writing everyone in that world knew. It is a testament, a farewell.

My scriptures have them. Moses gives his farewell to Israel in Deuteronomy. Jacob blesses his sons before he dies. The Acts of the Apostles gives Paul a farewell speech too, to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus, where he tells them they will never see his face again (Acts 20:17–38). In the century before me and the centuries after, Jews and Christians wrote testaments for many famous figures who had died long before.⁴

A testament gives a dying man’s last instructions to the people who come after him. Hold on to the truth. Guard what you were given. Beware of the teachers who are coming. That is what this letter does.

Left alone

The saddest lines in the letter are about being abandoned.

This you know, that all who are in Asia turned away from me (2 Timothy 1:15). At my first defense, no one came to help me, but all left me. May it not be held against them (2 Timothy 4:16).

I know something about that. On the night I was arrested, my friends all left him, and fled (Mark 14:50). And Luke remembers me saying, from the cross, Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34).⁵

May it not be held against them. Whoever wrote that line, it is the right one.

The same letter is less generous to a man named Alexander the coppersmith: The Lord will repay him according to his deeds (2 Timothy 4:14). And to two men named Hymenaeus and Philetus, who taught that the resurrection is already past, whose words will consume like gangrene (2 Timothy 2:17–18). The letter also says The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but be gentle toward all (2 Timothy 2:24). Like most of us, it did not always manage both.

Every scripture

This letter has one sentence that has carried more weight than almost any other in the New Testament.

Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).

You may have been taught that this verse proves the whole Bible is without error, cover to cover. Read it in its place, and three things stand out.

First, which scriptures. The verse before says that Timothy had known the holy Scriptures from infancy (2 Timothy 3:15). When Timothy was a child, there was no New Testament. There were no gospels at all. The scriptures his mother and grandmother taught him were my scriptures, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. This letter itself was not yet scripture to anyone. It was a letter.

Second, the grammar. The Greek can also be read Every God-breathed scripture is also profitable, and some older English Bibles translate it that way.⁶ Either way, the verse says scripture is breathed by God and useful. It does not explain what that means, and it does not list the books.

Third, what it is for. The sentence goes on: that each person who belongs to God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:17). The point is not a theory about a book. The point is good work. That is what I always thought the scriptures were for.

Go deeperWhen the New Testament was put together

When this letter was written, there was no New Testament. Paul’s letters were copied and passed from church to church, and a letter in his name asks that one be read aloud in another city (Colossians 4:16). But no one had gathered them into a set.

The first person we know of to make a fixed list was Marcion, a shipowner from Pontus who taught in Rome about the year 140. His list had one gospel, an edited Luke, and ten letters of Paul.⁷ Other Christians had to decide what they thought belonged. By about 180, Irenaeus, a bishop in Gaul, was arguing that there should be four gospels, no more and no fewer.⁸

Agreement came slowly, and not everywhere. About 325 the historian Eusebius sorted books into those accepted by everyone and those still disputed. Some of the disputed ones, such as James, 2 Peter and Jude, are in your Bible now.⁹

The first surviving list with exactly the twenty-seven books of your New Testament is an Easter letter written in 367 by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. Church councils in North Africa, at Hippo in 393 and at Carthage in 397, approved the same list. No council of that age decided it for the whole church, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 did not take it up.¹⁰

The last days

The third chapter has a list of what people will be like in the last days. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant … lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding a form of godliness, but having denied its power (2 Timothy 3:2–5).

Every generation since has read that list and recognized its own neighbors. That is because it does not describe one generation. It describes people.

But notice which sins come first. Lovers of self, lovers of money. And notice the last line, the people who keep a form of godliness without its power. The writer was not warning about people outside the church. He was warning about people inside it.

A grandmother and a mother

The letter begins with a small detail I like. It remembers the sincere faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5). Acts says Timothy’s mother was a Jewish believer and his father was a Greek (Acts 16:1).

The letters to Timothy include the one that told women not to teach. And the young man they were written to learned his faith from two women.

How it ended

The letter expects death, and the real Paul did die in Rome. Acts ends with him there, under guard, still preaching, and does not tell what happened next. A letter written from Rome around the year 96, known as 1 Clement, says that Paul gave his testimony before rulers and was taken from the world. Later tradition says he was beheaded under the emperor Nero, in the mid-60s.¹¹

I have kept the faith. Whether Paul wrote those words in his cell, or a student who loved him wrote them afterward, they were true of him.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Timothy 3:14–17.

You will find: the scriptures Timothy knew from infancy, which could only have been the scriptures of my people, and a verse that ends with every good work.

Then read 2 Timothy 4:9–21. Notice the cloak, the books, the friends who left and the ones who stayed.

The Short Version

• 2 Timothy is written as Paul’s last letter, from a prison cell in Rome.
• Its personal details, like the cloak left at Troas, are the best argument that Paul wrote it. Most scholars still think a follower did, perhaps using genuine notes.
• It belongs to a known kind of writing, the farewell testament.
• Every Scripture is God-breathed meant the Jewish scriptures. The New Testament did not exist yet.
• May it not be held against them is the right answer to being abandoned.