Introduction

A Letter Written Near the End

Nero’s custody was closing in on Paul, and the visit he had promised Timothy in his first letter kept slipping out of reach. Paul’s answer, Theophylact suggests at the opening of this, the shortest of his prefatory Arguments in the Pauline series, was simple and circumstantial: unable to come in person, he wrote instead, to console his disciple by letter in place of the presence he could not give. Theophylact reads real strain behind Timothy’s situation—worn down, he suggests, both by Paul’s absence and by the weight of governing a church, a burden that presses even on able men, and pressed with particular force in a season, as this one was, when persecution was breaking out on every side. Paul also asks Timothy to come to him, Theophylact notes, because by now he was nearing the end of his own life, and wished to see his disciple once more before it came.

A Gift Received Through the Laying On of Hands

Early in the letter Paul reminds Timothy of the grace “in you through the laying on of my hands” (2 Tim. 1:6), and Theophylact reads the verse as Paul’s own record of Timothy’s ordination: Paul had laid hands on him and made him a bishop, and the charge now is not to receive some new gift but to fan the one already given into a stronger flame. The spirit of power, love, and self-control that follows in the next verse Theophylact takes apart carefully—love toward God and toward one’s neighbor together, self-control as soundness of mind and as a discipline that steadies a man under trial, power as the courage that keeps a bishop from being shaken loose from either. None of this, Theophylact stresses, works automatically: grace supplies the gift, but Timothy himself must be the one who fans it. The letter that follows reads, on this understanding, as an older bishop’s charge to a younger one standing in real danger of losing heart.

A Father’s Testament to His Child

The letter’s most moving passage comes near its close, where Paul writes that he is “already being poured out as a drink-offering”, and that he has “fought the good fight” (2 Tim. 4:6–7). Theophylact reads these not as boasting but as consolation, and offers an image of his own to explain the tone: a dying father, seeing his child in tears beside him, speaks of his own life well spent not to claim honor for himself but to steady the child who must go on without him. So Paul writes to Timothy, composing the letter, Theophylact says, almost as a testament—anticipating the objection that a fight ended in chains and execution can hardly be called good, and answering it directly: it is a good fight precisely because it was fought for Christ’s sake, where the ordinary contests of this world purchase a crown for one brief hour, but this one brings a splendor that does not end.

Grievous Times

Between the charge to Timothy’s own ministry and Paul’s closing farewell comes a warning that Theophylact reads as pastoral reassurance rather than raw prediction: “in the last days grievous times will set in”, marked by men who are “lovers of self” before they are lovers of anything else (2 Tim. 3:1–2). Theophylact takes care to explain what Paul does and does not mean. A day cannot itself be wicked, he observes; it is the deeds and the people within it that earn the name, exactly as ordinary speech calls a season good or bad from what happens in it. And self-love, named first among the vices that follow, he reads as the root from which the rest grow—the man who looks only to his own good, and not to his neighbor’s, injures the whole body he belongs to, the way harm to one limb spreads to the rest, or a crack in one wall threatens the whole house. Paul’s point in reciting the list, Theophylact reads, is not to alarm Timothy with novelty; the wicked were no newer in Timothy’s day than in Moses’s, when Jannes and Jambres already opposed the truth, and Timothy is not to be shaken by finding the same pattern repeated in his own time.

How to Read This Commentary

Second Timothy is brief and personal, and Theophylact’s commentary follows its tone, moving with less of the doctrinal combat found elsewhere in his Pauline work and more of the pastoral warmth suited to a letter written, on his own account, in the last months of Paul’s life. Read with that in mind, the charge to “preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season” that fills the letter’s final chapter lands as it was meant to: not abstract exhortation, but the last instructions of a teacher who will not have another chance to give them, entrusted to the disciple he had ordained with his own hands.