Introduction

Left Behind on Crete

Theophylact begins this commentary with no separate preface, moving directly into Paul’s opening address to Titus, and lets the occasion emerge from the letter itself. Paul had left Titus on Crete, he explains, to “set in order the things that are lacking”—the same kind of charge Paul entrusted to Timothy at Ephesus, and Theophylact draws the comparison deliberately, reading both letters as evidence of how the apostle divided the labor of founding churches: the harder work of first preaching he undertook himself, moving on to fresh ground, while the honor of ordaining and organizing what he had begun he handed to his disciples. Titus is charged to “appoint presbyters in every city”, and Theophylact reads Paul’s insistence on a presbyter for every city, rather than one bishop over the whole island, as a matter of simple pastoral wisdom: oversight divided among many hands is lighter to bear and more exact in its care than oversight stretched thin over too wide a territory.

A Reputation Worth Answering

Among the qualifications Paul lists for a bishop, Theophylact draws out one in particular: not “self-willed”, since a bishop governs a willing people and has no right to rule by his own judgment alone, the way a worldly ruler governs subjects who never agreed to obey him in the first place. Paul then turns, famously, to the character of the Cretans themselves, quoting “one of them, a prophet of their own”, who had written that “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies” (Titus 1:12). Theophylact identifies the source by name—Epimenides, a Cretan poet whom the Greeks knew for his skill in divination, who had composed the line while rebuking his own countrymen for claiming that the god Zeus was buried among them, when a true god, he insisted, could not die at all. Theophylact is careful to say exactly what Paul endorses in quoting him and what he does not: not the poet’s theology, which was false, but his verdict on Cretan character, which Paul judged accurate enough to cite—and cited from a Cretan’s own mouth precisely because a people are shamed most effectively by a witness drawn from their own house, as Paul had likewise done at Athens in quoting the poet Aratus against the Athenians’ own idolatry.

Grace That Trains, Not Merely Forgives

The letter’s doctrinal high point comes almost in passing, in the course of practical instruction to household servants: “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, training us, that having denied ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live soberly” (Titus 2:11–12). Theophylact reads the passage as answering an unspoken objection—why should even slaves be held to so exacting a standard of conduct? — and finds Paul’s answer in the universality of the grace itself: it has appeared to all, servant and free alike, and grants the forgiveness of sins to both without distinction. But Theophylact stresses that the grace Paul describes does more than cancel a past debt; it actively trains, forming the believer toward a settled, sober life going forward, so that gratitude for what has already been forgiven becomes the ground of a changed way of living rather than a debt paid once and then forgotten.

The letter’s closing chapter returns to the same theme from a different angle, describing salvation as coming “not by works that we did in righteousness, but according to His mercy”, through “the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5). Theophylact reads regeneration as nothing less than a second birth and a wholly new fashioning of the person—not a repair of what was already there, he says, but the way a builder does not prop up a ruined house but tears it down to its foundations and raises it anew. That this is the Spirit’s own work and not a human achievement, he adds, is confirmed by Paul’s own wording: the Spirit was not merely given but “poured out richly”, a generosity in the giving that matches the completeness of the change it works.

How to Read This Commentary

Titus is one of the shortest of Paul’s letters, and Theophylact’s commentary on it is correspondingly brief and direct, moving without digression from church order in its first chapter to sound teaching and Christian conduct in the chapters that follow. Read together with First Timothy, it completes Theophylact’s picture of how the apostolic churches were meant to be governed and by whom, and the reader will do well to notice how naturally, in his reading, doctrine and daily conduct fold into one another here—the same grace that saves is, in the same breath, the grace that disciplines and teaches.