Thieves in the Night: Faking 1 Timothy and Titus to Counterfeit a Religion and Rob Us of Our Christian Faith

By Brother Yeghian

"Brothers and sisters, once you know what you are looking at, it is so obvious a cave scholar could see it. 1 Timothy and Titus are phonier than a 3-dollar denarius."

Brother Yeghian has been studying the Greek New Testament from the oldest known Koine Greek manuscripts for over 45 years. With almost a half of a century of study behind him

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing Group
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641119511

Book preview

The Real Deal – Paul’s Genuine Article Epistles: Paul’s Authentic Style, His Vocabulary, His Voice, His Theology, and His Life

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efore we introduce the author or authors of 1 Timothy and Titus as special guests on our first century television courtroom, reality TV special, let’s look at letters that most scholars hold are authentic. After that, then let’s invite our special guests out to go over merely eight details why 1 Timothy and Titus were written in ink that was mixed with the venom of snakes. Those are strong words, yes.

Yet, that aside, when we review all the letters that have Paul’s name either written on them or ascribed to him by tradition, seven consistently have Paul’s heart and soul written into them. Scholars who can read them in the original language from an ancient manuscript most often considered them, in chronological order, to be 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Those are the seven letters that contain his teachings, his theology, and were written either by his own hand or by a scribe transcribing directly for him. Those seven are authentically from Paul. There are other books in the New Testament that are also considered to be pseudepigraphical and accordingly have Paul’s name associated with them, but the association is more innocuous. In either case, these following seven are the real deal.

1 Thessalonians

Thessalonica had become the capital of Macedonia under Roman rule. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians is thought to be the first letter that Paul wrote, which probably would have been sometime around 48–52 AD. It is written to people whom he knew. In Acts 16:19–40, we see that Paul had caused quite a stir in Philippi because he cured a slave girl of a spirit of divination, or more literally in the text, from the spirit of the Python. That was quite a problem. Being in possession of that particular spirit put her in the club with the likes of the Oracle of Delphi, and that was drachmas in the bank. Having the spirit of the Python made her an investment-grade soothsayer.

Yet Paul cast that spirit out, which basically meant in his day that he had unplugged her owner’s private pigtailed Wall Street. Her owner had Paul and his companion, Silas, put in chains for it. After all, damaging another person’s property was against Roman common law, and it was in a Philippi holding cell that Paul led a jailer to Christ. After Paul and Silas left Philippi, they passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia and then stopped in Thessalonica where there was a synagogue.

He taught there and led people to Christ Jesus, and after leaving the city he headed to Athens and then on to Corinth. Paul stayed with Aquila and Priscilla for a significant period of time, and therefore, many scholars hold that Paul wrote back to the people he had met in Thessalonica to encourage them.

Let’s not forget that salvation freely given would put temples out of business. In Philippi and Thessalonica, Paul didn’t start out by preaching to a choir. So, he wrote back to encourage them and to thank them for their faith and kindness, and for the hope that he had in them.

Over time Christians saved this letter, and it is as authentic as authentic can get when it comes to what was actually written or dictated by Paul. It was written sometime around 50 AD, but we are uncertain of the exact year. A solar calendar had been put in place by Julius Caesar sometime around 46 BC, but let’s remember that by circa 50 AD the Roman Christian calendar, which marks the year annually in relationship to the birth of Jesus, hadn’t been invented yet. Although technically they could have put at the top of their letters, Written During the X–Year of Emperor Marcus So-&-Socius, it hadn’t yet become the custom to do so.

While some Greek writers did attempt to date what they were writing (with Thucydides being an example), simply put, even by the first century, Greco-Roman common people hadn’t yet gotten into the custom of dating private letters to a specific year. Accordingly, our New Testament letters do not have a year of what emperor they were writing under at the top of them in a similar way that we often date our correspondence. Notwithstanding this, 1 Thessalonians was written around 48 – 52 AD, or so today’s scholars seem to think. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians is an authentic window into the heart of the real Paul.

Galatians

Galatians shows a major transition point in the history of the relationship between Christian Jews and gentiles. The Greek word behind the word gentile is better translated as a person from the nations, but by convention the word gentile has stuck. In either case, Galatians is like a photograph of the time when certain Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah were accepting gentiles, but many of those Jews were still expecting those gentiles to embrace many of the rabbinic regulations. Galatians captures the period when even key disciples of Jesus were vacillating over their feelings about fellowship with gentiles. Some were leaning one way; some were leaning the other.

Paul says in Galatians 2:11 about Cephas (Simon in Hebrew, Cephas in Aramaic, and Petros in Greek all basically meaning, stone/rock): … for until certain people came from James, he [Cephas/Petros] used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. Along with 1 Thessalonians, Galatians is probably one of two of Paul’s earliest letters. What he has to carve out and fashion into a rough-hewn rock to explain to this faction of Jews in Galatians, he later smooths and polishes as more finished marble to present in Romans.

To get an idea of who Paul was and the impact that he had on the Jews he met in his day, we can see in Galatians that Paul spoke directly to the Apostle Peter himself and said something to the effect of if put in English, "If we require the nations to follow our laws to be saved and to receive the grace of God, then Jesus, the Messiah, died on the cross for nothing." Paul said something like that to Peter to his face. It was revolutionary.

Galatians is in Paul’s language, with his idioms, and his syntax (the order of words in a sentence), and in his tone and voice. If authentic means that the person’s name at the top of the first page and the person who wrote it or dictated it are both one and the same, then Galatians is one of the most authentic books in the Bible.

1 Corinthians

The First Epistle to the Corinthians is right there next on the list. Corinth was a unique city in the ancient world. She was a major ally in the Peloponnesian League with Sparta in the league’s war against the Athenian League during the Peloponnesian War. Sparta was essentially the head of the spear of the Peloponnesian League during that war which lasted from 431 to 404 BC, when at the end of that horrific conflict, Sparta and the Peloponnesian League finally brought Athens to her knees.

Corinth was an up-and-coming naval rival of Athens, so the alliance between Corinth and Sparta, combined with other city-states in the Peloponnesian League, after thirty-five years, eventually ground the Athens into submission. Athens never fully recovered, and its fall to Sparta in 404 BC closed the curtain on the Golden Age of Greece.

That later helped opened the door for Phillip the II of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great (or Alexander of Macedon, depending on whom we ask). Philip II defeated Athens and her allies in 338 BC and formed another alliance that historians call the League of Corinth. Philip II had high hopes of invading Persia for some good old-fashioned, ancient world eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth justice. Persia invaded Greece in 490–492 BC, and Philip II wanted a Persian smack-down. The problem was he was assassinated in 336 BC, so Philip II never got to go hombre a hombre with the Persian King, Darius III.

His son, Alexander, picked up where he left off by invading Persia, ultimately winning both Egypt and Babylonia, too, as they had fallen under the golden wings of Persia. It was the army of Alexander that laid the foundations from which this New Testament Bible language comes from.

If you only had a limited supply of Greeks and Macedonians in heavy bronze Iron Man suits, and if the Persians had more men at arms and archers than ten times the total number of US paratroopers that jumped over Normandy in 1944, then you are going to have to have the tolerances in your close–order drill tighter than a yet-to-be invented Swiss watch. The linchpin for that was language. As the Greek and Macedonian army was going to be surrounded basically by all the Persians in the world, with helmets full of different Greek dialects in its ranks, the language had to get smoothed out. An order had to be understood by everyone as an order. Ultimately, that is the origin of Koine Greek, which is the language of the New Testament.

We can read in places things like, Not much survived in Koine other than the New Testament. That is a very relativistic statement. There are enough books passed down in Koine to keep any serious scholar busy for an entire lifetime. To name a few things, the Old Testament was translated into Koine, the Argonautica is in literary Koine, and if the Hellenistic romance novels aren’t your thing, Galen the Physician, a doctor of Marcus Aurelius and later Commodus, wrote in an extremely sophisticated form of the Koine language. Very, very few New Testament scholars make it through Galen’s work.

That aside, while Greece continued to try to get her footing after the Peloponnesian War and later after her wars with Philip II, and then again during the age of Alexander, the Romans not too long after rolled into northern Greece in 146 BC under Lucius Mummius and marched down and captured Corinth. The Romans lived up to their reputation in Corinth. From the surviving records, their level and degree of mayhem, murder, and looting of the art of Corinth made the Nazi art theft in Europe two millennia later look selective and restrained.

The Romans put most of the men in Corinth to the sword and sold off the women and children to pay for the campaign. Nothing much was left of Corinth but broken up columns and ashes until Julius Caesar about a hundred years later underwent a huge program to rebuild Corinth in 44 BC. He turned it into a kind of Roman Greek Disneyland. An interesting note, though, is that the Romans permitted the Corinthians to keep their religion.

This is all part of the backdrop to Paul’s 1 Corinthians. What was its cultural and historical context? Well, there is no modern cultural equivalent, nothing even close, so let’s get out a cookbook and bake a Corinthian Soufflé:

First, get a bowl half the size of the Moon. It has to be big enough to fit in a country.

Add thirty days of fun in Thailand – at least three of them have to be spent completely blacked out on a floor in a cheap hotel and pour them in while slowly mixing. Be careful while mixing not to bruise the chipped paint.

With your leather suit still on, mix in San Francisco’s South of Market district and bring to a slow boil.

After the mixture is at a slow boil for fifteen minutes, add Chicago in the 1920s and New Orleans during the age of slavery just before the War of 1812. Don’t let it sit. Keep stirring.

Finely chop up the red-light district in the city of Amsterdam and add the pieces one by one while it is simmering.

Add Babylonia for seasoning, some mild cheese, and two eggs.

Mix in a culture that felt prostitution was a religious ordinance, and therefore sex trafficking was saving the gods’ money.

Boil it down to where only one cupful is left, put it on a table, and hire a eunuch to present it while saying, Voila! Be sure to serve with a nice Roman Chianti.

Welcome to Corinth after the Roman conquest. What you poured out would be only halfway there. Nero was known to take his favorite eunuchs and male companions who specialised in a variety of male entertainments to Corinth on corporate holidays. Rome, apparently, wasn’t fun enough. Prostitution wasn’t just legal in Corinth; it was a form of temple sponsored prayer. That was Paul’s Corinth in the first century.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 5:9 (Yeghian), I wrote a letter to you before instructing you not to associate with sexually immoral people; I did not mean to completely stay away from the immoral of this world, or the greedy, the thieves, or the idolaters, since for you to do that, you would have to step off the edge of the earth. Understanding Corinthian history gives 1 Corinthians 5:9 a whole different perspective. He is talking about a city that would make parts of San Francisco or Amsterdam look like St. Augustine’s City of God.

If 1 Corinthians feels a little preachy, try to remember the next time you travel to the ancient world that if you ever have problems with the ancient Greco-Roman version of the IRS, you can always settle your account by trading a daughter or a son for the amount in question. They will take them. Nero and Paul were contemporaries. Nero loved the town. Rome was wild, but it wasn’t Corinth, and Paul was trying to teach Christianity there.

While 1 Corinthians is held by an overwhelming majority of scholars to be an authentic letter of Paul, it does, nevertheless, have its shadier side. In 1 Corinthians 14:35, we read, (NRSV) If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. But hold on there; back in 1 Corinthians 11, it is fine if women do some kind of spiritual, prophetic yodeling, but they should be stoned if they speak or raise their hands to ask a question? Is this a local Christian community fellowship or a row in the ranks in a Roman legion? Infantry is based on the Latin word for infant, and that word is basically built off the Latin word for the silent ones.

Although authentic, another problem with this letter is that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 is the roving gnome of 1 Corinthians – its location in the text shifts depending on which manuscript you are reading. When we see 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 surface in different locations in different manuscripts, we can accordingly see that it is a later addition. Translators often like to smooth these things over.

More importantly in terms of the hold on minute factor is the