Three short letters in the New Testament are addressed to Christian pastors. Traditionally, these letters were attributed to Paul on the assumption that he wrote them while he was a prisoner in Rome. Two are addressed to Timothy, a young man whose parents became Christians prior to the time when Paul visited them in the town of Lystra, in Asia Minor. Timothy joined Paul in his missionary activities and continued to minister to the churches after Paul became a prisoner in Rome. The third letter is addressed to Titus, a young man born of Gentile parents who became a Christian and who was one of the delegates sent by the church at Antioch to accompany Paul and Barnabas when they went to Jerusalem for a meeting of the council. Nothing is said in either of the letters to Timothy about the occasion for writing, but the Epistle to Titus mentions that Paul is in prison.
New Testament scholars generally do not agree whether or not these letters, at least in their present form, were written by Paul. The reasons for not believing that Paul is the author are based partly on the letters' style and vocabulary, which are quite different from what we find in the older letters that Paul wrote. The theological conceptions that Paul used so frequently are absent, but the major reason why some scholars believe that Paul did not write these letters is that the ecclesiastical order that these letters presuppose did not exist in Paul's day. Perhaps the letters were written by someone who was an admirer of Paul and who wrote the kind of instruction of which he believed Paul would approve.
