Commentary on the Epistle to Titus

Latin source: Jerome's commentary on the Epistle to Titus (written at Bethlehem about 386–388 for Paula and Eustochium), from Vallarsi's text as printed in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 26 (Paris, 1845), cols. 555–600, verified against the page images and collated with Vallarsi's edition (Venice, 1769). Scripture is translated as Jerome quotes it, from his own Latin; Psalms keep the Latin (LXX) numbering. The Scripture references are the editors', not Jerome's, and are given corrected where Migne misprinted them. The words of Titus that Jerome expounds are in italics; the footnotes give the alternative readings printed in Migne. This English translation is released into the public domain.

Prologue

Although those who have made void their first faith are not worthy of faith (I speak of Marcion and Basilides, and of all the heretics who tear apart the Old Testament), yet we would bear with them in some measure if they at least kept their hands off the New, and did not dare to violate either the evangelists or the apostles of Christ, the Son (as they themselves boast) of the good God. But now, since they have both scattered his Gospels and made the epistles of the apostles to be not the apostles' of Christ but their own, I wonder how they dare to claim for themselves the name of Christians. For, to say nothing of the other Epistles, from which they erased whatever they had seen to be contrary to their doctrine, some they believed should be rejected entire: namely both the Epistles to Timothy, the one to the Hebrews, and the one to Titus, which we are now attempting to expound. And if indeed they gave reasons why they did not think them the Apostle's, we would try to make some reply, and perhaps to satisfy the reader. But now, since they pronounce with heretical authority and say, "That epistle is Paul's, this one is not," let them understand that they are refuted, on behalf of the truth, by the same authority by which they themselves do not blush to feign falsehoods. But Tatian, patriarch of the Encratites, who himself also rejected some epistles of Paul, believed that this one above all, that is, the one to Titus, must be pronounced the Apostle's, setting little store by the assertion of Marcion and of the others who agree with him on this point. The Apostle, then, O Paula and Eustochium, writes from Nicopolis, which, situated on the shore of Actium, is now by far the greatest part of your property; and he writes to Titus, his disciple and his son in Christ, whom he had left in Crete to instruct the churches; and he commanded him that, when one of the two, Artemas or Tychicus, had landed in Crete, he himself should come to Nicopolis. For¹ it was just that he who had said, "my care for all the churches", and who, setting out from Jerusalem, had founded the Gospel of Christ as far as Illyricum, should not allow the Cretans, from whom the seeds of idolatry first sprouted, to be left deserted by his own absence and that of Titus, but should send them, in place of himself and Titus, Artemas or Tychicus, by whose teaching and consolation they might be cherished.

HERE BEGINS THE BOOK.

1:1

Paul, a servant of God, but an apostle of Jesus Christ. In the Epistle to the Romans he began thus: "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called an apostle". In this one, however, he calls himself a servant of God, but an apostle of Jesus Christ. For if the Father and the Son are one, and whoever has believed in the Son believes also in the Father, then the servitude of the apostle Paul too is to be referred without distinction either to the Father or to the Son. But this servitude is not the one of which the Apostle himself says: "For you did not receive the spirit of servitude again in fear², but you received the spirit of adoption³, in which we cry, Abba, Father" (Rom. 8:15); rather, it is a noble servitude, of which David also speaks to God: "I am your servant, the son of your handmaid" (Ps. 115:16). And blessed Mary to the angel: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to⁴ your word" (Luke 1:38). Moses too had this servitude, of whom the Lord says to Joshua the son of Nun: "Moses," he says, "my servant is dead" (Josh. 1:2). And in another place: "Moses the servant of the Lord died in the land of Moab by the word of the Lord" (Deut. 34:5). God forbid, indeed, that we should believe that Moses and Mary had the spirit of servitude in fear, and not in the love of God. Nor is it any wonder that men, holy though they are, are nobly called servants of God, since through the prophet Isaiah the Father speaks to the Son: "It is a great thing for you to be called my child (puer)" (Isa. 49:6), which in Greek is said: μέγα σοί ἐστι τοῦ κληθῆναί σε παῖδά μου. Now because "child" (puer), that is, παῖς, can according to the Greeks signify both servant (famulus) and son, we inquired in the Hebrew, and found written not "my son" but "my servant", that is, ABDI (עבדי). Hence also the prophet Obadiah (Abdias), whose name means "servant of the Lord", received his name from his service to God. If it disturbs anyone that the Lord and Savior, who is the founder of the universe, is called a servant of God, he will not be disturbed if he hears him speaking to the apostles: "Whoever wishes to be greater among you, let him be the servant of all"; and: "The Son of man came, not to be served, but to serve" (Matt. 20:27, 28); and, lest he should seem to teach this by words alone, he showed it by example. For taking a towel, he girded himself, and filling a basin with water, he washed the feet of the disciples (John 13). It is therefore not impious to believe that he who had taken the form of a servant did those things which belong to a servant, so that he may be said to have served his Father's will, since he himself served his own servants. Now this servitude belongs to love, through which we are commanded to serve one another. And the Apostle himself, though he was free from all, made himself the servant of all (1 Cor. 9). And in another place: "Your servant," he says, "for Christ's sake". He is a servant of God who is not a servant of sin. "For everyone who commits sin is a servant of sin" (John 8:34). The Apostle, therefore, who was not a servant of sin, is rightly called a servant of God the Father and of Christ. Further, his saying but an apostle of Jesus Christ seems to me to be just as if he had said: prefect of the praetorium of Augustus Caesar, master of the army of the emperor Tiberius. For just as the judges of this age, in order to appear more noble, take their titles from the kings whom they serve and from the dignity with which they swell: so too the Apostle, claiming for himself a great dignity among Christians, inscribed himself beforehand with the title of an apostle⁵ of Christ, so as to awe his future readers by the very authority of the name, indicating that all who believed in Christ ought to be subject to him. Moreover, what we set down a little before as written to the Romans, "A servant of Jesus Christ", does not differ from his having said: a servant of wisdom, a servant of righteousness, a servant of sanctification, a servant of redemption: "For Christ was made for us by God the Father wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption" (1 Cor. 1:30).

1:2-4

According to the faith of the elect of God, and the knowledge of the truth which is according to piety, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before eternal ages; but he has manifested in his own times his word in the preaching which has been entrusted to me according to the command of our Savior God. To Titus, dearest son, according to the common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father, and Jesus Christ our Savior. He who had said, not out of humility, as most suppose, but truly: "Even if I am unskilled in speech, yet not in knowledge", a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the Law a Pharisee, does not unfold his profound meanings in the Greek tongue, and scarcely brings out in words what he thinks. Let us therefore discuss each point as it is written, following the order of the meanings and the sequence of the matters rather than of the words. According to the faith, he says, of the elect of God: refer what he has brought in to what precedes: Paul, a servant of God, but an apostle of Jesus Christ according to the faith of the elect of God, that is, of those who are not only called but also elect. Among the elect themselves, too, there is great diversity according to the variety of their works, minds and words. Nor does whoever is elect of God at once possess faith according to his election, or have knowledge of the truth according to his faith. Hence the Savior also spoke to the Jews who had believed in him: "If you remain in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:31, 32). And the evangelist testifies that he said these things to those who believed indeed, but did not know the truth, which they could attain if they remained in his word, and, being made free, would cease to be servants. The question is asked why, to his saying according to the faith of the elect of God and the knowledge of the truth, he joined which is according to piety: whether there is some truth that is not set in piety, and the knowledge of the truth which is according to piety is now brought in to distinguish it from that other. There plainly is a truth that does not have piety: if someone knows the art of grammar, or dialectic, so as to possess the method of speaking correctly and to judge between false and true. Geometry also and arithmetic and music have truth in their knowledge; but that knowledge is not⁶ of piety. The knowledge of piety is to know the Law, to understand the prophets, to believe the Gospel, not to be ignorant of the apostles. And on the contrary there are many who have a true knowledge of piety, but not at once the truth of the other arts as well, and of those which we mentioned above. This truth, then, the knowledge of which is according to piety, is set in the hope of eternal life, because it at once bestows the reward of immortality on him who has come to know it. Without piety, however, the knowledge of truth delights for the present, but does not have the eternity of rewards, which God, who does not lie, promised before eternal ages, and manifested in his own times in Christ Jesus. But to whom did he promise beforehand, and afterwards make it plain, if not to his own Wisdom, which was always with the Father, when it rejoiced at the completed world and was glad over the sons of men; and did he not promise that whoever would believe in it would have eternal life? Before he laid the foundations of the world, before he poured out the seas, set up the mountains, hung up the sky, and made the earth firm with its mass cast down, God, in whom there is no lie, promised these things. Not because he could lie and is unwilling to break out into words of falsehood, but because he who is the father of truth has no lie in himself, according to that saying: "But let God be true, and every man a liar" (Rom. 3:4). Now God is called "who does not lie" for this reason: for⁷ he promises certain things with an oath in the prophets, so that we, made more secure, may hope the more that the things foretold will come to be, and, believing with our whole mind, may be prepared to attain the things that are to come.

It seems not beside the point to touch briefly on why God alone is called true, and every man a liar, by the voice of the Apostle. And unless I am mistaken, just as he alone is said to have immortality, although he has made both angels and many rational creatures to whom he has given immortality, so too he alone is said to be true: not that the others are not also immortal and lovers of truth, but that he alone is, by nature, both immortal and true. The others, however, obtain immortality and truth from his bounty, and it is one thing to be true, to have something through oneself; another to have what you have in the power of the giver. But neither do I think this should be passed over in silence: how God, who does not lie, pledged eternal life before eternal ages, from the time the world was made, according to the history of Genesis, and the times were established through the succession of nights and days, of months and years alike. In this course and wheel of the world, times glide by and come, and either are to be or have been. Hence certain of the philosophers think that there is no present time, but only past or future, because everything we say, do or think either passes while it is being done, or, if it has not yet been done, we await it. Before these times of the world, then, we must believe there was a certain eternity of ages, in which the Father was always with the Son and the Holy Spirit; and, so to speak, the one time of God is all eternity; nay rather, the times are innumerable, since he is himself infinite who, before times, exceeds all time. But not yet a thousand years of our world are fulfilled: and how many eternities before, how many times, how many origins of ages must we think there were, in which angels, thrones, dominions and the other powers served God, and, without the successions and measures of times, subsisted at God's command! Before all these times, then, which speech cannot utter, nor mind comprehend, nor silent thought dare to touch, God the Father promised to his Wisdom his Word, and that his very Wisdom and the life of those who were going to believe would come into the world. Attend carefully to the sequence and order of the reading: for the eternal life which God, who does not lie, promised before eternal ages, is nothing other than the Word of God. For he has manifested, he says, in his own times his word: therefore the eternal life which he had promised is itself his Word, which in the beginning was with the Father: and the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt in us (John 1). And that the Word of God, that is, Christ himself, is life, he testifies in another place, saying: "I am the life" (John 14:6). A life, moreover, not brief, not bounded by any times, but perpetual, but eternal: which has been manifested in the last ages, in the preaching which was entrusted to Paul, the teacher and master of the Gentiles, that it might be announced in the world and become known to men, according to the command of God the Savior, who willed us to be saved, by fulfilling what he had promised. Now the Apostle writes to Titus, dearest son, which in Greek is said γνησίῳ τέκνῳ (true-born son), and cannot be expressed in the Latin tongue: for γνήσιος rather conveys this, when someone is called faithful and one's own, and (so to speak) legitimate or genuine, beyond comparison with another. From this we understand that there was also a very great difference among Paul's sons: that some he had as γνησίους, that is, most genuine, and joined to himself, and begotten of a true marriage and of a free woman; but others as if of a handmaid and of Hagar, who cannot receive the inheritance with Isaac, the son of the free woman. For the speech and wisdom and doctrine with which Titus instructed the churches of Christ made him the Apostle's own son, and set him apart from all fellowship with others. Let us see after this what follows: According to the common faith: whether he called the faith common to all who believed in Christ, or common only to himself and Titus? It seems better to me that the faith was common to the apostle Paul and Titus than to all believers, in whom, according to the variety of their minds, the faith also could not be common, but diverse. Finally, the preface of the Epistle and the greeting of the Apostle's preface to Titus are completed with this ending: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior: whether because both grace and peace come as much from God the Father as from Christ Jesus, and both may be understood as given by each; or because grace is referred to the Father, and peace to the Son. We must not pass over without scruple that the Apostle prayed for some that grace and peace might be multiplied to them, whereas now, to Titus, peace and grace are set down without multiplication. Noah, a just man, alone preserved when the world was shipwrecked, is said to have found not many graces but one grace in the sight of God. And Moses to the Lord: "If I have found," he says, "grace with you" (Exod. 33:13). And wherever else grace is set down in the person of the saints, seek and you will find⁸ that they found not graces, but grace. That merchant in the Gospel who had many pearls at last found one precious one, which alone he bought with the many pearls (Matt. 13). For it belongs to the perfect to buy one pearl and one treasure in exchange for all their pearls and their whole substance; but to beginners, and those still set upon the road, to have not just one and only one, but many pearls.

1:5

For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might correct the things that were lacking. It belongs to the apostolic dignity to lay the foundation of the Church, which no one can lay except the master builder. "But there is no other foundation than Christ Jesus" (1 Cor. 3:11). Those who are lesser craftsmen can build houses upon the foundations. Paul, therefore, as a wise master builder, striving with all labor not to boast in things already prepared, but to preach where Christ had not yet been announced, after he had softened the hard hearts of the Cretans to the faith of Christ, and had tamed them as much by word as by signs, and had taught them to believe not in their native Jupiter but in God the Father and in Christ, left his disciple Titus in Crete to strengthen the rudiments of the newborn Church, and to correct anything that seemed lacking, while he himself went on to other nations, to lay the foundation of Christ among them in turn. Now his saying that you might correct the things that were lacking shows that they had not yet come to the full knowledge of the truth, and that, although they had been corrected by the Apostle, they still needed correction. For everything that is corrected is imperfect. For in the Greek too the addition of the preposition, by which ἐπιδιορθώσῃ is written, does not convey the same as διορθώσῃ, that is, you might correct (corrigeres), but, so to speak, you might correct further (supercorrigeres): namely, that the things which have been corrected by me, and have not yet been drawn back⁹ to the full line of truth, may be corrected by you and receive the rule of evenness.

And¹⁰ you might appoint presbyters throughout the cities, as I arranged for you. Let the bishops hear, who have the power of appointing presbyters in each city, under what law the order of the Church's constitution is held; and let them not think these to be the words of the Apostle, but of Christ, who says to the disciples: "He who rejects you rejects me; and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me" (Luke 10:16). So also he who hears you hears me; and he who hears me hears him who sent me. From this it is plain that those who, scorning the Apostle's law, have chosen to confer an ecclesiastical rank on someone not on merit but by favor act against Christ, who through his Apostle has set out in what follows what kind of presbyter is to be appointed in the Church. Moses, the friend of God, to whom God spoke face to face (Deut. 5 and 31), could certainly have made his own sons the successors of his rule and left his own dignity to his descendants; but Joshua, an outsider from another tribe, is chosen, so that we might know that rule over the peoples is to be conferred not on blood but on life. But now we see very many making this matter a favor, so that they do not seek to raise up as pillars of the Church those who can be of more benefit to the Church, but those whom they themselves love, or by whose services they have been soothed, or for whom one of the great has asked, and (to say nothing of worse things) those who have obtained by gifts that they should become clerics. Let us attend carefully to the words of the Apostle, who says: That you might appoint presbyters throughout the cities, as I arranged for you. Discussing in what follows what kind of presbyter ought to be ordained, he says this: "If anyone is without crime, the husband of one wife", and the rest; and afterwards he added: "For a bishop must be without crime, as the steward of God". A presbyter, therefore, is the same as a bishop; and before, at the devil's instigation, factions arose in religion, and it was said among the peoples, "I am of Paul, I of Apollos, but I of Cephas" (1 Cor. 1:12), the churches were governed by the common council of the presbyters. But after each one thought that those whom he had baptized were his own and not Christ's, it was decreed throughout the whole world that one chosen from among the presbyters should be set over the rest, to whom the whole care of the church should belong, and the seeds of schisms be removed. Should anyone think¹¹ that the view that bishop and presbyter are one, and that the one (presbyter, that is, "elder") is a name of age, the other a name of office, is not that of the Scriptures but our own, let him read again the words of the Apostle to the Philippians, saying: "Paul and Timothy, servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with¹² the bishops and deacons: grace to you and peace" (Phil. 1:1, 2), and the rest. Philippi is a single city of Macedonia, and certainly in one city there could not have been several bishops, as they are called. But because at that time they called the same men bishops whom they also called presbyters, for that reason he spoke of bishops indifferently as of presbyters. This may still seem doubtful to someone, unless it is proved by a second testimony. In the Acts of the Apostles it is written that when the Apostle had come to Miletus, he sent to Ephesus and called the presbyters of that church, to whom he afterwards said, among other things: "Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has placed you as bishops, to feed the Church of the Lord, which he acquired by his own blood" (Acts 20:28). And here observe more carefully how, calling the presbyters of the single city of Ephesus, he afterwards called the same men bishops. If anyone is willing to receive the Epistle written under the name of Paul to the Hebrews, there too the care of the church is divided equally among several. For he writes to the people: "Obey your rulers and be subject to them: for they are the ones who keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account, so that they may not do this with sighing; for this is useful for you" (Heb. 13:17). And Peter, who received his name from the firmness of faith, speaks in his Epistle, saying: "The presbyters among you, therefore, I beseech, as a fellow presbyter and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, who am also a partaker of his glory which is to be revealed in the future: feed the flock of the Lord which is among you, not as under necessity, but willingly" (1 Pet. 5:1, 2). This we have said in order to show that among the ancients presbyters were the same as bishops, but that little by little, so that the seedlings of dissensions might be rooted out, the whole responsibility was conferred upon one. Just as the presbyters, then, know that by the custom of the Church they are subject to him who has been set over them, so let the bishops know that they are greater than the presbyters more by custom than by the truth of the Lord's arrangement, and that they ought to rule the church in common, imitating Moses, who, though he had it in his power to preside alone over the people of Israel, chose seventy with whom to judge the people (Num. 11). Let us see, therefore, what kind of presbyter, or bishop, is to be ordained.

1:6

If anyone is without crime, the husband of one wife, having faithful children, not under accusation of licentiousness, or not submissive. First, then, let him be without crime, which I think is named by another word to Timothy, "irreproachable" (1 Tim. 3): not that¹³ he be without any crime only at the time when he is to be ordained, having washed away past stains by a new manner of life, but that from the time he was reborn in Christ he be gnawed by no consciousness of sin. For how can the head of the Church remove evil from its midst, if he has fallen into a like offense? Or with what freedom can he reprove a sinner, when he silently answers himself that he has committed the same things that he reproves? Thus whoever desires the episcopate desires a good work. "A work", he says, not an honor, not glory. "But he must also have a good testimony from those who are outside, so that he may not fall into reproach and into the snare of the devil". Now what he says, the husband of one wife, we ought to understand thus: not that we should think every once-married man better than a twice-married man, but that he can exhort to monogamy and continence who holds out his own example in teaching. For suppose that someone in early youth has lost his wife and, overcome by the necessity of the flesh, has taken a second wife, whom he too has at once lost, and from then on has lived continently; and that another has stayed married into old age, and, enjoying the use of a wife, which most people consider happiness, has never ceased from the work of the flesh: which of the two seems to you to be better, more chaste, more continent? Surely the one who was unfortunate even in his second marriage, and afterwards lived chastely and holily, and not the one who was not separated from his wife's embrace even in old age. Let not anyone, then, who is chosen as a once-married man applaud himself as being better than every twice-married man, since in him it is rather good fortune than will that has been chosen. Some take this passage thus: It was the custom of the Jews, they say, to have two wives or more, which we also read of Abraham and Jacob in the old Law; and they will have this now to be the precept, that he who is to be chosen bishop should not have two wives together at one time. Many, more superstitiously than truly, think that even those who, when they were Gentiles, had one wife, and when she was lost married another after the baptism of Christ, are not to be chosen for the priesthood: whereas, surely, if this is to be observed, those ought rather to be kept from the episcopate who, having before indulged a roving lust among harlots, took one wife after being regenerated; and it is much more detestable to have fornicated with many than to be found a twice-married man, since in the one there is the misfortune of marriage, in the other a wantonness prone to sin. Montanus, and those who follow the schism of Novatus, have presumed to claim for themselves the name of purity, and think that second marriages should be barred from the communion of the Church: whereas the Apostle, in commanding this of bishops and presbyters, surely relaxed it in the case of the rest: not that he exhorts to second marriages, but that he makes allowance for the necessity of the flesh. Tertullian too wrote a heretical book On Monogamy, which no one who has read the Apostle will fail to recognize as contrary to the Apostle. And indeed, for a bishop, or presbyter, to be without crime and to have one wife lies within our power. But what follows, To have faithful children, not under accusation of licentiousness, and not submissive, is outside our will. For suppose that parents have brought up their children well and from an early age have always instructed them in the Lord's precepts: if these afterwards give themselves to licentiousness and, overcome by vices, give the reins to lust, will the blame flow back upon the parents, and will the sins of the sons stain the holiness of the father? If anyone instructed his sons well, among these I think was Isaac too, who surely must be believed to have brought up his son Esau well. Yet Esau, a fornicator and profane, sold his birthright for one meal (Gen. 25). Samuel also, who was such that he called upon the Lord and the Lord heard¹⁴ him, and obtained winter rain at the time of harvest, had sons who turned aside after avarice and took gifts, and proved such unjust judges that the people, unable to bear it, demanded a king for themselves in the likeness of the other nations (1 Sam. 12). If, therefore, there were an election of priests, both Isaac because of Esau and Samuel because of his sons would be thought unworthy of the priesthood. And since the sins of the parents are not imputed to the sons, now that the saying, "The parents ate the sour grape, and the teeth of the sons were set on edge" (Ezek. 18:2), is no longer in force, shall the vices of the sons tell against the parents? First, then, it must be said that the name of the priesthood is so holy that even things set outside us are reckoned to us: not that we are not to be made bishops because of our own vices, but that we are to be kept from this rank because of the incontinence of our sons. For with what freedom can we reprove other people's sons and teach what is right, when the one who has been reproved can at once throw at us: First teach your own sons? Or with what face do I reprove a stranger who fornicates, when my own conscience answers me: Then disinherit your fornicating son; cast off your sons who are slaves to vices? But when a worthless son lives with you in one house, do you dare to take the mote from another's eye, not seeing the beam in your own (Matt. 7 and Luke 6)? So the just man is not polluted by the vices of his sons; but freedom is reserved by the Apostle for the leader of the Church, in that¹⁵ he should be such a one as does not fear to rebuke strangers because of the vices of his children. Next, this too must be brought against those who swell with pride over the episcopate and think they have obtained not a stewardship of Christ but a command: that those who have not been ordained bishops are not at once worse than all these, nor should they think themselves the more approved from the fact that they were chosen; but let them understand that certain men have been removed from the priesthood for this reason, that the vices of their children hindered them. But if the sins of the sons debar a just man from the episcopate, how much more will each one, considering himself and knowing that the mighty shall suffer torments mightily (Wisd. 6), draw back¹⁶ from this, which is not so much an honor as a burden, and not seek to occupy the place of others who are more worthy! Lastly this must be said: that in the Scriptures by sons are understood λογισμοὺς, that is, thoughts, and by daughters πράξεις, that is, works; and that he is now commanded to be made bishop who has both his thoughts and his works in his power, and believes truly in Christ, and is stained by no blot of creeping vices.

1:7

For a bishop must be without crime, as the steward of God: not insolent, not irascible, not given to wine, not a striker, not a seeker of shameful gain. It is required, then, among stewards that one be found faithful, and not, eating and drinking with drunkards, strike the menservants and maidservants; but let him await the uncertain coming of God, and give his fellow servants their food in due season. Now between the steward (of the estate) and the household there is this sole difference: that a fellow servant has been set over his fellow servants. Let the bishop and the presbyter know, then, that the people are his fellow servants, not his servants. The other things that follow are set within our power: Not insolent, that is, not swelling and pleased with himself because he is a bishop, but, like a good steward, seeking what benefits the greater number. Not irascible. He is irascible who is always angry, and is stirred by the slight breeze of a reply or of an offense, like a leaf by the wind. And truly nothing is more foul than a raging teacher, who, though he ought to be gentle (and according to what is written (2 Tim. 2): "But the servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be humble toward all, a teacher, patient, instructing in gentleness those who oppose"), on the contrary, with grim look, trembling lips, wrinkled brow, unbridled abuse, a face changing between pallor and redness, roars with shouting, and does not so much draw back the erring to the good as hurl them headlong into evil by his savagery. Hence it is that Solomon also says: "Anger destroys even the wise" (Prov. 15); and: "The anger of man does not work the righteousness of God" (Jas. 1:20). Nor yet is he who is sometimes angry irascible; but he is called irascible who is frequently overcome by this passion. He also forbids the bishop to be given to wine, as is written to Timothy: "Not given to much wine" (1 Tim. 3:8). But what a thing it is to see a bishop given to wine, so that, his senses seized, he either raises a laugh against the seemliness of gravity and guffaws with slack lips, or, if he has a little sadly remembered something, bursts out among the cups into sobs and tears. It would be long to go through each point and unfold the madnesses that drunkenness prompts. You may see some turning their cups into weapons, throwing a goblet in the face of a fellow guest; others, with torn clothes, rushing to wound others; some shouting; some dozing; he who has drunk more is counted the braver; it is a ground for accusation, when adjured by the king's name, not to have drunk the more often. They vomit in order to drink, they drink in order to vomit. The digestion of the belly and the throat are taken up with one office. Let it suffice to have said this now: that according to the Apostle, in wine there is licentiousness. And wherever fullness and drunkenness have been, there lust holds sway. Look at the belly and the genitals: the order of the members follows the character of the vices. I shall never think a drunk man pure; for even if, put to sleep by wine, he has slept, he could still have sinned through wine. Yet we marvel that the Apostle condemned fondness for wine in bishops or presbyters, when in the old Law too it was commanded that the priests, when they enter the temple to minister to God, should drink no wine at all (Lev. 10); and that the Nazirite, as long as he grows his holy hair and looks on nothing defiled, nothing dead, should abstain both from wine and from raisins and from the weaker drink that is usually made from grape skins, and from all strong drink, which turns the mind away from its whole soundness (Num. 6). Let each say what he will: I speak my own conscience: I know that abstinence, when interrupted, has harmed me, and when resumed has helped me. After fondness for wine he commands this, "that he be not a striker": which, even understood simply, edifies the hearer, that he should not readily stretch out his hand to strike, nor burst out like a madman to beat another's face. But it is better that we call him not a striker who, gentle and patient, knows in due time what is to be said or what kept silent, and does not strike the conscience of the weak with useless speech. For the Apostle, in forming the leader of the church, does not forbid him to be a boxer and a pancratiast [παγκρατιαστὴν, that is, an athlete] (which is censured even in a common man and in any Gentile whatever, if it is found in him), but this, as I said: that he should not, being insulting and garrulous, destroy one whom he could have corrected by modesty and mildness. A craving for shameful gain also ought to be foreign to one who is to be a bishop. For there are many teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain, who overturn whole houses and think piety to be a source of profit. "But better is", according to Solomon, "a modest receiving with righteousness than many fruits¹⁷ with iniquity" (Prov. 16:8); and a good name in poverty is rather to be chosen than a very bad name in riches. A bishop who desires to be an imitator of the Apostle, having food and clothing, ought to be content with these alone (1 Tim. 6). Those who serve the altar should live from the altar (1 Cor. 9). Let them live, he says, not grow rich. Hence also the copper is shaken out of our belt, and we are clothed in a single tunic only (Matt. 10 and Mark 6), and we take no thought for the morrow. It is a craving for shameful gain to take thought for more than the present. Up to this point it has been commanded by the Apostle's word what a bishop or presbyter ought not to have; now, on the contrary, what he ought to have is set out.

1:8-9

But hospitable, a lover of good things, pure, just, holy, self-controlled, or abstinent, holding fast the faithful word which is according to doctrine, that he may be able to comfort in sound doctrine, and to refute those who contradict. Before all things hospitality is enjoined on the future bishop. For if all desire to hear that word of the Gospel, "I was a stranger, and you took me in" (Matt. 25:35), how much more the bishop, whose house ought to be the common lodging of all! For a layman, receiving one or two or a few, will fulfill¹⁸ the duty of hospitality; a bishop, unless he receives all, is inhuman. But I fear that, just as the queen of the South, who came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon (Matt. 12), will judge the men of her time, and the men of Nineveh, who did penance at the preaching of Jonah, will condemn those who scorned to hear the Savior, greater than Jonah, so very many among the peoples may judge the bishops, withdrawing themselves from the ecclesiastical rank and practicing what does not befit a bishop. Of these I think John too writes to Gaius: "Dearest, you act faithfully in whatever you do for the brethren, and that for strangers, who have borne witness to your love before the Church: you will do very well if you send them on their way worthily of God: for they went out for the name of the Lord, accepting nothing from the Gentiles" (3 John 5 ff.). And truly, the Holy Spirit speaking in him, he even then rebuked what was to come in the churches, saying: "I wrote also to the Church: but Diotrephes¹⁹, who loves to hold the first place among them, does not receive us. Therefore, when I come, I will call to mind his works which he does, slandering us with evil words; and it is not enough for him that he does not himself receive the brethren, but he also forbids those who wish to, and casts them out of the Church." Truly one can now see what was foretold: in very many cities, bishops, or presbyters, if they see laymen hospitable, lovers of good things, envy them, rage, excommunicate them, expel them from the Church, as though it were not lawful to do what the bishop does not do, and as though for laymen to be such were²⁰ a condemnation of the priests. So they find them burdensome, and as though set upon their own necks, and harass them with various persecutions in order to draw them away from good work. Let the bishop also be chaste, whom the Greeks call σώφρονα; and the Latin translator, deceived by the ambiguity of the word, rendered "prudent" (prudentem) instead of "chaste" (pudicum). Now if laymen are commanded to abstain from intercourse with their wives for the sake of prayer, what are we to think of a bishop, who is every day to offer to God unblemished victims for his own sins and those of the people? Let us read again the books of Kings²¹, and we shall find that the priest Abimelech was unwilling to give of the loaves of the presentation to David and his young men before he asked whether the young men were clean from a woman: not, of course, another man's, but a wife (1 Sam. 21). And had he not heard that they had kept away from the marital act yesterday and the day before, he would by no means have granted the loaves which he had at first refused. There is as great a difference between the loaves of the presentation and the body of Christ as between the shadow and the bodies, between the image and the truth, between the patterns of things to come and those very things which were prefigured through the patterns. Just as, therefore, gentleness, patience, sobriety, moderation, abstinence from gain, and also hospitality and kindness ought to be found especially in the bishop, and to stand out among all the laymen, so too a purity of his own and (so to speak) a priestly chastity, so that he abstain not only from the unclean act, but also from the glance of the eye and the straying of thought, so that the mind that is to consecrate the body of Christ may be free. The bishop ought also to be just and holy, so as to exercise justice among the peoples over whom he presides, rendering to each what he deserves, and not to respect persons in judgment. Now between the justice of a layman and of a bishop there is this difference: that a layman can appear just in a few things, but a bishop can exercise justice in as many as he has subjects. Now holy, which in Greek is said ὅσιος, signifies rather this: when holiness itself is mixed with piety and is referred to God. For whom we call holy (sanctus), the Greeks call ἅγιον; but whom they call ὅσιον, we can call devout toward God (pium in Deum). Let the bishop also be abstinent: not only (as some think) from lust and from his wife's embrace, but from all the disturbances of the soul: that he not be roused to irascibility, that sadness not cast him down, that fear not agitate him, that immoderate joy not lift him up. Now abstinence is numbered by the Apostle among the fruits of the spirit. And if it is required of all, how much more of a bishop, who, patient and gentle, ought to bear the vices of those who sin, comfort the fainthearted, support the weak, render to no one evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. Finally, let him hold fast the faithful word which is according to doctrine, so that, just as the word of God is faithful and worthy of all acceptance, so he too may show himself such that everything he says is deemed worthy of faith, and his words are the rule of truth. Let him be able also to comfort those who are tossed by the whirlwinds of this age, and through sound doctrine to destroy weak precepts. Now doctrine is called sound to distinguish it from languid and weak doctrine. Let him also be such as to refute those who contradict: the heretics or the Jews, and the wise men of this age. And indeed the earlier qualities which he set down among the virtues of a bishop pertain to life. But this which he says, That he may be able to comfort in sound doctrine, and to refute those who contradict, is to be referred to knowledge. For if a bishop has only a holy life, by living so he can benefit himself. But if he is learned in doctrine and speech, he can instruct himself and the others; and not only instruct and teach his own, but also beat back the adversaries, who, unless they are refuted and convicted, can easily pervert the hearts of the simple. This passage tells against those who, giving themselves to sloth and leisure and sleep, think it a sin to read the Scriptures, and despise as garrulous and useless those who meditate on the Law of the Lord day and night, not noticing that the Apostle, after the catalogue of the bishop's manner of life, likewise commanded doctrine too.

1:10-11

For there are many who are also not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers of minds, especially those who are of the circumcision, on whom silence must be imposed; who overturn whole houses, teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain. Let him who is to be the leader of the Church have eloquence joined to integrity of life, so that his works may not be silent without speech, nor his words blush for lack of deeds; especially since there are not few but many, and not submissive but insolent, who do not care to say that word of the Psalmist, "Is not my soul subject to God?" (Ps. 61:1), but by empty persuasion pervert the good²² seed of minds, which by nature has knowledge of God. For this is what Paul seems to me to have meant when he says φρεναπάται: not, as the Latin translator simply rendered it, deceivers (deceptores), but deceivers of minds (mentium deceptores). And indeed, without the authority of the Scriptures their garrulity would win no belief, unless they seemed to strengthen their perverse doctrine with divine testimonies as well. These are the Jews of the circumcision, who at that time were striving to overturn the newborn Church of Christ and to bring in the precepts of the Law; of whom Paul treats more fully both to the Romans and to the Galatians. And we, a few months ago, dictated three volumes in the explanation of the Epistle to the Galatians. Such men the teacher of the Church, to whom the souls of the peoples have been entrusted, ought to overcome by the reasoning of the Scriptures, and impose silence on them by the weight of testimony: men who overturn not one or a few houses, but whole houses, with their masters and households, teaching about the distinctions of foods, about the long since abolished sabbath, about the injury of circumcision. And would that they did this very thing out of zeal for the faith! It could be pardoned in some measure, since the Apostle says: "I confess, they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge" (Rom. 10:2). But because their belly is their God, they wish for the sake of shameful gain to make disciples their own, so that, as masters, they may be fed by their followers. We can, however, also interpret otherwise what was said, for the sake of shameful gain: so as to think that the Apostle used a common word, by which all heretics, when they teach perverse things, are wont to declare themselves gainers of men, whereas it is not gain but perdition to kill the souls of those they deceive. On the contrary, whoever has reproved his erring brother according to the Gospel, if he has been converted, has gained him. For what greater gain can there be, or what more precious, than if one gains a human soul? Every teacher of the Church, therefore, who persuades to the faith of Christ by right reasoning is an honorable gainer. And every heretic, who deceives men by certain tricks and is deceived, speaks what he ought not, for the sake of shameful gain.

1:12-14

One of them, their own prophet, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies. This testimony is true: for which cause rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not attending to Jewish fables and the commandments of men who turn themselves away from the truth. As far as the sequence of the discourse and the context of the passage are concerned, what he says, One of them, their own prophet, said, seems to be referred to those of whom he spoke above: "especially those who are of the circumcision, who must be restrained, who overturn whole houses, teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain", so that there follows: one of them, their own prophet, said. But because this little hexameter verse is found in none of the prophets who prophesied in Judea, it seems to me that it should be read in two ways: so that what he says, One of them, their own prophet, said, is joined with the earlier words, "for this reason I left you in Crete, that you might correct the things that were lacking", and there follows: one of them, their own Prophet, said, that is, of the Cretans. But because much lies in between, and this seems absurd, and perhaps no one would accept it, it must therefore be fitted otherwise to the earlier words, which are nearer, so that we read: "For there are many who are also not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers of minds, but especially those who are of the circumcision"; these many, both not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers of minds, together with those who are of the circumcision, must be restrained, who overturn whole houses, teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain: one of them, their own Prophet, said; so that what he says, their own Prophet, is referred not specially to the Jews, and to those especially who are of the circumcision, but to the many who are not submissive, and empty talkers, and deceivers of minds, who, since they were certainly in Crete, must be believed to have been Cretans. Now this little verse is said to be found in the Oracles of Epimenides, the Cretan poet; whom he here called a prophet either mocking²³, namely that such Christians deserve to have such prophets, just as there were also prophets of Baal, and prophets of confusion, and others of stumblings, and whatever corrupt prophets Scripture mentions; or truly, because he wrote about Oracles and responses, which themselves foretell the future and proclaim long beforehand the things that are to come. Indeed the book itself is headed with the title Oracles; and because it seemed to promise something divine, I think the Apostle looked into it on that account, to see what the divination of the Gentiles promised, and at the right time made use of the little verse, writing to Titus, who was in Crete, so as to convict the false teachers of the Cretans by the island's own teacher. And Paul is found to have done this not only in this passage, but in others as well. For in the Acts of the Apostles, when he was addressing the people and disputing in the Areopagus, which is the senate house of the Athenians, he says among other things: "As certain of your own poets also have said: For we are also his offspring" (Acts 17), a half-line which is read in the Phaenomena of Aratus, whom Cicero translated into the Latin tongue, and Germanicus Caesar, and lately Avienus, and many whom it would take very long to enumerate. To the Corinthians too (1 Cor. 15:33), who were themselves polished with Attic eloquence and, because of the nearness of the places, seasoned with the savor of the Athenians, he took an iambic verse from a comedy of Menander: Evil conversations corrupt good morals. Nor is it any wonder if, as the occasion offered, he made use of the verses of Gentile poets, since, changing some things in the inscription of an altar, he even spoke to the Athenians: "For passing through," he says, "and beholding your objects of worship, I found also an altar on which was written: To an unknown God. What, therefore, you worship without knowing, this I announce to you". But the inscription of the altar was not as Paul declared, To an unknown God, but thus: To the gods of Asia and Europe and Africa: to unknown and foreign gods. But because Paul did not need many unknown gods, but only one unknown God, he used the singular word, to teach that his God was the one whom the Athenians had inscribed in the title of the altar, and that they ought rightly to worship, knowing him, the one whom they venerated without knowing, and whom they could not fail to know. But Paul did this rarely, and as the occasion of the place rather than of display required, in the manner of bees, which are wont to make honey from various flowers and fit together the cells of the combs. There are those who think this verse was taken from Callimachus, the poet of Cyrene, and in some measure they are not mistaken. For he too, writing in praise of Jupiter against the Cretans, who boasted that they could show his tomb, says: Cretans are always liars, who even with sacrilegious mind built his tomb. But, as we said above, the whole verse was taken by the Apostle from the poet Epimenides, and Callimachus used its opening in his own poem; or else he put into meter, without theft of another's work, a common proverb by which the Cretans were called deceitful. Some think the Apostle should be censured for having slipped imprudently, and that²⁴, while refuting false teachers, he approved that little verse which says that the Cretans are called²⁵ deceitful for this reason, that they built an empty tomb of Jupiter. For if, they say, Epimenides or Callimachus charge the Cretans with being deceitful, evil beasts and idle bellies for this reason, that they do not perceive divine things and imagine that Jupiter, who reigns in heaven, is buried in their island; and if what they said is proved true by the Apostle's judgment, it follows that Jupiter is not dead but alive. Ignorantly, then, did Paul, the destroyer of idolatry, while dealing with perverse teachers, assert the gods whom he was attacking. To these we must reply briefly: just as in his saying, Depraved²⁶ conversations corrupt good morals, and in that other, For we are also his offspring, he did not at once approve the whole comedy of Menander and the book of Aratus, but made use of the fitness of the little verse; so too in the present passage he did not, through one little verse, confirm the whole work of Callimachus or Epimenides, of whom the one sings the praises of Jupiter, the other writes about Oracles; but he only rebuked the Cretans as liars for the vice of their race: not because of that opinion for which they were charged by the poets, but because of their inborn readiness to lie, confuting them by the race's own author. But those who think that one who has used a part of a book must follow the whole book seem to me also to receive among the Scriptures of the Church the apocryphon of Enoch²⁷, from which the apostle Jude set down a testimony in his Epistle, and many other things which the apostle Paul spoke from hidden writings. For by this argument we could say that, because he said that among the Athenians he worshipped the unknown God whom they had noted on the altar, Paul ought also to follow the other things which had been written on the altar, and to do the things the Athenians did, since he had agreed in part with the Athenians in the worship of the unknown God. Far be it from me to drag an argument and scholastic elegance into calumny. No one is such an assassin, such a parricide, such a poisoner, as not to have done something good at some time. If, then, seeing one good deed of his, I approve it, will the necessity also lie on me of approving his other deeds, which were evil? If an enemy wrangles against us and shouts, will he not speak something of truth amid the words of enmity and quarrel? which is not altogether censured even by us, against whom he speaks. So too Callimachus and Epimenides did not speak truly that Jupiter is a god, and the rest that is contained in their poems, because the Cretans are deceitful; but they spoke truly only in this, that they expressed the inborn vice of lying of the Cretans, who, because they are deceitful, have not therefore never spoken the truth at some time. For Jupiter would not on that account not be a god, if the Cretans spoke truly; but yet, even if they were silent, one who was dead would not have the title of god. Finally, so that we may know that the Apostle spoke against the Cretans not by chance and casually, as one pleases (as those men think), but with consideration and circumspection, and guarding himself on every side: This testimony, he says, is true: not the whole poem from which the testimony was taken, not the entire work, but only this testimony, this little verse in which they are called liars. And surely he who agreed with only one part of a poem must be believed to have refuted the rest. But how the Cretans are marked as liars, and the Galatians as foolish, and Israel as stiff-necked, and each province by its own vice, we have discussed in the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians; and because there is nothing more that we can bring forward here, we are content with that. Therefore rebuke them, he says, sharply: for they are liars, and evil beasts, and idle bellies; who persuade men of falsehoods, who after the manner of wild beasts thirst for the blood of those they deceive, and do not eat their own bread working in quietness; whose god is their belly, and their glory is in their shame; and rebuke them, that they may be sound in the faith. Of this soundness of faith he speaks also in what follows: that the old men be sober, honorable, chaste, sound in faith, and in love, and in patience; and after the likeness of faith, soundness is also ascribed to doctrine. "There will be", he says²⁸, "a time when they will not acquiesce in sound doctrine". There are also words of soundness, of which he speaks to Timothy in the first Epistle: "If anyone teaches otherwise, and does not acquiesce in the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the doctrine which is according to piety" (1 Tim. 6:3). And in the second: "Having a pattern of sound words which you have heard from me" (2 Tim. 1:13). Those who have this soundness of faith and doctrine and words will not attend to Jewish fables and the commandments of men who turn themselves away from the truth. Let us humor the Jews for a little while, and listen patiently to the absurdities of those among them who are called wise; and then we shall understand what are²⁹ the Jewish fables, of men who, without the authority of Scripture, without any support of reason, invent certain fabulous animals; of whom Isaiah prophesied, saying: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. But they worship me in vain, teaching the doctrines and commandments of men" (Isa. 29:13). Approving this testimony in the Gospel, the Savior convicts them of having preferred the commandments of men to the Law of God. "For God says: Honor father and mother"; but they handed down: "That whoever says to father and mother, Whatever gift is from me will profit you, shall not honor his father and his mother" (Matt. 15:3 ff.). If anyone after the coming of Christ is cut, and not circumcised, he serves Jewish fables and the commandments of men who turn themselves away from the truth³⁰. For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he who is one inwardly; and circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter. If anyone keeps the Pasch, not in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, so as to purge from his soul all the old leaven of malice and wickedness, he attends to fables and follows shadows, neglecting the truth. If anyone, not rising with Christ, nor seeking the things that are above but those that are below, says, "Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle the things that are in corruption", by their very use, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, he follows righteousnesses that are not good, and precepts that are not good. But where there is truth, and the spiritual law, there are good justifications, and the precepts are the best: whoever does them shall live in them.

1:15

All things are clean to the clean, but to the defiled and to unbelievers nothing is clean: but both their mind and their conscience are polluted. Because he had said above, "For there are many who are also not submissive, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those who are of the circumcision", and of those who had been deceived by them he had consequently added, "Rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and the commandments of men who turn themselves away from the truth"; and because, as is argued most fully to the Galatians and to the Romans, they thought there was a distinction among foods, since some seemed clean and some unclean, he therefore now adds: All things are clean to the clean, that is, to those who believe in Christ and know that every creature is good, and that nothing is to be rejected which is received with thanksgiving. But to the defiled and to unbelievers nothing is clean: because both their mind and their conscience are polluted; and for this reason even the things which are clean by nature become unclean to them. Not that anything is either clean or unclean, but that, according to the character of those who eat, it becomes both clean to the clean and unclean to the defiled. Otherwise, even the bread of blessing and the Lord's cup do not help any who are unbelievers and polluted; because whoever eats of that bread and drinks of the cup unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself (1 Cor. 11). By the coming of Christ all things have been purified. What he has cleansed, we cannot make common. But we must take care, in treating these things, not to give occasion to that heresy which, according to the Apocalypse (ch. 2) and the apostle Paul himself writing to the Corinthians, thinks one may eat of things sacrificed to idols, because all things are clean to the clean (1 Cor. 8). For the Apostle's purpose here was not to discuss the things that are sacrificed to demons, but to argue against the Jews, who, according to the discipline of the abolished Law, thought some things clean and some unclean. "For we cannot," he says, "partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons; nor can we drink at once the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons" (1 Cor. 10:20, 21). It lies with us, then, to eat things either clean or unclean. For if we are clean, the creature is clean to us. But if we are unclean and unbelievers, all things become common to us, whether through heresy dwelling in our hearts, or through the consciousness of offenses. But if our conscience does not reproach us, and we have the confidence of piety toward the Lord, we will pray with the spirit, we will pray also with the mind; we will sing with the spirit, we will sing also with the mind (1 Cor. 14); and we shall be far from those of whom it is now written: Both their mind and their conscience are polluted.

1:16

They confess that they know God, but in deeds they deny him: detestable, and disobedient, and reprobate for every good work. These, whose mind and conscience are polluted, confess that they know God, but in deeds deny him, according to that which is said in Isaiah: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me" (Isa. 29:13). Just as, therefore, one who honors with the lips and withdraws far off with the heart, so one who confesses God in speech denies him by works. And one who denies God by works, with a feigned confession, is rightly detestable and profane; and, persuaded by no reasoning of the truth, he is called disobedient and unbelieving. Hence it comes about that he is reprobate for every good work: namely, that even the things that, overcome by natural goodness, he may perhaps have done well are not good, since they are reprobate through the perversity of his mind. Some think that God is denied only if someone, seized by the Gentiles in persecution, refuses to own himself³¹ a Christian. But see, the Apostle declares that God is denied by all deeds that are perverse. Christ is wisdom, righteousness, truth, holiness, fortitude. Wisdom is denied by folly, righteousness by iniquity, truth by lying, holiness by shamefulness, fortitude by weakness of soul. And as often as we are overcome by vices and sins, so often do we deny God; so that³², on the contrary, as often as we do something well, we confess God. Nor should it be thought that on the day of judgment only those will be denied by the Son of God who denied Christ in martyrdom; but through all works, words and thoughts, Christ either, being denied, denies, or, being confessed, confesses. Of this confession, I think, he also gave command to the disciples, saying: "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8), so that in all good works and words the mind devoted to him may confess Christ. There is also a certain praiseworthy denial, of which the Apostle himself says: "That, denying impiety and worldly desires, we may live purely and justly and piously in this present age, awaiting the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior God" (Titus 2:12). Whoever denies with this denial, and is willing to follow the Savior when he says, "Whoever will³³ come to me, let him deny himself" (Luke 9:23), having put off the old man with his works and put on the new, will follow his God. But how one denies himself must be considered. The chaste man denies the fornicator that he formerly was; the wise man the imprudent, the just man the unjust, the brave man the weak. And, to speak of all in common, we deny ourselves as often as, trampling on our former vices, we cease to be what we were and begin to be what we were not before.

2:1

But you, speak the things that befit sound doctrine. It is one thing to speak sound doctrine, another to teach the things that suit sound doctrine: for in the one there is simple instruction only; in the other, together with the teaching, there is also the correction of life. "For whoever breaks one of these least commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:19): the Lord commanding the disciples that they ought not only to labor in meditation on the Scriptures, so as to go over what is written and store it up in the treasury of memory, but first to do what has been commanded. "But whoever does and teaches, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." For unless our righteousness surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and of the Pharisees, we cannot enter the kingdoms of heaven (Matt. 5). They, sitting upon the chair of Moses, say and do not do, and bind unbearable burdens which they lay upon men's necks, and will not themselves touch them with their least finger. This, then, is what the Apostle now teaches Titus, his son in Christ and his disciple: to speak the things that suit sound doctrine; because doctrine has soundness then, when the teacher's doctrine and his life agree alike.

2:2

That old men be sober, honorable, chaste, sound in faith, and in love, and in patience. Having first commanded Titus in general what he himself ought to say to all, where he says, "But you, speak the things that befit sound doctrine", he now sets out, class by class, what befits each age. First what suits old men, then what befits old women, third what is fitting for the young, both male, that is, and female; although within the precept for the old women he has set down the commands concerning young women, so that he did not so much teach the young women himself as set out what they should be taught by the old women. Lastly he speaks of slaves; and through each age and condition he lays down his precepts so fittingly that his speech is a rule of life and of morals. Old men, then, are to be sober, or watchful, because νηφάλιοι among the Greeks means both; honorable, so that gravity of morals may adorn the gravity of age; chaste, lest they run riot at an age not suited to it, lest, with blood already cold toward lust, they be an example to the young unto ruin. Sound in faith: of this soundness of faith we spoke above. And sound not only in faith but also in love and in patience, so that, when they have first the soundness of faith, they may hear from the Savior: "Your faith has made you whole" (Mark 10:52). And elsewhere: "For not even in Israel have I found such faith" (Matt. 8:10). And because of this same soundness of faith let them become sons of Abraham, of whom it is written: "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness" (Gen. 15:6). And Habakkuk, recalling this soundness of faith, says: "But the just man lives³⁴ by my faith" (Hab. 2:4). Read again the Epistle of the apostle Paul to the Hebrews (or of whoever else you think it is, since it has now been received among the ecclesiastical writings), count through that whole catalogue of faith in which it is written: "By faith Abel offered to God a greater sacrifice than Cain" (Heb. 11:4 ff.). And: "Enoch was translated, that he should not see death"; and Noah, believing God about the things he did not yet see, built the ark; and Abraham went out into a land he did not know. And lest Scripture should seem to give women no example of faith, it is written in the same Epistle that Sarah too received power to conceive seed when the time of her age was already past it, because she judged him faithful who had promised. There the faith of Isaac and of Jacob, of Joseph, of Moses too and of Rahab, and of the rest, is praised, whom he can know better who has read the Epistle itself. As there is, then, a soundness of faith, so the same soundness is also in love. And who possesses the soundness of love but he who has first loved God with all his soul, and with all his heart, and with all his strength? Then, hearing Christ's precept concerning his neighbor, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt. 5), he has divided his love: because on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. He who has the soundness of love is not envious, is not puffed up, does not act wrongly, not dishonorably, is not provoked to anger, thinks no evil, does not rejoice³⁵ over iniquity, but rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, awaits all things (1 Cor. 13). And because love never falls away, he who is in the soundness of love never himself falls either. For neither tribulation, nor distress, nor famine, nor persecution, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword will be able to separate him from the soundness of love which he has in Christ Jesus. Why should I speak of the sword and the other lesser things, which cannot divide him who possesses the love of soundness, when neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor strength, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature whatever can separate him who has the love of soundness in Christ Jesus? If the soundness of love has been understood by us, let us take from the Scriptures some example of those who are in weakness of love. The Savior says of the last times: "Because when iniquity has been multiplied, the love of many will grow cold" (Matt. 24). For love is warm in those who are fervent in spirit, but cold, icy and frozen in those who have taken in the harshest blasts of the North wind. "For from the North evils will blaze forth upon all who inhabit the land" (Jer. 1:14). With this coldness of love Amnon too had grown stiff toward his sister Tamar (2 Sam. 13). We must fear, then, lest we too at some time be overcome by this weakness of love. For it sometimes happens that at first our love toward a virgin, or toward any woman, is holy; and when the mind has been softened into affections, little by little the soundness of love grows pale with languor, and begins to weaken, and carries the lover to final death. Hence the Apostle too, cautiously and prudently, commands Timothy to exhort the young women in all purity (1 Tim. 5). And all purity is in flesh and spirit and soul: that the eye be not made to stumble; that we not hang³⁶ clinging to the beauty of a woman's face; that it not delight us to hear flattering words; that the mind, hard before, not wilt at feigned words. Let them beware, then, as we have said, young men as well as old, young women as well as old women, and keep their heart with all diligence, lest through the soundness of love the sickness of love enter in, and through holy love there come to be an unholy love which drags them down to Gehenna. Let him who is sound in faith, who is sound in love, be sound also in patience: and in patience, which is proved above all in temptations; because it profits nothing to have had the things we enumerated above, unless all the riches and merchandise with which the ship is laden are preserved in the storm, and, while the winds blow from this side and that, what has been well gained is delivered without shipwreck. "He who", indeed, "has persevered to the end, he shall be saved" (Matt. 24:13).

2:3-5

Old women likewise in holy demeanor, not inciters, not enslaved to much wine; teaching well, that they may instruct the young women in purity, that they may love their husbands, that they may love their children: chaste, pure, having care of the house, kind, subject to their husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed. Although the apostle Peter has commanded that husbands give honor to their wives as to the weaker vessel, it is not, however, to be supposed that a wife, who has a weak vessel of the body, is at once weaker in soul as well. Hence it is now commanded them, so that in them too that saying of the Apostle may be fulfilled: "Power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9); and it is said that they also are to have all the things that were commanded in common to the old men, namely in that he says, Old women likewise, that is, just as the old men, honorable in all things, sober, chaste, sound in faith, and in love, and in patience; and, for their sex, they are to have this as their own, that they be in holy demeanor, or, as it reads better in the Greek, ἐν καταστήματι ἱεροπρεπεῖς (in a bearing befitting what is sacred), so that their very gait and movement, face, speech and silence may display a certain dignity of sacred seemliness. And because this kind of little women is usually talkative, according to that saying: "And at the same time, being idle, they learn to go about from house to house; and not only idle, but also wordy and busybodies, speaking things they ought not" (1 Tim. 5:13): therefore he wants them to be not inciters (incentrices), that is, not accusers, not such as disparage some in order to please others. Or certainly, not such as, because they themselves have already passed beyond youth, discuss the ages of the young women and say: That one adorns herself so, that one does her hair so, so that one goes out; she loves him, she is loved by him: whereas, even if these things are true, they ought not so much to accuse her before the others as to reprove the girl herself in private with the love of Christ, and rather to teach her not to do it than to accuse in public what she has done. Women of this age, because they have grown cold to the licentiousness³⁷ of the body (although there are very many who are not ashamed of their gray hairs, and, trembling, are dressed up as little maidens before a flock of grandchildren), are accustomed to give themselves to wine in place of lust; and when among their cups they have seemed to themselves wise and eloquent, to put on a kind of austerity of morals, speaking as what they seem to themselves to be, and not remembering what they were. So let old women be kept also from too much drinking of wine, since what lust is in the young, drunkenness is in the old. Or how can an old woman teach young women purity, when, if a young woman has imitated the drunkenness of an old woman, she cannot be chaste? And he expressed it pointedly: not enslaved to much wine. For it is a kind of servitude, and the lowest condition, for a man's senses to be seized by wine, and for him to be not his own but wine's. Since, then, he taught first what the old women ought to be, and after the things they have in common with the old men set out also the things proper to them, that they be full of an honorable and holy demeanor and of all seemliness: not accusers, not disparaging others, not with their senses seized by wine; now, accordingly, he hands them the reins of teaching, so that, when they are such, they may have freedom to teach, namely to teach the things that are good. For although in another place he has said, "But I do not permit women to teach" (1 Tim. 2:12), it must be understood thus: that teaching directed at men is taken from them. For the rest, let them teach the young women as their daughters. First purity: because the enemy fights more against this in the flowering age, and all his power against women is in the navel of the belly; then that they love their husbands and love their children. What teaching is there in loving husbands, since this is established not in the eloquence of one who teaches but in the heart of one who loves? He wants them to love their husbands purely: he wants there to be a chaste love between husband and wife, so that with modesty and reserve, and as if by the necessity of her sex, she rather renders the debt to her husband than herself demands it of him, and believes that she performs the work of begetting children before the eyes of God and of the angels: thus she will not blush even at the secret couch, and the darkness of the night, and her closed chamber, since she will have reflected that all things lie open to the eyes of God. And they love their children thus, if they instruct them in the discipline of God. But to be unwilling to sadden them by teaching the things that are good, and to grant them the freedom to sin³⁸, is not to love children but to hate them. Let the young women also be instructed to have care of the house. And because it could happen that the care of the house was governed with harshness, and through this precept of the Apostle the matron might become too severe toward the household servants, he therefore joined to it kind: so that she might believe that she rules her husband's house well when she commands the servants with kindness, not with terror. And also subject to their husbands: lest, puffed up by riches and rank, they not remember the sentence of God by which they are subjected to their husbands. For he says to the woman: "Your turning shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you" (Gen. 3:16). In this the prudence of holy Scripture is to be considered: that the Lord did not say this to the man, saying, "You shall rule over your wife", but to the woman herself, so as to leave her the reward of compliance, since it is in her own power, if she wishes to obey the precepts of God, to serve the man and to be subject to her husband, so that it might in some way be a free servitude, and full of love; she is therefore serving her husband while she fears to offend him. For man was not created for the woman, but woman for the man. And since the man is the head of the woman, and Christ the head of the man, any wife who is not subject to her husband, that is, to her head, is guilty of the same crime as the man is if he is not subject to Christ, his head. And the word of the Lord is blasphemed either when the first sentence of God is despised and counted for nothing, or when the Gospel of Christ is defamed, while she who is a Christian, and subject by the law of God, desires, against the law and the faith of nature, to command her husband: when even Gentile women serve their husbands by the common law of nature.

2:6-8

Exhort the young men likewise to be chaste in all things, showing yourself an example of good works, in doctrine, in integrity and purity, in sound and irreprehensible speech, so that he who is on the opposing side may be abashed, having nothing evil to say of us. Just as, in what he had commanded above, saying, "Old women likewise in holy demeanor", we had said that the likeness of the old women was to be referred to the old men, so now, in what he has added, "Urge the young men likewise to be chaste", we judge that the likeness of the young men is to be fitted to the old women, and through the old women to the old men: so that they have the sobriety of the old men, and be honorable and chaste, and sound in faith, and in love, and in patience; and that of the old women in holiness of demeanor³⁹, that they be not accusers, not enslaved to much wine, teaching well, and the rest. And he has set down this as proper to the young men, that they be chaste in all things, namely in mind as well as in body, in deed as well as in thought, so that there be in a young man no suspicion of shamefulness. And although some of the Latins think it should be read thus: "Urge the young men likewise to be chaste", and afterward add, "in all things showing yourself a pattern of good works", yet let us know that in all things is to be referred to what precedes, that is: urge them to be chaste in all things. It must also be known that continence is necessary not only in the work of the flesh and in the desire of the mind, but in all things: that we may not seek undue honors, that we may not be inflamed by avarice, that we may not be overcome by any passion. "Showing yourself", he says, "a pattern of good works". It profits nothing for someone to be practiced in speaking and to have worn his tongue smooth for talking, unless he teaches more by example than by word. In short, one who is unchaste, however eloquent he may be, if he exhorts his hearers to purity, his speech is weak and has no authority to exhort. And conversely, however rustic and slow of speech he may be, if he is pure, he can by his example drive men to the likeness of his life. And what he says, "in incorruption", is to be taken thus: that incorruption (incorruptio) properly means virginity. Indeed, those who are virgins are commonly called incorrupt (incorrupti), and those who have ceased to be virgins are named corrupted (corrupti); and we say: She who was once a virgin has been corrupted. Hence I think that Titus, believing the Gospel before he was taken up with the work of the flesh, received baptism and remained a virgin, and is now admonished by the Apostle to show a pattern of himself in incorruption: an incorruption which, indeed, we do not see in Timothy. For when he said to him, "Let no one despise your youth, but be a pattern of the faithful⁴⁰ in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity" (1 Tim. 4:12), he was silent about incorruption and set down only "purity". But purity can be understood also in celibacy without virginity. Unless perhaps we take purity as in the mind, and incorruption as in the body, according to what is written elsewhere in the definition of a virgin: "That she may be holy in body and in spirit" (1 Cor. 7). And he himself has now added in sequence: "in doctrine, in incorruption, in chastity". We could⁴¹ interpret both chastity and incorruption as the integrity of doctrine too, were it not that what follows specifically, sound and irreprehensible speech, would then hold a precept of its own concerning instruction in doctrine. And as for his saying irreprehensible speech: not that anyone is of such eloquence and prudence as to be reprehended by no one (for even the apostles and evangelists are reprehended by heretics and Gentiles), but that he says or does nothing worthy of reprehension, even though adversaries are ready to reprehend. And because there are many who are not subject, empty talkers and deceivers of minds, who hate him who reproves in the gates and abhor holy speech, therefore let us show ourselves an example in all things, in doctrine, in integrity, in chastity, in sound and irreprehensible speech, so that our adversaries, thoroughly frightened by the soundness of our life and doctrine, may not dare to accuse, that is, may fabricate nothing plausible in accusation. And indeed to this day we see some in the churches (although this is a rare bird) of such gravity and continence that they have testimony even from their adversaries, and it is said: That man is great, and of holy conduct and upright morals, were he not a heretic. For no one is of such unbounded impudence that he could accuse the rays of the sun of being dark, and overspread its clear light with the gloom of night. Hence the Apostle too, guarding against these same things, says: "That I may cut off occasion from those who desire occasion" (2 Cor. 11:12). He who is on the opposing side can also be understood as the devil, who is the accuser of our brethren, as John the Evangelist proclaims: who, when he has nothing evil to lay against us, blushes, and the slanderer will not be able to slander. And diabolus in the Latin language means "slanderer" (criminator).

2:9-10

Let slaves be subject to their masters in all things: let them be pleasing, not contradicting, not stealing, but showing all good faith, that they may adorn the doctrine of our Savior, God, in all things. Since our Lord and Savior, who says in the Gospel, "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you" (Matt. 11:28), considers no condition, age or sex a stranger to blessedness, therefore the Apostle now lays down precepts for slaves too, namely as for a part of the Church and members of the body of Christ. And just as above he taught what Titus ought to instruct the old men, the old women, the young women and the young men, so now he lays down precepts suited to slaves. First, that they be subject to their masters in all things. But in all those things which are not contrary to God: so that if the master commands things that are not opposed to the holy Scriptures, the slave is to be subject to the master; but if he commands things contrary to them, let him obey the master of the spirit rather than the master of the body. Pay careful attention to how he decrees precepts suited to the persons. "Let slaves", he says, "be subject to their masters in all things" (Eph. 6:5). In another place, treating of children, he says: "Children, obey your parents" (Col. 3:20). For it befits children to obey their parents, but slaves to be subject to a master who commands. Nor let us think it contradictory that in another Epistle "Let wives", he says, "be subject to their husbands" (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18), and in this one has declared that wives are to be subject to their husbands, as though he used the same word both of slaves and of wives. For in a certain way the husband is the master of the wife. "He", it says, "shall rule over you" (Gen. 3:16). The Savior too was subject to his parents (Luke 2), but when he was still twelve years old and differed in nothing from a slave, though Lord of all; for he had not yet reached the full age of a man that could take up the inheritance. But it is also written of him elsewhere: "For when all things have been subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who subjected all things to himself, that God may be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). And all things will be subjected to him when he has said, "The Lord to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet" (Ps. 109:1). In slaves who are subject, the Lord is subject. And just as he is said to be a curse for us, though he is not a curse but true blessing, so for us he is written either as subject or as not subject, according as we are either subject to God or not subject. Some read this passage thus: Let slaves be subject to their masters, and after they have punctuated up to here, they add, in all things let them please: whereas in the Greek the order of the reading is different, that is, let slaves be subject to their masters in all things; so that there follows εὐαρέστους εἶναι, which we can render, though not fully, yet in some measure, that they be well content with themselves: namely, lest the sentence of God on their condition should seem unjust to them. But just as the poor man can be saved according to his measure, and the woman in the weakness of her sex is not excluded from the kingdom of God, and every condition can attain blessedness according to its rank, so let slaves too be well content with themselves that they are slaves, and not think that they cannot serve God because they are subject to men; but rather that they please the will of God in this, if they are both subject to their masters in all things and well content with themselves in their condition; and let them carry out what the Apostle commands next, that they be not contradicting, not stealing. Indeed the greatest vice of slaves is to contradict their masters, and, when these have commanded anything, to mutter to themselves. Therefore he admonishes Titus to take away, through sound doctrine, a passion of this kind from those who are Christian slaves. For if the slave must carry out what the master commands, why should he not do this very thing with good will, rather than both offend his master and still do what he is told: especially since God too was offended at the water of contradiction? And in another place he speaks of the murmuring people: "Let their murmuring cease from me, and they shall not die" (Num. 17). After contradiction, let the doctrine of Christ correct another vice of slaves too, "that they be not thieves". Now a thief is judged one not only in greater things but also in lesser. For it is not what has been carried off by theft but the mind of the one stealing that is considered. Just as in fornication and adultery, the fornication or adultery is not different on this account, if the woman is beautiful or rich, ugly or poor, a harlot or an adulteress, but whatever she may be, it is one fornication, or adultery: so also in theft, however much a slave has carried off, he incurs the crime of theft. Hence in the law of Moses thieves are compelled sometimes to restore sevenfold, sometimes fourfold, and at times the thief himself is cut down, at times he is sold for his theft, matters which I recall that I recently expounded to you in Leviticus. But if this is forbidden in a slave, how much more in a free man, lest either a judge plunder, or a soldier not content with his pay lay waste what belongs to others? Finely did a certain man of the greatest gravity, when the integrity of a certain judge was being praised to him and the one praising said of him, "He is not a thief", reply: "He would make an excellent slave, if he were not a runaway as well": so far should the suspicion of theft be from every free man. So let slaves be subject to their masters in all things, let them be well content with their condition, so that they do not bear slavery bitterly, do not contradict their masters, do not steal, and besides this show good faith in all things, that they may adorn the doctrine of the Savior, our God, in all things. For if they have been faithful in the least with their fleshly masters, greater things will begin to be entrusted to them with God. And he adorns the doctrine of the Lord who does the things that are fitting to his condition. And on the other hand he puts it to confusion who is not subject in all things, whose condition displeases him, who, a contradicter and a defrauder, shows good faith in nothing. For how can⁴² he be faithful with the goods of God who could not show faith to a fleshly master?

2:11-14

For the grace of God the Savior has shone forth to all men, instructing us that, denying impiety and worldly desires, we should live chastely, and justly, and piously in this age, awaiting the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and cleanse for himself a choice people, an emulator of good works. After the catalogue of doctrine to Titus, of what he ought to instruct the old men, what the old women, what the young women and the young men, what, lastly, the slaves, he now rightly adds: For the grace of God the Savior has shone forth to all men. For there is no difference at all between free and slave, Greek and barbarian, the circumcised and the one who has a foreskin, woman and man: but we are all one in Christ, we are all called to the kingdom of God, all of us after the offense are to be reconciled to our Father; not through our merits, but through the grace of the Savior: either because Christ himself is the living and subsisting grace of God the Father, or because this is the grace of Christ, God the Savior; and we have been saved not by our own merit, according to what is said in another place: "For nothing you will save them" (Ps. 55:8). This grace has shone forth to all men for this reason: to instruct us that, denying impiety and worldly desires, we should live chastely and justly and piously in this age. And what it is to deny impiety and worldly desires, I trust can be understood from what we expounded above, "They confess that they know God, but in deeds they deny him", opposites being explained through their opposites. Worldly desires, then, are those which are suggested by the prince of this world: and since they belong to the age, they pass away with the cloud of this age. But when we have lived chastely and justly in Christ, sinning, that is, neither in body nor in mind, we shall also live piously in this age: and this piety awaits the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. For as impiety dreads the coming of the great God, so piety, secure about its work and about its faith, awaits him. Where is Arius the serpent? Where Eunomius the snake? The great God Jesus Christ is called Savior; not the firstborn of every creature, not the Word of God and wisdom, but Jesus Christ: names which belong to the man assumed. Nor indeed do we call Jesus Christ one and the Word another, as a new heresy falsely charges: but the same one, both before the ages and after the ages, both before the world and after Mary, nay rather from Mary, we call the great God, our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that with his precious blood he might redeem us from all iniquity, and cleanse for himself a people περιούσιον (for so it stands in the Greek) and make it an emulator of good works. Often considering with myself what the word περιούσιον might mean, and asking the wise men of this age whether they had perhaps read it anywhere, I could never find anyone to explain to me what it signified. Therefore I was compelled to have recourse to the old instrument, from which I supposed the Apostle too had taken what he had said. For a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and as to the law a Pharisee, he was surely setting down in his Epistle what he knew he had read in the Old Testament. So in Deuteronomy I found: "For you are a holy people to the Lord your God, and it has pleased the Lord your God in you that you should be to him a people περιούσιον out of all the peoples that are upon the face of the earth" (Deut. 7:6). And in the hundred and thirty-fourth Psalm, where we have, "Sing psalms to his name, for it is sweet: for the Lord has chosen Jacob for himself, Israel for a possession (in possessione) for himself" (Ps. 134:3–4): for what is "for a possession" (in possessione), in the Greek it is written εἰς περιουσιασμὸν, which Aquila and the Fifth Edition indeed expressed as εἰς περιούσιον. But the Seventy and Theodotion, translating περιουσιασμὸν, made a change of syllable, not of sense. Symmachus, then, for what is περιούσιον in the Greek, SGOLLA (סגלה) in the Hebrew, expressed ἐξαίρετον, that is, "choice" (egregium), or "special" (præcipuum); for which word, using the Latin language in another volume, he rendered "peculiar" (peculiarem). Rightly, then, did Christ Jesus, our great God and Savior, redeem us with his blood, to make the Christian people peculiar to himself, a people that could then be peculiar if it proved an emulator of good works. Hence also what is written in the Gospel according to the Latin translators, "Give us this day our daily (quotidianum) bread" (Matt. 6:11), is better rendered in the Greek "our bread ἐπιούσιον", that is, "special", "choice", "peculiar": namely him who, coming down from heaven, says, "I am the bread that came down from heaven" (John 6:51). Far be it, indeed, that we, who are forbidden to take thought for the morrow, should be commanded in the Lord's prayer to ask for that bread which in a little while is to be digested and cast out into the drain. Nor is there much difference between ἐπιούσιον and περιούσιον: for only the preposition has been changed, not the word. Some think that the bread in the Lord's prayer is called ἐπιούσιον because it is above all οὐσίας, that is, above all substances. If this is accepted, it does not differ much from the sense we have set out. For whatever is choice and special is outside all things and above all things.

2:15

Speak these things and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. He has set down three things: speak, exhort, and rebuke. And what he says, speak, seems to refer to doctrine. But what he has added, exhort (exhortare), that is, παρακάλει, means something different in the Greek from what it means in the Latin: for παράκλησις means comfort rather than exhortation. He used this word above too about the young men: "Comfort (consolare) the young men likewise to be chaste in all things". In its own place we rendered it as it is read in the Latin, as though "exhort" were written. He, then, comforts his hearer who says, "We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:20), and humbles and subjects himself, to gain the one he comforts. But the third thing, rebuke, seems to me to be the opposite of comfort, so that whoever has despised comfort is worthy of rebuke, and deserves to hear: "You have forgotten the comfort which speaks to you as to sons". To Timothy also we read of comfort as one thing and rebuke as another, as the Apostle says: "Be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, comfort" (2 Tim. 4:2). And there, indeed, rebuke is taken up first, and afterward severity is tempered by comfort. Here, however, he wants the disciples first to be comforted, and, if they have not profited by the comforting, then to be reproved, and reproved with all authority. For so I understand what has been said, rebuke with all authority: that it refers specifically to rebuke, and not to the two preceding in common. For it is not fitting to say, comfort with all authority, and speak with all authority, but only, rebuke with all authority.

Let no one despise you. Someone might think that this is the very same thing now written to Titus that was said to Timothy: "Let no one despise your youth" (1 Tim. 4:12). But we, following the distinction of the Greek language, think that περιφρονείτω, which is written here, means one thing, and καταφρονείτω, which was said to Timothy, another, and that the prepositions περὶ and κατὰ make a different sense. And that the apostle Paul uses, not by chance and at whim, different nouns and verbs, and even different prepositions, according to the variety of the matters, can be made plain from what he says: "For the woman is from the man, but the man through the woman" (1 Cor. 11:12). And elsewhere: "For from him and through him and in him are all things" (Rom. 11:36). And also this: "Paul an apostle, not from men, nor through man" (Gal. 1:1). We think, therefore, that καταφρόνησιν properly pertains to contempt, as when someone, stretched on the rack and among the hot plates, despises pain, and fears neither the threats of the judge nor the roar of the crowd standing around, but for the confession of martyrdom despises and disdains all torments. On the other hand there is also an evil contempt, of which Habakkuk too, the Holy Spirit speaking in him, testifies: "Behold, you despisers, and look, and wonder at wonders, and perish" (Hab. 1:5). According to which we have said that it was written to Timothy also: "Let no one despise your youth" (1 Tim. 4:12), that is: I do not want you to show yourself such that you could deservedly be despised by anyone. Περιφρόνησις, however, means this, as the Stoics at any rate assert, who distinguish subtly between words: when someone, trusting in himself that he is better than another, looks down on the one he thinks inferior, and, being above, that is, wiser, judges the humbler man worthy of contempt. Something of this kind a certain person among the Greeks, swelling with the vanity of pride and looking down on heaven itself and the sun, is mocked for having said: Ἀεροβατῶ καὶ περιφρονῶ τὸν ἥλιον, which we can say in Latin: I climb through the air, and I know myself to be worth more than the sun. Περιφρόνησις, then, which is now set down to Titus, has this sense: Let no one of those who are in the churches, while you act sluggishly, so live as to think himself the better. For what sort of edification will there be for the disciple if he perceives that he is greater than his master? Hence not only bishops, presbyters and deacons ought to take great care to go before all the people over whom they preside in conduct and in speech, but also the lower rank: exorcists, readers, sacristans, and absolutely all who serve the house of God. For it greatly destroys the Church of Christ that laymen should be better than clerics.

3:1-2

Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey; to be ready for every good work; to blaspheme no one, not to be quarrelsome; to be modest, showing all gentleness toward all men. Something of the kind is written to the Romans as well: "Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities. For there is no authority except from God" (Rom. 13:1). This precept, both here and there, I think was issued for this reason: that at that time the doctrine of Judas the Galilean was still flourishing and had very many followers. Mention of him is made also in the Acts of the Apostles, where Scripture relates: "For before these days Theudas rose up, saying that he was someone great; and about three thousand men joined him" (Acts 5:36); and, "after him rose up Judas the Galilean in the days of the census". Among other things he put forward this as if it were plausible from the Law: that no one ought to be called Lord except God alone, and that those who brought tithes to the temple should not pay tribute to Caesar. This heresy had grown so much that it troubled a great part even of the Pharisees and of the people, so that this question was brought even to our Lord: "Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not" (Matt. 22:17)? Answering them prudently and cautiously, the Lord says: "Render the things that are Caesar's to Caesar, and the things that are God's to God" (ibid. 21). In agreement with this answer, the apostle Paul teaches that believers ought to be subject to principalities and authorities. For Ἀρχαὶ, which is read in the Greek, sounds more like "principalities" (principatus) than "rulers" (principes), and signifies the authority itself, not the men who are in authority. But because he had said, "Remind them to be subject to principalities and authorities", an occasion for denial could be given to those who dread torments: they might claim, according to the Apostle's saying, that they were subject to principalities and authorities and were doing what these commanded; therefore he added: To obey for every good work. If what the emperor and the governor command is good, comply with the will of the one who commands. But if it is evil and savors of what is against God, answer him with that saying from the Acts of the apostles: "One must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). Let us understand this same thing of servants toward their masters, of wives toward their husbands, and of children toward their parents: that they ought to be subject to masters, husbands and parents only in those things that do not go against the commandments of God. What follows, To be ready, is to be read in two ways: either so that "to be ready for every good work" is understood; or else, joining what he says, to obey for every good work, with what precedes and ending it there, to be ready is, as it were, another precept of its own and a special one, in keeping with what is written in Leviticus: "The goat that is sent away, bearing the curses of the people, is to be handed over into the hands of a ready man" (Lev. 16:21). If, then, anyone is ready to hold the ἀποπομπαῖον (the scapegoat), and lead it out⁴³ into the desert, and there destroy it, and, so far as in him lies, banish it by the lot of the curse, he, when he has obeyed, will also be ready for every good work. To be ready can also be taken in another way: that they should picture to themselves beforehand in their minds everything that can happen, so that when it does happen they suffer nothing as if it were new, but all things have been prepared for them in advance. No one, too, to blaspheme, is not taken simply. For he does not say, to blaspheme no man, but absolutely, no one: not an angel, not any creature of God. For all things that were made by God are very good. "When Michael the archangel was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a judgment of blasphemy, but said, May God command you" (Jude 9). If, then, Michael did not dare to bring a judgment of blasphemy against the devil, who was surely most deserving of a curse, how much more ought we to be pure of every curse? The devil deserved a curse; but blasphemy ought not to come out through the archangel's mouth. Read the old books again, and see which tribes were stationed on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, and which on the other mount to curse. Reuben, who had defiled his father's bed, and Zebulun, the last son of Leah, and the children of the handmaids are placed on Mount Ebal⁴⁴ to curse those who are worthy of cursing (Deut. 27). It would take long if I were now to recount how Jacob, who had called his sons to a blessing (Gen. 49:1), saying, "that I may bless you", afterward joins, as if within the blessing, "cursed be their fury, because it was headstrong"; and how the Lord himself speaks in Genesis: "Cursed is the ground in your works" (Gen. 3:17). Let it suffice now to have said only this: that the disciples of Christ ought not to blaspheme, nor, as is added, to be quarrelsome. For if we are sons of peace, and wish peace to rest upon us, and have come to the heavenly Jerusalem, which took its name from peace, let us have peace with those who hate peace, and, so far as in us lies, let us be peaceable with all men: not only with the modest but also with brawlers, since there is no virtue in bearing with the gentle; and let us give place to wrath, showing all gentleness toward all men: not that we ought, from a desire for vainglory, to show ourselves gentle to all men, but that, while we bear with all and do not repay injury in kind, our very works may become better known to all. Someone can, for the sake of boasting and the opinion of the crowd and popular favor, feign gentleness before certain people and pretend goodness. But where there is no true, genuine and solid gentleness, I do not know whether all can be persuaded that he is gentle.

3:3-7

For we too were once foolish, disobedient, erring, serving various desires and pleasures, living in malice and in envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the goodness and kindness of our Savior God shone forth, not from works of righteousness which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and of the renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that, justified by his grace, we may become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. Someone may ask how Paul was foolish, unbelieving, erring, and serving various desires and pleasures, in malice and in envy, hateful and hating, before the goodness and clemency of our Savior saved him through the washing of the second regeneration: not from the works of righteousness which he had done, but out of his mercy, the Holy Spirit having been poured out abundantly and generously upon the apostles and believers through Jesus Christ, so that, having obtained the inheritance of grace, they might possess the hope of life forever. And indeed we read that, according to the righteousness which is in the Law, he was without reproach, circumcised on the eighth day (Phil. 3:5): a Hebrew of the Hebrews, according to the Law a Pharisee, of the tribe of Benjamin, educated at the feet of Gamaliel, and instructed in the sacred Letters from infancy (Acts 22). To this the answer is that the Jews who were versed in the Law before the coming of the Savior and his passion and resurrection had righteousness, if not full, yet in some part: as Simeon too did, and Anna the prophetess, who was found serving in the temple of God. But after the people cried out together, "Crucify, crucify him; we have no king but Caesar" (John 19:15), and, "His blood be upon us and upon our children" (Matt. 27:25), and the kingdom of God was taken from them and given to a nation producing its fruits: from that time whoever did not believe in Christ was foolish, wandering, unbelieving, and serving various pleasures. Or does it not seem to us⁴⁵ that Paul was foolish when he had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, and persecuted the Church, and kept the garments of those who were stoning Stephen? when he blazed up, goaded into such hatred against the Savior, that he received letters from the priests and went to Damascus to bind those who had believed in Christ? Or could he have any virtues without the power of God, Christ Jesus, or quench the raging flame of pleasures, when he was not a temple of God? And what greater malice and envy can there be than to take up letters against people who are absent, and everywhere to lay waste the disciples of Christ; to be unwilling to be saved oneself, and to envy others who could be saved; to hate Christians and consequently to earn the hatred of all? And what greater error, and disobedience, and madness is there than, after the day has breathed and the shadows have passed away, to wish to keep the abolished Law and to say, "Do not handle, do not touch, do not taste", and, when solid and manly food has appeared, to desire to be given the milk of infancy to drink? Let us attend more carefully, and we shall find in the present passage the Trinity most manifest. For the benignity and clemency of our Savior God, of none other than God the Father, through the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, justified us unto eternal life. The salvation of believers is the mystery of the Trinity. Others understand this place in such a way as to think it said not of Paul and the apostles, but, under the person of the apostles, of others: so that, just as he spoke in his own person and in that of Apollos and of Cephas about the dissension and schism which he was rebuking among the Corinthians, so also in the present place, naming himself and the apostles, he showed what all who had believed in Christ were like before the regeneration of the life-giving washing. At the same time his humility too is to be admired: that he who despised all the humility⁴⁶ and righteousness of the Law as refuse and offscourings rightly recalls that without Christ he had served all vices.

3:8

A faithful word, and concerning these things I want you to confirm⁴⁷, that those who believe in the Lord may take care to be foremost in good works. These things are good and useful to men. What he says, a faithful word, is to be joined to what precedes, where he had set down first, "that, justified by his grace, we may become heirs according to the hope of eternal life". For the word about the inheritance of God and about the hope of eternal life is worthy of faith. Hence one ought, not doubting, not fearing, both to believe these things oneself and to confirm them so that others may believe; and not only this, but this too is to be confirmed, together with these others who wish to believe: wherefore he says, and concerning these things I want you to confirm. And those who have believed that these things are truly so must take care of good works, through which the inheritance of God and the hope of eternal life are prepared. And beautifully, to produce greater faith, he did not say, who believe men, but who believe God. For it is necessary that they take care of good works, which, when fulfilled and carried out with all zeal, are good and useful to believers.

3:9

But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and fights that come from the Law: for they are useless and vain. Because questions are manifold and diverse, Solomon therefore spoke about those who seek God, saying: "But those who seek him rightly have found peace" (Prov. 16:8). Those, then, who do not seek God rightly cannot find peace. There are very many examples of those who seek God not rightly. The Jews seek God perversely, hoping that they can find him without Christ. The heretics, clattering with an empty din of words, seek one whom they cannot find. Philosophers too, and barbarians, holding various views about God, have sought God. But because they did not seek rightly, their questions were foolish, since they thought that God could be comprehended by human senses. From these questions, then, Paul calls us back. But to wise questions, and to those propped up by the authority of the Scriptures, he rather exhorts and summons us, not unaware of the precepts of the Savior, in which he says: "Seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you, ask and it will be given to you. For everyone who seeks finds⁴⁸, and who asks receives⁴⁹, and to him who knocks it will be opened" (Luke 11); only let our body not be subject to sins, and wisdom will enter into us. Let the understanding be exercised, let the mind be fed daily with divine reading, and our questions will not be foolish questions. And what he says, "Avoid genealogies and contentions and quarrels that come from the Law", strikes properly at the Jews, who boast in this and think they have knowledge of the Law if they hold the names of individuals: names which, because they are barbarous and we do not know their etymologies, are generally pronounced corruptly by us. And if perhaps we have erred⁵⁰ in accent, in the length and shortness of a syllable, either lengthening short ones or shortening long ones, they are wont to laugh at us for our lack of skill, especially in the aspirates and in pronouncing certain letters with a scraping of the throat. This has come about because the Seventy translators, through whom the divine Law was translated into the Greek tongue, expressed in particular the letter HETH, and AIN, and others of this kind (because they could not carry them over into the Greek language with a double aspiration), by adding other letters. For example, so that for Rahel they said Rachel, and for Jeriho, Jericho, and for Hebron, Chebron, and for Seor, Segor; but in other cases this attempt fails them⁵¹. For we and the Greeks have only one letter s, but they have three, SAMECH, SADE and SIN, which have different sounds. Isaac and Sion are written with SADE; Israel with SIN, and yet it does not sound as it is written. Seon, king of the Amorites, is both pronounced and written with the letter SAMECH. If, then, these idioms of the names and of the language, being of course barbarous, have not been expressed by us as they are expressed by the Hebrews, they are wont to raise a guffaw and to swear that they have no idea at all what we are saying. Hence it has also been our care to correct, from the originals themselves, all the books of the old Law which the learned man Adamantius had arranged in the Hexapla, copied from the library of Caesarea; in these both the Hebrew words themselves are written out in their own characters and they are expressed in Greek letters in the adjoining column. Aquila also and Symmachus, the Seventy too and Theodotion keep their own order. Some books, however, and especially those which among the Hebrews are composed in verse, have three other editions added, which they call the fifth, sixth and seventh translation, editions that have gained authority without the names of their translators. That immortal genius bestowed these things on us by his own labor, so that we need not greatly fear the haughtiness of the Jews, who delight in loosened lips, a twisted tongue, hissing saliva and a scraped throat. They have also another occasion for pride: just as we who are Latins more easily commit to memory Latin names having⁵² their origins from our own tongue, so they from an early age, with their innermost⁵³ senses, have drunk in⁵⁴ the native words of their speech, and from the beginning, Adam, to the last, Zerubbabel, they run through the generations of all so readily and swiftly from memory that you would think they were reciting their own name. We, who either learned other letters, or certainly believed in Christ late, or, even if we were given over to the Church as infants, pursue the sense of the Scriptures rather than the words: if perhaps we do not know this so⁵⁵ well, they think themselves more learned in reciting names, in reckoning years, and in grandsons and great-great-grandsons, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and great-great-great-grandfathers. I heard a certain one of the Hebrews, who pretended at Rome to have believed in Christ, raise a question about the genealogies of our Lord Jesus Christ written in Matthew and Luke: namely, that from Solomon to Joseph they agree with each other neither in number nor in the correspondence of the names. When he had perverted the hearts of the simple, he would bring forth, as if from the inner sanctuary and an oracle, certain solutions, as they seemed to him, when he ought rather to have sought righteousness and mercy and the love of God, and after those things, if it happened to come up, to dispute about names and numbers. Perhaps we have said enough, and more than was necessary, about the haughtiness of the Hebrews; but an occasion was given us to discourse on the genealogies and contention and quarrels that come from the Law. The dialecticians, whose chief is Aristotle, are wont to spread nets of argumentation and to shut up the roving freedom of rhetoric within the thorn-thickets of syllogisms. These men, then, who wear away whole days and nights in asking or answering, in giving a proposition or accepting it, in assuming, confirming and concluding, call certain people contentious, those who dispute as they please, not by reason but with the temper of litigants. If, then, those whose art is properly contention do this, what ought the Christian to do but flee contention altogether? Quarrels about the Law, too, are to be utterly rejected and left to the folly of the Jews. For they are useless and vain, having only the appearance of knowledge; but they profit neither those who speak nor those who hear. For what does it profit me to know how many years Methuselah lived, or in what year of his age Solomon took a wife, lest perhaps Rehoboam be believed to have been born in the eleventh year of Solomon's age? and many things of this kind, which are either hard to find because of the variety of the books and the errors that have grown in (while uncorrected copies are gradually written from uncorrected copies), or, even if we should find them with great zeal and labor, we know will profit nothing. It often happens that we have fights over the Law, not from a desire for truth but from boasting of glory, while we wish to be thought learned among those who hear; or at any rate we pursue shameful gain from this petty bit of fame. For what does it profit to chatter with foaming lips and with the barking of dogs, when a simple and moderate answer can either appease you, if it is true, or, if false, be corrected gently and peaceably?

3:10-11

Avoid a heretical man after one and a second reproof, knowing that such a one is subverted, and sins, being condemned by himself. The name of heresy is used also in the Epistle to the Corinthians: "For there must also be heresies among us, so that those who are approved may become manifest" (1 Cor. 11:19). And to the Galatians it is numbered among the works of the flesh: "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, contentions, rivalries, angers, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envyings, drunkennesses, revellings, and other things like these, which I foretell to you as I have foretold: that those who do such things will not possess the kingdom of God" (Gal. 5:19 ff.). In these it must be carefully observed that, just as the other vices which are numbered among the works of the flesh exclude us⁵⁶ from the kingdom of God, so heresies too take the kingdom of God away from us; and it makes no difference in what way anyone is excluded from the kingdom, so long as he is excluded. And, what may be more wonderful, that passage from the Acts of the apostles also seems worth reading again, where our faith in Christ and the discipline of the Church were already then called a heresy by perverse men. "For we", say the Jews to the apostle Paul, "have neither received letters from you from Judea⁵⁷, nor has any of the brethren come and reported to us, or anyone spoken evil of you. But we ask to hear from you what you think; for concerning this heresy it is known to us that it is everywhere spoken against" (Acts 28:21, 22). And although the name of heresy is not spoken at Miletus, yet its works are named by Paul when he speaks to the presbyters of the church: "I know that after my departure grievous wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among yourselves men will rise up speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them" (Acts 20:29, 30). Let these things be said in passing, about where else too heresy is so named. Now the name itself seems to need to be sifted most fully. Heresy is named in Greek "from choice" (electio), because each one chooses for himself what seems to him better. The philosophers too, Stoics, Peripatetics, Academics, Epicureans, are said to be of this or that heresy. It is superfluous to go through them one by one and to enumerate Marcion, Valentinus, Apelles, Ebion, Montanus and Manichaeus with their doctrines, since it is very easy for anyone to know by what errors each is led. Arius and Eunomius, and the author of a new heresy: would that they were not so well known; perhaps they would have deceived fewer! Avoid, then, a heretical man after one reproof, or, as the Greek has it better, νουθεσίαν; and νουθεσία signifies rather admonition and teaching without rebuke. In the Latin manuscripts is read (and Pope Athanasius too approved it as true): "After one and a second reproof"; namely that it is not enough for one who is depraved by some error to be reproved or admonished only once, but a second teaching too must be applied to him, so that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may stand. And why he is to be avoided after a first and second reproof, he gives the reasons, saying: "that such a one is subverted, and sins, since he is condemned by himself". For he who, reproved once and twice, having heard his error, does not wish to be corrected, thinks the one correcting him is in error; and on the contrary, preparing himself for fights and wranglings of words, he wants to win over the one by whom he is taught. He is said to be condemned by himself for this reason: because the fornicator, the adulterer, the murderer and the other vices are driven out of the Church through the priests; but heretics pass sentence on themselves, withdrawing from the Church by their own choice; and this withdrawal seems to be a condemnation by their own conscience. Between heresy and schism they think the difference is this: that heresy holds a perverse doctrine, while schism separates from the Church on account of episcopal dissension; which indeed can be understood in some measure at the beginning. But there is no schism that does not invent some heresy for itself, so that it may seem to have withdrawn from the Church rightly.

3:12

When I send Artemas to you, or Tychicus, hasten to come to me at Nicopolis; for there I have decided to winter. We read at the beginning of this Epistle: "For this reason I left you in Crete, that you may correct the things that were lacking, and appoint presbyters in the cities, as I arranged for you". This was so that, since the Cretans had recently believed, they should not be left orphans when Paul withdrew and passed on to other churches, but should have an apostolic man to correct the things that seemed to be lacking. Since, then, after the foundation of other churches Titus was needed to build the structure upon it, he writes to him that when he had sent Artemas or Tychicus, that is, one of the two who had been with him, to Crete, to fill⁵⁸ his place, he himself should come to Nicopolis, declaring that he would winter there. From this we prove⁵⁹ Paul's fatherly affection toward the Cretans. He needs Titus for the ministry of the Gospel; yet he does not want him to come to him before Artemas or Tychicus has arrived as successor in his place. Nicopolis is the city which received its name from the victory of Augustus, because there he overcame Antony and Cleopatra.

3:13

Send Zenas, the teacher of the law, and Apollos ahead with care, so that nothing may be lacking to them. This is the Apollos about whom it is written to the Corinthians too: "Each of you says: I am of Paul, but I of Apollos, and I of Cephas" (1 Cor. 1:12). He was a man of Alexandria, of the Jews, very eloquent and perfect in the Law, bishop of the Corinthians. Because of the dissensions that were at Corinth, it is to be supposed that he crossed over with Zenas, the teacher of the law, to the neighboring island of Crete, and that, when the dissensions that had arisen at Corinth were calmed by Paul's Epistle, he returned again to Corinth. As for Zenas, the teacher of the law, we cannot say from any other place of Scripture who he was, except only this: that he too, an apostolic man, had the same work that Apollos was doing, that of building up the churches of Christ. He therefore instructs Titus that, since they were about to sail from Crete to Greece, he should not let them be in need of provisions, but should see that they have what is necessary for provisions for the journey.

3:14

But let ours also learn to be foremost in good works for necessary uses, so that they may not be unfruitful. Above he had said: "Send Zenas, the teacher of the Law, and Apollos ahead with care, so that nothing may be lacking to them". Since, then, a hidden reply could arise, so that not so much Titus as any reader of the Epistle might say this: "And from what means is Titus to bestow on them, since they have no provisions for the journey?", he resolves this question and, as if no objection were put to him, strikes it down by saying: But let ours also learn to be foremost in good works for necessary uses, so that they may not be unfruitful. He calls his own "ours", those who had believed in Christ: because they were Christ's, they rightly deserved to be called both Paul's and Titus's. You have, he says, authority over the disciples; teach them not to be unfruitful, but to minister to the evangelists and apostolic men who serve good works; and to minister not in any matters whatever, but for necessary uses: "For having food and clothing⁶⁰, let us be content with these" (1 Tim. 6:8); and let those who serve the altar live from the altar; and those who have become partakers of our spiritual things ought to share their carnal things with us. And lest perhaps they should easily despise either Paul's letter or Titus's precept, he calls unfruitful all who have not ministered to the evangelists. Solomon too says in Proverbs: "But almsgiving is fruit" (Prov. 3:9). And Paul himself calls love the first fruit of the spirit (Gal. 5). Love, however, is proved above all in sharing and in ministry. So that they may not, he says, be unfruitful. "For every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire" (Matt. 3:10). Now I say this because he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. To be unwilling to give to apostolic men and to the evangelizers of Christ for necessary uses is to condemn oneself of barrenness.

3:15

All who are with me greet you. Either he used the customary formula, saying that Titus was greeted by all who were with him; or else he says it properly of Titus, because he was such as to deserve the love of all who were with Paul. And it is great praise of Titus to be greeted through Paul by all.

Greet those who love us in faith. If everyone who loves loved in faith, and there were not others who love without faith, Paul would never have added faith to love, saying: Greet those who love us in faith. For mothers too love their sons, so much that they are ready to meet death for them; but they do not love in faith. And wives love their husbands, with whom they very often die; but that love is not of faith. Only the love of the saints loves in faith, so much so that, even if the one who is loved is an unbeliever, the saint nevertheless loves him in faith, according to that saying: "Let all your things be done in faith" (1 Cor. 16:14). And elsewhere: "Love your enemies" (Luke 6:35). The saint loves his enemies, and therefore loves in faith, because he believes in him who promised that he would render a reward for the fulfilling of the commandment.

The grace of our Lord be with you all. It should be known that in the Greek manuscripts it is written thus: "Grace be with you all", so that neither "of the Lord" nor "our" is found in the authentic books. So he invokes grace in common upon the saints and believers, upon Titus and the others who were with him. And just as the patriarch Isaac blessed his son Jacob (Gen. 27), and he himself the twelve Patriarchs (ibid. 49), the apostles too, entering a house, used to say: "Peace to this house" (Matt. 10:12). And if the house was worthy, their peace rested upon it; but if it showed itself unworthy, it returned to those who had invoked it. So now too, at the end of his Epistle, the Apostle invokes grace upon believers: a grace which had its effect together with the prayer, and lay in the power of the believers, if the one blessed was willing to show himself such as the one who blessed him.

1 Another reading: quia, "because".
2 Another reading: timorem, "to fear".
3 Another reading adds filiorum, "of sons".
4 Another reading: juxta.
5 Another reading: apostolorum, "of the apostles".
6 Another reading adds scientia, "knowledge".
7 Another reading: et, "and".
8 Another reading: reperies.
9 Another reading: retractata, "revised".
10 Another reading: Ut, "So that".
11 Another reading: putat, "thinks".
12 Another reading: et, "and".
13 Another reading: quo.
14 Another reading: exaudisset.
15 Another reading: ut, "so that".
16 Another reading: retrahit.
17 Another reading: germinata, "sproutings".
18 Another reading: implevit, "has fulfilled".
19 Another reading: Dioprepes.
20 Another reading: est.
21 Another reading: Regnorum, "of Kingdoms".
22 Another reading: bonarum, "of good (minds)".
23 Another reading: alludens, "alluding".
24 Another reading: ut, "that".
25 Another reading: dicunt, "they say".
26 Another reading: mala, "evil".
27 Another reading: apocryphorum Enoc, "the apocrypha of Enoch".
28 Another reading: enim, "for".
29 Another reading: sint.
30 Another reading: veritate.
31 Another reading adds esse, "to be".
32 Another reading: Et, "And".
33 Another reading: vult, "wishes".
34 Another reading: vivet, "will live".
35 Another reading: congaudet, "rejoices with".
36 Another reading: impendeamus, "hang over".
37 Another reading: luxuriam.
38 Another reading: peccati, "of sin".
39 Another reading: habitu sanctitatem, "holiness in demeanor".
40 Another reading: filiorum, "of the sons".
41 Another reading: possumus.
42 Another reading: poterit, "will he be able".
43 Another reading: deducat.
44 Another reading: Eliel.
45 Another reading: vobis, "to you".
46 Another reading: utilitatem, "advantage".
47 Another reading: affirmare, "affirm".
48 Another reading: inveniet, "will find".
49 Another reading: accipiet, "will receive".
50 Another reading: erravimus.
51 Another reading: defecit, "failed".
52 Another reading: trahentia, "drawing".
53 Another reading: peritissimis, "most skilled".
54 Another reading: imbuerunt, "imbued".
55 Another reading omits ita, "so".
56 Another reading: excluduntur, "are excluded".
57 Another reading: de te... a Judæa, "about you ... from Judea".
58 Another reading: impleturum.
59 Another reading: probemus.
60 Another reading: vestitum.