Authorship of Pastoral Epistles

There are three sort-of-mainstream views about the authorship of the pastoral epistles. Some see them as a total forgery. This view generally takes them to be at the beginning of the second century or the end of the first. It has been proposed that the forgery was by Luke as volume three of Luke-Acts, and this must have been the end of the first century. Some see them as fragments of Paul supplemented by lots of other material and put into coherent wholes. Then the authentic pieces would be from Paul's lifetime. The third view is that Paul had someone else write the letters (an ammanuensis), probably because he was in a bad way at the end of his life and in prison. The most likely candidate for the ammanuensis is Luke, who would have been given more freedom than such a scribe might have had in the earlier Pauline letters. This would likely have been in the mid-60s.

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