All Scripture is God-breathed: Paul's last charge to Timothy

Second Timothy is a letter from 'Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus' (1:1) to Timothy, his 'beloved child'. It is probably the last of Paul's letters. He is a prisoner, chained and awaiting trial (1:8, 16-17; 2:9), and he says plainly that his death is near, describing his life as a drink offering already being poured out (4:6). The traditional view places this in Rome about AD 64 to 67, in the time of Nero, and tradition says Paul was executed there. Timothy was a young colleague from Lystra, the son of a Jewish mother and Greek father (Acts 16:1-3), raised in the faith by his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois (2 Timothy 1:5). He is now serving in Ephesus (1 Timothy 1:3; 2 Timothy 4:19).

Second Timothy is one of three Pastoral Epistles with 1 Timothy and Titus. Many critical scholars believe the three were written after Paul's death by a follower in his name, pointing to vocabulary, style, church order and the difficulty of fitting them into the story of Acts. Others, among them Donald Guthrie and Luke Timothy Johnson, defend Pauline authorship, explaining the differences by Paul's age, the personal subject matter and the use of a secretary, and see the details of 2 Timothy, which include named people and personal requests, as marks of a real letter. The class reads it as Paul's, the view of the early church.

The occasion is a farewell charge. Paul wants Timothy to come to him (4:9, 21), and in the meantime he urges him to stand firm, to suffer for the gospel, to guard the truth, and to preach the word. Chapter 3 gives the reasons: bad times will come, but Paul's life and the Scriptures are a sure guide.

Second Timothy belongs to a recognised type of ancient writing: the farewell testament, in which a dying man gives final instructions to a successor. It is warm, personal and urgent, and it should be read as such. Paul is not writing a handbook of doctrine; he is telling one trusted younger man how to stay faithful when the teaching of the church is threatened.

Chapter 3 includes a vice list (verses 2-5). Greek and Jewish moralists often wrote such lists, and Paul uses one elsewhere (Romans 1:29-31). The list should not be read as a forecast of events in a distant future only. The 'last days' in the New Testament are the period that began with Christ's coming (Acts 2:17; Hebrews 1:2; 1 John 2:18), and Paul tells Timothy to 'turn away' from such people, which implies that they were already present. Verse 1 says 'will come' and verse 5 'turn away from such', and these two tenses show that the last days include Timothy's time.

The chapter ends with one of the most quoted verses about Scripture. Two interpretive points apply.

• First, the word 'Scripture' (graphe) in Paul's day meant the Old Testament, the 'Holy Scriptures' Timothy knew from childhood (verse 15).
• Second, the statement is made about those writings, within a letter about faithfulness, and claims that follow for the New Testament rest on how the apostles and the church treated their own writings (2 Peter 3:15-16; 1 Timothy 5:18) as well as on this verse.

Verses 1 to 5. 'In the last days terrible times will come.' The list that follows begins with self-love and money-love, and moves through pride, abuse, ingratitude and a refusal of family obligation, to a love of pleasure rather than of God. The centre of the list is verse 5: they have 'a form of godliness but denying its power'. The problem is not outright pagans but people inside the community who keep the outward religion while rejecting its transforming power. Paul's command is blunt: 'Turn away from such as these!'

Verses 6 to 9. These teachers 'worm their way into households' and exploit vulnerable women who are weighed down by sins and led by various passions. The women are not condemned; the sentence describes how the false teachers prey on them. These are people who are 'always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth'. Paul compares them to Jannes and Jambres, who 'opposed Moses'. The Old Testament does not name Pharaoh's magicians (Exodus 7:11), but Jewish tradition did, in the Targums and in the Damascus Document found at Qumran, and Paul uses a name his readers would know. The point is that those who oppose the truth are 'depraved in mind and disqualified from the faith', but they 'will not advance much further', because their folly will be plain, as the magicians' folly was plain in Egypt.

Verses 10 to 13. Paul turns from the false teachers to Timothy with 'You, however'. Timothy has followed Paul's teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, perseverance, persecutions and sufferings, including the ones in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra. On his first journey Paul was driven out of Antioch, threatened with stoning at Iconium and stoned at Lystra (Acts 13:50; 14:5, 19), the region Timothy came from. 'Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.' Paul then states a principle: 'all who desire to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted'. By contrast, 'evil men and imposters go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived'.

Verses 14 and 15

'But as for you, continue in the things you have learned and firmly believed, since you know from whom you have learned them.' Some manuscripts have 'whom' in the plural, which would include Paul, Eunice and Lois. From infancy Timothy has known the Holy Scriptures. They are able to 'make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus'. For Paul, the Old Testament is a book that leads to Christ, and its purpose is salvation received by faith.

Verses 16 and 17

'All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness.' The Greek word theopneustos is found only here in the New Testament. It is made up of theos (God) and pneo (to breathe), and the sense is passive: Scripture is breathed out by God. The word says the writings themselves come from God, and not only that their writers were inspired. A grammatical question affects the sentence. The Greek has no verb 'is', so it may read 'All Scripture is God-breathed and useful' (as the BSB has it) or 'Every God-breathed Scripture is also useful'. Most commentators prefer the first, and either way the passage gives the same assurance. The four uses cover teaching what is true, rebuking what is false, restoring the wrongdoer, and training in what is right. The aim is 'so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work'. 'Man of God' was a title for Moses and the prophets in the Old Testament, and here it is applied to Timothy and to all who serve God's word.

The passage contains the Bible's most direct statement about its own origin. Scripture is 'God-breathed': God is its source, and the human writers wrote as the Spirit moved them, as 2 Peter 1:20-21 also says. Jesus treated the Old Testament in the same way (Matthew 5:17-18; John 10:35). Christian theology has drawn from this the doctrines of inspiration (God's work in producing the text), authority (Scripture's right to teach and correct) and, in many traditions, inerrancy or infallibility (Scripture's truthfulness), stated for example in the Chicago Statement of 1978. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum says Scripture teaches truth without error, and Catholic theologians discuss the exact scope of that phrase.

The passage also teaches what Scripture is for. It makes people wise unto salvation through faith in Christ, and it equips those who serve for good works. Scripture is therefore both the means of coming to faith and the means of growth. The chapter also teaches that godly living attracts opposition, that false teaching is a mark of the last days, and that the church is to guard what it has received. Paul's closing charge in 4:1-5 follows: preach the word.

There is a relationship to other parts of the Bible. The Old Testament's own claims (Psalm 19:7-11; Psalm 119) value the law as perfect and trustworthy. The New Testament extends this to the apostolic writings: Peter places Paul's letters among 'the other Scriptures' (2 Peter 3:15-16).

Although the passage is about Scripture, Christ stands at its centre. The Holy Scriptures make a person wise for salvation 'through faith in Christ Jesus' (3:15). The Old Testament, in Paul's view, is a witness to him. Jesus taught that the same Scriptures speak of him: on the road to Emmaus he explained to the two disciples what was said about himself in all the Scriptures, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets (Luke 24:27, 44), and in John 5:39 he says that the Scriptures testify about him.

Christ also appears in the example of Paul. Paul's sufferings in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra are those of a servant who follows his Lord, and the rescue he received is from 'the Lord' (3:11). In 4:17 he says that the Lord stood by him and strengthened him. The pattern in Philippians 3:10 and Colossians 1:24 is that those who belong to Christ share in his sufferings and in his deliverance. The saying that all who desire to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted echoes Jesus' own words (John 15:20).

The man of God who is 'complete' reflects the Old Testament's picture of faithful servants such as Moses, and Christ is the one to whom they pointed.