Paul’s letter to Titus: Context & Overview

Authorship & Audience:

Paul (a Messianic Jew of the Pharisee class) to Titus (a Gentile convert) who Paul had left in Crete to stabilize & structure leadership and lay the foundations for a healthy faith community.

Purpose:

The community in Crete is young, mostly Gentile. The goal is to establish order, cultivate Torah-grounded ethics, and guard the community from misleading teachers (this is a clue that supports the audience being a mostly Gentile community – they hadn’t grown up knowing the Scriptures since birth as Jewish believers had.) The stakes weren’t just for the community there – the wider Cretan community desperately needed to see what transformed lives looked like so they could be part of God’s Kingdom, too.

Context:

Overall, Crete was known as a place of dishonesty, immorality, and religious confusion:

• Greco-Roman civic religion and mythology
• Imperial Roman cult
• Embedded Jewish communities with mixed levels of halakhic observance (rules of community life)
• A growing Gentle Jesus-believing population with little grounding in Scripture (Torah, prophets, etc.)

Why’d they get a letter?

The body of Messiah in Crete was in a transitional stage… Gentiles were joining rapidly, Jewish leadership in the diaspora (outside Jerusalem) was shifting, the Temple was still standing, Jew and Gentile followers of Jesus were trying to figure out how to exist in community together, and the Gentiles were being pressured to become legally Jewish (proselytized). Jews (mostly non-Messianic) took offense to the idea that Gentiles could partake in the covenant without conversion (circumcision and adherence to all of Torah).

SO, Paul installed Titus in Crete to help them co-exist and be a good witness in their pagan context. In this letter, we get to eavesdrop on Paul trying to give Titus a little more clarity and establish the foundations of the faith community in Crete on a few issues in particular:

• Grounding new-to-God Gentiles in moral formation so they could live in community with Jewish believers
• Appointing qualified leadership
• Confronting a) charlatans, b) teachers using Jewish identity as leverage, c) Jews insisting Gentiles must take on Jewish legal status to be acceptable leaders

Big picture, Paul is protecting Gentile believers from proselyte pressure while not delegitimizing Jewish Torah observance (remember that Paul himself, as a Jew, maintained his identity as a Pharisee through his whole ministry… Acts 23:6).

What should be really interesting to us as believers is that Titus is a Greek believer who never underwent circumcision (Galatians 2:3). Paul is taking the opportunity to affirm that Titus – and by extension, all Gentile believers (us!) – isn’t second-class:

• He’s fully grafted in to Israel through Messiah
• He’s not required to take on Jewish identity markers
• He’s still fully responsible to uphold covenant ethics as revealed in Torah

Equal in salvation. Distinct in identity. Responsible for God’s standard of righteous living. God chose and Paul positioned Titus very purposefully because he models Gentile participation and qualified leadership. This is incredible news for us Gentiles!

We also see so much of this letter focusing on instructions for Christian living in accordance with sound doctrine. Good works are the fruit that flows from salvation. Salvation by grace → Sanctification expressed through obedience → Obedience rooted in Torah vs. Greco-Roman virtues.

Faithful and fruitful.

The goal is to honor God in a pagan environment so that more can come to know Him.

In the Western, 21st century church, we’re conditioned to read this letter as a break from Torah, but if Paul had preached that, he would have been rejected as a false prophet by the Jerusalem apostles, Jewish believers, and by the Torah itself (Deut. 13). Rather, Titus is a micro-manual for mixed communities where Paul is guarding the “one new man” reality:

• Keeping Gentile believers from disdaining Jewish identity
• Keeping Jewish believers from imposing Jewish identity on Gentiles
• Building unified, ordered communities under the authority of Messiah and the Apostles
• Maintaining covenantal ethics without forcing uniformity of covenantal identity

We’ll very much misread Paul and dishonor the ministry of Titus if we assume:

• Jesus and Paul started a new religion
• The Torah is obsolete
• Jews need to stop keeping Torah
• What God gives is not good
• More rules / added doctrine brings people together

Once we shake all that off it starts to get clearer. Distinction Theology is so far the only lens I’ve found that’s able to harmonize all the New Testament evidence and Old Testament promises and prophecy. Western Christianity inherited a post-Constantinian reinterpretation that was very different from a first-century Jewish context… and we’ve missed out on a lot of richness.

How did we miss it for so long? Well, for over 1,000 years, most Christians had no access to Scriptures in their own language and teaching was controlled by clergy who were heavily biased against anything “Jewish” and only had access to mediated liturgical teaching. It’s really only been the last ~70 years that we’ve been able to unbury this perspective – starting with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. How incredibly blessed are we to live in a generation that has access to Scripture and scholarship!

What we inherited:

• Torah cancelled
• Israel replaced
• Jewish distinctiveness erased
• Gentile identity universalized
• Unity = sameness

But according to Paul, Jews & Gentiles have:

• Equal status (Gal 3:28; Rom 10:12)
• Different callings (1 Cor 7:17–20: “Let each remain in the calling in which he was called”)
• Shared covenant ethics (Rom 13; Titus; Eph 4–5)
• Honoring of Israel’s election (Rom 9–11)
• Gentile inclusion without becoming Jews (Acts 15)

Paul and the apostles weren’t starting a new religion. They were Jews who believed the Messiah had come (a radical concept, clearly!), and they were inviting Gentiles into the God of Israel’s story and promises – against the better wishes of some Jews, as we can see in this letter. I don’t know how I’ll ever comprehend how profound this invitation and extension of God’s promises to me really is… this means we get access to the God of Abraham, Moses, Daniel, and Ruth and an invitation to the Kingdom!

Summing it up:

One of the biggest and most urgent questions the early church had to navigate was: “Do Gentiles need to become Jews to follow Jesus?”

Acts 15, Galatians, and Titus all testify to the same answer: Gentiles are fully accepted and do not need to legally become Jewish to partake in the covenant, and the standards of Torah guide community living so that Jews and Gentiles can worship and serve God together, bearing His witness to the world.

… and then it all fell apart.

But we have the same task. The same standard. And the same big, holy, welcoming God.

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For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
– John 3:16-17

… [God] who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
– I Timothy 2:4

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
– Matthew 4:17

…and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
– Luke 24:47

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Supporting Scripture:

• Acts 15 – assumes Gentiles remain Gentiles
• Acts 21 – The Jerusalem apostles continue to live as Torah-observant Jews (Paul offers sacrifices)
• Jeremiah 31 – God’s love for Israel is everlasting
• Ezekial 36-37 – God will set up His eternal dwelling place among Israel
• Romans 3:31 – “Do we overthrow the law by faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.”
• I Corinthians 7:17-24
• Matthew 5:17-19