Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Companions of the Apostle Paul
January 26
also known as Timothy the Deacon, Titus the Bishop, Paul's disciples
Timothy and Titus were companions of the apostle Paul, sent ahead of him and left behind by him to steady churches he could not stay in. Timothy came from Lystra, the son of a believing Jewish mother and a Gentile father; Titus was a Greek, and the Jerusalem meeting recorded in Galatians turned on whether he would be compelled to be circumcised. Tradition remembers Timothy as first bishop of Ephesus and Titus as bishop in Crete. They were venerated separately for most of Christian history and joined on one day only in 1969.
Paul came a second time to Lystra, in Lycaonia, and there was a disciple in that town named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who believed and of a Greek father. The brethren at Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him, and Paul took him along. Because his father was a Gentile and everyone in those places knew it, Paul circumcised him first, so that no door among the Jews would be closed by the young man's presence. Timothy was still young enough that Paul would later have to write to a whole congregation, let no man despise thy youth.
He had come by his faith at home. Paul, writing near the end, names the two women who gave it to him: his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, and a boy who had known the holy scriptures from his infancy. Who first brought Lois and Eunice to Christ nobody recorded. It happened somewhere out of sight, in a house in a small Lycaonian town, and the whole rest of the story runs out of it.
What Paul did with Timothy was send him away. From Athens back to Thessalonica, to steady a frightened church. Ahead into Macedonia and on to Corinth, where Paul had to write to the Corinthians and ask them to see that Timothy be with them without fear, which tells you something about what the errand cost him. Timothy is a co-sender of the letters, one name beside Paul's, again and again, until Paul writes of him the sentence he wrote of nobody else: I have no man so of the same mind, who with sincere affection is solicitous for you; as a son with the father, so hath he served with me in the gospel.
Titus is harder to see, because so little was written down. He was a Greek. Paul went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas and took Titus along, and there, in front of the men who could have insisted on it, Titus was not compelled to be circumcised. That refusal is the reason a great many people who are not Jews are Christians. Titus stood in the middle of the argument and was not made to yield, and the door stayed open behind him.
Then Corinth went wrong, and Paul sent Titus into it. Waiting for word, Paul came to Troas to preach, and could not rest, because he did not find Titus his brother there; so he went on into Macedonia. It is one of the plainest human sentences the apostle ever wrote: he had an open door and could not use it, for worrying about a man and a letter. When Titus finally came, he came with good news, and Paul said that God comforted us by the coming of Titus, and that Titus carried a most affectionate memory of the very people who had wounded him. Afterward Paul sent him back to Corinth again, with two brethren, to gather the collection for the poor of Jerusalem, arranged openly so that no one could accuse them over the money.
Their last notice together is a cold one. Paul, imprisoned, lists who has gone: Demas has left me, loving this world; Crescens into Galatia, Titus into Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. And then, in the same letter, come before winter. Titus is in Dalmatia because he was sent there. That is the last the Scriptures say of him.
Afterward the church remembered more than the letters record. It says that Timothy stayed at Ephesus and was made its first bishop, and that at eighty years old he walked into a festival procession to stop the carrying of the idols and was clubbed and stoned by the crowd, dying of the wounds. It says Titus stayed over the churches of Crete and died at Gortyna at a great age. These are traditions, held for many centuries and told in every calendar East and West, and no early witness records them. What the earliest layer does record is smaller and surer, and it is enough: two men who kept going where they were sent, and one letter, near the end, that had no one left to name but them.
You will probably not be told the whole of your errand. Timothy was sent back to Thessalonica, sent ahead to Corinth, left at Ephesus; Titus was sent into a quarrel he had not started, sent back for the collection, and finally sent to Dalmatia, where the record simply stops. Neither of them left a line explaining himself, and what we know of their inner lives is one apostle's word that Timothy served as a son with a father, and that Paul could not rest at Troas until Titus came. That is a strange kind of life to be remembered for: being reliable in someone else's work, in places you did not choose, with the outcome mostly out of sight. Where have you been sent that you would rather have been asked about first, and what would it look like to go anyway?
The two men stand on very different footings, and the difference should be visible. Both appear in letters nobody disputes are Paul's own: Timothy in 1 Thessalonians, arguably the earliest surviving Christian document to name him, and in 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians and Philemon; Titus in Galatians and, most fully, in 2 Corinthians. From those letters alone come roughly ten datable movements between them, anchored to Pauline chronology by the Gallio inscription at Delphi, which places Paul at Corinth about AD 51 to 52. Acts, ascribed to Luke and composed within a generation, supplies Timothy's recruitment at Lystra and much of his itinerary. Acts never names Titus at all, not once, including in its own account of the Jerusalem council where Galatians puts Titus at the centre of the argument. Every explanation of that silence is a hypothesis.
No source gives a birth year for either man. The figures in circulation for Timothy are modern back-calculations from Paul's language about his youth or from the traditional age of eighty at death, and they do not fully agree. For Titus there is no basis for an estimate at all. Titus's attested biography is three facts and a series of errands: he was a Greek, he was not compelled to be circumcised, and Paul called him a beloved son in a shared faith. Parents, birthplace, education, and the manner of his coming to faith are all unrecorded. The asymmetry is the evidence, not a gap in it.
The largest question concerns the three letters addressed to them. Nearly everything about Ephesus and Crete as settled posts comes from 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus, and their authorship is contested. The traditional framework, defended at length in the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia, holds that Paul was released from the Roman imprisonment of Acts 28 about AD 62, travelled again to Crete and Ephesus, and was imprisoned a second and final time under Nero, so that the three letters date from about 63 to 67. The majority modern-critical position, developed across the nineteenth century from Eichhorn's argument of 1812, holds them pseudepigraphic, written by a later hand of a Pauline school somewhere between about AD 80 and 140. A real minority of serious scholars still defends Pauline authorship, so near-consensus rather than universal is the accurate description of the field. The honest calibration is that the men are solid history from the earliest layer, and the letters addressed to them are a contested attribution. Two smaller cautions belong beside it: Colossians, where Timothy is co-sender, is itself contested, so the three captivity letters are not evidentially uniform; and Hebrews 13:23, the only notice of an imprisonment and release of Timothy himself, is anonymous, has been so since antiquity, and is dated anywhere from about 60 to 95.
Neither man left a written word, and no saying is reliably attributed to either. Both are known exclusively as addressees and subjects of other people's writing, and both apocryphal Acts, checked for embedded direct discourse, preserve no reported speech of either man even inside the legend. Readers should be warned that quote-aggregator sites circulate 1 Timothy 6:6 to 10, on contentment and the love of money, under the name of Saint Timothy. Those are Paul's words, in Paul's letter, filed under the recipient's name.
The pairing on 26 January is modern, and the veneration behind it is ancient. In the West, Timothy was kept alone on 24 January from the thirteenth century; Titus was absent from the Tridentine calendar entirely and entered the General Roman Calendar only in 1854, on 6 February. The Calendarium Romanum of 1969 moved both to 26 January, the day after the Conversion of Saint Paul. The Church of England, The Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (which commemorates Timothy, Titus, and Silas together) each adopted the date afterward through their own calendar processes. The Christian East never paired them: Timothy is kept on 22 January, Titus on 25 August and again on 4 January among the Seventy.
Both are pre-congregation saints, with no process and no paper trail beyond calendar history. Timothy's relics were carried from Ephesus to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople in 356, on Jerome's authority, to lie beside those of Andrew and Luke; a tenth or eleventh-century page of the Menologion of Basil II pictures the translation with that church in the background. Termoli, in Molise, holds them now: on 11 May 1945, during restoration of the cathedral crypt, a wooden box containing a skeleton without its skull was found behind a marble slab reading, in the year of the Lord 1239, that the body of blessed Timothy, disciple of the blessed Apostle, was hidden there by Bishop Stephen with the chapter of Termoli. The skull is kept separately and travelled to Rome for the Week of Christian Unity in January 2020.
Titus's relic has the straighter road. His skull went with the see from Gortyn to Chandax about 828 when Arab forces took Crete, rested in the church built there under Nikephoros Phokas in 961, passed through Venetian custody and then Ottoman, the church becoming the Vizier Mosque, and left for Venice in 1669 at the fall of Candia. After negotiations begun in 1957 it came home, arriving at the port of Heraklion on 15 May 1966. It lies in a silver reliquary in the Church of Saint Titus there, a living shrine still.
Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims version in Bishop Challoner's revision, which supplies the wording of Acts 16:1 to 3 on Timothy's recruitment and circumcision, Philippians 2:20 and 22 on Paul's commendation of him, Galatians 2:1 and 3 on Titus at Jerusalem, 2 Corinthians 2:12 to 13 and 7:6 to 15 on the Corinthian crisis, and 2 Timothy 4:10 to 11 and 4:21 on the last notices of both men. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, book III, chapter 4, section 6, supplies the earliest surviving statement that Timothy held the episcopate at Ephesus and Titus in Crete; it is quoted here from the Schaff translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, available at newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm. The Termoli tombstone inscription is given as reported in the local heritage account at molisecoast.com. The apocryphal Acts of Timothy and Acts of Titus, with their dating and manuscript traditions, are described in NASSCAL's e-Clavis Christian Apocrypha, nasscal.com. John Chrysostom's eighteen homilies on 1 Timothy and six on Titus, the landmark patristic reading of these letters as the charter of pastoral office, are at newadvent.org/fathers/2306.htm and newadvent.org/fathers/2308.htm. The traditional case for Pauline authorship is set out in the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia, newadvent.org/cathen/14727b.htm. The account of Titus's relic chain from Gortyn to Venice and back to Heraklion in 1966, and the Termoli account of Timothy's, are drawn from johnsanidopoulos.com.
Timothy is as much to say as holding dread. Or of timor, that is dread, and theos, a word of Greek, which is deus in Latin and God in English, as the dread of God.
Of S. Timothy.
S. Timothy was taken under Nero of the provost of Rome, and was grievously beaten, and had quicklime put in his throat and upon his wounds. And he rendered thankings to God with all his heart. And then two angels came to him, saying: Lift up your head to heaven. And then he beheld and saw the heaven open, and Jesu Christ, which held a double crown, and said tn him. You shall receive this of my hand. Anda man named Apollinarius saw this thing and did him to be baptized. And therefore the provost commanded that they twain together, persevering in the confession of our Lord, should be beheaded about the year of our Lord fifty-six.
The bishop tradition is first stated, so far as surviving texts go, by Eusebius of Caesarea about AD 313 to 324, in the Ecclesiastical History: Timothy was the first to receive the episcopate of the parish in Ephesus, Titus of the churches in Crete. Eusebius writes roughly 250 years downstream and cites no source. That is evidence the tradition was recorded by the early fourth century, not independent confirmation of it. The death accounts are later still. Timothy's stoning at Ephesus, aged eighty, at a festival that some sources place in honour of Dionysus and others of Diana, rests solely on the apocryphal Acts of Timothy, dated by most scholars to the fifth century and known through a ninth-century summary by Photius and later epitomes. For Titus's death at Gortyna the years 96 and 107 circulate in twentieth-century reference works without a traceable ancient source. These are traditions, and marking them as such takes nothing from the centuries that kept them.
The transmission of the three letters is worth its own note, since neither man wrote anything to transmit. The earliest witness is Papyrus 32, in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, a fragment of a single leaf carrying Titus 1:11 to 15 and 2:3 to 8, published by A. S. Hunt in 1911; its date is genuinely contested, generally placed about AD 200, with Bell, Skeat and Kenyon favouring 150 to 200 and Philip Comfort arguing for 100 to 125. It is the earliest Greek manuscript witness to Titus and the only one before Codex Sinaiticus. There is no early papyrus of 1 or 2 Timothy at all, and Papyrus 46, the great early codex of Paul's letters, does not contain the Pastorals. Sinaiticus, of the fourth century, carries all three complete. Vaticanus does not now preserve them: the manuscript breaks off in Hebrews and the relevant quires are lost, so whether it ever held them is unknown. In English, Tyndale rendered all three from the Greek in 1526 and revised them in 1534, and his choice of elder rather than priest for the Greek presbyteros has shaped how these letters read in English ever since.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servants Timothy and Titus to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50