Salutation and Letter Opening (1:1–4)
As often in Paul’s letters, this letter’s opening has a host of theological points to consider. It is as if Paul cannot wait to get to the body of the letter to glory in the gospel of Christ. Paul stresses his particular appointment to be an apostle—not to boast over against Titus, but, as in 1 Timothy 2:4–7, to show conclusively that God has by his appointment testified to his plan that even Gentiles (like Titus and the Cretans) are to be included in the covenant people of God (see comments on 1 Tim. 2:4–7).
God, who does not lie (1:2). When Paul says that God does not lie (1:2; cf. Heb. 6:18) and that he has promised eternal life to all who believe, Paul is speaking in light of two lying groups: (1) the Cretans, among whom Titus is working and who “are always liars” (Titus 1:12); and (2) the Greek/Cretan gods, who were ever lying and deceiving in the classical myths. There was never a greater lying trickster than Olympian Zeus, who always seemed to wrap himself in a fog in order to ravish some maiden out of sight from his wife, Hera, and then to lie about the deed. This caused some of the pagans embarrassment, which early Christian apologists exploited.2
To Titus, my true son (1:4). Titus, despite his Roman name, was a Greek who was an early companion of Paul in his missionary ventures (Gal. 2:1, 3). He is not mentioned in Acts, but Paul elsewhere speaks of him in the highest collegial terms (e.g., 2 Cor. 8:23). In addition to his work with Paul, Titus was now working on his own in Crete and would later go to Dalmatia (2 Tim. 4:10). He was called the first bishop of Crete in church tradition.
Titus’s Task on Crete (1:5–16)
Husband of but one wife (1:6). When Paul tells Titus in 1:6 that the elder is to be the “husband of but one wife,” he says something clear enough at first glance: Men who have more than one wife are excluded (cf. 1 Tim. 3:2, 12; also “wife of one husband” in 5:9). However, we run into a problem here because Greeks and Romans of the time did not practice polygamy; they were unambiguously monogamous. In consequence, we are left with only two options for understanding this statement about “husband of but one wife.”
(1) The first option is that the man or wife involved must not be divorced and remarried. Divorce for the Greeks and Romans was fairly common, especially among the upper classes. Divorce could be initiated by either party (or even by the wife’s father) and was usually the result of some failure to provide the basic requirements of the implicit contract, for instance, house and board or legitimate children. Read, for example, this statement in Dio Chrysostom (ca. A.D. 40–110), in a dialogue on slavery where one of his characters says: “Yes, I know that freeborn women often palm off other persons’ children as their own on account of their childlessness, when they are unable to conceive children themselves, because each one wishes to keep her own husband and her home.”3 Clearly a Greek woman feared divorce for childlessness; raising up one or more heirs was considered vital to Greek and Roman families. A Greek man could also divorce his wife out of his obligation in order to marry a female heiress within his clan (an epikleros).4
(2) Paul perhaps means that a prospective elder should not have one or more concubines. This seems more likely to be Paul’s meaning, for many Greeks and Romans of the time practiced concubinage. In the Greek world a Greek man married around age thirty—in contrast, girls normally married around age fourteen—and it was taken for granted that before manhood “wild oats should be sown and done with…. Youth rates a certain indulgence.”5 This could occur with courtesans (hetairai) at the dinner parties (symposia) that a young man attended in a special room of Greek homes called the andron (“banquet hall,” but more literally, “men’s hall”). Furthermore, some men purchased courtesans as slaves and kept them as mistresses outside the home, while some married men had one or more concubines among the slave-girls in their households. “Don’t many Athenian men have relations with their maidservants, some of them secretly, but others quite openly?”6 Evidence for these practices is widespread.7
The same practices can be found among the Romans. Pliny the Younger, for example, reports on the murder of a Roman noble by a few of his slaves and mentions in a tellingly off-handed manner that the dead man’s concubines raised a dreadful din on discovery of the dying man.8 Neither the Greeks nor the Romans regarded these practices as adultery or polygamy. The Greeks conceived adultery as a sexual liaison of a free married woman with a man (married or not), but not of a man, married or not, with an unmarried woman.
Paul, as would any Jew, regards this common practice of concubinage the same as polygamy, since the sexual union is tantamount to a marital union (e.g., Gen. 2:24; 1 Cor. 6:16). Hence, he says that the overseer should be the “husband of but one wife,” because union with a concubine or a prostitute constitutes another marital relation.
Cretans are always liars (1:12). The church fathers attributed the quotation on the Cretans in Titus 1:12 to Epimenides of Crete, a legendary figure from the seventh to sixth century B.C., whose works have all been lost. The line given here, “Cretans are always liars,” does appear in the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, but he was not from Crete and thus not the “one of their own prophets,” which Paul has in mind.9 It was commonly understood in antiquity that the Cretans were a particularly cunning and self-serving lot, even by the Greeks who themselves deified sly tricksters like Odysseus (hero of Homer’s Odyssey and many other tales). The Greek verb kretizō, “to Cretonize,” meant “to double deal” and “to lie” all rolled into one (see also the accompanying box).