Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Yeah, tonight we're going to introduce not just First Timothy,

but sort of the pastoral epistles in general.

And for purposes of this introduction,

I'm going to sort of wrap in Philemon, even though

Philemon is not technically a pastoral epistle. The title of the pastoral epistles

really refers to 1 Timothy, 2nd Timothy, and Titus.

What Philemon has in common with them, other than being here at the end of St. Paul's letters, is that it's written to a person as our first and second Timothy and Titus.

So it is of a similar genre, I guess, of epistle, right, of letter.

It's in the place that it is, of course, because Phileilemon is the shortest.

It's like a paragraph, a longish paragraph.

But since it's written to a person in some ways, some of the things here apply to it. And some will not, and I'll try to differentiate

those. So one of the biggest issues with the pastoral epistles,

First and Second Timothy and Titus, does not apply to Philemon.

And that is, did St. Paul actually write them, and if so, when, and under what circumstances?

Right?

That doesn't apply to Philemon because pretty much everyone agrees that St. Paul wrote Philemon.

There's a rough agreement about roughly when it was written.

It was around the time he was writing the other epistles we've just been going through.

So this doesn't, this part doesn't apply to Philemon, but it very much applies to 1st and 2nd

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