Timothy the Apostle

Origins and family at Lystra

Timothy was born about the year 17 at Lystra, a small Roman colony in the highlands of Lycaonia in central Asia Minor. His family was of the mixed world the Gospel would soon gather in: his father was a Greek — a pagan, so far as the record shows — while his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois were devout Jewesses who had come to faith in Christ. Paul remembered them with tenderness: "the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also" (2 Timothy 1:5). From a child Timothy had "known the holy scriptures" (2 Timothy 3:15), taught them at his mother's knee; but because his father was a Greek he had not been circumcised, and grew up on the seam between the synagogue and the Gentile city.

Conversion and the call to follow Paul

The tradition, following the OCA and Greek synaxaria, places Timothy's coming to Christ about the year 52, when Paul first passed through Lystra on his missionary journeys and the young man — with his mother and grandmother — was won to the faith. When Paul returned to Lystra on his second journey, he found Timothy "well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium" (Acts 16:2), and resolved to take him as a fellow-worker. "Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek" (Acts 16:3) — a step Paul took not from any need of the Law, which he had just been defending against at the Council of Jerusalem, but from pastoral prudence, that the mixed parentage of his companion should be no stumbling-block to the Jews they would meet. From that hour Timothy was Paul's own, ordained to the ministry by the laying-on of the Apostle's hands and of the presbytery (1 Timothy 4:14; 2 Timothy 1:6), and sent out on the work with a prophetic word spoken over him (1 Timothy 1:18).

Companion and fellow-worker of Paul

For some fifteen years Timothy shared Paul's labours, his journeys, and his imprisonments, and no companion is named so often or so warmly in the Apostle's letters. He was with Paul in Macedonia and at Philippi, at Thessalonica and Beroea — where he and Silas were left behind to establish the young church (Acts 17:14) — and at Corinth and Ephesus. Paul sent him on the most delicate errands, as his own presence in another form: to Thessalonica, "to establish you, and to comfort you concerning your faith" (1 Thessalonians 3:2); to Corinth, "who shall bring you into remembrance of my ways which be in Christ" (1 Corinthians 4:17; 16:10); to Philippi, "for I have no man likeminded, who will naturally care for your state… ye know the proof of him, that, as a son with the father, he hath served with me in the gospel" (Philippians 2:19–22). So fully was Timothy joined to the Apostle's mind that Paul names him co-sender of no fewer than six of the epistles — 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Philemon — "Paul… and Timothy our brother." He shared, too, the Apostle's chains: the Letter to the Hebrews closes with the news that "our brother Timothy is set at liberty" (Hebrews 13:23), a glimpse of an imprisonment and release of his own.

Bishop of Ephesus and the two epistles

When Paul, journeying on, could no longer remain at Ephesus, he left Timothy there to govern the great church of Asia: "As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine" (1 Timothy 1:3). The tradition of the Church, East and West alike, knows Timothy as the first bishop of Ephesus — the see he held for the rest of his life, some three or four decades.

To him, in this charge, Paul addressed the two epistles that are Timothy's enduring monument and, with the Letter to Titus, the "Pastoral Epistles." No other of the Seventy is the named recipient of Scripture, and the two letters have shaped the Church's ministry ever since. In them the aged Apostle sets out the qualifications of a bishop and of deacons (1 Timothy 3), the ordering of prayer, of widows, and of elders, the guarding of "that which is committed to thy trust" (1 Timothy 6:20), and the whole temper of a pastor: "Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity" (1 Timothy 4:12). There too is the homely counsel that has fixed itself in memory — "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities" (1 Timothy 5:23) — a word that tells us Timothy was of frail health and ascetic habit, drinking only water until his father in the faith bade him spare himself. The Second Epistle, written from a Roman prison as Paul faced death, is the most moving of the two: the Apostle, "ready to be offered," longs to see his son once more — "Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me" — charges him to "preach the word; be instant in season, out of season" and to "do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry" (2 Timothy 4:2, 5, 9), and leaves him, as a testament, the words that have steadied countless Christians since: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith" (2 Timothy 4:7). The hymnography of Timothy's feast turns on just this: that the disciple, taught by the "Chosen Vessel," himself "kept the faith and finished a like course."

With John the Theologian

After the martyrdom of Paul at Rome, Timothy continued at Ephesus, and the tradition joins him in his later years to the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, who spent the close of his life in that same city. The synaxaria relate that Timothy received John on his return from exile on Patmos and drew from him, as once from Paul, an abundance of grace — so that the last of the Twelve and the beloved son of the Apostle to the Gentiles kept the church of Ephesus together in the sunset of the apostolic age.

Martyrdom at the Katagogia

Timothy's death, about the year 97 (the reign of the emperor Nerva or the early years of Trajan), sprang from his zeal against idolatry. Ephesus was the city of the great temple of Artemis, and its pagans kept a wild yearly festival which the synaxarion names the Katagogia (Καταγώγια): the crowds, their faces hidden behind masks so that none should be known, went in procession through the streets bearing idols and clubs, singing and raving, and falling upon whomever they met to rob and to beat and to murder under cover of the feast. The aged bishop, unable to bear the frenzy and the shame done to God, went out among them and preached Christ, calling them from their idols to the living God. The maddened mob rounded on him: they beat him with their clubs (the bakloi of the account) and stoned him, and left him for dead. His disciples carried him out, and two days later he died of his wounds — a bishop of Christ slain by the very idolatry he had spent his life opposing. He was buried on a hill outside the city (the tradition names Mount Pion).

Relics and translations

The relics of Timothy rested at Ephesus for more than two centuries and a half. In the year 356, in the reign of the emperor Constantius II, they were translated to Constantinople and enshrined with great honour in the Church of the Holy Apostles, laid — as the historians Jerome and the Byzantine chroniclers record — beside the relics of the Apostles Andrew the First-Called and Luke the Evangelist, the three apostolic bodies gathered into the imperial city's shrine of the Apostles. (This translation is one of the earliest recorded gatherings of apostolic relics to the new capital, and the church father Jerome mentions it, as does the pilgrim record of the age.) The presence of the three apostles at the Holy Apostles was famed through the Byzantine centuries; portions of Timothy's relics were later dispersed to the West, and a skull venerated as his is kept in Italy, but the great translation the tradition remembers is that of 356 to Constantinople.