The author of the second letter to Timothy has been traditionally accepted as Paul, though the authenticity of Paul’s authorship of this and the other Pastoral Epistles has also long been questioned, with no consensus reached (Dibelius and Conzelmann 1972: 1–10). 2 Timothy 2 opens in a paternal tone fitting for the guidance that is its main subject. The writer addresses Timothy as ‘my child.’ Full of advice and exhortation, the text is a form of communication for which the literary term is parenesis.

This quality especially characterizes this chapter of the epistle. The emphasis is on the discipline, morality, and endurance that Timothy and those ‘faithful people who will be able to teach others as well’ (2:2) are called to show. The writer builds a memorable image of the ‘good soldier’ whose aim should be to please the ‘enlisting officer’—literally, ‘the one who enlisted him’ (v:4) (Quinn and Wacker 2000: 621). An ideal starts to emerge: of troops of resilient followers, fit, in every sense, for active service.

The Socialist Realist imagery of Aleksandr Deyneka’s poster makes for a thought-provoking comparison with the second letter to Timothy. The poster is one of around fifteen that Deyneka produced between 1930 and 1933, while he was a professor teaching drawing composition and poster art at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. They all address the themes of socialist construction, physical culture, and other aspirations of the Five Year Plan under Stalin’s increasingly authoritarian rule. While they come from very different contexts, both the poster and the epistle call on their recipients to develop the exemplary personal qualities required in the cause of collective attainment. They include the military ‘virtues’ of discipline, obedience, and subordination. They involve competing according to the ‘rules’ and working for a harvest, literal and metaphorical. Deyneka’s recurrent concern with the athletic body has been seen as a ‘mimesis of industrial work’. Its corporeal immortality has also been read as a substitute, in Stalin’s modernity, for a traditional concept of spiritual immortality (Groys 2014: 49). The analogy may help us to reflect further on the ways in which bodily fortitude and moral rectitude are conceived in early Christianity as pre-requisites for a productive life of discipleship.

All should be ready not only to work together for the harvest, but also to suffer as Paul has. As the model for that afflicted yet faithful worker, Paul’s example reminds his readers that suffering is part of the way that followers of Jesus must walk. The task of Timothy and those he guides is not only to develop fortitude and stamina in the face of trials. They must also ‘pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace’ (2:22). A key to attaining such qualities as the Lord’s servant (v.24) is to avoid the kinds of petty quarrels that can damage and weaken collective resolve. The letter is stern in its condemnation both of ‘profane chatter’ (v.16) and of ‘senseless controversies’ (v.23). The one leads to impiety and a spreading infection of the community, the other even to the snare of the devil (v.26). The writer of the letter is particularly concerned about the perils of discordant ‘wrangling over words’ (v.14) among the faithful. The grim futility of the quarrelsome is uniquely imagined in James Ensor’s gloriously incongruous (and only secondarily moralizing) subject of two skeletons fighting over a pickled herring.

If these two works help to visualize the desirable over the undesirable qualities in the body of the faithful, Lucio Fontana’s art, which repeatedly involves the crisp, sharp cutting of the very surface of the work, may offer a more oblique nuance to the text. It resonates with the epistle’s emphasis on rhetorical precision and correct language, ‘rightly explaining the word of truth’ (2:15), which uses a compound word incorporating the verb ‘to cut’. Fontana’s enigmatic practice of inscribing the word ‘hope’ on the reverse of some of his ‘cuts’ makes possible a note of ambiguity in reading a passage that otherwise seems to gain most of its traction from a series of oppositions and indeed from its cutting, separating clarity. There is, throughout, the hope in the ‘firm foundation’ of God’s ‘truth’ and the possibility of ‘gentle’ correction (2:25) within the community—if the message is heard (over squabbles about herrings or anything else!) and true unity of purpose attained.

References

Dibelius, Martin and Hans Conzelmann. 1972. The Pastoral Epistles, trans. by Philip Buttolph and Adela Yarbro (Philadelphia: Fortress)

Quinn, Jerome D. and William C. Wacker. 2000. The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

Groys, Boris. 2014. ‘Alexander Deyneka: The Eternal Return of the Athletic Body’, in Groys, Alexander Deyneka (Moscow: Ad Marginem), pp. 45–63