Timothy of Ephesus

Life and Ministry

Timothy was the son of a Jewish believing mother, Eunice, and a Greek father, brought up at Lystra in southern Galatia and instructed in the Scriptures from infancy by his mother and grandmother Lois (2 Timothy 1:5, 3:15). Paul took him as a companion on the second missionary journey, circumcising him for the sake of the Jewish mission, and from that point Timothy appears beside Paul in nearly every Pauline letter as co-sender and trusted emissary. He represented Paul to Thessalonica, Corinth, Philippi, and finally to Ephesus, where Paul left him as overseer with the charge to guard the deposit and to stand against the false teachers infiltrating the church. The two Pastoral Epistles addressed to him are Paul's last extant letters; the second was written from the Roman prison shortly before Paul's death and ends with the apostle's plea, Do your best to come to me soon.

Circumstances of Death

A Greek martyr-act of the fourth century, the Acts of Timothy, preserved by the Bollandists, places Timothy's death around AD 97, in the final year of Domitian or the first of Nerva, during the pagan festival of the Katagogion at Ephesus, when a procession in honor of the goddess Diana passed through the streets with phallic emblems and ecstatic ritual. Timothy, then an old man, met the procession and rebuked it in the name of Christ. The crowd turned on him with clubs and stones and beat him to death on the steps of the temple of Diana. He was buried at Ephesus, near the church of John, and his relics were translated to Constantinople in AD 356 by the emperor Constantius II.

Legacy

Timothy is the prototype of the second-generation pastor — the man Paul left to do what Paul could no longer do, the man the apostle calls my true child in the faith, the man whose timidity Paul exhorts to be steeled by remembering that God has not given us a spirit of fear. His witness is that the gospel is meant to be passed: the things you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). He guarded the deposit and gave it on, and at the end he stood in front of the same idolatry Paul met at Athens — and went down preaching.