What the Scripture Says

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Timothy, First Epistle to,” “Pastoral Epistles,” “Ephesus,” “Bishop,” “Deacon,” “Widow.”
• Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (IVP) — “Pastoral Letters,” “Pseudepigraphy,” “Church Order and Government,” “Households and Household Codes.”
• Dictionary of the Later New Testament (IVP) — “Creeds and Hymns,” “Godliness, Religion,” “Faithful Sayings.”
• New International Dictionary of NT Theology and Exegesis — εὐσέβεια, μεσίτης, λύτρον, παραθήκη, ἐπίσκοπος.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on 1 Timothy 5:18 and 1 Corinthians 9:9, the two New Testament uses of Deuteronomy 25:4.

A New Testament letter has no Hebrew column and no Septuagint column of its own. The Greek printed on this page is the language the letter was composed in, not a translation of a Hebrew original. What still has to be checked is whether the verse divisions agree, and here they do.

Counted from the corpora themselves, not from a table: 113 verse units in the MorphGNT file, and 113 addressable verses in the public-domain English text held here. No ESV file for 1 Timothy is held on this disk, so the ESV row above is the printed edition’s own divisions rather than a count. Every reference on this page therefore means the same verse in every edition. Old Testament pages on this shelf frequently do not have that luxury — Nahum carries a one-verse offset in two of its three chapters — which is exactly why the question is asked every time.

1 Timothy 5:18 quotes Deuteronomy 25:4, and Deuteronomy is a book where the Hebrew and Greek verse numbers do line up at that point — Masoretic 25:4, CATSS Greek 25:4, ESV 25:4 are the same verse. The quotation is measured against CATSS Deuteronomy 25:4 and nothing was converted.

Counted across the Greek Old Testament files held on this disk — 30,637 verse units in 64 CATSS files — the εὐσεβ- group occurs 96 times.

The claim in the heading is now much stronger than when it was first printed, and for two reasons.

First, the whole Greek Pentateuch is on this disk now — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, 5,801 verse units — and the εὐσεβ- group occurs in it zero times. When this page was written, three of those five books were missing, so ‘not a Torah word’ was an inference from a partial Torah. It is now a measurement over the complete one.

Second, of the 96 occurrences, 86 stand in books this shelf treats as witnesses and not as Scripture — 4 Maccabees, Sirach, 2 and 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Judith, Wisdom, Susanna, the Psalms of Solomon. Only ten stand in books the shelf prints as Scripture, and all ten are in Isaiah and Proverbs. The word is Hellenistic-Jewish before it is anything else.

Against that, 1 Timothy uses the group nine times in 1,591 words — 2:2, 3:16, 4:7, 4:8, 5:4, 6:3, 6:5, 6:6 and 6:11. The whole Greek New Testament has 22 occurrences; nine of them are here, five are in 2 Peter and four in Acts. No other book has more than five.

6:20 tells Timothy to guard the παραθήκη. The noun occurs three times in the New Testament and all three are in these two letters: here, and 2 Timothy 1:12 and 1:14. In wider Greek it is the ordinary word for a deposit placed with a trustee — goods or money handed over for safekeeping, to be returned intact.

That last sentence is reported from lexica and reference works. No documentary papyri were consulted for this page, and the papyri are precisely where the commercial usage would be demonstrated. Stage 5 says so again.

The letter names the city once, at 1:3. It does not mention Artemis, the temple, the silversmiths, or anything else Acts 19 makes famous about Ephesus. What it does describe is internal: teachers of a different doctrine, myths and genealogies, ascetic rules about marriage and food (4:3), a register of widows, and disputes about words.

So a study that reads Artemis into 2:12 is importing a background the letter never supplies. That background may still be right — the city was what it was. But it is an argument from outside the text, and this page keeps the two apart.

Counted from the MorphGNT lemma column over all 27 books: 66 lemmas occur in 1 Timothy and in no other book of the Greek New Testament and only once in it. Widen the test to lemmas found only in 1 Timothy at any frequency and the figure is 75. Both counts are given because they answer different questions.

⚠️ One entry in the raw list is a tagging artefact, and the page removes it rather than banking it. MorphGNT tags the adverbial πρῶτον at 1 Timothy 5:4 with the lemma πρῶτον, while the other 64 occurrences of the same surface form across the New Testament are tagged πρῶτος. That is a decision about parts of speech, not a rare word. The raw screen returned 67 and 76; the figures printed everywhere on this page are 66 and 75, with that one row struck out.

Some of the sixty-six, so the reader can judge the class of word for themselves: γραώδης (old-womanish, 4:7), στόμαχος (stomach, 5:23), ὑδροποτέω (to drink water, 5:23), καυστηριάζω (to brand with a hot iron, 4:2), τεκνογονέω (to bear children, 5:14), ξενοδοχέω (to show hospitality, 5:10), ἀνδραποδιστής (slave-trader, 1:10), ἀπρόσιτος (unapproachable, 6:16). These are not theological neologisms. They are the words a letter needs when it stops to talk about widows, digestion and household management.

The single deepest run 1 Timothy has anywhere in the Greek New Testament is twelve consecutive words, and it is a letter greeting.

Print those first and the reader is properly warned: depth alone is not evidence of quotation. A greeting, a doxology and a title can all run deep because they are fixed forms. What makes a run interesting is depth with a narrow band and a reason to look.

The verse reads: λέγει γὰρ ἡ γραφή· Βοῦν ἀλοῶντα οὐ φιμώσεις, καί· Ἄξιος ὁ ἐργάτης τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ.

Three separate exhaustive searches back this up.

• The two-word sequence βοῦν ἀλοῶντα occurs once in 30,637 verse units of the local Greek Old Testament (Deuteronomy 25:4) and twice in the 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament (1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18).
• The five-word sequence ὁ ἐργάτης τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ occurs in exactly two verses of the Greek New Testament: Luke 10:7 and 1 Timothy 5:18. That is the tie band of one.
• Matthew 10:10 has the same saying with a different noun — τῆς τροφῆς, his food, not τοῦ μισθοῦ, his wages. 1 Timothy’s wording is Luke’s and not Matthew’s.
• And the negative is measured, not assumed. The sequence ἄξιος ὁ ἐργάτης occurs zero times in the 30,637 verse units of Greek Old Testament held here. That negative was re-run on 30 August 2026 against the enlarged corpus and it survived — the twenty files this page used to name as missing, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua and Wisdom among them, are all here now, and none of them carries the sequence. It is still a negative on the CATSS files and not on the whole Septuagint tradition, but it is no longer a negative with the Pentateuch missing from it.
• 🔄 One figure here did move, and it moved against the page. The deepest run the whole second half reaches anywhere in the Greek Old Testament is still three — τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ — but the tie band was 1 on the 44-file corpus and is 2 on the 64-file corpus. Sirach 11:18 (a witness, not Scripture) is now joined by Exodus 22:14, and that is not a stray match: it is the hired-worker clause of the Covenant Code — ἔσται αὐτῷ ἀντὶ τοῦ μισθοῦ αὐτοῦ, it shall be to him in place of his wages. The nearest thing in the Torah to ‘the labourer deserves his wages’ was invisible to this page for as long as Greek Exodus was off the disk.

⚠️ What this does NOT establish. It does not establish that 1 Timothy is quoting Luke’s Gospel, or that Luke is quoting 1 Timothy, or that either had the other in front of him. A saying of Jesus circulating in a fixed Greek form would produce exactly this measurement, and so would a written source both used. This shelf never asserts direction of influence. What is measurable is the shape of the contact, and the shape is: the identifiable Old Testament quotation is the looser of the two.

1 Corinthians 9:9 quotes the same verse with an explicit formula: ἐν γὰρ τῷ Μωϋσέως νόμῳ γέγραπται, for it is written in the law of Moses. The SBL edition then prints Οὐ κημώσεις βοῦν ἀλοῶντα.

So the two New Testament citations of one short Septuagint line diverge from it in opposite directions. 1 Timothy keeps all four words and changes the order. 1 Corinthians keeps the order and changes the verb — κημόω instead of φιμόω. Counted across the whole Greek New Testament, κημόω occurs once, in that verse. Neither citation reproduces more than two consecutive words of the Greek Old Testament as this corpus holds it.

The SBL editors mark their reading at 1 Corinthians 9:9 with an apparatus siglum, which means there is a competing reading — φιμώσεις, the Septuagint’s own verb. If that reading is right, 1 Corinthians matches the Septuagint word for word and the contrast above collapses on that side. The page prints the reading its corpus holds and names the alternative rather than hiding it.

All 113 verses of 1 Timothy against the other 7,814 verses of the Greek New Testament.

Across the 113 rows: 106 reach two consecutive shared words, 57 reach three, 25 reach four, 9 reach five, 5 reach six, 4 reach seven, one reaches twelve, and nothing reaches thirteen. Seven rows reach only one — that is, they share isolated words and no two-word sequence at all with any other verse in the New Testament.

Against the Greek Old Testament screened here, the profile is much flatter: over the 30,348 verse units screened (of 30,637 held in 64 CATSS files), 103 of the 113 rows reach two, 47 reach three, 6 reach four, and one goes further. It is 1:17 — εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων and the words either side — running to seven consecutive words, tie band one, against 4 Maccabees 18:24 (a witness, not Scripture), and it is doxological language, not a citation. ⚠️ Re-run 2026-09-24. Until then this paragraph still gave the 44-file screen, which the 30 August re-run missed: 100 of the 113 rows reaching two, 38 three, 4 four, and one reaching five — 1:17 against CATSS Psalm 83:5 (Masoretic 84:5, English 84:4), band one. Re-running that 44-file screen today reproduces every one of those figures except the first, which comes out 101; the 100 is left as first printed. 4 Maccabees, which carries the whole doxology, arrived on 30 August. 1 Timothy quotes the Old Testament with a citation formula exactly once, at 5:18.

That is a statement about citation formulae, not about dependence. The letter leans on Genesis 2–3 at 2:13–14 and on the two-or-three-witnesses rule of Deuteronomy 19:15 at 5:19 without flagging either, and a run-screen cannot see an allusion that shares no consecutive Greek words. The method finds verbatim contact; the absence of a run is not the absence of a source.

Screened against 2 Timothy alone, 14 of 1 Timothy’s 113 rows reach four consecutive words or more; against Titus alone, 7 do. The deepest against 2 Timothy is the greeting at twelve; the deepest against Titus is the same greeting at eight (Titus 1:4). After the greetings, the shared runs are the trustworthy-saying formula (1:15 and 4:9 against Titus 3:8; 3:1 against 2 Timothy 2:11), τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν θεοῦ at 2:3 against three verses of Titus, and the vice-list at 3:3 against Titus 1:7.

Shared formulae between three short letters addressed to two co-workers are what anyone would expect on any account of their origin. The numbers are reported; no conclusion about authorship is drawn from them here.

The measurement is sound; the inference from it is narrow. Runs of consecutive normalised word forms detect verbatim contact. They do not detect allusion, they do not detect paraphrase, and a reordering of the same four words — which is exactly what 1 Timothy 5:18 does to Deuteronomy 25:4 — is invisible to the method as quotation even though any reader can see it. The run of two is a true number and a misleading one if it is read as distance rather than as word order. The page says both.

The 1 Corinthians 9:9 reading is contested and the finding partly rests on it. SBLGNT prints κημώσεις with an apparatus marker. No critical apparatus was consulted here; the alternative was identified from the siglum in the text file, not from the evidence behind it.

Only one Greek Old Testament edition was searched. CATSS, following Rahlfs. The Deuteronomy of Codex Alexandrinus, of the Hexaplaric recension, or of any other line could read the words in 1 Timothy’s order, in which case the run of two is an artefact of which edition sits on this disk. That possibility is not remote and it was not checked.

The hapax count is a real count and a weak argument, in both directions. 66 words in 1,591 is a genuine measurement. It does not establish that Paul did not write this letter, and the shelf's position is stated in the Author panel above — the letter names him. It also does not establish that he did. Subject matter, a secretary, an interval of years and a change of opponent would each raise the number, and the count cannot distinguish them.

The comparison table is uncorrected for tagging artefacts in the other books. One was found and removed in 1 Timothy (the πρῶτον row at 5:4). The same class of artefact almost certainly exists in Romans and 1 Corinthians and was not hunted there. At the scale of the gap being reported — 41 per thousand against Philippians’ 25 — a handful of artefacts would not reverse the ordering, but the table should be read as indicative, not as a published statistic.

And this page did not attempt the harder tests. P. N. Harrison’s study and the stylometric literature that followed it measure particles, connectives and sentence structure, not just rare nouns. None of that was run here. Nothing on this page replicates or refutes it.

No Greek critical apparatus, for any verse. No manuscript evidence for the ὅς / Θεός variant at 3:16 beyond the reading SBLGNT prints. No documentary papyri, which is where παραθήκη and αὐθεντέω would actually be tested. No Apostolic Fathers — Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians overlaps this material and is not held here. No Josephus and no Philo. 4 Maccabees, which this page used to name as the single most important missing book for the εὐσέβεια count, arrived on 30 August 2026 and is measured now — see stage 2, where it turned 26 occurrences into 96. No inscriptions from Ephesus.

And the meaning of αὐθεντέω at 2:12 is not settled here and cannot be settled from this corpus. One occurrence in the New Testament. 🔄 This page used to add ‘zero in the Greek Old Testament held here’, and on the 44-file corpus that was true. On the 64-file corpus it is not. The verb αὐθεντέω is still unattested in the Greek Old Testament held here, but two cognate NOUNS now stand in it: Wisdom 12:6, αὐθέντας — parents who are the perpetrators, in the passage on child sacrifice — and 3 Maccabees 2:29, αὐθεντίαν, of a royal absolute authority. Both books are witnesses on this shelf, not Scripture, and they are named because Wisdom 12:6 is one of the standing data points in the scholarly argument about 2:12 — it was being cited against this page from outside while the page could not see it. Two nouns in two Hellenistic-Jewish books still do not settle the force of a verb in Ephesus. The argument still runs mainly on classical and documentary evidence outside anything on this disk, and the honest change is from “zero, and the evidence is all elsewhere” to “two, both nouns, both in witnesses, and the evidence is still mostly elsewhere.” A page that reported a count and then announced a meaning would be overreaching, and this one stops at the count.

• I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles (ICC, 1999).
• William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles (WBC 46, 2000).
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy (Anchor Bible 35A, 2001).
• Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT, 2006).
• P. N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford, 1921) — the study that put the vocabulary question on the table.
• Armin D. Baum, “Semantic Variation within the Corpus Paulinum,” Tyndale Bulletin 59 (2008) — on how much genre alone moves these counts.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

1 Timothy is a short, practical, occasionally awkward letter written because a church had a problem. It stops to describe how to keep a list of widows. It stops to tell a young man to take some wine for his stomach. It uses sixty-six words no other book of the New Testament uses, and most of them are not lofty — they are the words you need when you are talking about hospitality, childbearing, slave-traders and digestion.

And once, in the middle of the practical stretch, it says the Scripture says and quotes two lines. One is Deuteronomy. One is not in the Old Testament at all. The letter sets them side by side under a single formula and does not distinguish them.

We went looking for the Deuteronomy half to be the strong contact, and it is the weak one. Four words from the Septuagint, reordered, so only two run consecutively. The other half runs five straight words with Luke 10:7 and with nothing else in the New Testament. The measurement will not tell you who read whom. It will tell you that when this letter reached for something everyone in the room would recognise, the words that came out in their fixed order were the words of Jesus about a worker and his pay.

New Testament shelf: this is the whole of 1 Timothy, all six chapters, 113 verses, Greek New Testament and ESV.