The Deposit and the Names

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Timothy, Second Epistle to,” “Pastoral Epistles,” “Jannes and Jambres,” “Inspiration,” “Virtue/Vice Lists.”
• Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (IVP) — “Pastoral Letters,” “Virtues and Vices,” “Pseudepigraphy,” “Suffering.”
• Dictionary of the Later New Testament (IVP) — “Creeds and Hymns,” “Faithful Sayings,” “Scripture, Use and Interpretation of.”
• New International Dictionary of NT Theology and Exegesis — θεόπνευστος, γραφή, γράμμα, παραθήκη, ἄστοργος.
• Dictionary of NT Background (IVP) — “Moses Traditions,” “Damascus Document,” “Testaments.”

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: 83 verse units in the MorphGNT file and 83 addressable verses in the public-domain English edition held here, a file consulted for numbering and printed nowhere on this page. ⚠️ The ESV row in the table above is not a local count — no ESV file for this book is held on this disk — and is given as the standard English versification. Every reference on this page therefore means the same verse in every column. Old Testament pages on this shelf frequently do not have that luxury, which is exactly why the question is asked every time.

2 Timothy 4:17 shares three consecutive Greek words with a Psalm, and the Psalter is the worst offender on this shelf for numbering. The verse is CATSS Greek Psalm 21:22 · Masoretic 22:22 · ESV 22:21, and all three numbers are printed wherever it appears below. The Greek Psalter runs one chapter behind the Masoretic from 9/10 through 147; inside Psalm 22 the Hebrew counts the superscription as verse 1 and the English does not, which costs a further one. Nothing was converted silently.

2 Timothy 2:19 is the other place a source would be named. ★ This note used to read: “it is worse — the line commentators place at Numbers 16:5 cannot be checked here at all, because Numbers is one of the twenty CATSS files not on this disk.” Numbers arrived 30 August 2026, the check was run, and it came back with Numbers 16:5 as the verse’s single unrivalled partner in all 30,348 screened units. Stage 4 prints the run, the band, and the one-word divine-name difference that keeps the exact string at zero.

Catalogues of vices are standard equipment in Hellenistic moral writing — Stoic handbooks, Hellenistic Jewish paraenesis, and the New Testament all use them. The form piles up adjectives with no connectives, often alliterating, often building compounds with an alpha-privative — the a- that turns a word into its negation.

That form is the mechanical reason for this page’s central measurement. Of the six words in 2 Timothy 3:3, five begin with that alpha-privative: ἄ-στοργος, ἄ-σπονδος, ἀ-κρατής, ἀν-ήμερος, ἀ-φιλάγαθος. All four of Romans 1:31’s words do the same. A writer coining negations on the spot will produce words nobody else in the corpus happens to have used, and the measurement is detecting that as much as anything theological. The page reports the number and reports the reason.

No Stoic handbook, no Hellenistic Jewish paraenetic text and no papyrus was read for this page. The description of the form above is reported from reference works. Stage 5 repeats that.

Measured: Ἰάννης and Ἰαμβρῆς each occur once in the Greek New Testament (2 Timothy 3:8) and zero times in the complete 64 Greek Old Testament files held here. The letter treats them as common knowledge and does not explain who they are. Reference works place the tradition in Second Temple Judaism — the Damascus Document names an opponent pair, and later Greek and Latin writers know the name Iannes — but none of that literature is on this disk and none of it was read.

A near-miss printed so nobody else trips on it: a stem search on the local Greek Old Testament returns two hits for Ἰαμβρ-, at 1 Maccabees 9:36 and 9:37. They are Ιαμβρι — the sons of Jambri, a Transjordanian clan. A different man and a different name. Not a match, and it is reported here rather than quietly dropped.

σπένδομαι at 4:6 is sacrificial vocabulary: two occurrences in the Greek New Testament (Philippians 2:17 and here) and nineteen in the complete 64-file Greek Old Testament. ★ This page published thirteen, over 44 files. Greek Exodus and Numbers arrived 30 August 2026 and the count is nineteen. The thirteen were Genesis 35:14, 1 Chronicles 11:18, Hosea 9:4, Jeremiah 7:18, 19:13, 39:29, 51:17, 51:19 (twice) and 51:25, Ezekiel 20:28, Daniel (Th) 2:46 and Sirach 50:15. The six new ones are Exodus 25:29, 30:9, 38:12 and Numbers 4:7, 28:7 — the tabernacle drink offering itself — and 4 Maccabees 3:16, a witness, not Scripture.

⚠️ And the re-run corrected two things in the old sentence besides the number. It named 2 Samuel 23:16 among the thirteen; the CATSS lemma is not there — 2 Kingdoms 23:16 tells the story with ἡθέλησεν and no libation verb, and it is the parallel at 1 Chronicles 11:18 that carries it. And it said “every one of them a libation poured out.” That is now too tidy: 1 Chronicles 11:18 and 4 Maccabees 3:16 are both David pouring out the water his men risked their lives for, which is a libation by extension, not an altar rite. The corrected sentence: nineteen occurrences, seventeen of them cultic drink offerings, two of them David’s water. The letter is still not saying I am tired. It is saying I am the wine at the base of the altar, and the shelf can now show the altar.

Against that, 4:13. φαιλόνης is a heavy travelling cloak and μεμβράνα is the Latin membrana, prepared animal skin, in Greek endings. Both occur once in the Greek New Testament and zero times in the Greek Old Testament held here. The same paragraph that says the drink offering is being poured out asks for a coat and some parchment. Whatever one concludes about who wrote this letter, that combination is not what a forger reaches for.

The claim that μεμβράνα is a Latin loan, and the claim that these would be notebooks rather than scrolls, are reported from lexica and reference works. No documentary papyri were consulted, and the papyri are precisely where that would be demonstrated.

Counted from the MorphGNT lemma column over all 27 books: 59 lemmas occur in 2 Timothy, once, and in no other book of the Greek New Testament. Widen the test to lemmas found only in 2 Timothy at any frequency and the figure is 62 — the three extra are ἀθλέω, συγκακοπαθέω and the name Ὀνησίφορος, each twice. 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 neuter plural χρυσᾶ at 2 Timothy 2:20 with the lemma χρύσεος, while the same normalised surface form elsewhere is tagged χρυσοῦς. That is a decision about which lexical form to head an entry with, not a rare word. The raw screen returned 60 and 63; the figures printed everywhere on this page are 59 and 62.

Some of the fifty-nine, so the reader can judge the class of word: μάμμη (grandmother, 1:5), στρατολογέω (to enlist as a soldier, 2:4), γάγγραινα (gangrene, 2:17), γυναικάριον (a weak little woman, 3:6), κνήθομαι (to have itching ears, 4:3), φαιλόνης (cloak, 4:13), μεμβράνα (parchment, 4:13), χαλκεύς (coppersmith, 4:14). These are not theological neologisms. They are the words a letter needs when a man in custody talks about his family, his infections, his luggage and the tradesman who hurt him.

The two deepest runs 2 Timothy has anywhere in the Greek New Testament are a greeting and a doxology.

Print those first and the reader is properly warned: depth alone is not evidence of quotation. A greeting, a doxology and a date-formula 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 question asked was the simplest one the substrate can ask: does this verse share a single word form with any other verse in the Greek New Testament? Not a phrase. Not two consecutive words. One word. Run over all 7,927 verses, each against the other 7,926.

7,925 verses say yes. Two say no.

⚠️ What a zero means here, said exactly. This screen runs with unigram_fallback=True, the Greek-side convention on this shelf: a verse that shares only isolated single words still reports 1. So a reported 0 means the verse shares no word form at all — the strong sense. It is not the Hebrew-side convention, where 0 means only that no two consecutive words are shared.

And the two verses are joined by a word the measurement cannot see. ἄστοργος — without natural affection — occurs exactly twice in the Greek New Testament, and the two occurrences are these two verses and no others. But Romans has the accusative ἀστόργους and 2 Timothy has the nominative ἄστοργοι. This shelf counts word forms, never lemmas. Two forms of the same word do not match. So the only lexical link between the New Testament’s two loneliest verses is invisible to the method that found them. That is not a flaw being confessed; it is the method working as designed and the page saying what the design costs.

The mechanical reason is the alpha-privative. Five of 2 Timothy 3:3’s six words and all four of Romans 1:31’s begin with the negating a-. Piling up negated compounds is what a Greek vice list does, and a compound coined for a list is exactly the kind of word that will not occur twice in a corpus of 137,554 words. The measurement is detecting a literary form at least as much as anything else.

And the words are not all rare as lemmas. διάβολος is the ordinary New Testament word for the devil and its lemma occurs 37 times in 35 verses; it is only the masculine nominative plural διάβολοι that occurs once. ἀσύνετος in Romans 1:31 occurs five times as a lemma. The zero is a zero of FORMS. Say ‘these verses contain no word found anywhere else in the New Testament’ and you have overstated it, and this page does not.

What is left when both of those deductions are made is still worth printing: of 7,927 verses, these two and only these two are cut off at the level the run engine works at, they are both catalogues of what a person becomes, and they are tied to each other by a single word for the loss of natural love.

The verse reads: ἔχων τὴν σφραγῖδα ταύτην· Ἔγνω κύριος τοὺς ὄντας αὐτοῦ, καί· Ἀποστήτω ἀπὸ ἀδικίας πᾶς ὁ ὀνομάζων τὸ ὄνομα κυρίου.

★ What this page could not do, and now has. Until 30 August 2026 this section read: “this zero is weaker than it looks… standard commentary places the first line at Numbers 16:5, and Numbers is one of the twenty CATSS files not on this disk. So the correct sentence is: the line is not in the forty-four Greek Old Testament books searchable here, and the book it is usually traced to was not among them.” Numbers came onto the shelf that day. The screen has been re-run and it found the verse the commentators name, unrivalled. Where the whole verse used to drift into a band of thirty-eight rows all sharing one stock phrase, it now lands on one row out of 30,348, and that row is Numbers 16:5.

⚠️ And the exact string still returns zero — for a reason that is now known, and is one word wide.

Four of the five words match, in order. The one that does not is the divine name. The letter has κύριος where this Greek Numbers has ὁ θεός, and that single substitution is the whole of why an exhaustive search for the five-word string returns nothing. The zero is real and it is not a finding about absence any more; it is a finding about a divine-name difference between 2 Timothy’s line and the Greek Numbers on this disk. Whether Paul is quoting a Greek text that read κύριος, translating the Hebrew himself, or citing from memory, a run-length screen cannot say and this page does not guess.

The second line is a separate question and it did not resolve. Commentators variously send let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity to Numbers 16:26, Isaiah 26:13, Sirach 17:26 or Job 36:10. Now that all of those are on disk, the shelf has measured all four: Numbers 16:26 reaches 1 (ἀπό), Isaiah 26:13 reaches 2 (τὸ ὄνομα), Sirach 17:26 reaches 2 (ἀπὸ ἀδικίας, and Sirach is a witness, not Scripture), Job 36:10 reaches 1. None of them is contact at the level this screen measures. The seal’s first line now has a partner on this shelf and its second line still does not — and that asymmetry could not be seen at all while Numbers was missing, because then neither line had one.

What can be said cleanly: 2 Timothy never uses a citation formula. γέγραπται, it is written, occurs zero times in this letter — but it also occurs zero times in Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, Titus and Philemon, so that is a fact about short letters and not about this one in particular. What 2:19 has instead is ἔχων τὴν σφραγῖδα ταύτην — bearing this seal — which is an inscription formula, not a Scripture formula.

2 Timothy 4:17 ends καὶ ἐρρύσθην ἐκ στόματος λέοντος — and I was rescued from the lion’s mouth.

Three consecutive words, and the three-word sequence occurs exactly once in each corpus. A tie band of one on both sides. The Greek Psalm reads σῶσόν με ἐκ στόματος λέοντος, save me from the lion’s mouth.

And this is the row that proves the shelf’s first rule. 4:17’s deepest run against the Greek Old Testament is not this. It is four — πάντα τὰ ἔθνη καί, all the nations, and — in a tie band of twelve. The deeper run is the formula and the shallower run is the contact. Reporting only the maximum would have hidden the interesting result entirely.

And it still asserts nothing about direction. A man in a Roman prison reaching for the language of Psalm 21/22 is one explanation; a stock phrase for deliverance is another; a Greek idiom neither of them invented is a third. Three shared words is a shape, not a lineage.

All 83 verses of 2 Timothy against the other 7,844 verses of the Greek New Testament.

Across the 83 rows: 81 reach two consecutive shared words, 51 reach three, 31 reach four, 8 reach five, 5 reach seven, 2 reach nine, one reaches twelve, and nothing reaches thirteen. One row reaches only one, in a tie band of 5,343 — 2:12, the middle of the trustworthy saying — and one row, 3:3, reaches zero.

Against the Greek Old Testament held here, the profile is much flatter: 77 of the 83 rows reach two, 34 reach three, 9 reach four, 2 reach five, and nothing reaches six. The two that reach five are 1:18 (in that day, band of five) and 4:18 (the doxology, band of two). Neither is a citation, and the book’s single clearest Old Testament contact — the lion’s mouth at 4:17 — sits at three and never appears in a maximum-only table at all.

That is a statement about verbatim contact, not about dependence. This letter is soaked in Old Testament thought — a seal, a foundation, a crown, a drink offering, an opponent of Moses — 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 1 Timothy alone, 14 of 2 Timothy’s 83 rows reach four consecutive words or more; against Titus alone, 7 do. The deepest against 1 Timothy is the greeting at twelve (1:2 against 1 Timothy 1:2); the deepest against Titus is the same greeting at eight (Titus 1:4). After the greetings the shared runs are 1:11 against 1 Timothy 2:7 at seven (for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle), 4:1 against 1 Timothy 5:21 at seven (I charge you in the presence of God and Christ Jesus), 4:18 against 1 Timothy 1:17 at seven (the doxology), and 4:9 against Titus 3:12 at four (do your best to come to me). Every run named in this paragraph stands in a tie band of one inside its own restricted screen.

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.

1. It is a fact about word FORMS, and forms are an arbitrary unit. Fold the corpus to lemmas and the finding changes shape completely: διάβολος appears 37 times, ἀσύνετος five, and neither verse is isolated any more. The result exists at one level of description and dissolves at another. That is stated plainly rather than buried, because a reader who learns it elsewhere first will rightly distrust everything else here.

2. The literary form explains most of it. Alpha-privative compounds in an asyndetic list are precisely the words a corpus of 137,554 words will only see once. A different genre would not produce this result no matter how isolated the theology.

3. One edition, one digitisation. The screen ran on the SBL Greek New Testament as digitised by MorphGNT. A different critical text, a different normaliser, or a different treatment of the movable nu could move a verse in or out of the zero set. No critical apparatus was consulted for any verse on this page.

4. Two is a very small number. Any claim built on a set of size two is one tagging decision away from being a claim about a set of size one or three. The page reports the pair; it does not build a doctrine on the pair.

The hapax count is a real count and a weak argument, in both directions. 59 words in 1,235 is a genuine measurement. It does not establish that Paul did not write this letter — 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, a change of opponent and a prison cell would each raise the number, and the count cannot distinguish them.

⚠️ And this page’s table disagrees with its own sibling by one row. The 1 Timothy study on this shelf struck one tagging artefact by hand and printed 66 New Testament hapax legomena and 41 per thousand. The automatic filter used here — strike any lemma whose normalised surface form is tagged to a different lemma elsewhere in the corpus — flags two rows in 1 Timothy and yields 65 and 40.9. The two pages differ, the difference is one word, and it is named here rather than smoothed over. It does not change either page’s conclusion, and neither figure should be quoted as a published statistic.

The comparison across the other twelve letters is indicative, not definitive. The same automatic filter was applied to every book, which is more than most such tables do, but it catches only one class of artefact. And the top three — 2 Timothy 47.8, Titus 47.0, 1 Timothy 40.9 — are close enough that the ordering between the first two is not something this page would defend.

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

No Greek critical apparatus, for any verse. No documentary papyri, which is where παραθήκη and μεμβράνα would actually be tested. No Apostolic Fathers — 1 Clement and Polycarp both overlap this material and neither is held here. No Damascus Document, no Targum, no rabbinic literature, and no Greek or Latin author outside the New Testament: the whole Jannes and Jambres tradition is described on this page from reference works and was not read. No Stoic or Hellenistic Jewish vice catalogue, which is the comparative material the central finding most needs.

★ Twenty Greek Old Testament files used to be unsearchable, and this section used to end there. They arrived on 30 August 2026, and what they did to this page is set out rather than absorbed. This paragraph read: “Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Judith, Tobit, 2–4 Maccabees, Odes, Wisdom, Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, Bel and Susanna are not on this disk. Numbers is the one that matters most here, because it is where 2:19’s first line is normally placed. Every zero reported against the Greek Old Testament on this page is a zero over 44 files, not over the Septuagint.” All twenty are now on disk; the corpus is the complete CATSS set, 64 files and 30,637 verse units held; and every count on this page has been re-derived against it.

⚠️ AND THEN ONE OF THE TWENTY CAME BACK OUT OF THE SCREEN, LATER THE SAME DAY. THE PAGE PRINTS THE HISTORY RATHER THAN A NEW NUMBER ON ITS OWN. The Odes are the fourteen liturgical canticles bound after the Greek Psalter, and they were in that list of twenty. They stay on disk. They are no longer inside what this shelf screens as ‘the Greek Old Testament’, for two independent reasons.

(1) Two of them are New Testament text. Ode 9 is Luke 1 — the Magnificat and the Benedictus — and Ode 13 is Luke 2, the Nunc Dimittis. Screened, Ode 9:48 matches Luke 1:48 at eighteen consecutive words. That is not a contact between two Testaments; it is Luke matching Luke under an Old Testament shelfmark, and a page could report such a hit as a Gospel’s deepest Old Testament contact while measuring its own text. This page is built almost entirely on zeroes — θεόπνευστος, Λωϊς, Εὐνίκη, Ἰάννης, Ἰαμβρῆς, ἱερὰ γράμματα, the two quotation-shaped lines at 2:19 — and a zero cannot be broken by taking text away. A phantom hit, though, is the one thing that could have broken one, and the Odes are where this shelf found that the instrument can produce them. (2) Ten of them are second copies of passages already in the corpus — Ode 1 = Exodus 15, 2 = Deuteronomy 32, 3 = 1 Samuel 2, 4 = Habakkuk 3, 5 = Isaiah 26, 6 = Jonah 2, 7 and 8 = Daniel (Th) 3, 10 = Isaiah 5, 11 = Isaiah 38 — so a verse standing once appeared to stand twice, and any tie band touching a canticle was doubled for no textual reason.

HELD and SCREENED are therefore two different numbers, and this page uses whichever one a sentence means. The shelf holds 30,637 verse units in 64 files; a screen sees 30,348, the difference being exactly the 289 Odes units.

★ Every figure in the table below was re-derived a second time against the 30,348-unit corpus, and not one of them moved. παραθήκη still stands three times — Leviticus 5:21, 5:23 and Tobit (S) 10:13, none of them a canticle; μάμμη still once at 4 Maccabees 16:9; σπένδω still nineteen; 2:19 is still a run of 4 in a tie band of 1 against Numbers 16:5; and every zero is still a zero. The only thing this correction changes on this page is the number the zeroes are zeroes against — and that number is now smaller, cleaner, and free of a book that would have let a Gospel match itself.

Three counts moved and one of them changed a finding. The παραθήκη zero was this page’s evidence that Paul’s word for the guarded deposit had no Greek Old Testament home. It has one, and it is the Levitical law of goods left with a trustee — which is the word’s own legal sense, and makes the metaphor sharper rather than weaker. The remaining zeroes held.

⚠️ What is still true about every zero on this page. It is now a zero over the complete CATSS digitisation of Rahlfs — a far stronger scope than 44 files — but still one edition, and never a zero over “the Septuagint” as such. And the deuterocanonical books now inside the count are WITNESSES, NOT SCRIPTURE: Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, the Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon are measurement partners for the Greek, and this page names what they are at every hit.

Nor is the meaning of 3:16 settled here. Whether πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος is all Scripture is God-breathed or every God-breathed Scripture is also profitable turns on Greek syntax with no verb in the clause, not on any count. A page that reported a count and then announced a translation 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).
• B. B. Warfield, “God-Inspired Scripture,” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 11 (1900) — the study that fixed the passive sense of θεόπνευστος in English-language discussion.
• P. N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford, 1921) — the study that put the vocabulary question on the table.
• Albrecht Pietersma, The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians (Brill, 1994) — the primary collection for the tradition behind 3:8.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

2 Timothy is a short letter written by a man who expects to die. It names forty-one people and places in 1,235 words — who left, who stayed, who did harm, where the coat is. It uses fifty-nine words no other book of the New Testament uses, and most of them are not lofty: a grandmother, a gangrene, an itch, a coppersmith, a parchment.

And it is the letter the church quotes when it wants to say where Scripture comes from. All Scripture is breathed out by God — a sentence whose key word occurs once in the Bible, and whose verse, measured against the whole Greek New Testament, shares two words with anything else, and those two words are the and in.

We came for that verse and stopped three lines above it. Of 7,927 verses in the Greek New Testament, exactly two share no word form with any other verse: Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3. Both are lists of what a person becomes. The one word that ties them together — ἄστοργος, without natural affection, twice in the New Testament and only in these two verses — stands in two different case forms, so the machine that found the isolation cannot see the bond. A vice list is the one place in the New Testament where the language itself runs out of company.

Which leaves the letter’s own answer standing where it put it. Not a chain of citations — there is not one citation formula in the whole letter. A deposit: something handed to you that is not yours, which you guard and then hand on. Guard the good deposit (1:14). What you have heard from me … entrust to faithful men (2:2). And behind both, the seal at 2:19: the Lord knows those who are his.

New Testament shelf: this is the whole of 2 Timothy, all four chapters, 83 verses, Greek New Testament and ESV.