144 andrew w. pitts
in urban capitals to advance the gentile mission. his strategy, after hav-
ing planted a church within a community, was to commission local level
elders to continue functioning authoritatively in his place. So earlier in
the apostle’s career these structures would naturally be less developed;
later in his career, more so. it makes sense that Paul, potentially approach-
ing death, now speaks most directly in terms of these structures. in
hallidayan language, the shift in shared knowledge between the ecclesial
letters and the Pastorals provides a new semiotic environment that makes
available a range of technical vocabulary within its metafunctions, real-
ized co-textually through lexis. other uses of technical vocabulary likely
relate to the shift in topic from the earlier letters to the Pastorals and/or
(perhaps most importantly) collocation restraints.81
the demographic also shifts, from a mixed urban Pauline community
to a singular male, in the case of timothy, a Jew; and in the case of titus,
a greek. Perhaps this is why titus remains so distinct from the other Pau-
lines in many of the studies of Pauline style,82 involving not only a shift
in plurality (along with 1–2 timothy) but also a substantial shift in demo-
graphic within its own register profile, writing to a gentile rather than
a Jewish male—not to mention the issue of length, which Kenny draws
attention to.
We must also weigh the influences of Bell’s diachronic or temporal axis.
Paul is not only older, more experienced, and serving his second prison
sentence in rome (level 2: individual), we also have to account for lin-
guistic evolution and potential bilingual interference (level 3: Social).
latin influences were at their highest in the greco-roman world up to
this point. thus, the potential for bilingual latin interference would have
been greater in register profile 5 than at any other point in Paul’s career,
given his potential for exposure and because of its increasing popular-
ity, especially in rome, which would climax in late antiquity, on into
the Byzantine period.83 certain of Paul’s hapax legomena in the disputed
81 as marshal and towner, Pastoral Epistles, 61, note in their endorsement of Johnson:
“a further important observation is made by Johnson, 11f., and backed up in the discus-
sion of individual passages in his commentary, namely that the use of non-Pauline words
tends to be most evident when the writer is dealing with topics, such as the heresy or the
qualifications for church leaders, which are not addressed in the accepted letters of Paul;
the unusual vocabulary is thus in some measure due to the unusual subject-matter.”
82 e.g. Kenny, Stylometric Study, 82, 100; Quinn, Titus, 5–10.
83 J. n. adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (cambridge: cambridge university
Press, 2003), 521; r. g. g. coleman, “greek and latin,” in anastasios-Phoibos christides
(ed.), A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity (cambridge: cam-
bridge university Press, 2007), 792–99; cf. also hitchcock, “latinity,” 348–53; e. K. Simp-