“The Sentence Always Did”: The Greek Witnesses on 1 Timothy 4:13

“The Public Reading of Scripture” argued that the noun in 1 Timothy 4:13, ἀνάγνωσις (anagnōsis, “reading”), does not carry its setting with it. The same word names a man’s study of his books and the lesson read aloud in the assembly, and something in the context, not the word, tells us which is meant. An argument of that kind stands or falls on its sources, so I have printed them.

Published today is a companion to “The Public Reading of Scripture”: The Greek Witnesses on 1 Timothy 4:13, c. 150–1100, with the Greek text and an English translation in parallel columns. When I wrote the paper I had room for two passages of Chrysostom, and I knew several others only in English. For the edition every Greek line was read again from the printed page, and witnesses came into view that the paper never used. They do not change its conclusion. They make it easier to see.

The Passages the Paper Quoted, Now Given Whole

The paper could quote only fragments. The edition prints each passage entire, so that the reader can see the context that decides the sense.

Chrysostom on the verse itself. His thirteenth homily on 1 Timothy is his exposition of the verse, printed now from the lemma to the end of his comment. He glosses the noun himself as “the reading, that is, of the divine writings.” He turns the command outward, “let us all hear,” and grounds it in Paul’s own schooling at the feet of Gamaliel. Then he ends with an indignant question: is Paul to attend to reading, while we are idle? No reader, deacon, or assembly appears anywhere in the comment.

The deacon, the lector, and Timothy in one paragraph. His nineteenth homily on Acts describes the service as his people knew it. The deacon cries, “Let us attend.” The reader (ἀναγνώστης, anagnōstēs, the office-noun) begins the prophet Isaiah. The congregation does not listen. Then Chrysostom reaches for our verse: “What is equal to Timothy? Yet even to him Paul wrote, ‘Attend to reading.’” Scripture, he says, is a spring that has no bottom. The office and the verse stand in the same paragraph, and he never joins them.

The commentators. Theodoret draws the lesson that even Timothy, “spiritual though he was,” had to supply the labor of reading, and so must we. The catena that bears the name of Oecumenius adds a phrase naming the hearers to exhortation, “toward the people,” and none to reading. Theophylact paraphrases the command: “Until I come, read the Scriptures, and from them you will have the laws; when I come, I will supply the rest.” The reading stands in for the absent teacher. And the same catena that glosses our verse as study uses the very noun, a chapter earlier, for the church’s lectors. That is Theodore on 1 Timothy 3:13: “some perform the reading.” The commentators knew the public sense and did not use it here.

The word at work elsewhere. Cyril of Jerusalem runs the verb both ways in one sentence: what is not read in the churches, do not read by yourself. Basil’s canon 69 treats the reader as a clerical grade, with its own discipline and its own ladder of promotion. The Euthalian apparatus numbers the lessons of Acts as ἀναγνώσεις (anagnōseis). Malalas uses the bare verb of a boy emperor at his schoolwork in the palace. The word could mean any of these things. In every case the sentence around it tells us which.

What the Paper Did Not Have

For these I had no room in the paper, or I knew them then only in English.

Both senses in one sentence. In his eleventh homily on John, Chrysostom asks his people a favor. He wants each of them to take the Gospel lesson “which is to be read among you” on the Lord’s Day, “sit down at home and read it” beforehand, mark what is clear and what is obscure, and then come to hear it. The verb for the church’s reading (ἀναγνωσθήσεσθαι, anagnōsthēsesthai) and the verb for the man’s reading at home (ἀναγινωσκέτω, anaginōsketō) are one verb, in one sentence. Only the words around them tell the two apart: “among you” in one place, “at home” in the other. That is the paper’s whole argument, and Chrysostom makes it himself.

He sees the excuse coming, too: “that they neither own nor have books.” He will not hear it from the rich. To the poor he puts a question: does not every craftsman own all the tools of his trade, however poor he is? Then he grants the point that cuts the other way. Even the poorest can know the Scriptures “from the continual reading that takes place here.” In that sentence the bare noun ἀνάγνωσις means the church’s lesson, and the only word that says so is “here.”

Not for monks only. In his second homily on Matthew he answers the layman who says, “I am not one of the monks. I have a wife and children and the care of a household.” His reply: “Why, this is what has ruined everything: your supposing that the reading of the divine Scriptures belongs to those only, when you need it much more than they.” The reading of Scripture is a householder’s duty, done at home. In his ninth homily on Colossians he goes further: “Get yourselves books, medicines for the soul. If you will have nothing else, get at least the New Testament.”

The lector and the letters from heaven. None of this makes Chrysostom careless of the lesson read in church. In his third homily on 2 Thessalonians he says that when the reader stands up and says, “Thus says the Lord,” and the deacon commands silence, the honor is paid not to the reader “but to him who speaks to all through him.” This is his highest theology of the lection, the reading as God’s own address. It stands beside the lowest estimate of the man who does the reading, and he does not cite 1 Timothy 4:13 for any of it. Everything that tells us this is the assembly’s reading stands in the context: the reader standing up, the deacon, the silence.

A bare verb, plainly public. A sermon on Isaiah 45:7, which survives in a single manuscript, names the day’s lessons by what they contained: “the woman with the issue of blood was read”; “the marks of Paul were read too.” The verb stands alone, as bare as τῇ ἀναγνώσει (tē anagnōsei) in 1 Timothy 4:13, and no one could mistake it, because the sentence before speaks of “the things read to us today.” When a Greek writer means the assembly’s reading, his sentence carries a marker. Our verse carries none.

The verse in Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood. Here he cites 1 Timothy 4:13 to show that a bishop must be skilled in the word so that he can teach and refute. He glosses it as attending “to the reading and to the Scriptures.” When someone objects that such things are prescribed only for priests, he shows that Paul lays the same duty on “the governed.”

Theodore, whole. Theodore of Mopsuestia’s comment on the verse survives in Greek only in part, and the Greek fragment speaks of exhortation and teaching and says nothing of reading. The Latin version, which survives entire, supplies what the Greek lacks: “Spend your care on the readings, so that you may learn what is fitting for you both to do and to teach others; so that, instructing yourself by assiduous reading, you may be able to persevere in teaching and exhortation.” Theodore also read the verse as Timothy’s study.

Before the church. The prologue to Sirach, written by Ben Sira’s grandson about 132 B.C., uses the same noun for the grandfather’s “reading of the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers.” That was study, and it made the old man learned enough to write a book of his own. The grandson then asks his own readers “to make the reading with goodwill and attention.” The genitive names what was read; it does not make the reading public.

The Witness on the Other Side

One text in the edition cuts against a narrow form of the paper’s argument, and I would rather hand it to you than have you find it. The early Christian sermon known as 2 Clement says: “I read to you an appeal, to the end that you may give heed to the things which are written, so that you may save both yourselves and him that reads among you.” Here is the very construction of 1 Timothy 4:13, προσέχειν (prosechein, “give heed”) with a dative, used of hearers attending to what is read aloud. The reading is public. But notice what makes it so: “to you,” “among you.” The audience stands in the sentence. In 1 Timothy 4:13 no such word stands beside τῇ ἀναγνώσει.

The canon that shows the liturgical sense. The Council of Laodicea, in the fourth century, ordered that in the assemblies the psalms should not be run together, but that “a reading shall come between each psalm.” That is the noun of our verse in its plainly liturgical sense, and the canon itself says why: “in the assemblies” (ἐν ταῖς συνάξεσι, en tais synaxesi).

The word never told anyone where it was read. The sentence always did.

Corrections to the Paper

Reading every Greek line again from the printed page turned up errors in the paper itself:

• wrong page numbers for Field’s Chrysostom and for Cramer’s catena;
• two misreadings of the Migne type that had turned οὐκ into οὐχ;
• a sentence of Chrysostom’s that is a question, printed as a statement;
• a date for the Euthalian apparatus stated more firmly than the evidence allows.

The paper and its post were corrected on 18 September.

Before We Come

Chrysostom did not think he was choosing between the lectern and the kitchen table. He wanted the Gospel read to his people on the Lord’s Day and read by them at home before they came, and he used one word for both, trusting his hearers to know the difference from the sentence. They did, and so can we. This Sunday a lesson will be read in our churches, by whoever is appointed to read it. The question 1 Timothy 4:13 puts to each of us is the one Chrysostom put to his own congregation: whether we will have read it before we come.

The Greek Witnesses on 1 Timothy 4:13, c. 150–1100: Greek text with English translation (Three Doves Press, 2026), 31 pp., is available as a PDF. The paper it accompanies, “The Public Reading of Scripture,” is here.