Acts of Titus — Large Print

Introduction

There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds certain ancient texts — not the silence of insignificance, but the silence of suppression, of careful omission, of history choosing to look the other way. Some documents survive the centuries in cathedral libraries, copied and recopied by devoted hands, their authority proclaimed from pulpits and enshrined in canon. Others survive almost despite themselves, tucked into the margins of manuscripts, preserved in obscure languages, passed between scholars in whispers rather than proclamations. The text you are about to encounter belongs firmly to the second category. It is a document that the mainstream tradition of Christianity largely forgot, or perhaps chose to forget, and yet it carries within its pages a vision of the early church that is vivid, strange, theologically daring, and unmistakably human.

To read early Christian apocrypha is to step into a world that feels simultaneously familiar and disorienting. The names are recognizable — Paul, Titus, the communities of Crete and beyond — but the stories do not always behave the way we expect them to. Miracles occur with startling frequency and peculiar specificity. Theological arguments are conducted not in abstract terms but through dramatic confrontations, healings, and contests of spiritual power. Characters who appear in the canonical New Testament as minor figures suddenly expand into protagonists with rich inner lives, complex relationships, and their own distinct theological voices. This expansion, this filling-in of the gaps, is precisely what apocryphal literature does, and it does so in ways that reveal as much about the communities that produced these texts as about the figures they describe.

The figure at the center of this particular text is Titus, and it is worth pausing at the outset to appreciate just how remarkable his relative obscurity is. In the canonical New Testament, Titus appears primarily as a trusted lieutenant of the Apostle Paul — a Gentile convert who served as a diplomatic envoy between Paul and the fractious community at Corinth, a man trusted enough to carry the collection for the Jerusalem church, and eventually the recipient of one of the three so-called Pastoral Epistles that bear his name as addressee. The letter to Titus, whatever one makes of its authorship, presents him as the overseer of the churches of Crete, tasked with the formidable challenge of appointing elders, correcting false teachers, and maintaining order in communities described with some exasperation as prone to dishonesty and moral laxity. He is, in other words, a figure of genuine importance in the Pauline mission — not a peripheral footnote but a central operative in the spread of early Christianity across the Mediterranean world.

And yet, compared to Peter, Paul, John, Mary Magdalene, or even Thomas, Titus has attracted remarkably little legendary elaboration in the surviving record of early Christian storytelling. There is no Gospel of Titus, no widely circulated Apocalypse of Titus, no dramatic martyrdom account that achieved broad popularity across the ancient Christian world. The text we are examining here is, in this sense, genuinely rare — one of the few extended narrative treatments of this figure that has come down to us from antiquity, and one that rewards careful reading precisely because of its rarity. It does not have the luxury of a well-established interpretive tradition telling us what to think of it before we have read a single line. We come to it, in a sense, fresh.

This freshness is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that without a long tradition of commentary and contextualization, readers must do more work themselves to situate the text within the broader landscape of early Christian literature and history. The opportunity is that we can read it without the distorting lens of centuries of received interpretation, allowing its actual concerns, its actual theology, its actual narrative strategies to speak for themselves. What emerges from such a reading is a portrait of the early church that is neither the triumphalist narrative of later orthodoxy nor the purely sociological document that some modern scholars prefer, but something richer and stranger — a text that takes the miraculous seriously while also caring deeply about the practical challenges of community formation, ethical instruction, and the transmission of apostolic authority.

Before going any further, it is worth addressing directly a question that any intellectually honest introduction must confront: what do we mean when we call a text 'apocryphal,' and does that designation tell us anything useful about its value or reliability? The word itself comes from the Greek apokryphos, meaning 'hidden' or 'concealed,' and in the context of early Christian literature it has come to designate texts that were not included in the canonical New Testament — texts that circulated in early Christian communities, that were sometimes treated as authoritative or even scriptural, but that were eventually excluded from the official collection of writings that the church recognized as uniquely inspired and normative. The process by which this exclusion occurred was neither swift nor simple. It took centuries of debate, regional variation, and gradual consensus-building before anything like a fixed New Testament canon emerged, and during those centuries, texts now classified as apocryphal were read, copied, cited, and valued by Christians who would have been puzzled by the sharp distinction we now draw between canonical and non-canonical.

This historical reality has important implications for how we should approach the text before us. It does not mean that all apocryphal texts are equally valuable, equally early, or equally reliable as historical sources — they are not. Some are late compositions that reflect the theological preoccupations of centuries well removed from the apostolic period. Some are clearly fictional elaborations designed to satisfy popular curiosity about figures and events the canonical texts left undescribed. But none of this means they are without value. Even late, clearly legendary texts tell us something important about the communities that produced and treasured them — about their theological anxieties, their narrative imagination, their understanding of what the apostolic mission meant and what it demanded. And some apocryphal texts, including some that have been dismissed or ignored by mainstream scholarship, contain traditions that may be genuinely early, genuinely independent of the canonical texts, and genuinely illuminating of the historical realities of the first and second centuries of Christian history.

The text associated with Titus invites us to hold all of these possibilities in mind simultaneously. We should neither approach it with the credulity of someone who accepts every detail as historical fact, nor with the dismissiveness of someone who assumes that anything outside the canon is necessarily late, derivative, or worthless. The appropriate posture is one of engaged critical attention — reading carefully, asking questions about sources and traditions, comparing with what we know from other early Christian literature, and remaining genuinely open to the possibility that this text preserves things worth knowing.

A World of Wandering Apostles

To understand the text that follows, it helps enormously to have some sense of the world in which it was produced — a world that was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary periods of religious transformation in human history. The first two centuries of the Common Era saw the Mediterranean basin become the site of a remarkable proliferation of religious movements, philosophical schools, and spiritual communities, all competing for adherents, all developing their own texts, rituals, and institutional structures, all trying to make sense of the same fundamental human questions about meaning, mortality, and the nature of the divine. Within this crowded religious marketplace, the movement that would eventually become Christianity was in many ways just one competitor among many — and a relatively marginal one for much of this period, concentrated largely among the urban poor and lower-middle classes of the great cities of the Roman Empire.

What distinguished this movement, from the beginning, was its extraordinary missionary energy. The stories of wandering apostles — men and women who traveled the roads and sea lanes of the Roman world carrying their message from city to city, establishing communities, working miracles, debating philosophers, confronting magistrates, and sometimes dying for their convictions — are among the most compelling narratives that antiquity has left us. These figures were not simply preachers in the modern sense. They were understood by their communities as bearers of divine power, as channels of the Spirit, as living embodiments of the message they proclaimed. When Paul writes in his letters about the signs and wonders that accompanied his preaching, he is not speaking metaphorically or making a rhetorical flourish. He is describing what he and his communities genuinely believed was happening — a direct, palpable, experiential encounter with the power of God that manifested itself in healings, exorcisms, prophetic utterances, and transformations of character that seemed to those who witnessed them nothing short of miraculous.

The apocryphal Acts literature — a genre that includes the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, the Acts of John, the Acts of Thomas, and the Acts of Andrew, among others — is the literary crystallization of this apostolic culture. These texts take the wandering apostle as their central figure and follow him (occasionally her) through a series of adventures that combine the excitement of ancient romance novels with the theological seriousness of early Christian homiletics. They are not simple-minded productions. The best of them display considerable narrative sophistication, theological depth, and genuine literary artistry. They also display, with great vividness, the tensions and anxieties of early Christian communities — tensions about wealth and poverty, about the body and sexuality, about the relationship between Christian communities and the Roman state, about the nature of apostolic authority and who has the right to exercise it.

The text concerning Titus belongs to this tradition, and reading it against this background illuminates both its particular emphases and its broader significance. Titus, as Paul's representative in Crete and the eastern Mediterranean, occupies a specific position in the apostolic network that the Pauline letters describe — a position of delegated authority, of trusted representation, of carrying the apostolic message into territories that Paul himself could not always reach. The apocryphal elaboration of his story takes this delegated authority seriously and explores what it means in practice: how does one exercise apostolic power without being an apostle in the primary sense? How does one maintain the integrity of the message while adapting it to new contexts? How does one build lasting institutions out of the charismatic energy of the earliest missionary period?

These are not merely historical questions. They were live and urgent questions for every Christian community of the second and third centuries, facing the challenge of institutionalization — of transforming a movement built around the personal authority of charismatic founders into something that could survive the deaths of those founders and maintain its coherence across generations and geographies. The figure of Titus, as elaborated in this text, is in many ways a figure for this challenge itself: the faithful disciple who must carry the work forward, who must translate the master's vision into institutional reality, who must be both conservator of tradition and creative adapter to new circumstances.

The geographical setting of the text also deserves attention. Crete, where Titus is traditionally associated with early Christian leadership, is not a random location. It was a significant crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean world — a place where Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Eastern influences intersected and mingled. The island had a complex religious landscape, with ancient cults, mystery religions, and Jewish communities all present alongside the emerging Christian communities. The famous line quoted in the canonical letter to Titus, attributed to the Cretan poet Epimenides — 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons' — reflects a real ancient stereotype, but it also points to the genuine complexity of the cultural and moral environment in which early Christianity was trying to establish itself. The apocryphal text is alive to this complexity in ways that reward attention.

Beyond Crete, the text's geographical imagination extends across the broader world of Pauline mission — the cities of Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, the ports and trade routes that connected the communities Paul and his associates founded. This geography is not merely decorative. The movement of characters through physical space carries theological meaning in early Christian narrative. The apostle who travels is the apostle who carries the gospel, and the routes of travel map the routes of divine purpose. Reading the text with an awareness of this geographical theology adds a dimension to the narrative that is easy to miss if one reads it purely as a sequence of events.

It is also worth noting the role of miracles in this text, as in apocryphal Acts literature generally. Modern readers sometimes find the miracle stories in these texts the most difficult element to engage with seriously — they can seem extravagant, repetitive, or simply incredible. But to read them this way is to miss their function. In the world of early Christian narrative, miracles are not primarily proofs of divine existence or demonstrations of supernatural power for its own sake. They are signs — in the full theological sense of that word — that point beyond themselves to a reality that transcends them. They are moments when the boundary between the visible and invisible world becomes permeable, when the power of the new age breaks into the old, when the claims of the gospel are enacted rather than merely stated. The specific form that miracles take in a given text is rarely arbitrary. It reflects the theological concerns of the community that shaped the text, and reading the miracle stories carefully, asking what they are signs of and what they are meant to demonstrate, is one of the most productive ways of entering into the text's own logic.

The healing miracles that appear in this tradition, for instance, are rarely just about physical restoration. They are about the wholeness that the gospel promises — the integration of body, soul, and community that the early Christians understood as the fruit of the Spirit's work. The exorcisms are not just about dramatic confrontations with demonic forces. They are about the liberation of human beings from the powers — spiritual, social, economic — that diminish and distort their humanity. Reading with this kind of theological attentiveness transforms what might otherwise seem like a collection of supernatural anecdotes into a coherent vision of what the Christian life was understood to mean.

Reading This Text Today

There is a question that haunts every serious engagement with early Christian apocrypha, and it is worth addressing it openly rather than leaving it to hover unacknowledged at the edges of the reading experience. The question is simply this: why should a contemporary reader care? The canonical New Testament already presents a formidable interpretive challenge. Adding to it a body of texts that the mainstream tradition has largely set aside can seem like an exercise in scholarly antiquarianism — interesting to specialists, perhaps, but not obviously relevant to anyone else. This question deserves a serious answer, and the answer, I think, is more compelling than it might initially appear.

The first reason to care is historical. If we want to understand how Christianity actually developed — how it moved from the small, intense communities of the first generation to the institution that would eventually shape the entire course of Western civilization — we cannot afford to read only the texts that the tradition eventually canonized. The canonical texts were chosen, in part, precisely because they were judged to be most representative of the tradition that was winning the argument about what Christianity should be. The texts that were set aside represent, in many cases, the roads not taken — the alternative visions of what the movement might have become, the theological possibilities that were explored and then foreclosed, the communities that found themselves on the losing side of debates whose outcomes were anything but inevitable. To read these texts is to recover a sense of the genuine contingency of Christian history — to understand that things could have gone differently, that the tradition as we have it is the product of real choices made by real people in real historical circumstances, and not simply the inevitable unfolding of a predetermined plan.

The second reason is theological. Even for readers who are committed Christians and who have no interest in challenging the authority of the canonical texts, the apocryphal literature offers something valuable: a kind of depth sounding of the tradition, a way of testing how far certain theological themes and concerns extend, of discovering which questions were so pressing that they generated narrative elaboration beyond what the canonical texts provided. When an early Christian community felt compelled to tell more stories about Titus — to imagine his miracles, his confrontations with opponents, his methods of community-building, his relationship with the apostolic tradition he had received — that compulsion itself tells us something about what mattered to them, what they were trying to work out, what they needed their faith to address. Reading these stories alongside the canonical texts does not diminish the canonical texts. It contextualizes them, enriches them, and sometimes illuminates aspects of them that familiarity has made invisible.

The third reason is simply literary and humanistic. These texts are, at their best, genuinely good stories. They are told with energy and conviction by people who believed passionately in what they were describing. They are populated by characters who feel real — not in the flat, idealized way of hagiography at its worst, but in the complicated, contradictory, surprising way of actual human beings trying to live out an extraordinary calling in the midst of ordinary life. The opponents of the apostles are not mere cardboard villains. The communities the apostles serve are not passive recipients of divine grace. The apostles themselves are not superhuman figures immune to doubt, fear, or failure. Reading these texts with the kind of attention they deserve is a genuinely rewarding literary experience, quite apart from any historical or theological considerations.

There is also something to be said about the particular moment in which we find ourselves as readers. We live in a time of intense interest in the diversity of early Christianity — in the texts and communities that were marginalized or suppressed by the process of canon formation, in the voices that were excluded from the official record, in the alternative visions of Christian life and thought that survived only in fragments and obscure manuscripts. This interest has sometimes been sensationalized, as if every apocryphal text were a bombshell revelation that overturns everything we thought we knew about Christian origins. It has also sometimes been met with defensive dismissiveness, as if the very existence of these texts were a threat to be neutralized rather than a challenge to be engaged. Neither response does justice to the actual complexity of the situation.

What the best scholarship on early Christian apocrypha has shown — and what this text exemplifies — is that the relationship between canonical and non-canonical is not a simple opposition between authentic and inauthentic, early and late, reliable and unreliable. It is a much more intricate relationship of mutual illumination, shared tradition, divergent development, and contested authority. The texts that were eventually excluded from the canon were not necessarily excluded because they were false or worthless. They were excluded because they did not fit the particular vision of Christian identity and authority that was consolidating itself in the late second and third centuries. Understanding why they did not fit — what made them problematic, what theological or institutional interests they challenged — is itself a profound education in the history of Christianity.

For readers coming to this text with a background in New Testament studies, the experience will be one of familiar figures in unfamiliar settings, familiar themes developed in unfamiliar directions. The Pauline theological vocabulary — grace, faith, the Spirit, the body of Christ, the new creation — is present, but it is deployed in narrative contexts that the canonical letters do not provide. The relationship between Paul and Titus, glimpsed in the letters as a relationship of mutual trust and shared mission, is here given flesh and drama and specific content. The challenges of community life in the Gentile churches, addressed in the canonical letters in terms of ethical instruction and doctrinal correction, are here dramatized in stories of conflict, miracle, and transformation.

For readers coming to this text with no particular background in early Christian studies, the experience may be one of discovery — the discovery that the world of the early church was far richer, stranger, and more contested than the familiar Sunday school version of Christian origins suggests. This is not a world of serene theological consensus and untroubled institutional development. It is a world of fierce debate, creative improvisation, genuine spiritual intensity, and remarkable human courage. The people who populate this text — apostles and converts, opponents and bystanders, the powerful and the powerless — were trying to work out what it meant to live in the light of the extraordinary claims their movement was making about the nature of God, the meaning of human existence, and the possibility of transformation. That project has not lost its urgency.

A word about the approach taken in this volume. The goal throughout has been to make this text accessible to a broad readership without sacrificing the intellectual seriousness that it deserves. This means providing sufficient historical and literary context to allow readers to situate the text within its proper setting, while not burying the text itself under an avalanche of scholarly apparatus. It means engaging honestly with the questions of date, authorship, and historical value that any responsible treatment of an apocryphal text must address, while not allowing those questions to become so dominant that the text's own voice is drowned out. And it means reading the text with the kind of sympathetic imagination that any serious literary and historical document demands — trying to understand it on its own terms before subjecting it to external judgments.

The pages that follow contain a story that has been waiting a long time to be read. It is a story about faith and power, about loyalty and mission, about the extraordinary challenge of keeping a movement alive and coherent across time and distance and cultural difference. It is a story about a man who stood in the shadow of a great apostle and had to find his own way of carrying the light. In that sense, it is a story with a timeless resonance — because the challenge of inheriting a tradition, of receiving something precious from those who came before and passing it on without diminishing it, is a challenge that every generation faces in its own way. The ancient communities that shaped this text were grappling with that challenge in their own terms and their own idiom. Reading their grappling with fresh eyes, without the distorting filter of centuries of received interpretation, is one of the genuine privileges that early Christian apocrypha offers us. Take that privilege seriously, and the rewards will be considerable.

Chapter 1

1-4 I am a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, sent to build the faith of God's chosen people and to help them know the truth that leads to a holy life and the hope of eternal life. This eternal life was promised long ago by God, who cannot lie, and now at the right time he has revealed his message through the preaching that God our Savior entrusted to me. To Titus, my true son in our shared faith, I wish you grace and peace from God the Father and from Christ Jesus our Lord.

5-6 The reason I left you behind in Crete was to finish organizing what still needed to be done, which includes appointing elders in every city as I instructed you. You should always look for a man who has a good reputation, is faithful to his wife, and has children who are believers and not known for wild living or disobedience.

7 Since an overseer is managing God's household, he must have a good reputation. He must not be stubborn, quick-tempered, a heavy drinker, violent, or greedy for money.

8 He must be hospitable, a lover of what is good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

9 He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others with healthy teaching and show those who oppose it that they are wrong.

10-11 There are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those who insist on circumcision, and they must be silenced. They are ruining entire families by teaching things they shouldn't for dishonest gain.

12-14 In fact, one of their own prophets said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, and lazy gluttons,” and this is true. Therefore, you must correct them sharply, so they will be strong in the faith and will stop paying attention to Jewish myths and the rules of people who reject the truth.

15 To the pure, all things are pure. But to those who are corrupted and unbelieving, nothing is pure, because both their minds and their consciences are corrupted.

16 They claim to know God, but their actions deny him; they are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good.