Have you ever wondered about those explanatory notes which appear at the end of some of the Epistles? At the end of Romans, for example, we read: ‘Written to the Romans from Corinthus, and sent by Phebe servant of the church at Cenchrea’. What are we to make of these notes?

The subscriptions are thought to have been added about the middle of the 5^th century by Euthalius, Bishop of Sulca in Egypt. Thomas Hartwell Horne says this man was ‘either grossly ignorant, or grossly inattentive’.^[1] Professor Patrick Fairbairn says, ‘the subscriptions...are oftener wrong than right’.^[2]

Several of these subscriptions are simply and clearly erroneous:

1. The First Epistle to the Corinthians is stated to have been written from ‘Philippi’, even though the Apostle writes in 1 Corinthians 16.8 that he intends to ‘tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost’ and then, in verse 19, sends greetings from ‘the churches of Asia’. According to Dr. T. C. Edwards, this subscription has no manuscript support older than the 8th century.^[3]

2. The Epistle to the Galatians is said to be written from ‘Rome’, but this cannot be right, for the Apostle Paul expresses surprise, in chapter 1 verse 6, that they were so ‘soon’ removed from Gospel Truth, but it was at least ten years after the Galatians’ conversion that Paul was in Rome.

3. The Epistles to the Thessalonians are said to be written ‘from Athens’, but they were clearly written at Corinth. Silvanus and Timothy, who are mentioned in the salutations (1 Thessalonians 1.1; 2 Thessalonians 1.1), joined Paul at Corinth according to Acts 18.1,5.

4. The First Epistle to Timothy carries a subscription which cannot possibly be correct or even early, because it states the Epistle was written from ‘Laodicea, which is the chiefest city of Phrygia Pacatiana’ but (to our knowledge) Paul never was at Laodicea and, in the Epistle itself, Paul writes of having left Ephesus for Macedonia (1.3), so it was apparently written from some place like Philippi. Furthermore, the country of Phrygia was not divided into two provinces—Pacatiana (or Phrygia Prima) and Phrygia Secunda—until the 4th century. The subscription must therefore have been written after this time.

5. The Epistle to Titus is said to have been written from ‘Nicopolis of Macedonia’ but there was no Nicopolis belonging to that Province (but there was one in Epirus and in Cilicia). Moreover, when Paul says (3.12) that his intention was to spend the winter ‘there’ (i.e., in Nicopolis), he clearly was not in that particular place at the time of writing. The further statement in the subscription that ‘it was written to Titus, ordained the first bishop of the church of the Cretians’ (as Timothy, apparently, was ‘first bishop of the church of the Ephesians’—2 Timothy) clearly reflects the ‘sub-apostolic’ emergence of ‘Diocesan Episcopacy’.

6. The Epistle to the Hebrews, apparently (from the subscription), was written ‘from Italy by Timothy’, but this is wholly without foundation and plainly contradicts the inspired writer’s own words in 13.23—‘Know ye that our brother Timothy is set at liberty; with whom, if he come shortly, I will see you’.

Dr. Debra Anderson writes:^[4] ‘Regarding the subscripts being in the Textus Receptus, they go back to Erasmus (we have a 1551 printing of his text in our library). They were, according to Scrivener, “appended to St Paul’s Epistles in many manuscripts... In the best copies they are somewhat shorter in form, but in any shape they do no credit to the care or skill of their author, whoever he may be”.^[5] The earliest original-hand manuscript I know of that has the subscripts is Codex H (6^th century), although Sinaiticus and Vaticanus both have titles and subscripts—these added later by a different hand’.

Since the subscriptions are no part of the Inspired Text and are clearly most unreliable, the Trinitarian Bible Society is intending to omit them from future editions of the Scriptures. In the new Windsor Text Bibles they have already been removed (along with the abbreviation ‘St.’, as in ‘St. Matthew’, etc., which also has no Biblical authority whatsoever).

Written by the Rev. M. H. Watts, Chairman of the General Committee

^[1] Dr. Thomas Hartwell Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 4 vols. ( London , England : T. Cadel l ,Strand, 1834), 2.76.

^[2] Dr. Patrick Fairbairn, Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark, 1874), p. 30.

^[3] Dr. Thomas Charles Edwards, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (London, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), p.476.

^[4] Personal correspondence, 21 July 2008. 

^[5] Dr. F. H. A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell and Co., 1883), p. 62.