A farewell letter, and the most personal of the three Pastorals. If Paul wrote it, it is the last thing we have from him; if not, it is a careful piece of writing about what that would have looked like.
What the book is
2 Timothy is written as a final letter from prison. It urges endurance, warns of difficult times and of teachers who will gather audiences for what they want to hear, recalls the addressee’s upbringing, and closes with personal requests — bring the cloak, bring the books, come before winter.
The tone is valedictory. The best-known passage, about having fought the fight and finished the race, is a summing-up rather than an instruction.
How it is put together
Unlike 1 Timothy, this letter has almost no church order material. It alternates between exhortation to the addressee and reflection on the writer’s situation, and ends with a long list of names: who has left, who has stayed, who did harm, who should be greeted.
That list is the feature that most complicates the authorship question in the other direction from the rest of the Pastorals.
The authorship question
2 Timothy shares the vocabulary and outlook of 1 Timothy and Titus, so it is usually judged with them, and the majority verdict is that all three are post-Pauline.
But it also carries a density of specific personal detail — named individuals, places, a cloak left at Troas, a coppersmith who did damage — that is harder to explain as invention than the church-order material of 1 Timothy. Some scholars who reject Pauline authorship for the group nevertheless argue that genuine Pauline fragments are embedded in this letter. Others regard the personal detail as exactly what a pseudonymous testament would supply, since verisimilitude is the point of the genre.
Both readings are available and the evidence does not force one. Dating follows: mid-sixties CE, or roughly 80 to 110.
Where the external record touches it
The letter anticipates the writer’s death, and Paul’s death is not documented by any contemporary external source. The earliest accounts are Christian and later: a letter attributed to Clement, from around the end of the first century, refers to his death without narrating it; second-century writers supply increasing detail. No Roman record of the execution survives, which is unremarkable — Roman records of individual provincial executions rarely do.
The tradition that he died at Rome under Nero is early and widely attested within Christian sources, and it is not corroborated outside them. That distinction is the whole substance of what this site means by external attestation, and it applies here as clearly as anywhere.
Related: 1 Timothy, Titus, and the method note on what external attestation means.