The shortest of the three Pastorals, sent to Crete, with a line about Cretans that quotes a Cretan poet insulting his own island. It is a manual for appointing leaders in a place the writer regards as difficult.
What the book is
Titus instructs its addressee to appoint elders in every town in Crete, gives their qualifications, warns against a group described as of the circumcision who are upsetting households, sets out instruction for different groups within the congregation, and closes with travel arrangements.
It is the shortest and most compressed of the three Pastorals, and its content overlaps heavily with 1 Timothy.
How it is put together
Three chapters: qualifications for elders and the problem to be addressed; instruction by group — older men, older women, younger women, younger men, slaves; then general instruction on conduct toward outsiders, with two short creedal passages that read as quoted material.
The structure is that of a mandate: here is what needs doing, here are the criteria, here is the standard of behaviour to be taught.
The line about Cretans
Chapter 1 quotes a saying that Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons, and attributes it to one of their own prophets. The quotation is generally identified with Epimenides of Knossos, a semi-legendary Cretan figure, and the same line is referred to by other ancient writers.
It is worth naming what this is: an ethnic slur, quoted approvingly, in a canonical text. Treating it as anything else would be dishonest, and softening it in translation has been common. What it also is, incidentally, is evidence of the writer’s familiarity with a Greek literary commonplace.
The dating question
Titus stands or falls with the other Pastorals. The vocabulary, the church structure, and the treatment of faith as a deposit to be guarded are the same, and almost all scholars treat the three as a group.
A further difficulty is specific to this letter: a mission of Paul to Crete resulting in churches in every town is not attested anywhere in Acts or in the undisputed letters, and there is no obvious point in the known chronology to place it. Defenders of authenticity locate it in a period after the end of Acts, which is possible and undocumented.
Mid-sixties CE if Pauline; roughly 80 to 110 CE if not.
Where the external record touches it
Crete is archaeologically rich for much earlier periods and reasonably documented for the Roman period, when it was administered jointly with Cyrenaica. Nothing in that record bears on the letter.
As with 1 Timothy, the useful external evidence is the manuscript and canon record: absent from Marcion’s collection, present in the Muratorian list, not preserved in P46.