A grandmother, a mother, and a boy

Paul is in a Roman prison writing his last letter, and he opens it by remembering a boy’s household.

Two women, named. Lois the grandmother, Eunice the mother. Paul says the faith he sees in Timothy lived first in them.

Timothy’s father was Greek, and Acts mentions him once, without a name and without a word about his belief. Whatever was passed down in that house came through the women in it.

And two chapters later Paul tells us what the passing-down consisted of.

From infancy you have known the holy Scriptures.

The word Paul uses is the ordinary one for a newborn or small child. Whatever teaching Timothy got, it started before he could have understood a syllable of it.

That is a household in a Roman colony in central Asia Minor, decades before a single page of the New Testament was written. The holy Scriptures Timothy learned from infancy were the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, taught in a mixed marriage by a mother and grandmother who had no synagogue backing and no curriculum.

Continue in what you have learned, he says, because you know those from whom you learned it — and then, immediately, that the Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation. The next verse is the one this volume studied in Week Two: all Scripture is God-breathed.

So the most quoted verse in the Bible about the nature of Scripture is introduced by a reference to a boy’s mother and grandmother. Paul moves from a kitchen table to the doctrine of inspiration in three verses and does not think he has changed the subject.

Which is worth sitting with, because it locates the work in the least impressive place available. No temple, no scribe, no platform. Two women in a provincial house, teaching a small boy texts they could not have known would produce a man who would carry letters that became Scripture themselves.

And notice how Paul dates the value. He does not say Timothy’s childhood teaching was a nice foundation later improved by apostolic instruction. He tells a grown minister, in a letter written to steady him against a coming collapse, to continue in what he learned as a boy. The childhood material is presented as the thing to hold onto in a crisis.

Neither of them lived to see what it came to. That is normal. It is what most of this work looks like from inside.

Acts 16:1 introduces Timothy as the son of a believing Jewish woman and a Greek father, at Lystra, where Paul had been stoned and left for dead on a previous visit. The household Paul commends had already watched what following this message could cost.

The word for sincere or unfeigned faith in 1:5 is anypokritos — literally un-hypocritical, without a stage mask. Paul uses it of love in Romans and of wisdom in James’ letter. Applied to a family faith, it means the version in the house was the same as the version in public.

The phrase in 3:15 is hiera grammata, sacred writings, which Paul uses only here; in the next verse he switches to graphe. The first is closer to what a Jewish household would have called the Scriptures; the second is the term he uses for the doctrine.

Note what Paul says the Scriptures are able to do in that verse: make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He is describing what the Old Testament did for a boy who would not hear the gospel until he was grown.

The two women are named nowhere else in Scripture. Everything we know about Lois and Eunice is in one verse of one letter, and it is enough to have put them in the Bible.

Paul’s phrase is that the faith lived first in them and now, he is persuaded, lives in Timothy. The verb for lived is the dwelling word of Colossians 3:16 — the same picture of a resident rather than a visitor, applied to three generations of one family.

Look it upG97 ἀνυπόκριτος anypokritos, sincere, unfeigned · G1025 βρέφος brephos, infant, newborn · G1121 γράμματα grammata, writings · G4679 σοφίζω sophizo, to make wise

Then read Deuteronomy 6:6–9, which is this week’s turn. The instruction Lois and Eunice were obeying is fifteen hundred years older than they are, and it was given to parents rather than to priests.

Where this touches2 Timothy 1:3–5; 3:14–17 · Acts 16:1–3 · Deuteronomy 6:6–9 · Psalm 78:1–8 · 2 Timothy 3:16 (Week Two, Day Three). Josiah, Ezra, the wilderness, the chariot, Emmaus, Pentecost, Apollos, Daniel and Stephen were the earlier scenes.