Letter to Titus 1

¹ From Paul, servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ to bring those whom God has chosen to faith and to the knowledge of the truth that leads to true religion;

² and to give them the hope of the eternal life that was promised so long ago by God. He does not lie

³ and so, at the appointed time, he revealed his decision, and, by the command of God our saviour, I have been commissioned to proclaim it.

⁴ To Titus, true child of mine in the faith that we share, wishing you grace and peace from God the Father and from Christ Jesus our saviour.

⁵ The reason I left you behind in Crete was for you to get everything organised there and appoint elders in every town, in the way that I told you:

⁶ that is, each of them must be a man of irreproachable character; he must not have been married more than once, and his children must be believers and not uncontrollable or liable to be charged with disorderly conduct.

⁷ Since, as president, he will be God’s representative, he must be irreproachable: never an arrogant or hot-tempered man, nor a heavy drinker or violent, nor out to make money;

⁸ but a man who is hospitable and a friend of all that is good; sensible, moral, devout and self-controlled;

⁹ and he must have a firm grasp of the unchanging message of the tradition, so that he can be counted on for both expounding the sound doctrine and refuting those who argue against it.

¹⁰ And in fact you have there a great many people who need to be disciplined, who talk nonsense and try to make others believe it, particularly among those of the Circumcision.

¹¹ They have got to be silenced: men of this kind ruin whole families, by teaching things that they ought not to, and doing it with the vile motive of making money.

¹² lt was one of themselves, one of their own prophets, who said,[*a] ‘Cretans were never anything but liars, dangerous animals and lazy’:

¹³ and that is a true statement. So you will have to be severe in correcting them, and make them sound in the faith

¹⁴ so that they stop taking notice of Jewish myths and doing what they are told to do by people who are no longer interested in the truth.

¹⁵ To all who are pure themselves, everything is pure; but to those who have been corrupted and lack faith, nothing can be pure – the corruption is both in their minds and in their consciences.

¹⁶ They claim to have knowledge of God but the things they do are nothing but a denial of him; they are outrageously rebellious and quite incapable of doing good.