Letters to the Churches

Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of the choice ones of God, and an acknowledging of truth that is according to piety,

upon hope of life age-during, which God, who doth not lie, did promise before times of ages,

(and He manifested in proper times His word,) in preaching, which I was entrusted with, according to a charge of God our Saviour,

to Titus--true child according to a common faith: Grace, kindness, peace, from God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour!

For this cause left I thee in Crete, that the things lacking thou mayest arrange, and mayest set down in every city elders, as I did appoint to thee;

if any one is blameless, of one wife a husband, having children stedfast, not under accusation of riotous living or insubordinate--

for it behoveth the overseer to be blameless, as God's steward, not self-pleased, nor irascible, not given to wine, not a striker, not given to filthy lucre;

but a lover of strangers, a lover of good men, sober-minded, righteous, kind, self-controlled,

holding--according to the teaching--to the stedfast word, that he may be able also to exhort in the sound teaching, and the gainsayers to convict;

for there are many both insubordinate, vain-talkers, and mind-deceivers--especially they of the circumcision--

whose mouth it behoveth to stop, who whole households do overturn, teaching what things it behoveth not, for filthy lucre's sake.

A certain one of them, a prophet of their own, said--`Cretans! always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies!'

this testimony is true; for which cause convict them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith,

not giving heed to Jewish fables and commands of men, turning themselves away from the truth;

all things, indeed, are pure to the pure, and to the defiled and unstedfast is nothing pure, but of them defiled are even the mind and the conscience;

God they profess to know, and in the works they deny Him , being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work disapproved.

And thou--be speaking what doth become the sound teaching;

aged men to be temperate, grave, sober, sound in the faith, in the love, in the endurance;

aged women, in like manner, in deportment as doth become sacred persons, not false accusers, to much wine not enslaved, of good things teachers,

that they may make the young women sober-minded, to be lovers of their husbands, lovers of their children,

sober, pure, keepers of their own houses, good, subject to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be evil spoken of.

The younger men, in like manner, be exhorting to be sober-minded;

concerning all things thyself showing a pattern of good works; in the teaching uncorruptedness, gravity, incorruptibility,

discourse sound, irreprehensible, that he who is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say concerning you.

Servants--to their own masters are to be subject, in all things to be well-pleasing, not gainsaying,