It is the seventh decade AD. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, has established a Christian Community in the cosmopolitan Greek city of Ephesus after two years of unrelenting toil. He leaves the well-respected Timothy, a companion on his earlier missions to Galatia and his representative to Macedonia, Thessilonika and Corinth, in charge as he continues his missionary journeys.
But things are not going well for the Ephesians.....
Timothy is technically a Jew, since his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois were Jewish Christians, and has allowed himself to be circumcised to be more acceptable to the Jews. But he is Greek by paternity, as well as by upbringing and education. This makes him less acceptable than the Pharisee Paul to the Jews, but more so to the Greeks. Unfortunately, he does not have Paul's wisdom, eloquence, experience, or ability to find common ground on both sides, so each culture sees him as unfairly sympathetic to the other.
The idea of being saved by the merciful act of a loving Creator is foreign to both Jews and Greeks, and has resulted in questions which young Timothy is unable satisfactorily to answer. In response, Paul has written a letter to the community of Ephesians that deals with the duties of various classes of people under the new rules of Christian love and responsibility, and sets standards for Christian behavior. But both Greeks and Jews are finding loopholes in Paul's teaching, and both sides are developing philosophies of their own which two centuries later will be called the heresy of gnosticism,
There are also questions about the duties and qualifications of the clergy, the social positions of widows and other women, their selection for charitable ministrations, celebrations of the liturgy, and the obligations of wealth, about which Timothy has been insufficiently persuasive. He is being bullied by the Jews, the Greeks, the women, and the elderly, and he is becoming discouraged at his inability to imitate the charismatic elder statesman and theologically gifted Paul.
Two letters from Paul to Timothy are part of the Christian canon of Scripture, but there is no record of any letters of Timothy to Paul. Yet Paul's letters are very personal, unlike his Letter to the Ephesians, and suggest that the remarks they contain are in response to those of an earlier correspondence from the frustrated Timothy.
Here is my guess of what Timothy might have said, with Paul's underlining of the points he feels he needs to address.
Some things don't change!