He was a Greek, a Gentile by birth, converted through Paul, whom Paul calls his true child according to a common faith. When Paul went up to Jerusalem to lay his gospel before the pillars of the Church, he took Titus with him, and the fact that Titus was not compelled to be circumcised is the point Paul makes when he tells the story in Galatians. Titus was, in person, the test case. The Church's decision that a Gentile need not become a Jew first was made with him standing there.

Afterward he is Paul's man for the situations that have gone wrong. When the correspondence with Corinth reached its worst, it was Titus who was sent, Titus who got the church back, and Titus whose return with good news Paul describes in the second letter with visible relief. He was also given charge of the collection for the poor of Jerusalem, which involved carrying other people's money a very long way, and Paul's language about the arrangements for it is the language of a man who knows the accusation of embezzlement is coming and intends to make it impossible.

Paul left him in Crete, as the Epistle to Titus says in its first chapter, to set in order the things that were lacking and to appoint presbyters in every city. That sentence is the reason the letter exists and the reason Titus is remembered as a bishop: it is a working brief for organizing churches that already had converts and no structure.

The letter is short and unsentimental. It gives the qualifications for presbyters and bishops, it deals with a local reputation for lying that Paul quotes a Cretan poet about, and it spends most of its length on the relation between what a Christian believes and how a Christian behaves in an ordinary household. St. John Chrysostom's six homilies on it, preached at Antioch, are in this app in full.

Paul later sent for him and he came, and from Nicopolis he was sent to Dalmatia, which is the last thing the New Testament says about him. The tradition brings him back to Crete afterward and keeps him there as bishop of Gortyna, then the Roman capital of the island, for the rest of a long life.

The Menaion says he governed the Cretan church into great old age, and that he died in peace, in his nineties, having converted the island and never having married. The ruins of the basilica of St. Titus at Gortyna are still standing, and his head is venerated at Heraklion, where it was returned from Venice in nineteen sixty six after seven centuries away.

He is the patron saint of Crete. The Church keeps his memory on the twenty fifth of August, and among the Seventy on the fourth of January.

The reason to read him with Paul rather than apart from him is that the two letters to Timothy and the one to Titus are the only place in the New Testament where the apostolic generation writes down how to hand a church to the next one. Titus is the man that instruction was written to.