Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior, and Christ Jesus our hope;
As for the tradition that Timothy became the first metropolitan bishop of Ephesus, there cannot possibly be any value to it.  As Rutherford said, "The position which Timothy occupied at Ephesus cannot, without doing the greatest violence to history, be called that of a bishop (in the current sense of that word)."[7] In the New Testament, such terms as elder, bishop, overseer, presbyter, etc., are absolutely synonymous.  No competent scholar in these times denies this.