The life and work of St. Paul

PAUL'S LAST LETTKB. 679
ever-advancing impiety and the spreading canoer of their doctrine, which
identified the resurrection with spiritual deliverance from the death of sin,
and denied that there was any other resurrection, 1 to the ruinous uusettlemeut
of some. Fruitlessly, however, for God's firm foundation stands impregnable
with the double inscription on it, a " The Lord knoweth them that are His,"
and " Let every one who nameth the name of Christ stand aloof from un-
righteousness." * Yet there should be no surprise that such errors spring up
in the visible Church. It is like a great house in which are vessels of wood
and earth, as well as of gold and silver, and alike for honourable and mean
purposes. What each one had to do then was to purge himself from polluting
connexion with the mean and vile vessels, and strive to be "a vessel for
honour, sanctified, serviceable to the master, prepared for every good pur-
" 6 from the desires of youth, and in union
pose." * He is therefore to " fly
with all who call on the Lord with a pure heart to pursue righteousness, faith,
love, peace, having nothing to do with those foolish and illiterate questions
which only breed strifes unworthy of the gentle, enduring meekness of a
slave of the Lord, whose aim it should be to train opponents with all mildness, 6
in the hope that God may grant them repentance, so that they may come to
full knowledge of the truth, and " awake to soberness out of the snare of the
devil, after having been taken alive by him to do God's will." 7
The third chapter continues to speak of these evil teachers and their
future developments in the hard times to come. A stern sad picture is drawn
of what men shall then be in their selfishness, greed, conceit, ingratitude,
lovelessness, treachery, besotted atheism, and reckless love of pleasure.
bids Timothy turn away from such teachers with their sham religion, their
creeping intrigues, their prurient influence, their feminine conquests, 8
resisting the truth just as the old '
Egyptian sorcerers Jannes and Jambres
1 Sinui there is a trace of exactly the same heresy in 1 Cor. xv. 12, it is idle of Baur
to assume any allusion to Marcion here. St. Paul's warning against thus making the
resurrection a mere metaphor was all the more needful, because it was a distortion of hia
own expressions (Rom. vi. 4; Col. ii. 12, &c.).
* Cf. Kev. xxi. 14. See Numb. xvi. 5, 26.
4 2 Tim. ii. 21. The general meaning of the passage is clear, though it is indistinctly
expressed; on fKKaOapy Melancthon remarks, "Haec mundatio non est desertio congregationig,
sed conversio ad Deum."
6
eiri0vfA not exclusively sensual 6
passions.
See Matt. xii. 19, 20.
7 ii. 14 26. The devil has taken the mcaptive in a snare while they were drunk ;
awaking, they use their recovered soberness (iva.vitf>ta, crapulam excutio) to break the
snare, arid return to obedience to God's will, airov probably refers to Satan, iiwiVou to
God, although this explanation is not absolutely necessary.
8 Baur (Pastwalbriefe, p. 36) sees an allusion to the Gnostic prophetesses, Prisca,
Maximilla, Quintilla, &c., and quotes Epiphan. Haer. xxvi. 11. But, on the one hand,
these certainly did not deserve to be stigmatised as yvvoucopia (see Tert.), and on the
other it is absurd to suppose that women would be any less susceptible to every phase of
religious influence in the Apostle's days than they have been in all ages (cf. Jos. Antt.
xvii. 2, 4). Such a ywaiKdptov was Helena whom Simon Magus took about with him
(Justin, Apol, i. 26 ; Iren. c. Haer. i. 23). When Jerome speaks with such scorn and
slander of Nicolas of
Antipch (chores duxit femineos), Marcion and his female adherent,
Apelles and Philumena, Arius and his sister, Donatus and Lucilla, Epidius and Agape,
Priscillian and Galla, had he forgotten certain ladies called Paulla and Eustochium ?
Jannes and Jambres are mentioned by Origen, and even by Pliny (H, N, xxx. 1),
He