Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

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world ;
First Timothy IV. 1. 97
but must we suppose this to have been already in existence,
in order to understand the prediction of the writer ? In the manner
in which he mentions these errors ver. 3, seq., he does not betrayin
the least degree, that he derives them from this Gnostico-dualistic
view ; nay, the separation of clean and unclean had a direct point
of connexion with the Old Testament laws regarding meats.
And
if we look to the nature of the thing itself, we may with reason
maintain that nothing was more likely than that the false spiritualism
which made ethical perfection to consist in abstinence from
outward things, should reckon marriage among these things, and
that too without its being derived from any Gnostic view of the
world, or aversion to the creation. Where would a misunderstanding
of the Christian view of the opposition between flesh and spirit
more naturally betray itself than in the ideas concerning marriage ?
And how plausible a ground has the prohibition of marriage to rest
upon in the words of our Lord himself (Matth. xix. 10, seq.), and
such expressions of the apostle as we find repeated in 1 Cor. vii. ?
Think, for example, of an Origen !
And did appearances of the kind described in our passage, even
apart from what we read in the Pastoral Epistles, lie so far out of
the apostle's sphere of vision as to make his words unintelligible
when applied to his own time, and to necessitate our supposing that
a contemporary of Marcion was the author ? We have certainly not
the common Judaistic opponents of the apostle before us in this
passage ; but neither are the heretics of the Epistle to the Colossians,
with their philosophy and their
asceticism, the common Judaists,
although they stand more nearly related to them than do
those in our passage. These Colossian heretics afford a striking
parallel to the ascetic tendency described in our epistles (comp. especially
Col. ii, 16, seq., and Steiger on the passage). And have
we not in the Essenes, and Therapeutaa, as also in the Ebionites,
kindred examples of an asceticism connecting itself with the Old
Testament, but extending far beyond its prohibitions of meats, just
as we have already found to be the case in regard to the error combated
in these epistles ? Nor could Baur object, even though a
Gnostic view of the world could be shewn to belong to the heretics
here described, when he himself frankly acknowledges that such a
view prevailed among the Jewish Christians at Eome. With regard
to the other feature, namely, the forbidding to marry, we may
reasonably refer, in order to prove in a general way that this error
was not so remote from the apostolic period (for it does not appear
from the Pastoral Epistles to have as yet assumed a decided form)
to chap. vii. of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, which, especially
in the beginning, and then in vers. 28 and 36, shews plainly that
the apostle is refuting spiritualistic doubts regarding maniage.
Vol. VI.—