The Faith Is Entrusted, Not Traded for Gain

“Masters” here is despotes, the word for an owner with full rights over property, from which despot comes, rather than the gentler kyrios. The concern for God’s name echoes Isaiah 52:5, “my name continually every day is blasphemed”, which Paul quotes in Romans 2:24 of outsiders reviling God because of his people’s conduct.

“The benefit” is euergesia, the word for a public benefaction, the kind of gift a wealthy patron gave a city (Acts 4:9 uses it of the healing of the lame man). The phrase can be read so that the slave, by willing service, becomes the benefactor and the master the recipient, turning the usual roles upside down.

“Teach otherwise” is heterodidaskaleo again, from 1:3, so the letter closes on the problem it opened with. “Consent” is proserchomai, to come toward, to draw near. “Wholesome” is the medical word, healthy. “The words of our Lord Jesus Christ” may mean sayings of Jesus himself, one of which was quoted in 5:18.

“Doting” is noseo, to be sick, set against the healthy words of verse 3: these teachers are ill with a fever for questions. “Proud” is the smoke-fogged typhoo of 3:6. “Strifes of words” is logomachia, word-battles, and “evil surmisings” is hyponoiai, suspicions; neither occurs anywhere else in the New Testament.

“Perverse disputings” is paradiatribai, endless friction, people rubbing each other raw. The King James reverses the Greek, which means “supposing that godliness is a means of gain”: religion treated as a business. The closing words, “from such withdraw thyself”, are missing from the oldest manuscripts.

“Contentment” is autarkeia, self-sufficiency, a prized virtue of the Stoic and Cynic philosophers, who taught that the wise man needs nothing outside himself. Paul used the adjective in Philippians 4:11, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” The Stoics made the self the source of sufficiency; the verse attaches it to godliness.

The thought is Job’s: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither” (Job 1:21), and Ecclesiastes 5:15. The Greek is oddly phrased, “we brought nothing in, because we can carry nothing out”, and copyists smoothed it by adding “it is certain”, which the King James follows.

“Raiment” is skepasmata, coverings, a word that can take in shelter as well as clothing, found only here. “Let us be content” can also be read as a future, “we shall be content”. Proverbs 30:8 is the prayer behind it: “feed me with food convenient for me.”

“Snare” is pagis, the bird-trap of 3:7, where it was the devil’s snare. “Drown” is bythizo, to send to the bottom, the verb Luke 5:7 uses of the fishing boats so loaded with the catch that “they began to sink”. The catch that was wanted is the thing that sinks the boat.

The Greek is “a root of all kinds of evils”, without an article on root and with evils in the plural. Similar sayings circulated in Greek moral teaching; Diogenes the Cynic was remembered for calling love of money the mother city of all evils. “Coveted after” is orego, to reach for, the verb of 3:1. “Pierced” is to run oneself through on a spit.

“Man of God” is the Old Testament title of Moses (Deuteronomy 33:1), Elijah and Elisha, and here it is given to Timothy. The two verbs are run from and run after, flight and pursuit. “Meekness” is praupatheia, a gentle temper, found only here in the New Testament.

“Fight the good fight” is agonizou ton kalon agona, contend in the good contest, the language of the athletic games more than of battle. Paul uses the same words of his own race in 2 Timothy 4:7. The first verb is present, keep contending; “lay hold” is a single decisive grasp, as a runner seizes the prize.

“Quickeneth” is zoogoneo, to give life or keep alive, the verb used in the Greek of Exodus 1:17 for the midwives who “saved the men children alive”. This is the only mention of Pilate in Paul’s letters, and the phrase later settled into the creed. John 18:37 gives the confession: “To this end was I born... that I should bear witness unto the truth.”

“Unrebukeable” is anepilemptos again, the overseer’s “blameless” of 3:2. “Appearing” is epiphaneia, which in these letters becomes the usual word for Christ’s coming (2 Timothy 4:1, 4:8; Titus 2:13). “This commandment” may be the charge just given or the whole gospel entrusted to Timothy; readers divide.

“In his times” is the phrase of 2:6, “in its own seasons”. “Potentate” is dynastes, the word of Luke 1:52, “He hath put down the mighty from their seats”. “Lord of lords” comes from Deuteronomy 10:17, and Revelation 17:14 gives both titles to the Lamb. Persian kings had called themselves “king of kings”.

Immortality is something believers “put on” in 1 Corinthians 15:53; God alone has it by nature. The unseeable God is the God of Exodus 33:20, “there shall no man see me, and live”, and of Psalm 104:2, who covers himself “with light as with a garment”. The doxology closes a sentence that began in verse 13.

“In this world” is “in the present age”, set against “the time to come” in verse 19. “Uncertain riches” is literally “the uncertainty of riches”, adelotes, found only here: wealth whose one sure quality is that it is unsure. “Highminded” is to think lofty thoughts about oneself.

Four phrases, two of them single words found nowhere else in the New Testament: eumetadotous, generous in giving, and koinonikous, ready to share, from the koinonia word for fellowship. The pun turns on “rich”: those rich in this age are told to be rich in good works.

“Laying up in store” is apothesaurizo, to store up treasure, recalling Matthew 6:20, “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”. The oldest manuscripts read “that which is life indeed”, using ontos, the “indeed” of the widows “indeed” in 5:3, where the King James follows copies reading “eternal life”.

“Committed to thy trust” is paratheke, a deposit left with someone for safekeeping, a banking and legal word that returns in 2 Timothy 1:12 and 1:14. “Oppositions” is antitheseis; in the second century Marcion wrote a book called Antitheses, and some nineteenth-century scholars, F. C. Baur among them, took this verse as aimed at him. Most now doubt the link.

In the best manuscripts “Grace be with thee” is plural, “with you”: the letter to one man closes with a blessing for the whole church that would hear it. The King James subscription placing the writing at Laodicea, “the chiefest city of Phrygia Pacatiana”, is a later addition using a province name from the fourth century.