2 Timothy 2:18

οἵτινες implies that Hymenaeus and Philetus were only the more conspicuous members of a class of false teachers.

περὶ ἠστόχησαν : See notes on 1 Timothy 1:6; 1 Timothy 1:19.

λέγοντες, κ. τ. λ.: There can be little doubt that the false teaching here alluded to was akin to, if not the same as, that of some in Corinth a few years earlier who said, “There is no resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:12). What these persons meant was that the language of Jesus about eternal life and a resurrection received its complete fulfilment in our present conditions of existence, through the acquisition of that more elevated knowledge of God and man and morality and spiritual existence generally which Christ and His coming had imparted to mankind. This sublimest knowledge of things divine is, they said, a resurrection, and the only resurrection that men can attain unto. These false teachers combined a plausible but false spirituality, or sentimentality, with an invincible materialism; and they attempted to find support for their materialistic disbelief in the resurrection of the body in a perverse misunderstanding of the Christian language about “newness of life” (Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12; Colossians 3:1). “Esse resurrectionem a mortuis, agnitionem ejus quae ab ipsis dicitur veritatis” (Irenæus, Haer. ii. 31, 2; cf. Tert. de Resurr. 19); an achieved moral experience, in fact; not a future hope. The heresy of Marcion, on the other hand, while denying the future resurrection of the body, affirmed positively the immortality of the soul; cf. Justin Martyr, Dial. 80. “Marcion enim in totum carnis resurrectionem non admittens, et soli animae salutem repromittens, non qualitatis sed substantiae facit quaestionem” (Tert. adv. Marcionem, 2 Timothy 2:10).

τινων : See note on 1 Timothy 1:3.