Acts 20:29

ἐγὼ γὰρ οἶδα, see critical note. Baur and Zeller could only see in this assertion a vaticinium post eventum the heresiarchs are portrayed in the general expressions in vogue in the second century; so too Renan thinks that the writer gives us the ideas of a later date, although he does not carry us further than 75 80 A.D. But if we accept the early date of the Didaché, that document is quite sufficient to show us that similar phraseology to that in the address before us was current in the Church at an earlier date than Baur and Zeller supposed. If St. Paul had been engaged all his life in struggling with false teachers, it would have been inconceivably short-sighted if he had thought that such dangers would cease after his departure, and still more inconceivable if with such presentiments he had neglected to warn the Church. The vagueness of the description of the heretical teachers is in itself a proof of genuineness, and a writer of a later date would have made it far less general, and more easily to be identified with some current error. It has been further objected by Zeller and Overbeck, and even by Wendt, that it is strange that with present opponents before him, 1 Corinthians 16:8-9, St. Paul should speak only of the future; but whilst he had himself been present among them he had been their protector against their enemies, but now that he was about to withdraw from them nothing was more natural than that he should warn them against the subtle attacks which might be more easily made when his own careful superintendence was no more. εἰσελεύσονται : so men outside the fold the when of their entrance is not specified precisely, but the words were amply fufilled in the presence of the emissaries of the Judaisers, creeping in from the Jewish communities into the Churches of Asia, as they had slunk into the Churches of Galatia, cf. Hort, Judaistic Christianity, pp. 130 146, on the teaching of the Judaisers and its evil influence in the Pastoral Epistles. There is at all events no need to refer the words with Grotius to outward persecution, such as that of Nero. ἄφιξιν, i.e., his departure from amongst them (not necessarily including his death), not arrival, although the latter meaning attaches to the word in classical Greek, so too 3Ma 7:18; Jos., Ant., iv., 8, 47 (but see both Alford and Blass, in loco). λύκοι : continuing the imagery of Acts 20:28, cf. Matthew 7:15; Luke 10:3; John 10:12; so in the O.T. λύκοι of presumptuous and cruel rulers and judges, Ezekiel 22:27; Zephaniah 3:3. The similar kind of language used by Ignat., Philadelph., ii., 1, 2; Justin Martyr, Apol., i., 58; Iren., Adv. Hær., i., Præf. 2, may well have been borrowed from this, not vice versâ as Zeller maintained; but such imagery would no doubt be widely known from its employment in O. and N.T. alike. βαρεῖς, cf. for the sense of the adjective, Hom., Il., i., 89; Xen., Ages., xi., 12; so too Diog. Laert., i., 72. μὴ φειδ.: litotes, cf. John 10:12. The verb occurs six times in St. Paul's Epistles, twice in Romans and four times in the Corinthian Epistles (only twice elsewhere in N.T. in 2 Pet.).