1 Timothy 6:4-5

Vers. 4, 5. Here follows the result, in a didactic point of view, of the person who so turns aside from the right course of instruction: he is carried with conceit (or besotted with pride; see at 1 Timothy 3:6), knowing nothing (that is, having no right sense or apprehension of anything), doting (νοσῶν, as in a distempered and sickly condition, the opposite of a state adapted to receive the wholesome food of the gospel) about questions and word-fightings: things of little or no moment in themselves, but hurtful from the pugnacious spirit which they served to engender and exercise. For thence, as the apostle states, come envy, strife, blasphemies, evil surmisings, settled feuds: διαπαρατριβαὶ, the correct reading, (It is that of א, A, D, F, L; the παραδιατριβαι ́ of the received text has no uncial support whatever.) in which the διὰ, as usual, intensifies the meaning of the compound term, giving it the sense of continued enmities, or conflicts of a more lasting kind (Winer, Gr. § i6, b; Ellicott). And these settled feuds are further characterized as pertaining to men corrupted in their mind (τὸν νοῦν used, as often in New Testament Scripture, of the whole inner man, with respect to moral as well as intellectual qualities), and destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is gain; not as our translators have put it, “that gain is godliness,” which the position of the article before εὐσέβειαν alone renders grammatically untenable, and also against the general feelings of mankind; for no one scarcely would think of identifying gain absolutely with godliness. But there have never been wanting those who suppose godliness to be gain, consider it as a lucrative concern, and profess it only in so far as they find it serviceable to their worldly interests. We have the same sentiment expressed, and with reference to the same class of corrupt teachers, in Titus 1:11, where they are said to “teach things which they ought not, for the sake of base gain.” How the selfish end aimed at by such was actually accomplished, we are not distinctly informed. We may certainly infer it to have been carried on altogether apart from the constituted order and worship of the church by privately humouring the capricious tastes and unregulated fancies of certain individuals of a semi-religious, speculative cast. Setting themselves forth as men of profound lore, teachers of curious and far-fetched knowledge about sacred things, they drove a trade which found dupes enough to make it by no means unremunerating. It is well known that, both before and subsequent to the gospel era, many of the more depraved and covetous Jews resorted to even baser methods than these, cunningly working upon the fears of the superstitious by plying the arts of magic and soothsaying, in the face of the most express prohibitions and threatenings of the law of Moses. One need not, therefore, be surprised to learn that others with somewhat less, at least, of open disregard of the authorities they professed to reverence, yet with the same low desire for worldly gain, should have sought to gratify the religious idlers and speculatists of the time by pretended disclosures of the unseen world, and dogmatical assertions on matters that were at best learned frivolities. They might not inaptly be designated the spiritualists and rappists of early times, and in some cases perhaps stood in a similar relation to the Christian church that persons of that description do now. They were real, though not always the professed, antagonists of its sound doctrine and holy aims. (The addition in the received text, ἀφιστατο ἀπο ̀ τῶν τοιου ́ των, from such withdraw thyself, is wanting in the best authorities, א, A, D, F, and most of the versions; only two uncials have it, K, L.)