1 Timothy 3:2

1 Timothy 3:2. A bishop most be blameless. Literally, ‘ giving no handle to reproach, unassailable.'

The husband of one wife. The emphasis of the numerical adjective shows that the command is restrictive rather than injunctive, but both this verse and 1 Timothy 3:4 appear to take marriage for granted. It is obvious that in a community much exposed to the suspicions or the slanders of the heathen, this would be a safeguard against many of the perils to which a celibate clergy have always been exposed. What the nature of the restriction was is a more difficult question. Two, perhaps three, solutions present themselves: (1) That the bishop is not to have more than one wife at a time, and that the permission of polygamy by Jewish teachers (Joseph. Ant. xvii. 1, 2; Justin Mart. Tryph. p. 363 100) and among the Greeks made this restriction necessary, that the higher morality of the Christian society might not be impaired in its official representative. Against this is to be set the fact that polygamy was never recognised as permissible for any Christian disciple, and that it was therefore unnecessary to make it a special condition of any ministerial office. (2) That it forbids all second marriages. The prima facie meaning of the corresponding phrase in 1 Timothy 5:9, ‘the wife of one husband,' is in favour of this view, as is the fact that second marriages were regarded by Christians generally in the first two centuries as more or less disreputable, just short of actual sin, or as (e.g. Athenagoras) some did not shrink from saying, a ‘decent adultery,' and the traditional rule of the Eastern Church as to the unlawfulness of such marriages in the clergy. The bishop was not to be exposed to the stigma that attached to such unions, connected as they often might be with want of power to control sensuous desire, or with the schemes of the fortune-hunter. (3) A third explanation is, perhaps, more satisfactory. The most prominent fact in the social life both of Jews and Greeks at this period was the frequency of divorce. This, as we know, Jewish teachers, for the most part, sanctioned on even trifling grounds (Matthew 5:31-32; Matthew 19:3-9). The apostle, taking up the law which Christ had laid down, infers that any breach of that law (even in the one case which made marriage after divorce just permissible) would at least so far diminish a man's claim to respect as to disqualify him for office. This case would, of course, be included in the more general rule of the second interpretation, but the phrase ‘the husband of one wife' has a more special emphasis thus applied. St. Paul would not recognise the repudiated wife as having forfeited her claim to that title, and some, at least, of its rights.

Vigilant. ‘ Sober ' in the narrower, modern sense of the word.

Sober. In the wider sense of the word, implying (as in 1 Timothy 3:15) what has been called ‘self-reverence.'

Of good behaviour. The outward expression of self-restraint, in grave and measured bearing.

Given to hospitality. The stress laid on this virtue here and in Titus 1:8; 1 Peter 4:9; Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2, rested mainly on the special trials to which the state of society exposed the early converts. The houses of heathen friends were often shut against them; at inns they were exposed to ridicule and insult. It was the duty of all Christians, and especially of the bishop-elder, as representing the society, to be ready to receive even absolute strangers, supposing always that they brought sufficient credentials (the ‘letters of commendation' of 2 Corinthians 3:1) to show that they were neither spies nor heretics nor of disreputable life.

Apt to teach. In the older sense of the word, as implying special aptitude and gifts for the work.