Bad Theology

Text for today: I Timothy 2 vii

A forger claiming to be the apostle Paul protests vehemently that he is telling the truth and not lying, thereby disobeying one of the Saviour's very few reasonable and moral commandments.

The author of I Timothy writes to his true child in the faith with various instructions on how to appoint church officials, how to grovel before the powerful on earth in order to preserve the good name of the Almighty, how to treat young widows, and so forth. Presumably with a straight face, he also warns against false teachers and false knowledge; and he even has the gall to invoke the Saviour's testimony before Pilate, which included the assertion that His only purpose was to bear witness to the truth (John 18 xxxvii).

There is of course nothing more natural when telling the truth than to plead that one is not lying. Nevertheless, in doing so the forger violates the Saviour's commandment to speak the truth simply and not to embroider it with oaths and protestations. The obvious spirit of hypocrisy in which Jesus gave the commandment serves to emphasise the whimsically mischievous mood in which God dispensed His divine inspiration into the author of the Pastoral Epistles, and subsequently into the editors who included them in the canon.