Hi Jason, wondering if you just chose to use the word ‘happy’ (as it is a definition of makarios in Strong’s) or if you had some outside influence that made you use that instead of ‘Blessed’ ?
There isn’t really a distinction in Greek, so far as I know, which can make it hard to translate since context determines the meaning. (More than usual, perhaps I should say. {wry g})
Since the context in this case involves passing on an authoritative message from a ruling power, the {makarios} God, the attitude and intention of God in sending the message seems to me to be the key to interpretation.
Relatedly, although the word {charis} literally means the noun form of shining or glowing, its usage in Biblical Greek routinely goes rather beyond that, but I still make an interpretative habit of testing the next basic level of meaning, freely given joy (metaphoraized by shining) to see if that meaning makes sense. And it does here (as I have found it to typically do. Looking up incidences and cognates of {chara} and test-translating them that way makes for a highly interesting exercise! {g})
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Well I must say this understanding of “grace” came as a suprise to me. I had never thought of “χαρις” in this way. I examined the meaning of the word as expressed in four different lexicons. Two of them had no definition even close to either the “literal” meaning you provided or to the “next basic level” of meaning that you said is “freely giving joy.” However, the other two do seem to indicate this “next level.” The Online Bible Program lexicon gives as its primary definition “that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness: grace of speech.” The Abbott-Smith lexicon give as its primary definition as “that which causes favorable regard.”
But how could grace by either the literal definition or that of the next level, train us to be righteous?
For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all people, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and to live sensible, righteous, and devout lives in the present age, expecting the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; encourage and reprove with all authority. Let no one disregard you. (Titus 2:11-15)
Jason… without giving any solid evidence for this thought, from where do you draw that conclusion? The 1Cor 15 passage is NO contest regarding ‘body or no body’ BUT rather “which body?” — so how are you concluding “bodiless” and applying that to Hymenaeus?
Actually the contest at 1 Cor 15 (and I would argue earlier in the epistle, including just after mention of the Stepmom-Sleeping Guy), is between Paul in favor of the resurrection, and someone denying resurrections happen at all (thus Paul’s retort that if no resurrections happen at all then even Christ was not raised, which Paul states the Corinthians already accepted and as far as he knows still accepts as part of the kerygmatic proclamation for their faith, without which resurrection of Christ their faith would be in vain. He’s pointing out that they’re being inconsistent if they still profess faith in the resurrection of Christ but accept the opponent’s contention against resurrection per se.)
Whoever is opposing Paul in 1 Cor 15, is evidently using what in modern terms we’d call the Zombie Christ joke, painting the resurrection to come as though rotting bodies are returning from the grave. That doesn’t mean the opponent actually believes rotting bodies return from the grave – no more than the Zombie Christ joke really involves believing in a zombie Christ. The opponent is presenting what he regards as a reduction to absurdity. Thus Paul’s reply calling him a fool, and stating in various ways with various analogies that the body doesn’t come back mortal but transformed into an immortal form, i.e. people don’t come back as rotting bodies.
Part of Paul’s rebuttal in 1 Cor 15 involves opposing an Epicurian-ish philosophy, fitting the idea that his opponent takes the position that you can do whatever you want with the body because it isn’t coming back anyway being unimportant. (To this Paul’s immediate retort is another philosophical quote about the prudence of having good neighbors, in context meaning that even respected non-Christian philosophers taught not to hang out with party hounds. {wry g})
Back in 1 Cor 6, shortly after talking about the SSG, Paul seems to take a contradictory position where he advocates that the food is for the body and the body is for food and God will do away with both; and then seems to rebut his own statement by talking about the importance of the body and keeping it honorably because God ISN’T going to simply do away with it. This is a strong contender for being one of Paul’s occasional quotes of his opposition to which he’s replying: as he demonstrably does elsewhere, including in 1 Cor (and in 1 Cor 15 for that matter), he has a tendency to cite his opponents without specifying they’re the ones saying various things to which he’s replying. (Of course this might be a scribal tic, but the effect counts either way.) Presumably his audience among the Corinthians would be familiar with the contexts, but in later times this has caused confusion since it looks like Paul is saying one thing and then something totally different. (This confusion factors into disputes about whether or not Paul believed in a resurrected body, too.) The first saying about the body being for food and vice versa, but God doing away with both eventually, fits a loosely Epicurian philosophy similar to the citation later in 1 Cor 15, and connects to the idea that Paul’s opponent denies bodily resurrection altogether.
Where someone denies bodily resurrection altogether, they may still allow for a bodiless resurrection of some sort, as a survival and release of an incorporeal spirit from the body. This would be typical (though not universal) in Greek philosophy, and by that token someone could try arguing that a general resurrection has already happened even in Paul’s day, which would of course fly in the face of a bodily resurrection since obviously no such general bodily resurrection had happened yet (or yet in our day).
Between Hym’s denunciation for causing confusion over claiming, falsely (per Paul), that the resurrection has already happened; Hym being handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme, like the SSG in 1 Cor; the SSG being a hedonist (sleeping with his stepmom in contravention to moral convention); Paul opposing epicurian hedonism in 1 Cor; connections in 1 Cor between inconsequential hedonism and God doing away with the body; and Paul’s dispute in 1 Cor with someone trying to teach the Corinthians to despise the idea of a bodily resurrection, denying that it happens (strongly enough for Paul to appeal to the resurrection of Christ as evidence that it happens which his congregation was supposed to be accepting), along the apparent ground of who wants to come back as a rotting corpse from the grave – then I think there’s SOME ground for inferring that Hymenaeus MAY (as I said) have been promoting a concept of bodiless resurrection.
I can’t and don’t regard it as deductively certain, but the pieces seem to point that way.
If it comes to that, how could standard definitions of grace train us to be righteous?
I think it’s a pretty standard inference that Paul is talking about Christ Himself being “the charis of God” having appeared for the salvation of all people; and this would in fact connect in a bit of a roundabout way to the basic concept of shining or glowing (I’m away from all my ref books so I’m not where I can talk about the older meaning), if Paul is treating Christ here as the visible presence of YHWH manifesting in older times as the Shekinah, the shining presence in the Temple.
From that, the idea of Christ Himself being the freely given joy of God should fit well enough, too; but I never said {chara} or {charis} or their cognates had to fit that in EVERY instance. Just that it fits well enough in my experience to test it as a first interpretation when I run across it.
Anyway, it’s Christ (the freely given gift of God, and note that the {char-} cognates also connect to divine gifts, or even gift in general), Who has appeared for the salvation of all people, Who trains us to renounce impiety etc. But the glory of God appears, too, and the Shekinah is also connected in the NT to the Holy Spirit; and after all Paul goes on to say that our blessed (or happy {g}) hope is the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, the same Jesus Who (or if you prefer who) gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawfulness and to purify himself a people of etc. Which connects back again to the grace of God appearing for the salvation of all people, training us to renounce various evil things and to be good instead.
(I think the points here can be generally accepted without regard to various Christological and perhaps Pneumetological disputes, btw. Clearly I have the Trinity in mind myself, but I can’t imagine how any non-trinitarian would have theological problems accepting that Paul is talking about Christ as the {charis} of God here. Though perhaps there are other problems with that idea that I don’t see. Anyway I’m not intending a trinitarian argument here.)
You may not even have to go that far… keeping it in-house — try the Sadducees. All we know is that they denied the resurrection. BUT what concept therein of said resurrection they opposed is NOT at all stated. In all likelihood ‘resurrection’ for many in Israel equated to national release from the yoke of Roman oppression, aka death.
It makes you wonder though… IF the resurrection Hymenaeus and Philetus spoke of was a grave-popping event with literal folk flying through the air etc, HOW ON EARTH were some being overturned in their faith?? — all one would have to do is point to the LITERAL evidence; that didn’t happen because there wasn’t any!
The scholarly consensus overwhelmingly embraces the pseudonymity of the Pastoral Epistles and this verdict affects how the author’s intent and the heresies he combats are understood. Do you want the insights of this commentary to be engaged from this perspective? Or, for example, would you prefer that I just focus on the original meaning of the doctrine that the resurrection has already occurred?
Since that topic (whether the resurrection had already occurred) is very much a tertiary side-topic to this commentary (seeing as how I didn’t even bother going into the rationale for connecting Hymenaeus with some probability to the SSG in 1 Corinthians – a connection rather subtle for a pseudonymous author to attempt, btw), I don’t see the point in even bothering in regard to this commentary. But keeping in mind its side topicality, I don’t see a problem. After all, we’re devoting quite a bit of time to the tertiary side-topic ourselves in the afterchat so to speak.
I wouldn’t call the pseydonymity of the Pastorals (Titus usually being excepted) a “scholarly consensus” (since there are significant and respected dissenting scholars arguing for originality), but it does have a substantially large agreement across the ideological spectrum for various reasons – among those reasons being purported variances to the theology of the Pastorals compared to epistles generally accepted across the ideological spectrum as legitimate. To which one very general reply I’d make, is that several such arguments for differentiation vanish under the hypothesis that Paul and the Pastoral author(s) argue very similarly for universal salvation, where this doctrine harmonizes supposed serious variations. (There are other solutions, too, such as Paul changing his mind about theology to some degree over a period of roughly 20 years of composition: far from unheard of among theologians in Christian history! But of course this does not exhaust purported evidence for disparities strong enough to signal pseudonymity.)
What might be more interesting (to me anyway), and more topically applicable, would be the insights of the actual analysis (not the tertiary sidequest) engaged in from the perspective of pseudonymous authorship. Or from a perspective, rather, since there’s nothing even imaginably approaching a consensus on the (purportedly) real author and his situation (beyond concerns that might also be expected of Paul’s original authorship anyway, taken as details from the text. But I know various schools of sceptical interpretation like to chew over what’s ‘really’ being talked about through reading between the lines.)
An alternative interpretation of 1 Tim 1 based in a pseudonymous reading, would at least be interesting for comparison. But I will be slightly amused if it turns out to be focused primarily or even entirely on a topic that doesn’t even appear in 1 Tim 1 (e.g. the general resurrection).
Nevertheless Jason, I think this is as good a place as any, since this is (most probably) the very same Hymenaeus we later find still causing trouble in 2 Timothy 2. So please allow me to lay out my reasoning here.
I would argue that most likely, Hymenaeus was guilty of saying the resurrection had already occurred spiritually or allegorically, and so he was called out by Paul for wrongly spiritualizing away the hope we Christians should all have—of an unambiguous, still future, physical resurrection, as discussed in, e.g., Rom. 8:23, 1 Cor. 15:52, 1 Thes. 4:16.
Hymenaeus was apparently wrong about both the nature and the timing of this prophesied event. Paul called Hymenaeus’ assertion that the Resurrection had already occurred gangrenous to the Body of Christ (2 Tim. 2:17).
And again, in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, we see another confrontation along these very same lines, against the false idea that the yet future day of the lord had already occurred. Again, Paul brings reassurance to us regarding our hope of this coming event, explaining that there are unambiguous signs yet to be fulfilled which lead up to That Day. Paul explains that “the lawless one” (a.k.a THE Antichrist) will come with false signs and wonders, set himself up in the temple, and proclaim himself God. Further, (and most importantly) that the Lord Jesus in person will overthrow this “lawless one” at his own unambiguous, physical Second Coming—an event that is clearly yet future to us all.
Arguably, then, Hymenaeus was a proto-“full preterist.”
In my world (among non-denominational charismatic Christians), I am witnessing the dramatic growth of what is termed the “New Apostolic Reformation,” which promotes “dominionism.”
In broad strokes, the general idea in this movement (also referred to as Latter Rain/ Manifest Sons/ Joel’s Army/ Kingdom Now theology) is that the Second Coming is spiritual, not physical. Jesus, they say, is even now returning invisibly to certain selected individuals (“apostles”), who should be submitted to, and who will unite us and lead us in taking over the world for Christ—by christianizing the political and social institutions in order to create a utopia for Christ to reign over.
You will find that most of the adherents are not futurists—that is, holding some idea of a coming human Antichrist, rapture(s), and worldwide tribulation; rather, they are predominately preterists. Also, many adherents are openly sharing more and more ideas with New Age Movement adherents, for example, that prophetically there will next be some sort of a coming “Planetary Pentecost,” and a “victorious eschatology” of world unity and world peace.
Many dominionism proponents have been saying all along (with some scriptural support), that “Christ is the head, we are his Body, so together we are one man.” However, now some within the movement are beginning to also argue that “We ARE Christ.” But we should recall, regarding the perilous times leading up to his return, that Jesus specifically warned us in the Olivet discourse,
For MANY shall come in my name, saying, I AM CHRIST; and shall deceive many. Mt. 24:5.
Regarding the “Second Coming” of Christ: at Christ’s ascension, the two angels prophesied to the disciples of his unambiguous, physical, visible return,
This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven. Acts 1:11.
You will recall, the Jehovah’s Witnesses maintain that, ‘just as their prophets had predicted,’ Jesus DID return in 1914. However… he chose to do so invisibly, defeating the “lawless one” at that time. In that same vein, some dominionists say this “Coming" is now happening invisibly and spiritually, as Jesus overshadows elite individuals selected to be part of a Manchild leadership team.
As to correctly understanding Christ’s public, physical, and unambiguous return, we have these very serious warnings:
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“Therefore if they say to you, ‘Look, He is in the desert!’ do not go out; or ‘Look, He is in the inner rooms!’ do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” Mt. 24:26-27.
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“Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist , whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” 1 John 4:2-3.
Note: I use the KJV on 1 John 4:2-3, because it says, “is come,” which I believe better captures the intent of the perfect participle active in the Greek here, which can encompass past, present, and future. Jesus has chosen to permanently abide in a (now-glorified) physical body he received through his mother, Mary.
We know that the lesser physical realm—purged of all death—will one day be transformed and fully merged with the greater heavenly realm (see, e.g., 2 Peter 3:10, Rev. 21), with one single view of reality. Jesus’ physical body was the initial intersection point in that process. Jesus has already sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. So, Christ’s own return, his Second Coming, will be physical, not spiritual.
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Annnnnd now we’re devoting even more time to the tertiary side-topic. {wry g} I mean, you can see where this is going to go, right? This thread will now be about (varieties of) full preterism vs (varieties of) partial preterism. Instead of being about the soteriology of 1 Tim 1.
Relatedly, not that I disagree materially with your analysis Hermano (aside from any necessary connection of full preterism to the antichrist, perhaps), but how does that argument RELATE TO THE SOTERIOLOGY OF 1ST TIMOTHY CHAPTER ONE?!
That was the qualifier I asked for, in regard to any continuing discussion of the idea. There are, after all, whole other threads for discussing this debate in itself, not even counting the ability to create new threads for doing so.
(Next up, trinitarian vs unitarian vs maybe modalist interpretations of the Mediator verse in chapter 2, with no regard to the thread topic other than a tertiary topical connection… And Paul’s or maybe Timothy’s or someone’s statement about not letting women teach in chapter 2… because sure, why not. 
)
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Lol Jason… not sure why you’re bemoaning this BECAUSE you yourself actually DID make it part of the discussion in your OP, as per…
Yes, I made it a tertiary part of the discussion, and even then it was purely in reference to trying to figure out a detail of 1 Tim 1 that is there on the page: why is Paul torqued at Hym and Alexander, and how (or does) that connect to Paul’s soteriology in 1 Tim 1?
You bolded the wrong part of my quote. You should have bolded “if it turns out to be focused primarily or even entirely on a topic that doesn’t even in appear in 1 Tim 1 (e.g. the general resurrection)”.
Also, which I will repeat once again, with italics and all caps, because somehow this seems difficult to conceptually grasp: I MADE IT (i.e. Hym’s proto-preterism) PART OF MY DISCUSSION OF THE SOTERIOLOGY OF 1 TIM 1! – and no farther than that.
If someone wants to make that topic part of a discussion of the soteriology of 1 Tim 1, fine. If someone just wants to talk about that topic by itself, there are threads and new-thread capabilities for that. I have changed my mind about being slightly amused by people now making this the primary or sole topic. 
Not that I can stop people from doing so (other than exercising admin nuke options), but I henceforth recuse myself from it. Do what y’all like, but blaming me for it when I strictly set hard limits, consistent with my own limited reference to the topic, is pointless. (But this is the internet, so what should I have expected… 
)
I say - use the nukes if it will help keep the conversation based around the focus the OP stated. Seriously. I know we are supposed to be able to keep that focus ourselves, but it just has never happened that way.
Nuke the hell out of this or any other thread that goes into tertiary matters - really. I"m sure I’m not the only one who would appreciate focus.
We’ve let hundreds of potentially great threads get ruined by this sort of thing - i.e., ignoring the OP focus instead of just staying with it. And while admin/mods are certainly not responsible for that, any herding of the cats that can be done is a valuable thing imo.
Ooosp. Well, I apologize for my part in sidetracking things. But please, no nukes. 
I’ll note that Davo’s reference to the Sadducees back up here, sort of prompted Hermano’s post, which could be said to be aiming to answer Davo’s question, “IF the resurrection Hymenaeus and Philetus spoke of was a grave-popping event with literal folk flying through the air etc, HOW ON EARTH were some being overturned in their faith?? — all one would have to do is point to the LITERAL evidence; that didn’t happen because there wasn’t any!”
My shorter answer would be to appeal back to 1 Cor 15 again. Whatever resurrection Hymenaeus (and Alexander?) claimed had already come and gone, it wasn’t the resurrection Paul thought had happened to Christ and expected to therefore happen to other people later as it had happened to Christ. It was CLEARLY OBVIOUS that their notion of the resurrection hadn’t happened to Christ, and that would have been the shipwreck of the faith Paul was concerned with (whether in 2 Tim 2, or with different terms in 1 Cor 15).
Hermano’s longer point boils down to the same thing: any theory of a resurrection still to come in Paul’s day, whether it has fully pre-termitted (already finished) in our day or is still to come after this moment, must be equivalent to Christ’s resurrection in some categorically similar way, and also fit Paul’s description (in 1 Cor 15 and elsewhere) of Christ’s resurrection and the expected resurrection “body” (as Paul calls it) still to come. To which could be adduced the Gospel descriptions of Christ’s resurrection (or post-resurrection situations to be a little more precise since no Gospel portrays the actual event).
For 1 Tim 1 however, since Paul doesn’t mention the topic of the general resurrection to come at all there (or even Christ’s resurrection as far as I recall?), nor in 1 Tim 2 for that matter, the point of dispute is only important in adding any other connections between Hym & Alex and the Stepmom-Sleeping Guy, to get any more understanding for why Paul handed them all over to Satan. And that turns out (so far as I can tell) to be of tertiary interest. The main point of comparison is that in each case there is direct linguistic evidence that Paul handed them over for remedial punishment of some sort, not for a hopeless punishment.
Now if anyone wants to discuss somewhere else why Paul was so ticced off at Hym for teaching some kind of proto-preterism instead of whatever Paul was teaching, there are threads to do so. Go have at it. If you’re going to continue that particular topic here, put it in reference to an analysis of Paul’s soteriology in 1 Tim 1 – or, get ready to watch your post be burned out of existence.
(That goes for you, too, “Berserk” Donald. If I don’t think any next post is on the thread topic, I will nuke it at my convenience. I’m crabby and not up to people taking advantage of my leniency right now.)
Stay crabby and nuke any off-OP replies. The thread will be stronger and more useful as a result imho.
Well to be fair to me Jason, my one and only initial comment was itself nothing more than a tertiary comment on your tertiary comment… you’ll notice I didn’t buy into Hermano’s post at all. My subsequent post was again just noting the irony (chuckle) in your respective comments that followed… and me bolding them was fully tongue-in-cheek.
One further irony is this latest statement of yours… “My shorter answer would be…” lol Jason — anyone familiar with your posts KNOWS that “shorter” doesn’t exist, and that belabouring the point does 
— again said with a wry smile.
PS: you can be thankful no mind-numbing ZA music video have crawled onto your thread… 
Actually, Davo, you had two initial comments. Your first comment was the technical question of why I was linking Paul’s rejection of Hymenaeus with Paul opposing whomever’s position in 1 Cor 15, which to prevent bird-dogging (even by my standards ) I hadn’t included a rationale for in my commentary.
Your second comment was the one about the Sadduccees rejecting the resurrection and whether they and their opponents regarded the resurrection as freedom from Roman oppression which freedom was what was being rejected by that political party; plus the question of how on earth would Hym be overturning anyone’s faith if he (and Philetus) were teaching that the general resurrection had already happened but hadn’t been “a grave-popping event with literal folk flying through the air etc”. That’s the one Hermano was replying to (which then distracted me from replying to it myself for a while).
It isn’t too far a stretch to read those two comments before Hermano’s post, as not being about the soteriology of 1 Tim 1 so much as an extended complaint that I was connecting the idea of bodily resurrection to Paul and a denial of the bodily resurrection to Hymenaeus – which I was. Which would be annoying, of course, to anyone who believes today that the expectation of a general resurrection has already been fulfilled for us after Paul’s day, and it wasn’t a bodily resurrection at all either, since this opens up the question of whether Paul was handing Hym (and Alex) over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme, due to them teaching that a similarly non-bodily resurrection had already happened in Paul’s day over-against whatever Paul was expecting, which per 1 Cor 15 looks like a bodily transformation and not, say, Christians being freed from Temple worship or something that doesn’t involve dead bodies being actually transformed and coming to life again.
At no point, however, did I argue that Paul was handing them over to Satan for believing a bodiless resurrection had already occurred. I realize it’s an important topic in its own right, since Paul hands someone over for a severe (though remedial) punishment whom Paul in a related letter says was shipwrecking the faith for teaching a general resurrection had already happened in Paul’s day; and Paul is definitely complaining in 1 Tim 1 that Hym (and Alex) have abandoned their assigned ministry to teach something else which Paul regards as false. But I stuck with analyzing what Paul says in 1 Tim 1 about what they were doing wrong and what they should have been proclaiming as ambassadors instead – mostly the latter. And Paul simply isn’t complaining in 1 Tim 1 that anyone was teaching that a general (and obviously bodiless) resurrection had already happened.
That said, I’ll acknowledge that I have only myself to blame for not emphasizing more strongly and sooner (in my reply to Donald) that if posters are going to focus on the topic of whether the resurrection had already occurred, it should be in the context of Paul’s soteriology in 1 Tim 1. I looked like I was encouraging posters to talk about anything other than the actual post topic, and specifically that side-topic by itself.
As I duly note… you belabour the point I’m not sure I should respond in detail however to your assumption-laden post above as that would indeed move away from your main gist of 1Tim 1.