1 Timothy 1:4

1 Timothy 1:4. Fables and endless genealogies. In the absence of contemporary information as to the state of the Ephesian Church at this period, the exact meaning of these words must remain doubtful. It is fair to assume, as the ‘fables' are called ‘Jewish' in Titus 1:4, that they were more or less like those of which the Talmud is so full, legends that had been engrafted on the history of the Old Testament. Whether the ‘genealogies' were pedigrees in the strict sense of the term, by means of which Judaizing teachers claimed the authority of illustrious ancestry (as e.g. Sceva and his sons may have done, Acts 19:14), or lists such as those of the later Gnostics (Basilides and Valentinus) of the successive emanations of æons, male and female, with names such as Depth, Silence, Wisdom, and Fulness, from the primal abyss of Deity, we cannot now decide. It was natural that writers like Irenæus, living in the second century, and surrounded by these forms of error, should take the latter view, and it is, of course, possible that the germs of those theories appeared even in the Apostolic Age. The way in which Philo treats the actual genealogies of Genesis, as though each name represented a mystic truth, may have found imitators at Ephesus, and may have been the link between the purely Jewish and the purely Gnostic use of them. From St. Paul's point of view, these studies, whatever they were, were altogether profitless. They were ‘interminable.' Once enter on such a line of teaching, and there was no knowing when to stop. The ‘questions' they raised admitted of no answer. There is, indeed, nothing improbable in the thought that each of these forms of error may have had its representatives in the Apostolic Age, and that St. Paul condemned them all alike in one epithet of indignant scorn.

Godly edifying. The better reading gives ‘the dispensation (or steward-ship) of God.' St. Paul falls back on the thought so prominent in the Epistle to the Ephesians, that the truth of which he was the preacher was a system, an organized and compact whole, a ‘dispensation' of means to ends (1 Corinthians 9:17; Ephesians 1:10; Ephesians 3:2; Colossians 1:25), the ministers of which had received their stewardship from God, and so in strongest contrast with the rambling endlessness of the false teachers.

So do. The sentence in the Greek is with characteristic abruptness left unfinished, and St. Paul passes at once to that of which his mind is full.