1 Timothy 3:6

1 Timothy 3:6. Not a novice. Not referring to general inexperience, but specially to the state of one newly planted in the Church by conversion, and yet more definitely by baptism.

Lifted up with pride. Better, ‘ besotted' or ‘beclouded.' The explanation commonly given of the word (τυφωθεὶς) connects it with τ ῡ ρος, as smoke or mist, obscuring or dimming our perception of realities. There is sufficient evidence that the word was thus used both in earlier and later Greek. I am inclined, however, to suggest that St. Paul used the term with a more technical and definite meaning. The word τ ῡ ρος (the original of our modern ‘typhus') had come to be used, from Hippocrates downward, to describe a particular class of fever, of which stupor or delirium were characteristic symptoms, and this would seem to be precisely what St. Paul has in view. The neophyte suddenly raised to power is excited as by the fever of authority, and, as we say, ‘loses his head.' The word was likely from its history to be familiar to St. Luke, and thus takes its place in the induction which tends to show that intercourse with him influenced the phraseology of St. Paul's later Epistles.

The condemnation of the devil. Grammatically in the Greek, as in the English, the words are ambiguous and may mean either (1) the judgment which the devil passes; or (2) the judgment passed on him. The analogy of ‘the snare of the devil' in the next verse, so far as it goes, is in favour of (1), but is outweighed by the general analogy of Scripture, in which the devil is always, as the word διάβολος implies, the accuser and the slanderer, but not the judge, of man. Accepting (2), therefore, the words imply a reference to the Rabbinic view of the history of Satan, how, created in perfect excellence, his first act (here comes in the parallelism with the novice) was to admire himself, and so, fevered with ambition, to aspire after equality with God, and thus to bring upon himself the sentence of condemnation.