1 Timothy 4:3

1 Timothy 4:3. Forbidding to marry. The phenomenon taken by itself has been so common in all ascetic systems that it is not easy to identify the particular system to which St. Paul referred. Some of the Essene communities practised celibacy, and there were, as St. Paul's own teaching shows (1 Corinthians 7:25-35), reasons why many should prefer it. Here, however, the teachers condemned went beyond the acceptance of celibacy as the higher life, and ‘forbade marriage.' The nearest and earliest approach to this form of error was found in the teaching of Saturninus and Marcion, and the school of the Encratites which took its rise from them; and it is probable enough that the germs of this, as of other forms of Gnosticism (comp. Colossians 2:23), existed even in the Apostolic Age. The East has never emancipated itself from the feeling of the inherent impurity of matter, and of all acts that tended to perpetuate and reproduce its existence in new forms.

Commanding to abstain from meats. The word ‘commanding' is not in the Greek, but is supplied by a natural ellipsis from the previous prohibition. The word rendered ‘meats' is, as in Romans 14:15-18, 1 Corinthians 6:13, generic, but is probably used with special reference to animal food, abstinence from which has always been the mark of a false asceticism.

Hath created to be received. The statement strikes at the root of all Mankhæan theories of creation. God has made these things, and pronounced them good; He created them not as temptations and stumbling-blocks, but for men to partake of.

With thanksgiving. There is no ground for thinking that the word (εὐχαριστίας) had as yet acquired the higher sense which it afterwards gained in liturgical phraseology, but it is not unlikely that St. Paul's thoughts travelled on to the logical conclusion from the dogma against which he was protesting, as afterwards in the case of the Encratites, and more recently, of some of the extreme advocates of total abstinence. Men were drifting to a position from which they looked even on the Supper of the Lord as ‘common and unclean.' To this thought we may, I believe, trace the increasing solemnity of language in 1 Timothy 4:5.