2 Timothy 2:18

(18) Who concerning the truth have erred.—Or, have erred, or, more literally, have missed their aim. (See Note on 1 Timothy 6:21.)

The resurrection of the body, grounded upon the Lord’s own words (John 5:28-29), was one of the Articles of the Christian faith upon which St. Paul especially loved to dwell. (See, for instance, his words before Felix—Acts 24:15.) With this “resurrection of the body” St. Paul, prompted by the Holy Ghost, taught men that the future state of rewards and punishments was intimately bound up; the soul will be clothed with a body of glory or with a body of shame, according to the deeds done in the flesh. This doctrine appears, in very early times, to have been questioned by some in the Christian community. Then, as now, was the thought repugnant to the shrinking soul of man,—that the body in which he then lived and sinned would rise again.

Elaborated, but still scarcely disguised, the same denial of a bodily resurrection was a characteristic of the more important of the widely-spread Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries.These early Christian followers of men like Hymenæus and Philetus had much in common with the ascetic Jewish sects of Essenes and Therapeutæ, and especially with the famous Sadducean school, which attracted then so many cultured and wealthy Jews. They opposed, to use Van Oosterzee’s words, “their own sickly idealism to St. Paul’s strong and healthy realism.” Death and resurrection, with these early opponents of St. Paul, were terms which had only a spiritual meaning and application. As Waterland puts it, “They allegorised away the doctrine, and turned all into figures and metaphors.”Another consideration must not be lost sight of when we are considering the reasons for St. Paul’s fiery indignation with this unhappy school of dreamers. In attacking, with their thinly-veiled scepticism, the great doctrine of the resurrection of the body, in pushing aside the glorious hope, they touched with their impious hands the corner-stone of all Christian belief—the resurrection in the body of the Redeemer. This Resurrection was indeed past already.