Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
Glad to hear that the baby is fine. When the smiles come babies are irresistible. It makes cleaning up after the diapers and drooling really worth it.

Now about your disagreements, you said:

NIce try skirting around her abnormal hermeutical approach, but for anyone versed in biblical exegesis and hermeneutics would realise that such an interpretation needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

I don’t know what you mean by “her” abnormal hermeutical approach. Who is the “her” you are talking about? And you as far as making sweeping statements without actually giving evidence of your position, well, all I can say is that it is a sign of weakness. I am the one with proof from the text. You give generalities about a “grain of salt” that has no substance at all and no verse or grammar to point to and you even have to admit defeat on the verse. Pity. 😉

Your presupposition is that this text is addressed to a specific false female teacher and presumably her husband. Yet, there is no internal biblical evidence to support the ‘theory’ that such a false teacher existed.

Since none of the deceived are named and no gender is attributed to the unnamed people who are deceived, then there must be no internal evidence that a deceived male teacher was in Ephesus either. Do you believe that?

In verse 12 the teaching that is stopped is either true teaching or false teaching. I asked you to prove that God ever stopped any godly person from teaching the truth. You gave no such verse to support the stopping of the teaching of truth. What we have left then is the stopping of the teaching of error. Can we prove that God wants false teaching to be stopped. I think you are in a good position to affirm this.

Paul is not in the habit of keeping these decievers ‘anonymous’ and the only false teachers mentioned are men.

You switched here. I have been talking not about deliberate deceivers but about the deceived. The book of Revelation talks about a deceiver who was a woman and she was named. None of the ones who are ignorantly deceived are named. If you disagree, name one who is deceived but who is not a lying deceiver. The ones who were like Paul who were really believing the lie were never named.

We have been around this bush quite a few times and you have never yet been able to name one of the ignorant deceived. Why is that? Is it because you realize that there is a difference between the deceived and those who are deceivers and liars?

Second, there is no external extra biblical evidence to support your exegesis, for example other early documents ect.

Since Paul didn’t announce their names, why would we find those names in other documents? What are the names of the deceived men found in documents outside the Bible? The fact is that the Bible is enough for doctrine for reproof and for correction. Do you need more than that?

So the only think your exegesis is based on, is Cheryl Schatz’s interpretation of the grammar. This is a hermeneutical approach which is not popular.

Grammar has rules and the rules of grammar support my interpretation. Unfortunately you don’t have an interpretation by your own admission, so we can’t test your interpretation by the grammar rules.

Now the weight of evidence against your interpretation is the writings of church leaders, exegetes theologians throughout the history of Christianity.

Oh really? And since the writings of the early church leaders have pretty much been in unison that they aren’t sure what Paul meant by this entire hard passage, how do you measure the “we are not sure” by my view which fits with the grammar? I am amazed at the claims you make that have no substance at all. Why do you do that?

Now of course this is not infallible, but when one weighs up the evidence, the proper hermeneutic should always lean on the latter.

What “evidence”? What “latter”? What particular claims are you exactly making for the church fathers that you don’t even agree with yourself?

More in a bit.