Peter Kirk

Thank you, Cheryl. You may well be right about the two groups of false teachers. Certainly the ones in verses 3 and 6 had not gone as far as Hymenaeus and Alexander had, and so had not been put out of the congregation. But they were potential teachers. I suppose the point is that they had not yet become like H&A, but were perhaps heading in that direction and were to be stopped before the situation went so far. But surely heterodidaskein in verse 3 means something like “to teach false doctrine”, and the present infinitive here implies that they were not stop doing it, not just not to start. In verse 19, however, the group seems to have rejected conscience rather than faith, and Paul’s action in delivering two of them to Satan suggests that they had not voluntarily left the church. But I agree with you on the basic point that “Paul wants the deceived ones to be taught and the deliberate deceivers he shuns them until they have learned how to stop their blasphemous ways.”

Thanks also for the Bergen reference. This book happens to be on my bookshelf. But I will make that a separate comment simply because I must now take a break and don’t want to leave unsaved material.