Titus 1.10-16.
Epimenides of Cnossos was a shepherd, living on Crete. He claimed one day he took a nap in a cave that’d been dedicated to Zeus, and woke up 57 years later with the gift of prophecy. Meh; I figure he was just an old guy who decided to finally publish his youthful poetry. Next to none of it has survived to our present day, but in Paul and Titus’s time it was still pretty famous. Paul even quotes a line from his ode to Zeus, called the Cretica:
- …having built you [Zeus] a tomb, holy one, great one.
- Cretans always lie, the evil beasts. Lazy stomachs.
- But you aren’t dead! For you live, and live forever!
- For in you we live, move, and have our being.
Yep, Paul also quoted it in
I don’t know whether the Cretica prejudiced Paul against the people of Crete when he finally met them in person. Acts doesn’t tell of him spending a lot of time there; at most a week, ’cause his ship was anchored there due to foul weather.
Titus 1.10-16 KWL - 10 For many people do refuse to submit to others.
- They’re all talk, and misleading.
- Particularly those of the circumcision faction.
- 11 It’s necessary to muzzle them—
- whatever teachings knock down whole houses,
- which they ought not teach,
- but do to gain an immoral advantage.
- 12 A certain one of their own—a prophet!—says,
- “Cretans always lie, the evil beasts. Lazy stomachs.”
- 13 This witness is true.
- For this reason rebuke them quickly,
- so they might have a healthy faith,
- 14 paying no attention to Jewish myths,
- and human commands which turn away from truth.
- 15 Everything is ritually clean to clean people.
- To contaminated people, and unbelievers,
- nothing is clean—
- instead it contaminated them, the mind, and the conscience.
- 16 They claim they know God,
- and their works deny it—
- being disgusting and disobedient,
- and worthless in every good work.
Don’t mince words Paul; how d’you really feel about Cretans?
The circumcision faction.
Paul refers to
See, whenever Pharisees made converts, the very first thing they did to the men was circumcise ’em. That nasty foreskin had to go! And these Pharisees firmly believed Christian converts had to do the very same thing: If you’re converting from all your icky pagan gods to the One True God, you gotta follow his command to circumcise all your males. Right? It’s in the bible!
Genesis 17.10-14 KJV - 10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. 14 And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.
I mean there’s way more in the bible about mandatory circumcision, than about men laying down with other men. It was a big, big deal to the Pharisee Christians, and Paul spent most of Galatians telling them their obsession with foreskins had made them lose their way and mangle
And again: They weren’t necessarily Jews.
For these guys, Christianity was functionally Pharisaism plus Jesus. All the traditions of Pharisee rabbis, plus anything Jesus said to correct these guys… but since the rabbis had collectively accumulated way more teachings than Jesus, stands to reason Pharisee Christians spent way more time quoting their rabbis than our Lord. Including all the downright weird stuff the rabbis taught. All the fanfiction found
And produced no fruit. What’s the point of any of this? To reveal the love of God,
“Nothing is clean.”
When Paul tells Titus about teachings which “knock down whole houses,”
Leviticus 14.43-45 KJV - 43 And if the plague come again, and break out in the house, after that he hath taken away the stones, and after he hath scraped the house, and after it is plaistered; 44 then the priest shall come and look, and, behold, if the plague be spread in the house, it is a fretting leprosy in the house: it is unclean. 45 And he shall break down the house, the stones of it, and the timber thereof, and all the morter of the house; and he shall carry them forth out of the city into an unclean place.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if certain Pharisees were finding various oddly-colored spots in Cretan houses. Islands have a really different climate than Israel, so any number of things could’ve been growing there… but an ignorant Israeli would’ve told them, “Oh no; this should not be growing here; this house needs to come down. It’s in the bible. And
But all these rules and commands—and no grace—were about gaining “an immoral advantage” over one another.
Another fixation you’ll find among Pharisees is
Because Pharisees wanted to always be ready for worship, they bathed a lot. Because anything and everything might make you unclean. If a ritually unclean person touched something—say, a gentile who didn’t care about their cleanliness rules—it was unclean, and touching it made you unclean. Pretty much nothing was clean! But like Paul told Titus, this attitude says way more about the person who has it. It reveals an uneasiness and fear about the world—and about the power of a God who made this scary, scary world. Either he has no actual power to combat evil, or he wants things to be evil, just to keep us on our toes. In other words, either he’s weak and ineffective…
Hence these guys “claim they know God, and their works deny it.”
We Christians still have to quickly reject such teachings, lest they keep spreading. They’re still everywhere.
