“Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do” (I Timothy 1:4).
The “fables and endless genealogies” of which the apostle Paul warns could not have been Jewish traditions and patriarchal family records, as many have taught. Timothy was pastor of a Gentile church (Ephesus) and his father was a Gentile, so that such Jewish heresies would not have been a problem either to Timothy or his church. On the other hand, his childhood home, in Lycaonia, and especially his recent ministry in Ephesus, had been in centers of intense pagan idolatry, replete with all kinds of nature myths personifying the various forces of nature as a pantheon of immoral gods and goddesses, combined with an evolutionary pantheism involving endless cycles of aeons in an eternal universe.
Since all Scripture is profitable for everyone (II Timothy 3:16,17), these fables must refer to a far more serious and permanent danger than that. The myths of which Paul warns in the first verses of this letter must be the same as the “profane and vain babblings of science falsely so called” which he condemns in the last verses (I Timothy 6:20). In light of both the evolutionary paganism of Paul’s day and the evolutionary humanism predicted for the last days (see for example II Timothy 3:1–13), it becomes clear that Paul’s reference to “fables and endless genealogies” is merely first-century terminology for the twentieth-century mythology of multibillion-year particles-to-people evolutionism.
The tragedy is that many 20th-century Christians and Christian leaders have indeed “given heed” to this renewal of ancient evolutionary pantheistic paganism, and their teachings have “ministered questions” which lead many into apostasy. If a Christian life is to become a “godly edifice,” it must be established on a godly foundation. HMM
