Word or Epistle

This verse has spent four hundred years as a weapon in an argument it was not written for, and the fight usually starts by lifting four words out of the middle.

Paul built the source into the sentence. Hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle. Two clauses limit it: these people were taught them, and they came by Paul's own speaking or Paul's own letter. He does it again in the next chapter, over a brother who walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. The word itself is the plain one for something handed over and it carries no rating. Twice in two chapters Paul names who did the handing.

It also refuses to tell you what the spoken ones were. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? There was teaching in that room that is not in this letter, and Paul makes no attempt to reproduce it, so anyone who tells you its contents is supplying them. The reason they needed anything to hold sits thirteen verses above: they had been shaken in mind by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Somebody had already forged a tradition in Paul's name.

The same word for tradition is what Jesus condemns in Mark. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men. Then harder: Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition. Neither passage sorts traditions by age or beauty. Both sort them by who handed the thing down and whether the commandment of God survived it. That is a question you can put to anything you were taught, including what you were taught by people you love.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 148 is Beyond Imagination (1 Corinthians 2:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two