A Straight Cut, Not a Split

Many Bible students grew up with a phrase from the old King James Version: “rightly dividing the word of truth.” Whole systems of study have been built on it. The idea is that reading the Bible well means dividing it correctly, with the word of the law on one side and the gospel of truth on the other. A good teacher, on this view, knows where the line runs and keeps the two apart.

A second verse seems to support the idea. Paul told Timothy to charge certain men not to teach strange doctrines or pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, and since the Old Testament is full of genealogies and old stories, the reasoning goes, Paul must have been warning against teaching from the Old Testament.

On the surface, the claim holds together. The word “divide” really does appear in many English Bibles, and Paul really did warn about myths and genealogies. Both verses therefore deserve a close look, beginning with the one word on which everything rests.

A Straight Cut

This is the verse:

2 Timothy 2:15 Be diligent to present yourself dokimon(approved, verified) to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the logos λόγος log'-os(word) of aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth).

The YLV does not say “divide” at all. It says “accurately handling,” because of the Greek word underneath, orthotomeo ὀρθοτομέω or-thot-om-eh'-o. The word has two parts. Ortho means straight, the same prefix found in “orthodontist,” the one who straightens teeth. The second part comes from temno, to cut. Together, orthotomeo means to cut straight, to cut a straight path, and from there, to handle something rightly.

Picture a tailor laying a pattern on a bolt of cloth. When she cuts straight, she follows the line, so that the pieces come out true and fit together into one garment. Cutting straight does not mean slicing the cloth down the middle and throwing half of it away. It means handling the whole piece with such care that none of it is ruined.

That is the picture in Paul’s word. A workman who “does not need to be ashamed” handles the word accurately, neither bending it nor cutting a crooked line through it. Nothing in orthotomeo means separating one part of Scripture from another and setting one part aside.

What Is the Word of Truth?

The verse names what is being handled: “the logos(word) of aletheia(truth).” Logos (λόγος) is word, and aletheia (ἀλήθεια) is truth. The claim assumes that “the word of truth” means the gospel as opposed to the law, but there is no need to guess what the word of truth is, because Scripture says.

Psalm 119:142 Your righteousness is righteousness forever, and your Torah is truth.

The psalmist does not say that the Torah contains some truth, or that it pointed toward truth for a while. He says that the Torah is truth. The Hebrew word is emeth אֱמֶת eh'-meth, which carries the sense of firmness and faithfulness, of something on which you can lean your whole weight.

Yeshua, praying for His disciples on the night before He died, spoke in the same terms:

John 17:17 Sanctify them in Your aletheia(truth); Your logos(word) is aletheia(truth).

When Yeshua prayed this, the written word of His Father was the Scriptures of Israel, with the Torah at the front. The psalm’s “your Torah is truth” and Yeshua’s “Your logos(word) is aletheia(truth)” therefore describe the same thing from two sides.

Return now to Timothy. Paul tells him to handle “the logos(word) of aletheia(truth)” accurately. If the Torah is truth, then the Torah belongs to the very word Timothy is told to handle, and no one can rightly handle the word of truth by cutting the Torah out of it. That would be the crooked cut.

Myths and Genealogies

The second verse comes from the task Paul gave Timothy when he left him in Ephesus:

1 Timothy 1:3-4 As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the oikonomia οἰκονομία oy-kon-om-ee'-ah(administration) of God which is by faith.

A careful reader will search this passage without finding the words “based on the Old Testament.” Paul names “strange doctrines,” “myths,” and “endless genealogies,” and he tells us what is wrong with them: they “give rise to mere speculation” instead of furthering what God is doing.

The word for myths is mythos μῦθος moo'-thos, a story or a saying, and the word for genealogies is genealogia γενεαλογία ghen-eh-al-og-ee'-ah, a record of descent. Paul does not call every genealogy a problem. His concern is with endless ones, the kind that spin out into speculation without end or purpose. The genealogies of Scripture are not of that kind; Matthew opens his whole account of Yeshua with one.

In the Same Paragraph

The surest way to see what Paul meant is to keep reading. Only three verses later, in the same paragraph, he says this about the men who were causing trouble:

1 Timothy 1:7-8 wanting to be teachers of nomos νόμος nom'-os(law), even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions. But we know that the nomos(law) is good, if one uses it lawfully,

These men wanted to be “teachers of nomos(law),” yet they did not understand what they were saying. The problem Paul names is their ignorance, not the law. And lest anyone take his warning the wrong way, he adds: “But we know that the nomos(law) is good, if one uses it lawfully.”

Had Paul meant that teaching from the Torah was the danger, this would have been the place to say so. He says the opposite instead. The law is good, and the fault lay with teachers who handled it without understanding.

The Commandments of Men

Paul gives Titus the same warning, and this time he names more exactly what to guard against:

Titus 1:14 not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the aletheia(truth).

The danger is “Jewish myths and commandments of men,” human teaching laid on top of God’s word. And at the end of the verse, these people are said to “turn away from the aletheia(truth).”

Set that beside Psalm 119:142, where the Torah is truth. Read together, the two verses show that the myths and the commandments of men are not the Torah. They are what turns people away from the truth. Paul is warning Timothy and Titus against the very thing Yeshua warned against when He told the religious leaders that they were setting aside the commandment of God to keep their tradition (Mark 7:8-9). Book 1 looked at that warning in its discussion of the glasses we forget we are wearing.

Both verses that were supposed to divide the Torah from the gospel, then, say something else. Rightly handling the word means cutting straight through the whole of it, not cutting part of it off. And the myths Paul warned against were the commandments of men that pulled people away from the truth, not the Torah that Scripture calls truth.

Why It Matters

None of this changes how a person is made right with God, which is still by grace through faith, as we saw in Chapter 1. It does change what a justified person reads, and how. If the Torah is cut out of “the word of truth,” the believer loses the very writings that Paul called profitable “for paideia παιδεία pahee-di'-ah(training, discipline) in dikaiosyne δικαιοσύνη dik-ah-yos-oo'-nay(righteousness)” (2 Timothy 3:16).

That leaves one last claim for Part One, and it is a surprising one, because this time the claim gets the picture right. Believers are citizens of heaven, it says, and citizens of heaven live by heaven’s law. With that much we can agree, and it leads straight to the obvious question: what is heaven’s law?