μῦθος

The Pastorals warn against myths four times, and every reader assumes he knows what is meant. Pagan stories. Gods behaving badly on mountaintops. The residue of a superstitious world that the gospel came to displace.

Titus 1:14 says otherwise. The myths in view are Jewish ones.

Whatever these letters are worried about, it is not the local temple. It is speculation growing inside the household of faith — genealogies, disputes about the law, stories that elaborate what Scripture leaves alone. The false teaching of the Pastorals is not an alien intrusion. It is homegrown, biblically literate, and produced by people who could quote the text.

That relocates the whole diagnosis. And the diagnosis, when the letters give it, is not primarily about the content of the myths. It is about the appetite for them. People will not endure sound teaching; they will accumulate teachers to match their desires; they will turn aside to mythoi. The turning is the symptom. Something in the hearer wanted to be turned.

The Word

The Greek word is μῦθος (mythos), pronounced in the Erasmian convention as MOO-thos, with the accent on the first syllable. It is a second-declension masculine noun.

Its history is worth knowing because it is a case of a word acquiring a reputation. In Homer, mythos is simply a word, a speech, a thing said — entirely neutral, and roughly interchangeable with logos. The two drifted apart. By the classical period, philosophers had begun to set them in opposition: logos became the reasoned account, the thing you can argue for, and mythos became the story you tell instead. Plato uses mythos both admiringly and dismissively; Aristotle uses it technically for the plot of a tragedy. By the Hellenistic era the word had acquired, in intellectual usage, a settled tinge of the story people tell that is not so.

The New Testament inherits it at the pejorative end. All five occurrences are negative.

The word family and the neighbors, which in these letters matter as much as the word itself:

Genealogia (γενεαλογία) — genealogy. 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, both times paired with mythos. The pairing is the clue to what kind of speculation is in view: elaborations built out of the biblical text’s own furniture.

Kenophōnia (κενοφωνία) — empty sound, vacuous talk. 1 Timothy 6:20 and 2 Timothy 2:16. Literally empty-voicing.

Logomachia (λογομαχία) and logomacheō (λογομαχέω) — word-battle, to fight about words. 1 Timothy 6:4; 2 Timothy 2:14.

Zētēsis (ζήτησις) — inquiry, controversy, dispute. 1 Timothy 6:4; 2 Timothy 2:23; Titus 3:9. The word for a question used of the practice of generating them.

Mataiologia (ματαιολογία) — empty talk. 1 Timothy 1:6.

Typhoō (τυφόω) — to be puffed up, conceited. 1 Timothy 3:6; 6:4; 2 Timothy 3:4. The root typhos means smoke, and the image is of a man inflated with vapor. It is the Pastorals’ diagnosis of what the myth-appetite does to a person: fills him with nothing, visibly.

Graōdēs (γραώδης) — characteristic of old women. 1 Timothy 4:7, graōdeis mythous — the phrase behind the English “old wives’ tales.” A conventional dismissal in Greek moral writing rather than a considered judgment about elderly women, and worth noting as idiom.

Range of Meaning

A tale, a fable — pejorative. All five New Testament uses. There is no neutral occurrence to balance them, and the study should not manufacture one.

Speculative elaboration of the biblical text. The Pastorals’ particular target, established by the pairing with genealogia and by Titus 1:14’s “Jewish myths.” Not stories about other gods; stories that grow in the gaps of this one.

The alternative to eyewitness testimony. 2 Peter 1:16 uses the word for the express purpose of denying it: the apostolic proclamation is not sesophismenoi mythoi, cleverly devised tales, because there were eyewitnesses of his majesty. This is the most important occurrence outside the Pastorals and it defines the word by contrast.

A modern caution belongs in this entry. Since the nineteenth century, myth has also been used as a technical term in the study of religion — not meaning falsehood but meaning a narrative that carries a community’s fundamental convictions. That is a legitimate scholarly usage and it is not what the New Testament means by mythos. Confusing the two produces bad arguments in both directions: readers who think Scripture has pre-emptively condemned an academic method, and readers who think the New Testament writers were relaxed about whether the events happened. Neither follows. The apostolic claim in 2 Peter 1:16 is a claim about eyewitnesses, which is a claim about history.

Where You’ll Meet It

1 Timothy 1:3–4. “…so that you may instruct certain people not to spread false teachings, nor to occupy themselves with myths and interminable genealogies. Such things promote useless speculations rather than God’s redemptive plan that operates by faith.” The letter’s opening charge. Note the contrast Paul draws: myths produce ekzētēseis — speculations, question-generation — where the deposit produces oikonomia theou, God’s ordered arrangement, which operates by faith. Endless questions on one side; a settled administration on the other.

1 Timothy 4:7. “But reject those myths fit only for the godless and gullible, and train yourself for godliness.” The contrast again, and this time the alternative to myth is not correct doctrine but training. The remedy for a speculative appetite is a disciplined one.

2 Timothy 4:3–4. “For there will be a time when people will not tolerate sound teaching. Instead, following their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves… And they will turn away from hearing the truth, but on the other hand they will turn aside to myths.” The fullest diagnosis. Four verbs describe the hearers, not the teachers: they will not tolerate, they will accumulate, they will turn away, they will turn aside. The teachers in this sentence are supplied on demand.

Titus 1:14. “…and not pay attention to Jewish myths and commands of people who reject the truth.” The relocation.

2 Peter 1:16. “For we did not follow cleverly concocted fables when we made known to you the power and return of our Lord Jesus Christ; no, we were eyewitnesses of his grandeur.” The apostolic denial, and the entry’s anchor. Cross-link The Knowledge of Him.