"seen". Here therefore we might pause and say, When the Word became flesh and dwelt

among us, He manifested the invisible God and revealed the Father. In Him the mystery

of God and of godliness alike find their exegesis.

We now pass from the testimony of the structure to the text itself.  Chapter 3: is

largely devoted to the qualifications of bishops and deacons, and the Apostle states that

he has so written that Timothy may know how to behave himself in the house of God,

which is the church of the living God. A question now arises from the last clause of

verse 15. Is the church "the pillar and ground of the truth"? If we use the word "church"

in its most spiritual meaning, we shall find no basis in Scripture for such an important

doctrine.  The case before us, however, is most certainly not "the Church" but "a

church", a church wherein there are bishops and deacons;  in other words, a local

assembly, and surely it is beyond all argument that the truth does not rest upon any such

church as its pillar and ground. The reader will observe that in the structure, 3: 15 is

divided between D and E, and that the latter part of verse 15 belongs to verse 16.

There is no definite article before the word "pillar", and a consistent translation is as

follows. Having finished what he had to say about the officers of the church and

Timothy's behaviour, he turns to the great subject of the mystery of godliness with the

Here the teaching is that whatever or whoever the mystery of godliness shall prove to

be, it or He, is the pillar and ground of truth. The mystery of godliness is then explained

as "God manifest in the flesh" and He, we know, is a sure and tried Foundation.

We now come to the question of the true reading of I Tim. 3: 16. The A.V. reads

"God"; the R.V. reads "He Who", and some versions read "Which". As it is not possible

for us to depart from our practice, and use Greek type, we have prepared the following

explanation to which the reader, unacquainted with the Greek or with the ancient

manuscripts, is asked to refer as we proceed.

Anyone who has examined an ancient Greek manuscript will have noticed the large

number of abbreviations that are employed. For instance, the Greek word for God,

Theos, is always contracted to THS. Now this contraction is only distinguishable from

the relative pronoun HOS by two horizontal strokes, which, in manuscripts of early date,

it was often the practice to trace so faintly that they can now scarcely be discerned. Of

this, any one may be convinced by inspecting the two pages of Codex A which are

exposed to view at the British Museum. Need we go in? An archetype copy, in which

one or both of these slight strokes had vanished from the contraction THS, gave rise to

the reading HOS, "who", of which non-sensical substitute traces survive in only two

manuscripts, Aleph and 17; not, for certain, in one single ancient Father, no, not for

certain in one single ancient version. So transparent, in fact, is the absurdity of writing

to musterion hos ("the mystery who"), that copyists promptly substituted ho ("which"),

thus furnishing another illustration of the well-known property which a fabricated reading