an inquiry: the act of seeking out an answer, whether by formal investigation or by arguing a question back and forth
At its core this word names an activity, not a result: the work of seeking something out. That work takes different shapes depending on who is doing it and why.
- An official can conduct a formal investigation into a legal matter.
- Two parties who disagree can hash out a question between them.
- And a group can fall into a heated, drawn-out dispute over a contested point.
The striking thing about this word in the New Testament is that it is not, in itself, a negative term. In Acts it names the serious deliberation of the Jerusalem Council and the legal review of a Roman governor, both treated as legitimate and even necessary. Yet in Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus the very same word is used with contempt, tagged as foolish, pointless, and quarrel-breeding. Scholars widely agree that the word did not change its meaning between these settings. What changed was the framing: the writer of those letters borrowed a well-worn Greek habit of branding a rival's questioning as empty hairsplitting, and applied it to teachers he wanted to discredit.
So the senses below are shades of one activity, sorted by tone and setting: a magistrate's investigation, an honest debate, and a divisive controversy. The reader should not assume the word carries a built-in verdict. In the Bible it can name a good and fruitful inquiry just as readily as a worthless one.
Nuances
Disputed
What the "controversies" condemned in the Pastoral Letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) actually were, and whether the label describes real opponents or is chiefly borrowed rhetoric.
- majorityReal Jewish-Christian teachers whose speculative interpretation of the Law and of Old Testament genealogies the author recasts in the mold of the culturally reviled sophist; a combined reading (Jewish content, Hellenistic anti-sophistic form) now most widely held.; G. W. Knight, The Pastoral Epistles (NIGTC, 1992); W. D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles (WBC 46, 2000); P. H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT, 2006)
- minorityChiefly a conventional rhetorical construct: the author applies a stock Greek anti-sophistic script to his rivals, so the polemic reveals his own strategy more than the opponents' actual doctrine.; R. J. Karris, 'The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles,' JBL 92 (1973): 549-64; A. J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Fortress, 1989); L. T. Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy (AB 35A, 2001)
- minorityAn incipient or proto-Gnostic error, reading the "genealogies" as speculative myths; an older identification now largely receded for a first-century setting.; M. Dibelius and H. Conzelmann, The Pastoral Epistles (Hermeneia, 1972)