empty talk: religious teaching that has the outward form of doctrine but no truth behind it and no godliness to show for it
This word names speech that is empty in the fullest sense. It is not just trivial or long-winded, but futile: there is nothing real behind it, and nothing good comes out of it. Paul uses it once, in 1 Timothy 1:6, for teachers who have wandered away from the goal of love that flows from a pure heart and a clear conscience and turned aside into this kind of talk. They want to be teachers of the law, he says, yet they understand neither what they are saying nor the things they so confidently assert.
The word is rare, and it carries more weight than a plain gloss suggests. Behind it stands the way the Greek Old Testament labels idols as vain, empty things: objects that look like gods but have no reality in them. So calling teaching empty talk hints that it is a kind of counterfeit religion made of words. It sounds substantial and even pious, but there is nothing of God in it, and it leads people astray.
The word also draws on the way moral teachers of the day mocked showy speakers who could argue endlessly but had nothing worth saying. Aimed at the false teachers, it does three things at once: it says
- their message is hollow
- that it is harmful to those who listen
- that they have no real standing to teach at all
It is the opposite of the sound, health-giving teaching Paul wants for the church.
Disputed
How much weight ματαιολογία carries in 1 Timothy 1:6, and what it tells us about the false teachers in view. All sides agree the gloss is "empty, futile speech"; they divide over its primary force, and recent scholarship increasingly holds the dimensions together rather than choosing one.
- contestedThe term chiefly describes the opponents' actual teaching as empty and fruitless, and so points to a real message of speculative myths, genealogies, and misused law behind it.; I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (1999), 375-379; Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, NICNT (2006), 118-124; William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WBC 46 (2000), 24-26
- contestedThe term is chiefly a conventional insult borrowed from stock philosophical attacks on windbag sophists, so it degrades the opponents' standing as much as it describes their doctrine, and yields little firm information about what they actually taught.; Robert J. Karris, "The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles," JBL 92 (1973): 549-564; Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, AB 35A (2001), 165-168; Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (1989)
- contestedThe term chiefly carries the Greek Old Testament's charge that idols are empty, vain things, casting the false teaching as a kind of idolatry in speech: worship in words that produces nothing of eternal value.; Jerome D. Quinn, The Letter to Titus, AB 35 (1990), 96-98; C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. ματαιολογία; O. Bauernfeind, "μάταιος κτλ.," TDNT 4:519-524