'men's minds to the exclusion of solid and life- giving nutriment' (Hort, p. 137), hinders the fulfil- ment of the trust of life. It is contrary to sound doctrine. It does not belong to the healthy {vyiai- vovirrj) mind. In Tit 3* the warning is repeated : 'shun foolish questions and genealogies.'
The scornful method adopted by the Pastoral Epistles of dealing with these ' silly questions and genealogies' has been objected to as un- Pauline, and is cited as an argument for the late date of the Epistles. Without raising the question of author- ship, one may feel, on general considerations, that, in the interests of the Churcli, the question was a vital one — should Christianity be allowed to de- generate into a blend of Mosaism and Gentile philosophy or theosophy ? Even in religious con- troversy, rank growths are not to be eradicated with a pair of tweezers. Motfatt's rejoinder {EBi 5083) to McGifi'eit {Apostolic Age, Edinburgh, 1897, p. 402) may be regarded as justified and satis- factory : ' This movement [represented by fables, genealogies, etc.] is met by . . . methods, which seem denunciatory merely because we no longer possess any statement of the other side, and are, therefore, prone to forget that such rotigh and decisive w'ays are at times the soundest method of conserving truth. . . . Firmness and even ridicule have their own place as ethical weapons of defence.' See Fable. W. M. Geant.
GENERATION {yeved, 1 P 2^ : 'a chosen genera- tion,' AV=7^j'os iK\£KTdi'=' an elect race,' RV). — The use of yeved in the NT closely reproduces, as in the LXX it translates, the Hebrew nil. The two words, however, reach their common significance from different directions. Etymologically, 7€ved expresses the idea of kinship. It signifies de- scent, or the descendants, from the same ancestral stock ; then those of the same lineage who are born about the same time ; then the lifetime of such (measured from birth of parent to birth of child), or, more generally, an ' age ' or lengthened period of time. The root-idea of nn, on the other hand, is a period of time : hence it comes to mean the people whose lifetime falls approximately within a given period, and finally acquires the genealogical sense of a ' generation ' (see Liddell and Scott and Oxford Hebrew Lexicon, s.v.).
In the apostolic writings, the primary meaning of the word is (a) the body of individuals of the same race who are born about the same time (He 3'", Ac 13^", AV and K.Vm); but this sense usually passes into that of {b), the period covered by tlie lifetime of such (Ac 13=« RV, 14'6 15-^ Eph 3«) ; and thus the plural, yeveai, comes to mean (c) all time, past or future, as consisting in the succession of such periods. In Col 1-^, * the mystery hath been hid from the ages and from the generations,' the 'generation' is a subdivision of the 'age' and is added for the sake of emphasis, and in Eph 3'-^ the Apostle, struggling to express the idea of the Eternal Future, not only describes it as ' the age of ages' (the age whose component parts are tliem- selves ages), but adds to the picture the endless succession of ' generations ' which constitute each ' age ' — ' unto all the generations of the age of ages ' (cf. Ps 102-'^ Enoch ix. 4). Finally {d) the word is used, as often in the OT (Dt 325--", Ps 12' 24« etc.), with a moral connotation, as in Ph 2*^ and Ac 2^". In the latter passage the term has an eschatological colouring. 'Tliis crooked generation' is the pre- sent, swiftly transient period of the world's history, which is leading up to the Day of Judgment and the New Age.
Literature.— H. Cremer, Bibl.-Tkeol. Lexicon of NT Crreeki, ISSO ; Grimm-Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the HT'^, liUO; Theodor Keim, Jemsof Nazara, Engr. tr., 18S1, vol. v.
p. 245 n. Robert Law.
GEI^TILES
GENTILES
445
GENTILES {to. idv-q, 'the nations,' as opposed to Israel, 6 Xa6s. The opposition comes out clearly in Lk 2^2, Ac 26"- 23, Ro 15'". Cf. 'am and goytm in Dt 2618- 19 32*3, ig 428. Jq Rq ips 1527 154^ Qal 2»2- ^*, Eph 31 ?^»'7? = Gentile Christians; but in 1 Co 12^, Eph 211 4}\ 1 Th 45 St. Paul lays stress upon the moral separation of such from the idvri [cf. Harnack, Expansion, i. 67, n. 1]. The Vulg. has gentes for ^dvq, but nearly always Gentilis iox"EKkr)v fEXXijyh]. This may have led our translators to render "EXXi?!' six times by 'Gentile' [uniformly 'Greek,' how- ever, in RV]. When the Koine [vernacular and business Greek] became the international language, those Jews who spoke it began to apply the handy designation of ' Greeks ' to all non-Jews in order to distinguish them from themselves ; hence the phrase 'lovoaioi re Kal "^XKrjves came to be the col- loquial equivalent of 6 Xa6s Kal to, Idvij. But there are passages in the NT where "EXXijj'es appears to re- tain its proper national sense [Ac 16^* ^ 21-^ Ro l^'*, 1 Co r-^^, Gal 23, Col 3" ; cf. Zahn, Jntrod. to NT, i. 373 ; Harnack, Acts of the Apostles, p. 51]). — Intro- ductory.— The account of what occurred at Pisidian Antioch when St. Paul and Barnabas preached there the second time (Ac 13**'' ) may be taken as a short outline of the principal part of the history of the Apostolic Age. The Jews, filled with jealousy, contradict and rail at the preaching of the gospel. Tlie two apostles then speak out boldlj', and say : ' It was necessary that the word of God should first be spoken to you. Seeing ye thrust it from you . . . lo, we turn to the Gentiles.' The Gentiles receive the word with joy, and many of them be- lieve. The history of the Apostolic Age is mainly the history of how Christ was brought to the Gentile world, and how tlie Jewish nation ' hardened its heart more and more against the appeal of Christianity' (Harnack, op. cit. p. xxx). Addanother imjiortant feature to the history of this period — that the door which was set wide open for the ad- mission of the Gentiles into the Kingdom of God was kept wide open in spite of the attempt of a large section of the Judseo-Christian Church to shut it — and the outline is complete.