From
William Barclay's "new Testament Words." (p.47-f.) we
quote:
------------------------
"The
word alazon occurs twice in the N.T., in Rom. 1:30 and in
2 Tim. 3: In both places the Av translates it boasters and
Moffatt, boastful.... The alazon was the braggart and the
boaster out to impress men; the man with all his goods in the
shop window; the man given to making extravagant claims which he
can never fulfill. But we have still to see the alazon in
his most damaging and dangerous form....
The
Sophists were Greek wandering teachers who claimed to sell
knowledge... of how to be a success in life ..... The Sophists
claimed to give men subtle skill in words, so that, in the
famous phrase 'they could make the worse appear the better
reason'.
.Aristophanes
pillories them in THE CLOUDS. He says the whole object of their
teaching was to teach men to fascinate the jury, to win impunity
to cheat, and to find an argument to justify anything....
Plato
savagely attacks them in his book called THE SOPGIST:
"Hunters after young men of wealth and position, with sham
education as their bait, and a fee for their object, making
money by a scientific use of quibbles in private conversation,
while quite aware that what they are teaching is wrong.'
It
is these men. and the like of them, of whom the N.T. is
thinking, and against whom it warns the Christian. The warning
is
