All about liars, evil brutes and lazy gluttons

For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach - and that for the sake of dishonest gain. One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.” This saying is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith… Titus 1:10-13

Some Bible teachers have a lot of fun with these verses from Paul’s letter to Titus.

Paul is concerned for his younger friend, whom he has left on the island of Crete to look after the church there. It seems Titus is not going to have an easy time, for “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons”. Well, there’s no mincing of words there, is there!

Paul wants Titus to know that it’s not just his opinion, but that it comes in fact from a Cretan prophet, almost certainly a man called Epimenides, who lived some six hundred years before Christ. But “This saying is true!” Paul insists.

The bad reputation of the people of Crete obviously goes back a long way and is widely known. (In fact the Greek language even has a verb, to cretise, which means to lie.)

But wait a minute… This is where the fun comes in. If indeed “Cretans are always liars”, and if this comment is made by a Cretan, then obviously the comment itself must be a lie, so Cretans aren’t always liars. Putting it another way, if taken literally the comment is self-contradictory, for when Epimenides said what he said he was saying what he believed to be true; but he himself was a Cretan (and therefore a liar), so – well, it must be false, mustn’t it? Oh dear: one’s head begins to spin.

When Paul insists that “This saying is true”, should we imagine him smiling? – enjoying a bit of a joke? Was he writing “with a twinkle in his eye”, as one commentary suggests? I rather doubt it; our overall impression of Paul from his letters is that he was a very serious-minded man. I suspect that he was so concerned about the problems Titus might have to face in Crete that he was blissfully unaware of the seeming contradiction he was perpetrating.

Well, joke or not, there are various things we can take from this strange little passage.

First, it reminds us that the Bible is not always to be taken literally.

As Christians we believe that the Bible is inspired by God; but also that it is written by men. This means that it is marked by the usual characteristics of human language – things like figures of speech, metaphors, similes, exaggerations, paradoxes, rhetorical devices, features that are found in any and every language.

Obvious examples are some of the great claims of Jesus in John’s Gospel – to be “the Lamb of God” or “the door of the sheep” or “the living water”. Jesus, of course, wasn’t literally a lamb or a door or water; but we know very well the deep truths he was wanting to teach, and we gladly feed on them.

The rude remark about the people of Crete is an example of “hyperbole”, or extreme exaggeration, made to press home a point. Here in Britain we might say (though I hope we wouldn’t) that all Scots are tight-fisted, or all Yorkshiremen are stubborn, or all Essex girls… actually, I’m a bit hazy about what Essex girls are supposed to be like, but I suspect it's not very complimentary.

The point is simple: we need to learn to read the Bible on its own terms, not forcing it into a strait-jacket which we think it must fit. Our difficulty, of course, may be that we can’t always be sure when a passage is intended literally and when not – in which case we must look to wise and gifted teachers and pray for the Holy Spirit to give us light. And (please note!) be patient with fellow Christians who see it differently.

The second thing we need to take from this passage is that (as, sadly, we all know) even Christian people can behave badly -  and when they do they must be checked.

What is Titus to do about these Cretan trouble-makers? Answer: he is “to rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith”.

We don’t know all the details of where the trouble lay. But it seems that these people were Jewish Christians who were paying too much attention to “Jewish myths” (verse 14); and that the most troublesome belonged to “the circumcision group” (verse 10) – that is, they insisted that if a gentile, a non-Jew, wanted to become a Christian they must first submit to the Jewish law.

Well, we don’t today (so far as I know) have a “circumcision group” infiltrating churches and causing division. But there are plenty of other such groups: I know of good, healthy churches being virtually taken over by Christian “Zionists”, or by extreme charismatics, or by hard-line Calvinists.

This is tragic, for the body of Christ on earth is just too precious and important for such things to be ignored; and firm measures may be needed, hard though that can be.

But that’s a topic for another day.

As for Titus and the Cretans, let’s simply pray, first, to be thoughtful, prayerful and teachable Bible-readers, and, second, to have the faith and courage to stand up to bigoted and divisive behaviour when it rears its ugly head.

Oh - and I do hope Titus was effective in his tricky ministry, don’t you?

Dear Father, please help me to be a humble, teachable, Spirit-led and Bible-centred follower of your Son Jesus, to be wise in my reading of your Word, and a peace-maker in the life of your church. Amen.