J.K. Gayle: Thanks for the notes on “mataiologia” – I would be hopelessly lost in the Greek without the Blue Letter Bible and Strong’s, so I really do appreciate the context.

I actually like the God’s Word translation you provided – that captures the sense of those words quite nicely. I also thought that the NASB’s use of “fruitless” was very thematic for the Bible.

What a rare word “mataiologia” seems to be. Plutarch’s extant texts have it but once (in his Moralia specifically, ΠΕΡΙ ΠΑΙΔΩΝ ΑΓΩΓΗΣ, or Concerning the Instruction of Children). The Astrology of Vettius Valens has it three times. But that’s all I can find. My only translation of Plutarch here is in French, and I don’t have an English for Valens; no way to compare how English translators of these non-NT works have rendered the word.

J. B. Philips loses the Greek in his lackluster English: “Some seem to have forgotten this and to have lost themselves in endless words.”

God’s Word does a fair job of using a physical-movement metaphor with English still rooted in the senses of the three highlighted Greek words (somewhere between JB and Lattimore): “Some people have left these qualities behind and have turned to useless discussions.”

“As I asked you, when I was setting out for Macedonia, to stay on in Ephesus, it was so that you could tell certain people not to teach heretical doctrines, not to put their minds on myths and interminable genealogies which lead to speculations rather than the plan of God, which is through faith. The aim of my instruction is love, from a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith, qualities which certain people have missed and turned to talking nonsense, wanting to be teachers of the law without either knowing what they are saying or what those things are about which they are so firm.“