Gangrene (1044) (gaggraina from graô or grainô = to gnaw, to eat, an eating, spreading disease) describes the mortification of tissue which, unless properly treated, spreads from the place affected and eats away or consumes the neighboring parts of the body and at length destroys the whole body. Gangrene is a picture of dead cells "poisoning" the living cells around them, which in turn die and allow the gangrene to spread. So what are we to do? Paul instructs Timothy (and all believers) to get away from this poison because even the living things around will eventually be affected. Religious deceptions are so infectious, malicious, and insidious that they are to be handled only with protective mask and gloves, as it were. Using another figure, Jude says that those who are in grave spiritual danger should be snatched “out of the fire” (Jude23) like a hot ember. It was in a similar figurative way that the high priest Joshua, who had become corrupted like the rest of the priesthood, was divinely retrieved and spared, like “a brand plucked from the fire” (Zec3:2). The Columbia Encyclopedia explains that... Dry gangrene, the most common form, follows a disturbance of the blood supply to the tissues, e.g., in diabetes, arteriosclerosis, thrombosis, or destruction of tissue by injury. A second type, moist gangrene, results from an invasion of toxin-producing bacteria that destroy tissue. Gangrene usually affects an arm or leg, but it may occur anywhere, e.g., pulmonary gangrene may follow an abscess of the lung. Treatment of gangrene includes rest and the administration of antibiotics if the gangrene is moist and bacterial invasion is present. Excision of the diseased portions of the body may be necessary and, in advanced involvement, amputation of the part. In gas gangrene, which results from the invasion of wounds by anaerobic bacteria, gas forms under the skin and a watery exudate is produced. Emergency treatment with penicillin and antitoxin is needed; without treatment, gas gangrene is invariably fatal. (The Columbia encyclopedia. New York) ISBE writes that gangrene is The name was used by the old Greek physicians for an eating ulcer which corrodes the soft parts and, according to Galen, often ends in mortification. Paul compares the corrupting influence of profane babbling or levity, in connection with subjects which ought to be treated with reverence to this disease (2Ti 2:17). The old English word “canker” is used by 16th-and 17th-century authors as the name of a caterpillar which eats into a bud. In this sense it occurs 18 times in Shakespeare (e.g. Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, ii, 3). The canker-worm mentioned 6 times by Joel and Nahum is probably the young stage of Acridium peregrinum, a species of locust. Cankered in Jas 5:3 the King James Version means “rusted” (Greek katiotai), and is so rendered in the Revised Version (British and American). In Susanna verse 52 Coverdale uses the phrase, “O thou old cankered carle,” in Daniel’s address to the elder, where English Versions of the Bible has “waxen old in wickedness.” The word is still used in the Scottish dialect and applied to persons who are cross-grained and disagreeable. (Orr, J: The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia) Spurgeon comments that... ONE of the most serious calamities which can befall a church is to have her own ministers teaching heresy: yet this is no new thing, it has happened from the beginning. Paul and Peter and James and John in their epistles had to speak of seducers in the churches, even in those primitive days, and ever since then there have arisen in the very midst of the house of God those who have subverted the faith of many, and led them away from the fundamental truths into errors of their own inventing. The apostle compares this to a gangrene, which is one of the most dangerous and deadly mischiefs which can occur to the body. It is within the body, it eats into the flesh deeper and deeper, festering and putrefying, and if it be not stopped it will continue its ravages till life is extinguished by "black mortification." False doctrine and an unchristian spirit in the midst of the church itself must be regarded as such a gangrene, a silent wolf ravenously gnawing at the heart, the vulture of Prometheus devouring the vitals: no external opposition is one-half so much to he dreaded. (from 2 Timothy 2:20,21 The Great House and the Vessels) AMONG THEM ARE HYMENAEUS [singing man] & PHILETUS [friendly man]: on estin (3SPAI) Humenaios kai Philetos: It is often true that the most effective subverters of God's Word of truth are men who, outwardly, seem to be very smooth and charming (cf 2Co 11:13, 14, 15). Paul identifies one of the false teachers as Hymenaeus, who, because he was denounced in the previous letter, obviously had been a threat to the Ephesian church for some time. Although Paul had put him out of the church when he himself was still in Ephesus, having “delivered [him] over to Satan,” Hymenaeus obviously persisted in his efforts to mislead believers there, and Philetus had replaced Alexander as his co-conspirator (1Ti 1:20). As Jesus said of Judas (Mt 26:24), it would have been better if those men had not been born.