The Fatal Irony of Eastman FBC’s Timothy Strategy: Corrupted ESV & Apostasy Undermine 2 Timothy 2:2
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2 Timothy 2:2
“And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.”
King James Version (KJV)
The Timothy Strategy
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:3d2f31d8-59a7-40fc-837c-7bc3f3a001e3
Essential Background Study Links:
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2025/05/the-plea-for-understanding-why-kjv-only.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2025/02/the-reward-of-inheritance-in-striving.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2026/07/revelation-311-reward-of-inheritance.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2026/05/the-israel-paradox-jacob-supplanter.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2025/04/believe-gospel-of-salvation-framed.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2026/06/the-essential-meaning-of-things.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2026/06/the-essential-study-of-receive.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2025/03/christ-is-king-is-not-biblical-redux-of.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2024/08/i-also-learned-lot-from-my-atheist.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2024/06/thank-god-for-religious-decline-of-west_11.html
A ONE-YEAR PATHWAY OF DISCIPLESHIP AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT FALL 2026 COHORT First Baptist Church, Eastman, Georgia “...and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” 2 Timothy 2:2 (ESV)
A WORD FROM PASTOR TODD For over a decade, the Lord has been shaping in me a growing conviction: the health of the next generation of this church will not be determined primarily by what happens on a Sunday morning, but by whether we are faithfully entrusting the truths of God's Word to men and women who will, in turn, teach others also. The Apostle Paul's charge to Timothy — to take what he had received and entrust it to faithful people who would be able to teach others — is not a program idea. It is a pattern for how the church multiplies disciples across generations. The Timothy Strategy is our church’s intentional response to that charge. This is not a class. It is not a leadership seminar you attend and forget. It is a year-long invitation into deeper discipleship — walking alongside a mentor, wrestling with the Word in community, being shaped in character, and being sent out to serve and multiply. My prayer is that God would use this pathway to raise up a generation of leaders in our church who are so saturated in Scripture, so shaped by Christ, and so equipped for ministry that entrusting the gospel to the next generation becomes part of the DNA of who we are. If you sense God stirring something in you — a hunger to know His Word more deeply, a desire to grow in godliness, a longing to serve — | want to invite you to prayerfully consider this journey with us. In Christ, Pastor Todd Crosby Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church, Eastman
OUR FOUNDATION The Timothy Strategy is built on 2 Timothy 2:2 — Paul's charge to Timothy to entrust the gospel to faithful people who will be able to teach others also. This single verse captures a multi-generational vision of discipleship: truth received, character formed, ministry practiced, and leaders multiplied. This pathway exists to help our church move from simply attending worship to actively developing biblically grounded, godly-charactered, ministry-ready leaders — men and women who can shepherd small groups, disciple others one-on-one, serve in ministry leadership, and one day entrust these same truths to the next generation." End quote.
The irony is incredible - shocking and fatally TRAGIC.
Here is a Laodicean church claiming 2 Timothy 2:2 and not having studied what the scripture says while using the scripture opposite of its meaning.
Do we not truly see the Laodicean Church not rooted in Christ but saying they are vs the Church of Philadelphia?
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2024/06/the-tale-of-2-christians-philadelphia.html
The ESV and other modern translations do not even come close to the GREEK and what Paul is saying.
In other words they’re not even guarding the WORD in doctrine but perpetuating false doctrine
Entrust literally changes the meaning of 2 Corinthians 2:2 to focus on the recipients reliability not the chain of custody of the preservation of the GOSPEL of Paul that he received from Jesus Christ in the apologetic anointing who ordained the doctrine being transferred to a faithful Brother.
As I point out cleary in my study links above the Laodicean church does not understand the MYSTERY given to Paul and do not understand Doctrine and bottom line are NOT Rooted in Jesus Christ and are as the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:6,13 - Luke 8:13 KJV.
Notice that this pastor seeks laymen as the Pharisees seek out converts to carry forth their false teaching. Also interesting to note that more and more protestant faiths are copy cat to the Vatican's LAYMEN program to double on their evangelism.
Our ANTIVENOM:
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2026/02/jesus-christ-only-antivenom-to-zionism.html
https://www.thethirdheaventraveler.com/2025/08/essential-mystery-lesson-this-is.html
John 10:27
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:” King James Version (KJV)
John 10:5
“And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.” King James Version (KJV)
The Greek phrase Paul is using here is purely 100% fiduciary responsibility like very serious chain of custody of the contents to protect PLEDGE Oneself to Guard in the purest sense of who ordains over what is transferred.
This comes from the Etymological context in the English word COMMIT in the context of 2 Timothy 2:2 KJV on page 481 in my hard copy Oxford English Dictionary from BINDING ENGAGE UNITE JOIN TRUST YOURSELF to as a pledge commission.
In context of 2 Timothy 2:2 KJV:
1. To become liable for the condition of what one has received — this is bailment law, not a metaphor.
2. The deposit must be passed on unaltered. Embezzlement, dilution, or unauthorized change to a deposit carried real legal and social penalty in the Hellenistic world.
3. The obligation is active and continuous — Timothy must “keep” (φυλάσσω, guard) the deposit right up until the moment one commits it forward, and the cycle does not end with one person but is a CHAIN OF CUSTODY.
• The King James COMMIT is the right word for παρατίθημι in 2 Timothy 2:2. The ESV and NASB’s “entrust” DOES NOT reflect the Greek meaning in context of a legal transfer.
• παρατίθημι is rooted in Hellenistic banking and bailment law — a legal-deposit word.
• The Oxford English Dictionary (page 481) confirms COMMIT itself carries a “trust oneself / pledge oneself” sense dating to the 1530s — the same generation that produced Tyndale’s English Bible — fusing pledge-weight and legal-transfer-weight into a single word in a way ENTRUST never has.
• Because of that fused weight, COMMIT is truer to the Greek than ENTRUST: it preserves both halves of παρατίθημι’s own inheritance, formal deposit and binding obligation, in one word.
• The King James’s consistent use of COMMIT across 1 Timothy 1:18, 2 Timothy 1:12, 1:14, and 2:2 preserves a single unbroken chain-of-custody vocabulary for apostolic succession — content moving intact through bonded custodians, not authority moving independent of content.
• The recipient of that deposit — Timothy, and every faithful man after him — inherits a real fiduciary responsibility: to guard what was received, to pass it on unaltered, and to keep the chain moving rather than let it stop.
MY STUDY, then, leaves me with this: when Paul says “commit thou,” he is not asking Timothy for a warm feeling of confidence in a few good men. He is placing Timothy, and every one of us after him, under bond — accountable custodians of a deposit that is not our own, charged to guard it and pass it on exactly as it was given.
COMMIT in the Oxford English Dictionary: To Trust Oneself - United pledged to something
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (page 481), COMMIT carries the sense to trust oneself, to pledge oneself — a meaning the historical record dates to the 1530s, the very generation of Tyndale and the Geneva Bible, just decades before the King James translators sat down to their work in 1611. Webster’s 1828 — itself drawing on that same older layer of English — confirms it plainly:
With the reciprocal pronoun, to commit one’s self, is to do some act… which may bind the person in honor, good faith, or consistency, to pursue a certain course of conduct.”
This is a real and attested sense of the word, sitting directly alongside its other historic sense, “to give in trust, to entrust, to consign” (Webster’s 1828, sense 1).
COMMIT, in the era the King James was translated, was doing double duty — carrying both the weight of a personal, binding pledge and the weight of a formal, legal transfer of custody, under a single word. The Century Dictionary’s own synonym note draws exactly this line: “Commit implies some measure of formality in the act; it is the most general of these words” — set directly against the thinner, purely relational ENTRUST.
ENTRUST comes from a different, later, and narrower place. It is en- (“to put into a state”) plus TRUST, and TRUST itself descends from Old Norse traust, “confidence, firmness.” That is a word about a feeling of reliance. It was never a legal-formality word, and it never carried the pledge-weight COMMIT carried in the King James translators’ own English.
Why COMMIT Is Truer to the Greek Than ENTRUST
Here is the conclusion MY STUDY has reached, and I believe the lexical record supports it fully:
COMMIT is not a weaker or merely archaic stand-in for ENTRUST. It is, if anything, the fuller word. It fuses two things the Greek παρατίθημι itself fuses in its own history: the formal, legal act of depositing something valuable into another’s keeping (the secular banking-and-bailment sense, attested in Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, and the papyri) and the binding, personal weight of a pledge (the reflexive “trust oneself” sense the OED dates to the 1530s). ENTRUST captures only the first half, and even that half arrives softened, because modern English hears “entrust” as an act of warm personal confidence rather than a bonded legal transfer with consequences attached.
When Paul commands Timothy, παράθου — “commit thou” — he is not asking Timothy to feel confident in some faithful men and hand them a message. He is placing Timothy under the same category of obligation that governed a Hellenistic banker holding another man’s silver: liable, accountable, and bound to guard the deposit’s integrity until it moves to the next custodian. COMMIT, with its own inherited weight of formal, binding transfer, is the English word that keeps that stake in view. ENTRUST lets it quietly slip out of frame.
Apostolic Succession as a Chain of Custody
This is why the King James’s consistent use of COMMIT across 1 Timothy 1:18, 2 Timothy 1:12, 2 Timothy 1:14, and 2 Timothy 2:2 matters so much. It preserves a single, unbroken vocabulary for a single, unbroken transaction running through the whole letter:
• Christ commits the deposit to Paul (2 Timothy 1:12).
• Paul commits the deposit to Timothy (1 Timothy 1:18; 2 Timothy 1:14).
• Timothy is commanded to commit the same deposit to faithful men (2 Timothy 2:2).
• Those faithful men, by the verse’s own logic, will be “able to teach others also” — a fourth generation.
That is apostolic succession as MY STUDY understands it: not an office passed by ceremony, not authority transmitted independent of content, but one unaltered deposit moving intact through a chain of bonded custodians.
The legitimacy of each link in that chain rests on whether the deposit arrived unchanged — not on the personal stature of whoever is carrying it. This is a content-fidelity model of succession, and COMMIT is the word that keeps the reader’s eye fixed on the content being carried, generation after generation, rather than drifting toward the personal qualifications of whichever man happens to be holding it at the moment.
The Fiduciary Responsibility Placed on the Recipient
A first-century reader who heard παρατίθημι in this letter would not have needed the legal background explained. It would have been obvious to them the way “escrow” or “trustee” is obvious to us. That reader would have understood three things at once:
1. The recipient becomes liable for the condition of what he has received — this is bailment law, not a metaphor.
2. The deposit must be passed on unaltered. Embezzlement, dilution, or unauthorized change to a deposit carried real legal and social penalty in the Hellenistic world.
3. The obligation is active and continuous — Timothy must “keep” (φυλάσσω, guard) the deposit right up until the moment he commits it forward, and the cycle does not end with him.
His duty is discharged only by producing the next faithful custodian, not by holding the deposit safely and stopping there.
That is the fiduciary responsibility Paul places on Timothy, and through Timothy, on every faithful man since — including, I would say, every one of us who has received sound doctrine and is now responsible for whether it reaches the next generation unaltered. COMMIT keeps that legal and moral weight visible to an English reader. ENTRUST, however accurate at the level of dictionary definition, quietly lowers the temperature of the passage from a bonded trust with real accountability for loss or corruption, down to a warmer but lower-stakes act of interpersonal confidence.
“And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” (2 Timothy 2:2, KJV)
Paul is not making a suggestion. This is an imperative — a command laid on Timothy. The Greek behind it is παράθου (parathou), the second aorist middle imperative of παρατίθημι (paratithēmi), and it stands in a direct line with two other commands Paul has already given Timothy in this same letter:
That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.” (2 Timothy 1:14, KJV)
This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy…” (1 Timothy 1:18, KJV)
Here is why this matters for MY STUDY: the fiduciary sense of COMMIT is not a separate meaning bolted onto an otherwise unrelated word. It is the very same joining-and-fastening idea, applied to custody. To commit a deposit to faithful men is, at the linguistic root, to bind that deposit to them — to fasten it onto their charge so it cannot be pulled loose from their responsibility, the same way committere binds two boards, two armies, or two clauses of a sentence. And this is also why the reflexive “pledge oneself” sense belongs to the same family rather than standing off to the side: pledging yourself is binding your own future action to a course — the identical join-metaphor, turned back on the self.
Set this beside ENTRUST, and the difference in pedigree is stark. ENTRUST’s root, Old Norse traust, was never a binding or fastening word at all. It named a felt state — firmness, confidence. So where COMMIT’s entire word-family — unite, fasten, join, connect, engage, entrust, pledge oneself — carries one unbroken inheritance of forced, binding attachment, ENTRUST’s ancestry only ever carried the inheritance of felt reliance. COMMIT does not merely happen to cover the fiduciary sense. Its whole etymological family is built from the concept of binding one thing irreversibly to another — which is precisely what a fiduciary bond is.
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