2 Peter

2 But there came pretended prophets too among the people, the same as among you too shall be pretendant teachers who shall introduce ruinous ideologies, repudiating the very Master that bought them, bringing upon themselves a speedy bane; 2 and many will follow the example of their immoralities, because of whom the path of truth will be vilified; 3 and with rapacious intent they will exploit you by well-turned phrases—men for whom judgment is not inert from of old, and their bane is not napping.

4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but, engulfing them in Inferno’s pits of darkness, committed them to be kept for judgment, 5 and did not spare the primitive world, but reserved among seven others Noah, preacher of righteousness, while bringing a deluge upon the world of the impious, and, 6* laying in ashes the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, doomed them to obliteration, making them the example of men who should act impiously, 7 and delivered honest Lot, irked by the immoral living of the conscienceless,— 8 for with sight and hearing the honest man, residing among them, day by day tortured his honest soul with their lawless deeds,— 9 the Lord knows how to deliver pious men out of temptation but to keep doers of wrong under punishment to the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who go after flesh in desire for pollution and despise lordship. Cynically audacious, they do not quail at vilifying glories, 11 when angels, superior in strength and power, do not bring a defamatory charge against them before the Lord. 12 But these, like brute beasts, creatures of nature born to be caught and to perish, vilifying what they are ignorant of, shall perish too in their undoing, 13 suffering injury in payment for injuriousness. Taking luxury for the day as their idea of pleasure, blots and blemishes, luxuriating in their deceits while they feast with you, 14 with eyes full of a paramour who is another man’s wife and unresting in sin, luring unsteady souls, their hearts expert in greed, children of a curse, 15 they left the straight road and strayed, treading over again the road of Balaam the son of Beor, who fell in love with the pay of wrong-doing— 16 but he had evidence of his dereliction: a dumb beast, speaking with a man’s voice, checked the prophet’s craziness. 17 These are waterless springs and wind-driven puffs of mist, for whom the blackness of darkness is kept.

18 For, uttering extravagant futilities, they lure with the desires of flesh, with debaucheries, those who are making a narrow escape from those that live a life of misguided wanderings, 19 promising them liberty when they themselves are slaves of vice; for what one is beaten by he is enslaved to. 20* For if they make their escape from the pollutions of the world by awareness of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and are entangled in them again and beaten, they have the last turn out worse than the first; 21 for it would have been better for them not to been aware of the path of righteousness than after being aware of it to revert from the holy commandment that had been transmitted to them. 22 They have been through what the true proverb speaks of, “A dog turning back to its own vomit, and a bathed hog to wallowing in mud.”