Matthew Poole and continuators on 2 Timothy 2:23

23 But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes .

It is a precept or caution of the same nature with those, 1 Tim. 1.4. and 4: 7. and ver. 16. of this Chapter. The repetition of this precept of the Apostle four times in these two short Epistles, lets us know how important a thing he judged it, that Ministers of the Gospel should not spend their times in their Discourses to their Congregations, in things that tend nothing to the building up of their hearers in Faith or Holiness, being either old Wives Fables, like the stories in the Popish Legends, or the Apochryphal stories of Bell and the Dragon, Tobit and his Dog, and the Swallows dunging in his Eye, &c. or sifting out Genealogies, or vain and impertinent discourses or idle fruitless questions which tend not to edifying, but to satisfie curiosity, and increase strife and ungodliness, which kind of Preaching the Apostle also had defamed, 1 Tim. 6.4. as the issue of Pride, and Ignorance, and Dotage, and here he calls such questions unlearned in the same sense because impertinent to the end of Preaching. The Vanity of Humane Nature and their non-subjection to the Will of God appeareth much in this, that notwithstanding the unreasonableness of such Preachings, and the direct opposition of it to the so often repeated precepts of the Apostle, and to Titus, chap. 3.9. and Pauls proposing of his own Example to the contrary, 1 Cor. 2.1, 2, 3, 4. yet for many years in the times of Popery the People were fed with little besides these Husks, and too many yet, either out of Pride, to shew their parts and reading, or ignorance of the misteries of Godliness, and the true end of preaching, or dotage about unprofitable speculations and niceties can find little better food than these Husks for poor peoples Souls.