¹However, there were also false prophets among the people, as also among you there will be false teachers, who will stealthily introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves imminent destruction;

²and many will follow after their sensuality, through whom the way of the truth will be denigrated;

³and through covetousness with fabricated words they will exploit you, for whom the judgment of long ago is not idle, and their destruction does not slumber.

⁴For if God did not spare the messengers who sinned, but delivered them in chains of gloomy darkness to Tartarus, being kept for judgment,

⁵and He did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, one of eight, having brought in the flood upon the world of the ungodly,

⁶and having reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, He condemned them to destruction, having set them an example of what is coming on the ungodly,

⁷and He rescued righteous Lot, being distressed by the conduct of the lawless in sensuality;

⁸for through seeing and hearing, that righteous man dwelling among them day after day was tormented in his righteous being with their lawless deeds;

⁹the Lord then knows to deliver the devout out of temptation, then to keep the unrighteous being punished unto the day of judgment,

¹⁰then especially those walking after the flesh in the passion of defilement and despising authority. Bold, self-willed, they do not tremble blaspheming glorious ones;

¹¹whereas messengers, being greater in strength and in power, do not bring against them a reviling judgment from before the Lord.

¹²However, these, like irrational animals, were born as creatures of instinct for capture and destruction, blaspheming in what they are ignorant of, also will be destroyed in their destruction,

¹³suffering as the wage of unrighteousness. Esteeming carousal in the daytime as pleasure, blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, feasting with you,

¹⁴having eyes full of adultery and unceasing from sin, enticing unestablished souls, having a heart exercised in craving — children of a curse!

¹⁵Leaving the straight way, they have gone astray, having followed in the way of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wage of unrighteousness,

¹⁶however, he had reproof for his own transgression; a mute donkey, having spoken in a man's voice, restrained the madness of the prophet.

¹⁷These are springs without water and mists being driven by storm, for whom the gloom of darkness has been reserved forever.

¹⁸For speaking arrogant words of vanity, they entice with the passions of the flesh to sensuality those scarcely escaping from those living in error,

¹⁹promising them freedom, themselves being slaves of corruption; for by what anyone has been subdued, by that also he has been enslaved.

²⁰For if, when they had escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Anointed One, they had been entangled again in these and are subdued, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

²¹For it was better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to have turned from the holy commandment delivered to them.

²²Now the thing of the true proverb has happened to them: a dog having returned to its own vomit; and a sow having washed, to her rolling place in the mire.