¹But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will surreptitiously introduce destructive heresies, also denying the master who bought them, bringing swift destruction on themselves. ²And many will follow their debaucheries, on account of whom the way of the truth will be blasphemed. ³And prompted by greed, they will make merchandise of you with fabricated words – they for whom judgment from long ago does not lie idle, and whose destruction will not slumber. ⁴For if God did not spare angels who sinned but consigned them to Tartarus in chains of underworld gloom under guard, and he delivered them to judgment, ⁵and he did not spare the old world, but he did preserve Noah in a company of eight, a preacher of righteousness, when he brought a flood onto a world of the ungodly, ⁶and as he reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them with a downfall, making an example for those who intend to be ungodly, ⁷and he delivered righteous Lot who was worn down by the behaviour of those unprincipled individuals in their debauchery, ⁸for he who was righteous, dwelling among them, at the sight and sound of them tortured his righteous mind day after day at their lawless deeds – ⁹if so – then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly from temptation, and to guard the unrighteous up to the day of judgment to be punished, ¹⁰and especially those walking after the flesh with depraved desires, also despising lordship. Daring they are, presumptuous, not afraid to blaspheme those in glory, ¹¹where angels, being greater in strength and power, do not pronounce a defamatory judgment against them before the Lord. ¹²But these, like unreasoning animals in the order of nature, born to capture and to corrupt, who blaspheme against those they do not understand, will be utterly destroyed in their own corruption, ¹³who will receive the wages of iniquity in full, since they consider running riot in the daytime a pleasure. They are stains and blemishes, revelling in their deceits as they feast with you, ¹⁴having eyes full of an adulteress and being unceasing in sin, enticing unstable people, having a heart practised in fraud, cursed children; ¹⁵abandoning the straight way, they have gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the wages of iniquity, ¹⁶and who suffered the conviction of his own transgression, when a mute beast of burden, speaking with a human voice, thwarted the deranged intention of the prophet. ¹⁷These individuals are sources without water, clouds driven by a tempest, for whom the underworld gloom of darkness throughout the age is reserved. ¹⁸For they speak bombastically vain words as they entice – with lusts of the flesh and debaucheries – those who actually had fled from those who conduct themselves in error. ¹⁹While they promise them freedom, they themselves are servants of corruption. For one is brought into slavery by anyone to whom one yields. ²⁰For if having fled the defilements of the world in acknowledgment of the Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, they again become entangled by these things and yield to them, their final state is then worse than their first one. ²¹For it would have been better for them not to have acknowledged the way of righteousness than for them having acknowledged it to turn aside from the holy commandment handed down to them. ²²And the enactment of the true proverb has happened to them: a dog which has returned to its own vomit, and a washed sow to wallowing in the mud.

Reference(s) in Chapter 2: v.22 ↔ Proverbs 26:11.