Since January, we’ve been talking about making disciples: making better disciples of ourselves and then taking what we have learned and grown through ourselves, and moving out of the comfort of the church to go and make disciples of all nations. We’ve learned that we, each and every one of us, are responsible for making disciples, teaching them, and being a part of their spiritual growth.
Last week, we specifically looked at things we need to make sure to consider when we read God’s Word, things that when we do them, help us really get the most out of the Bible in a way that doesn’t go against what it actually says. We want to grow through God’s Word, and we know that the best way to do that is to thoroughly studying what the Bible says, taking into consideration many contexts and tools that help us dig in. We looked at seven different considerations last week.
So, this week, as the last week of our series on being and making disciples of Christ, we’re going to look at a passage that is often debated, misunderstood, and taken out of context, and we’re going to apply the considerations we learned about last week to this passage and see if it helps us understand the passage a little more.
I want you to turn to 1 Timothy 2:12, “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” Obviously, this can and has brought much confusion to the church since Paul penned his letter to Timothy nearly 2,000 years ago. Entire doctrines of beliefs about the church and the way it should work have been built off this one verse and one more that is similar. Because it has the possibility of dividing the church, we have to take a closer look at this passage, and we’re going to look at our seven considerations from last week to do that.
The first consideration for studying Scripture is to consider the context. We learned last week that it’s not wise to try to understand one verse independently of all the verses and chapters that surround it. So, we need to first look at the whole of what surrounds this verse.
1 Timothy is a letter that was written by Paul to sort of help guide Timothy through some issues that he was facing as he pastored the church that Paul helped establish in Ephesus. The thing with Paul’s letters though, is that he almost always opens his letters with two things: first, a greeting to the church or person he’s writing to; and second, the purpose of why he was writing the letter. This can be really helpful for us when it comes to understanding a passage in one of Paul’s letters, because what we can do is look back to the opening of Paul’s letter to see why he wrote the letter.
1 Timothy 1:3-7 gives us the purpose of Paul’s letter to Timothy, “As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith. But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions.”
In the simplest way I can put it, and there are blanks in your bulletins to fill along with this, 1 Timothy is about how to deal with FALSE teachers spreading HERESY throughout the church in Ephesus. So, what we have to do then, is read 1 Timothy with that understanding. Every part of 1 Timothy that we read we should go back to this point, and ask ourselves, “Okay, what does this have to do with false teachers in the church?”
I want us to do that with our key verse, “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” We should ask ourselves, “What does this have to do with false teachers in the church?” And try to start answering that question.
When I’m studying passages like this, particularly in Paul’s letters, and I’m trying to understand a passage through the context, I like to start writing down possible answers to the question of what the passage has to do with the purpose of the letter.
So for this passage, I would say, “Well, what does this have to do with false teachers in the church?”
Maybe, women, for some reason in this church, were teaching or saying things that weren’t true.
Maybe, these women were leading people astray.
Maybe, some women were being contentious and disruptive by how they were teaching.
When we start to try to figure out how a passage fits into its proper context and what it has to do with the reason the author wrote it, we start to see it in a different way.
The second consideration for this passage is to know the difference between interpretation and application. Interpretation is what the passage actually means, and application is how the meaning affects how we live our lives every day.
Now, we haven’t fleshed out an interpretation yet, but even still, we can start to look at how different interpretations might be applied. One possible interpretation is that Paul intended that no woman should teach a man or have authority over a man, under any circumstances. How is that applied? It might seem pretty cut and dry, but if we look at this application closer, we start to see some issues.
At what age does a boy become a man? For the Jews is was age 12, but that was a cultural decision. For us, we’d say that age is 18, or maybe even 21. These are movable conditions though, so the application of this potential interpretation is sticky at best.
What about in the home? Do women no longer have any authority over her male children when they turn 12? 18? What sort of chaos does that set a mother up for when dad isn’t home? What about single mothers?
How does this interpretation fit with other places in Paul’s letters? Is there contradiction or agreement? What does this mean for Jesus’s commands to all His disciples to make disciples and teach them? These are questions we have to ask.
The other interpretation of this passage is that Paul did not intend to discredit all women from teaching or preaching or having authority, as long as we understand certain contexts and conditions that should be met first. How is that applied? Well, in that interpretation we’d find that men and women become equally responsible and capable of fulfilling Jesus’s words to everyone to go and make disciples and teaching them to obey Christ.
We also find with this application that it agrees with many other places in Paul’s letters, like Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
So, we have to consider the way each interpretation changes the way we would apply this passage to our lives.
The third consideration is to find the plain meaning. We talked last week about how this simply means that we just read it and take it at face value, if we can. This is one of those passages where that might seem like a simple thing to do. But, remember that we’re looking at the whole context.
Let’s look a little further into the passage. Look at verses 13-15, “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.”
A simple reading of these verses might suggest that Adam took no part in being deceived by Satan, despite what Genesis 3 clearly says. A simple reading of these verses might also suggest that women are saved in part through childbirth, which is clearly a contradiction to the rest of the message of the New Testament. What about women who stay single, as Paul recommends? Are they not to be saved? What about women who can’t have children? Are they not to be saved? Clearly, this entire section of Paul’s letter to Timothy needs to be more closely examined, and unfortunately, a simple, plain meaning reading doesn’t work well here. So, and here’s your next blank, sometimes, you must DIG a little DEEPER to find the meaning.
The next consideration is to take the Bible literally. What is the over all truth that is taught? We know we need to dig deeper for this passage. One of the questions we should try to answer is what Paul indicates about women ministering to men in other places in his writings.
In Romans 16:1, Paul wrote this, “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea;” Now, a little digging into who Phoebe was will yield that the church in Cenchrea met primarily in her home. We also know from other places in Scripture, and from other historical documents, that those who held or hosted churches in their homes, were usually the ones who were teaching or preaching those who gathered. It’s most likely, that Pheobe was the teacher or preacher for the church at Cenchrea. In fact, in another place, Paul calls her a deaconess, charged with the duty of teaching the Word of God.
In 1 Corinthians 1:11, Paul says, “For I have been informed concerning you, my brothers, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you.” Chloe was another women who led a group of the Corinthian church in her home, much like Phoebe. Unlike some in the Corinthian church, she was reported to be faithful to the charge given to the church.
Or Romans 16:3, when Paul says this, “Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus,” Now, I’ll ask you to research Prisca, or Priscilla in one of your questions this week, but for now just know that what we see from her from Scripture is that she and her husband Aquila were fellow apostles along with Paul, and they worked hard to spread the gospel. You’ll even see that she, along with her husband, together, working as a team, corrected some false doctrine of one of their brothers in Christ.
What about Colossians 4:15 when Paul says, “Greet the brothers who are in Laodicea and also Nympha and the church that is in her house.” Much like Phoebe and Chloe, Nympha was likely responsible for teaching and preaching the Word of God to the church that gathered in her home.
Back to Romans 16:7, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.” Junia was a female apostle who at one point was imprisoned with Paul for preaching the gospel!
Contrary to what Paul wrote to Timothy in one verse, Paul generally had high praise for the women who preached and taught God’s Word, sometimes even right along side him! We have to take these passages literally too.
So, we’d be wise to keep going and to next consider the grammatical context. Paul says, “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.”
I said last week that we need to look at the who. Who is doing the action? Who is involved? Who is being addressed, etc? We already know Paul wrote the letter. We already know he wrote it to Timothy. Is there any other “who” in this verse?
We have Paul, the “I” in this verse. We have “a man” which in the Greek is plural and meant to indicate that Paul is talking about all men. And we have “a woman” which in the Greek is singular and indicates that Paul was talking about one woman. Hmm.
Then we should ask, “What woman, Paul?” He doesn’t specifically say, but we do need to consider the grammar here. He’s not encompassing all women with what he said, he was singling someone out. One particular woman. That’s a bit different, isn’t it?
On to the “what”. What is being done here, what is the action? The action is teaching or having authority over men. This has to be considered along with the how. How is the action being done? The answer is that it’s not, at least it shouldn’t be. The woman, Paul is saying, he would not let teach or have authority over men.
I want to point out one more interesting thing about the grammar here, how the words are being used. The word we translate as authority comes from the Greek “authentein”. It is the only time in the entire Bible that this word appears. What that means is that we can’t check this word against Paul’s other letters to see how he uses it in other contexts. What that means is that we don’t actually have an accurate picture of how to translate this word from Paul, who wrote it. The closest we have is other texts, not the Bible, that were written around the same time that use the word “authentein” to mean these things: doer of a massacre, author of crimes, perpetrators of sacrilege, supporter of violent actions, murderer of oneself, sole power, perpetrator of slaughter, murderer, slayer, slayer of oneself, authority, perpetrator of evil, and one who murders by his own hand.
So, maybe we have incorrectly translated this word when we translate it into English? The point is, we can’t know for sure because it’s the only time this word appears in the Bible. We call this a hapax legomenon. It means it only is used once. Language is very complex, and it’s foolish to build an entire church doctrine based on one word that appears one time in the Bible.
We want to also consider the historical context. Here’s what we know about what was happening historically in and around the church in Ephesus. We know that there was a negative cultural attitude toward women in general. Women were lesser than men. Women were meant to serve men, many times in a very demeaning way. Women had no rights, couldn’t vote, couldn’t hold property, couldn’t go to some public places.
Women couldn’t be educated, or at least not educated past a certain age. So, women didn’t have knowledge about how to read or write. They couldn’t go to the synagogues and listen to the rabbi so the only spiritual knowledge that they would have about the Bible would be what their husbands or brothers or fathers or maybe even sons taught to them.
In Ephesus, the temple to the goddess Diana was very popular, and there’s some evidence that a handful of women came out of temple service to the goddess Diana to the church in Ephesus. It’s possible that what they learned as temple servants to a false god wasn’t completely unlearned when they became Christians and then those false doctrines and heresies spread.
This is even more likely when we know that it’s highly unlikely that these former temple servants were educated in any way. We even know that there was a female heretical teacher at Thyatira, which was just 30 miles away from Ephesus.
We also have to consider, that in addition to the women Paul mentioned who did preach and teach the Word of God to men, there are many other women named in the New Testament who did the same work for the Lord: women like Lydia; the mother of John Mark; Tabitha, and even Mary Magdalene. What about the Old Testament? Miriam-Moses’s sister, Deborah-a judge over Israel, Huldah-a prophet of God who taught king Josiah in God’s ways, Esther, Ruth, Abigail, all of whom taught and had authority over men in some way.
So, the last thing we want to do is to let go of our baggage. Maybe you’ve never had an issue with women teaching and preaching, which is good for me, but you’ve always wondered about how this passage fits into the Biblical story. Maybe you grew up in a tradition where women weren’t even allowed to speak in service at all. Set all that aside. What is really being said here? Did Paul really mean to say that no women could preach and teach to men? Or just one woman in particular because she was spreading false doctrines and heresies? Does authority really mean in a position over, or have we mistranslated this and taken it to mean something it doesn’t and built an entire doctrine based off a misinterpretation? What of all the women Paul commends for their teaching of God’s Word to men? Let go of your baggage and hear what the Spirit is saying.
This are the questions I want you to answer this week:
1. Look at Acts 18:24-28. Study a little about Priscilla (Prisca), what other passages in the New Testament does she appear in? What did Paul have to say about this woman? What does verse 26 say about her role when it came to correcting Apollos?
2. Have you ever found yourself guilty of building a doctrine (belief) based on one verse, one word, rather than considering all the contexts involved in a passage? If so, what beliefs come to mind?
3. What kind of baggage do you need to let go of when it comes to this passage of Scripture? Cultural influences? Society influences? Tradition? Personal biases? Be specific, and ask the Spirit to relieve you of this baggage and lead you into a deeper understanding of God’s Word and His ways through this passage.