Top 10 Reasons Why Men Shouldn’t Be Ordained

(one of our commenters posted this and it’s too funny not to share with all of you. thanks chris. :)

10. A man’s place is in the army.

9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.

8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.

7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.

6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.

5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.

4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.

3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.

2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, change the oil in the church vans, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.

1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

Halden on Driscomania

I sometimes suspect that Halden Doerge, one of my favorite theo-bloggers, only blogs about Mark Driscoll because those posts generate such massive comment rolls and visitor traffic.  But this post hits some really good points about the evangelical press’s reactions to Driscoll, and I figured it was worth cross-posting here.  One of the best bits from why do evangelicals care more about cussing than the treatment of women? is thus:

Most everyone is talking about the fact that the problem with Driscoll is the inappropriateness of his language. Its just not okay for you to be talking explicitly about sex and cussing from the pulpit. That’s the downbeat of the current backlash, and that’s the central issue that has framed the current debate among evangelicals that run in these circles. To his credit, MacArthur (who I generally despise, at least theologically if not personally) has put is finger on the more troubling issue here. Namely that Driscoll’s sexual explicitness is all deployed in the interest of coercing women to fulfill whatever sexual whims their husbands might have. As MacArthur rightly points out, Driscoll’s regular sermons on what the Song of Song has to say about sex always ends up pointing out “obligatory acts wives must do if this is what satisfies their husbands, regardless of the wife’s own desire or conscience.” This is the real problem, people.

Lest anyone think Driscoll is being misrepresented here, listen to just a couple quotes from one of these sex sermons: “Ladies, let me assure you of this: if you think you’re being dirty, he’s pretty happy. Jesus Christ commands you to do this.” This is misogyny sexual domination at its worst. From the pulpit we have an evangelical pastor ordering the women in his church to perform any sex act a husband might desire because, after all, Jesus commands this. In the Song of Songs. I guess. 

I’ve intentionally avoided direct contact with Driscoll’s growing web-presence and other mediated messages because he seems like too much of a polarizer for any such contact to do much good.  I know that on a Christian feminism blog, this is far too easy a target, but it seemed worthwhile.

There’s Trajectories, then There’s Trajectories

Tony Jones Interview with Bart Ehrman

Let me get three things out of the way so that I don’t have to clutter the post up with them later:

1. Bart Ehrman is a petulant man-child who gets the press he does because he plays the evil henchman to Ditchkins so nicely.
2. Tony Jones should have taken him to task a number of times for his bad historical methodology, not to mention his inconsistent hermeneutics.
3. Homebrewed Christianity is a fun little podcast and well worth the listen.  And besides that, if you look at their links page, I’m a Deacon!

Alright.  That’s out of my system.  I had meant to link to this episode a while ago because Ehrman, true to form, has taken hold of what he calls “the trajectory theory,” reified it, and dismissed anyone who deviates from what he dreamed up in his university office, and I figured, since I wrote a post about what I called the vector approach to ethics a while back, I should say a thing or two about what Ehrman says and how my hermeneutic differs.

When Ehrman lays out “the trajectory theory,” his working assumption seems to be that it starts in the earliest-composed books and ends with the latest-composed books (and assumes that Bart Ehrman’s dating of things is right), claiming that “women’s roles” get better uniformly as one progresses.  As Tony Jones chuckles along without so much as a “let’s reconsider,” he moves on to the next point.

I’ve not read much Rob Bell (to whom Jones makes reference at this point), but when I talk about ethics as vector, I’m thinking of taking each Biblical text as speaking out of and to a particular moment in history, taking stock of which direction the text moves ethically and how radically that move is (hence vector).  In other words, I don’t look to Titus as some kind of “next step” after 2 Corinthians any more than I expect Isaiah to proceed from Exodus in any simplistic progressive manner.  Instead I look at the assumptions and expectations (the building blocks of culture) that surround men and women in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, then I look at 1 Timothy.

When one reads 1 Timothy and other texts-accused-of-misogyny in that light (as John Howard Yoder did in The Politics of Jesus), one discovers not anything one should call feminism positively but certainly a negation of the systems and structures that make patriarchy intelligible.  In other words, whereas I would not call Paul a feminist writer, I would say that, in the context of the Roman provinces and their culture, he makes space for what I could call feminism.

That making-space, I think, is what makes possible a Christian feminism that does not derive from a positive liberalism but attempts to live together in new ways where Christ breaks open the old wineskins.  Paul did not articulate an intelligibly feminist theology for the same reasons that he did not articulate a post-Hegelian phenomenology, but he does make intelligible moves away from the ontologically strong divisions on national, traditional, and gender lines.  That 20th-century reactionaries used Paul’s texts in order to enforce an order that’s not much to Bart Ehrman’s liking seems a rather shoddy reason for anyone with any historical sense to label the letters of Paul the way he does.

But I already said that in item one already.

At any rate, I’d recommend this podcast to anyone who listens to podcasts, and this episode I commend as an exercise in catching what Tony Jones (who should know better) seems to have missed because he was starstruck by a modern atheist celebrity.

labels, the f-word, and splitting hairs

awhile back makeesha had an excellent post on her blog about feminism and the chaos of labels. something she said has stuck with me all this time. she said:

One thing to keep in mind is that labels are self identifiers, they’re really not intended for us to place on others – they’re for others to place on themselves. In other words, they’re not supposed to be used as a way to judge others or put others in a box based on OUR understanding of that label.

i am reminded of her admonition when i identify myself as a “christian feminist”. christian feminism, as i see it, is a far cry from feminism. all one has to do is look at the wiki on feminism and see the numerous types of feminism there are to know that we are only one specific type of feminism rooted in christian thought. where we agree with the other types of feminism i rejoice and where we disagree i hope to extend grace.

the problem i’ve run into is that the f-word–feminism–is highly controversial. many years ago when i was in college one of my friends asked if i would help her with something. i’m not sure if it was a class assignment or what but i agreed. what we did was go around and informally ask people we knew in our dorm what they thought of the word “feminism”. the results were overwhelmingly negative and i remember internally thinking that i’d never claim to be a “feminist” as i didn’t want that negative baggage attached to me. well, now it’s 20+ years later and in some ways things haven’t changed much, especially in some church circles. 

what i’ve found is when people are engaging in all-or-nothing thinking and  i say i am a “christian feminist” all they hear is “feminist” and i subsequently get pigeonholed into a box in which i most definitely do not fit that is at odds with their belief system and values. maybe i should be more courageous and be willing to say i’m a feminist, but i see christian feminism as being quite different from the secular liberal feminism that many disdain. further, i find it quite disturbing when i see christians unable or unwilling, whichever the case may be, to think in more nuanced terms.

sadly, i’ve seen too many christians swing from one extreme of christianity to another not realizing those are not the only options. usually this is a swing from christian fundamentalism to liberal christianity or vice versa. a psychiatric nurse told me that in psychology there is even a term for this sort of thinking. it is called splitting because the person is unable to view life in a more balanced or moderate fashion but splits everything up into black and white categories, good vs. bad, all or nothing. this is not to say that sometimes things are good vs. bad but i believe it may not be as often as some would have us believe.

as this world we live in is changing many of us have left behind those limiting categories of either/or and moved on to seeing things in a more complex fashion. some associate this with postmodernism with it’s bothand thinking. i know some people think it’s not possible to be a “christian feminist” as “christian” is usually associated with conservatism and “feminism” with liberalism. thankfully, we are moving into an era where the reductionist thinking of modernity, which has a tendency to isolate and marginalize one as the Other, is being replaced by a more generous, complex, and inclusive way of thinking in postmodernity.

Jesus Creed Piece on Junia and Props to our Project

A Woman in the Footnotes

I’ll admit that I’ve traded most of the little text-critical ability I developed in seminary for a rewarding life teaching college English (which might explain why my best-received post was related to Shakespeare), but I do know that Jesus Creed is a high-exposure blog, and it can’t hurt, eh?  The argument itself seems sound enough for a lapsed Greek student like myself.

Also, I should have posted this sooner than this, but life has been hectic of late.  Anyway, our blog got mentioned in my friend and colleague Victoria Reynolds’s paper on conservative “fourth wave” feminism and evangelicalism at Toccoa Falls College’s “Evangelicalism: Then and Now” conference on Friday, February 27.  I have to think that’s partly because her friend Nate is a contributing writer, but I’d like to think that perhaps some of those young evangelicals might visit some day on her account.

And V?  Don’t you think you’d be a great contributing writer here?  Please?  Please?

when i grow up i want to be an old woman

i just love this commercial that features the michelle shocked song “when i grow up”. it’s so nice to see older women being shown in a positive, fun, and humorous light. as i heard a very attractive woman in church say once, ” i don’t try to hide my wrinkles…i’ve earned them!” if a woman living in los angeles among all the starlets can say that then i think we all can. :) 

women in christianity video

this blog hasn’t been update in eons, so i thought i’d post jennifer’s video ‘women in christianity’. some of you may have already seen it, but it really shows how historically women in the church have not been treated as the eikons of God that they truly are. tell me what you think.

 

Tam’d Shrews: A Brief Reflection on Antifeminism

The Shakespeareans I know (and being one myself, I know a few) aren’t entirely sure about how to read and to teach the Bard’s works that take as given certain prejudices common in the Elizabethan era.  Merchant of Venice, for example, is a source of never-ending (good-natured, usually) sparring between one of my colleagues and myself.  She maintains that the play is poking fun at English anti-Jewish bigotry; I think that it made money in the theaters precisely because it reinforced said bigotry.  (Our fights, raging as they do through the English department’s hallways, have become a sort of running joke in the department.)  And so the questions rage: is Othello an early black face minstrel show?  Is the subtext of Romeo and Juliet a working assumption that Italians are trigger-happy goons who marry too young?  What in the world does one do with Caliban from The Tempest?

Deserving at least honorable mention among those plays is the early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. If you’re not familiar with the text of the play or with its best-known movie adaption, Ten Things I Hate about You, the plot involves the family of Baptista, a gentleman in Padua, and his daughters Katherina and Bianca.  Bianca is a most desired bachelorette, largely because of her quiet ways (you knew this was going to be a feminist discussion, right?), but her father refuses to give her hand in marriage until he can find someone who will take the feisty Katherina (the shrew from the play’s title) off of his hands.

Over the course of the play, a young dandy named Petruchio, for reasons that critics cite variously as mercenary questing for dowry money and the challenge of “taming” her, agrees to marry her, then launches on a campaign of psychological abuse–showing up at his own wedding drunk and dragging her off before she can celebrate with friends and family, depriving her of food and sleep, contradicting everything that she says until she’s willing to agree with him on anything–and eventually taming her tongue and fists, thus taming her.  The debate among feminist critics, of course, is whether Shakespeare thinks Petruchio is a brutish boor or just the kind of man the world needs more of.  Being a suspicious Bard-reader myself, I’m inclined towards the latter.

In the final scene of the play (mercifully a scene without analogue in Ten Things), the audience learns quite vividly that Katherina’s violence and sharp tongue have not gone away; she simply has learned to turn them on socially acceptable targets, namely other women:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled-
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience-
Too little payment for so great a debt.

That’s about half the speech.  Again, critics debate whether Kate is a caricature or whether she’s Shakespeare’s ideal woman, but there’s the speech nonetheless.  When she finishes her tirade, Petruchio utters the play’s most famous line (”Kiss me, Kate!”), and the play shortly wraps up.  This week, as I browsed around some threads on The Ooze (I still read occasionally; I just don’t post any more), it occurred to me that The Taming of the Shrew sheds some light on the fact that some of the most vocally anti-feminist Christians are themselves women.

(You were hoping I’d get to a bit of Christian theology eventually, weren’t you?)

Like Shakespeare’s Kate, some of the antifeminists with whom I’ve interacted have no trouble breaking lutes over people’s heads.  (I do confess that I love that scene and the music tutor’s retelling of the story: “And there I stood amazed for a while”)  On the contrary, antifeminists seem to take a degree of pride in “putting in their place” both women and men whose philosophies do not match up with their favorite authors’ or preachers’.  They’re often just as skilled and less scrupulous in the ring when they set to textual brawling.  Such is not to condemn people who have a fighting streak: it’s only to say that it’s not especially becoming in women whose ideology calls on women to be silent in the assembly.  But there’s the rub: because by definition public spaces that allow women are not in these women’s “assemblies,” they use that green light pretty quickly to turn loose, to loose their venom on their fellow women (and on male feminists, if there happen to be any around), perhaps to get some kisses from their Petruchios.

Now I tend to prefer irenic exhanges, in Internet settings and otherwise, not because of any great virtue on my part but because I have no stomach for grand eristic exchanges with other Christians.  (I wouldn’t have made a very good Renaissance academic.)  So do take my suggestion with a grain of salt that perhaps in our exchanges with such Kates, we should not be lured into the violence of the exchange, that our own ethos should be one of mutual submission not only in marriage but among any group of Christians, no matter what the nature.  I know that some folks have a fighting streak more pronounced than mine, but if we are truly on a mission of peace as well as of justice, perhaps our light should shine as a contrast to the Kates of the world.

The Case For Junia, The Lost Apostle

“Greet Andronicus and Junia(s), my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.”–Paul, Romans 16:7

The story of Junia is a sad one. Beginning in the 13th century, her memory was not only diluted, but the fact that she was an “outstanding” female apostle was hidden by medieval copyists who changed her name to the more male-sounding “Junias.” Since the truth has been recovered that Junia was clearly a woman, modern-complementarian translators and scholars now try to strip Junia of the title “apostle,” by concluding that she was merely known by the apostles or favored by the apostles, but could never have been deemed an apostle herself. This is a NEW interpretation. The fact that Paul was commending two apostles was never debated, only whether Junia was female or male, and even that debate did not start until the 13th century. The historical reading of this verse has always been that Junia was both a woman and an apostle. It’s important to note that the early church fathers who conceded to these facts were by no stretch of the imagination “egalitarians.” Many held degrading beliefs about women and their “divinely designated” position in life. But even they could not deny that Paul deemed this woman Junia to be an apostle, and an outstanding one at that.

Two Complementarian Views

1. Junia was really a man

The more hardcore-complementarians still refuse to admit that Junia(s) is a woman, even though for the first 1300 years of church history, ALL commentators of Romans 16:7 believed Junia to be a female AND the male name “Junias” did not even exist during Paul’s era. On the other hand, the Latin/Roman-female-name “Junia” is found in ancient literature of Paul’s time and found nearly 250 times in ancient Roman inscriptions.

The first person to expound on Romans 16:7 was the early church father, Origen of Alexandria (185-253), who understood the name Junia to be feminine. Other prominent church fathers and theologians recognized “Junia” as a woman: Jerome (340), who translated the Latin Vulgate; Hatto of Vercelli (924-961), a bishop and Greek scholar; Theophylact (1050-1108), and Peter Abelard (1079-1142), a French theologian and philosopher. Not a single commentator on the text until Aegidius of Rome (1245-1316) assumed the name to be masculine. Aegidius offered no textual or historical evidence to support his belief that Junia was a man. He simply made the passing comment about how “these two men” must have been honorable.

John Chrysostom, church father from the 4th century, made it crystal clear that Junia was both a woman and an apostle:

“To be an apostle is something great. But to be outstanding among the apostles—just think what a wonderful song of praise that is…how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle.”

Even though the historical and textual evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of rendering “Junia” as a feminine name, complementarians like John Piper and Wayne Grudem cling to the writings of the notoriously disturbed church father, Epiphanius, to “prove” that Junia could have been a man. Epiphanius (315-403) wrote the “Index of Disciples,” in which he lists Junia as one “of whom Paul makes mention [and] became bishop of Apameia of Syria.” Since Epiphanuis wrote the phrase “of whom” as a masculine relative pronoun, Piper and Grudem conclude that Epiphanius believed Junia to be a man. Regardless of what Epiphanius believed about the gender of Junia, it should be noted that he also believed Priscilla was a man! He once wrote that “the female sex is easily seduced, weak and without much understanding. The Devil seeks to vomit out this disorder through women… We wish to apply masculine reasoning and destroy the folly of these women.”

Needless to say, Epiphanius is hardly a credible source. His own writings prove he succumbed to the worst brand of degrading patriarchy. He so despised women that he sought to edit influential ones right out of the scriptures.

New Testament scholar Bernadette Brooten comments on the fictitious male-name Junias:

“To date not a single Latin or Greek inscription, not a single reference in ancient literature has been cited by any of the proponents of the Junias hypothesis. My own search for an attestation has also proved fruitless. This means that we do not have a single shred of evidence that the name Junias ever existed. The feminine Junia, by contrast, is a common name in both Greek and Latin inscriptions and literature. In short, literally all of the philological evidence points to the feminine Junia.”

It’s important to note that not only is the male name “Junias” nonexistent within the New Testament manuscripts, but it does NOT appear even once in ANY ancient manuscripts, sacred or secular.

The feminine name Junia, however, is found in ancient Greek literature AND appears nearly 250 times in ancient Roman inscriptions.

Bible Scholar Richard Bauckman links the Latin/Roman name Junia to the Greek name Joanna. This would explain the title of apostle. In “Women in the Heart of God” by writers from Christian Thinktank, Bauckman’s theory is elaborated upon:

Recent argumentation by Bauckham makes a strong case that not only is this word-noun-name feminine, but also that it is the Latin-ized version of Joanna (one of Jesus’ traveling companions/disciples—cf Luke 8.3 and 24.10)! Joanna was the wife of Herod’s steward, and would have had a Latin/Roman name for purposes of administration. This identification would make the most sense of the name, her relation to Rome, her being ‘in Christ’ before Paul, and of her apostolic status (as a witness of Jesus’ deeds and resurrection—Acts 1).

2. Junia was merely known by the apostles

This interpretation asserts that Junia was most likely a woman, but was simply well known to the apostles or highly favored by the apostles, but was not an apostle herself. However, if this was the correct and most natural understanding of Romans 16:7, then copyists would not have stooped so low as to blatantly changing the text. This was a desperate and theologically-motivated alteration to change the gender of Junia without any textual or historical warrant. If the verse simply meant that a woman was well known by the apostles, there would have been no controversy, no deceptive tactics to mask Junia’s gender in male trappings in the first place. No one on either side of the debate ever questioned whether Paul was deeming these two apostles, but only whether or not Junia was male or female. So, this new interpretation emerged as a last ditch effort in the face of indisputable evidence that Junia was, in fact, a woman. It aims to disprove the notion that a woman could ever be a rightful apostle.

A report from BBC on Adronicus and Junia pointed out:

“The most natural way to read the Greek phrase is that both were apostles; some modern interpreters have rejected this reading mainly because they presuppose that women could never fill this office.”

The original Greek (nor the historical reading) does not support this complementarian interpretation. It’s basically grammatical gymnastics employed to cast flimsy doubt upon the validity of a woman apostle.

The fact that Junia was imprisoned with Paul should tell us that this woman was a public figure who was considered a leader in the church. The whole point of Romans arresting and killing christians was to make an example of the boldest ones and most influential ones, so other christians would be deterred from following suit. Had this woman remained “silent” in the assemblies and never dared to preach/teach the gospel to men, it hardly makes sense as to why she would find herself behind bars. History bears witness to the fact that the large majority of christians captured, imprisoned, and martyred were public figures and leaders within the early church, men and women alike (more on that in an upcoming post).

Below are two excellent articles on Junia. Both examine the evolution of Junia’s name from feminine to masculine and the original wording of this passage in the Greek. I highly recommend reading both articles to get a better grasp on the implications of the original language and the ugly reality of how Junia’s gender was masked for nearly 8 centuries. These two articles take a more in depth look into the original language. They have done such an excellent job, that I feel no need to regurgitate their findings here. :)

Junia, A Woman Apostle By Dianne D. McDonnell
Junia, The Female Apostle: Resolving The Interpretive Issues of Romans 16:7 by Dennis J. Preato

The Mistranslation of 1 Timothy 2:11-12

“Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.”–Paul, 1 Timothy 2:11-12

Paul’s letters are already difficult to interpret because they are like listening to one side of a telephone conversation, but faulty translations only further complicate our understanding of his words. There are a few key words that are conveniently mistranslated in 1 Timothy 2: 11-15.

Hesuchios/Hesuchia: Traditionalists normally translate this word as “silence” (at least in passages concerning women), but the word in all other places is translated as “peacefulness” “Peaceable” or “quietness.” The word does not carry the meaning of literal silence or absence of speech, but of an atmosphere or presence in which learning should take place. Strong’s Greek Dictionary defines hesuchios/hesuchias as “properly, keeping one’s seat,” “stillness” “undisturbed,” “undisturbing,” and “peaceable.”

When Paul has absence of speech in mind, he uses the term “sigao.” The same word is used just nine verses earlier and is translated as “peaceable,” 1 Timothy 2:1-2. Hesuchios/hesuchia is translated as quiet/quietness in 1 Thess. 4:11, 2 Thess. 3:12, 1 Peter 3:4. None of these verses are about silence, as in the literal absence of speech, but a tranquil quietness or peaceable presence/environment. This fits the context much better than a literal silence, since Paul just rebuked the men in the congregation for praying while angry and quarreling. Obviously, this would NOT be the optimum environment for anyone to learn in. Thus, Paul tells Timothy to make sure the woman can learn in quietness or peacefulness, and not amid the chaos that was taking over church meetings.

Paul also instructs that women should learn in full submission. This is not a unique request asked only of women, but men are also suppose to learn in full submission to the gospel and sound teaching. The reason this command is directed toward women here is only because teaching women in the same way as men was still a revolutionary practice and still repulsive to many men, believers or not.

Now, onto the grand-daddy of mistranslations and controversy….

“…nor to have authority over [authentein] a man…”

Exousia is the normal word used for “authority,” a carrying out of one’s official duties. But this is not the word Paul uses here. He instead picks the word authentein and it is the ONLY time this word appears in the New Testament. Exousia, however, appears over 100 times. Other uses of authentein from the same time period show that this word does not simply mean legitimate or routine authority, but carries violent, sexual, and dominating meanings.

Authentein.

It cannot be stressed enough how unusual this word is, especially for Paul. Paul writes about authority quite a bit and he never uses authentein as a synonym for legitimate, godly authority. For most mentions of authority, he uses exousia. Louw and Nida’s Lexicon lists 12 common ancient Greek words that are synonyms for routine or legitimate authority, exousia being the most common throughout the new testament. There are 47 words that are synonyms for legitimate “rule” or “governing.” Yet Paul uses none of these words in 1 Timothy 2:11, he chooses the unusual authentein.

We do not find any evidence that authentein, in any of its forms, connotates a routine or legitimate authority until the late third to fourth centuries, far too removed from Paul’s era to provide relevant meanings and contexts. And even once the word took on a less severe meaning in later centuries, THIS passage was ALWAYS been understood as Paul forbidding women to dominate a man, not simply exercise legitimate Christ-like authority. Consider these early translations:

Old Latin Version from the second – fourth century translates this verse as “I permit not a woman to teach, neither to dominate a man {neque dominari in viro}.

The Vulgate, from the second to fourth century, translates this verse as “I permit not a woman to teach, neither to domineer over a man {neque dominari in virum}.

“There is a basically unbroken tradition, stemming from the oldest version and running down to the twenty first century, that translates authentein as “to dominate” and not “to exercise authority over.”-Linda Belleville

It is not until the 1500s that the verb authentein used in this verse changes from the drastically negatively-charged “to dominate/domineer” to a slightly water-downed phrase, “to usurp authority” (thanks, King James). Still different from exercising legitimate authority, but much less forceful than the violent and even sexual connotations of the original authentein. The King James version asserts that women are not to wrestle authority or seize it from men. No believer is permitted to usurp authority or act in self-interest over others. It is not until after World War II that authentein really gets the botched-translated: “to exercise/assume authority over.” That’s right, less than 80 years ago! So, the notion that women may never exercise godly authority within the body based on this verse is completely unbiblical, both logically and historically.

Exegetical Fallacies in Interpreting 1 Timothy 2:11–15
This is by far the best article I’ve read on 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Linda Belleville, a new testament professor, put together a thorough and compelling paper on 5 exegetical fallacies concerning 1 Timothy 2:11-12 : Contextual/historical, Lexical, Grammatical, Cultural, and Doctrinal. She provides a thorough survey of the early uses of authenteo, in all its forms. This is a MUST read to gain a proper understanding of the egalitarian position.

Catherine C. Kroeger also put together a brilliant survey of authentein (and all it’s sister-nouns/adjectives) uses from before Paul up until the third and fourth centuries. I would particularly challenge Tonya and Catrina to read these articles in full before giving me CBMW rebuttals. :)

These combined articles find that early uses of authentein (in its noun, verb, and adjective forms) collectively mean “criminal mastermind,” “a perpetrator,” “one who slays with his own hand,” “self-murder,” “women who can command domestic and sexual services from their male concubines,” “incestuous sex and murder,” “religious sexual orgies,” “to dominate,” “to control,” “to restrain,” and “to domineer.”

Hardly the meaning we find in modern translations of 1 Timothy 2:11.

One of the earliest meanings to authentein is the act of murder or the act of violence.

Wisdom of Solomon 12:6, an apocrypha book translated into ancient Greek, considered “scripture” by both Jews and Christians until the second century AD, uses a form of authentein.

“With their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous crew, and the parents, that killed with their own hands [authentas] souls destitute of help.”

Ancient Greek grammarians and lexicographers define authentein as “to dominate,” “to control, restrain, and domineer.” It is also classified as a “vulgar” term, possibly because of it’s sexual uses.

Other notable uses of the word include:

Josephus, the famous Jewish historian from Paul’s own time, used the noun form, authenten, to describe the “author” of a poisonous drink. Diodorus of Sicily wrote about the “sponsors” (authentas) of daring plans and the “perpetrators” (authentas) of a crime. John Chrysostom, an early church father, used the same word, authentia to express “sexual license” or perverse sexual practices. Clement, another early church father, linked the word with women involved in sexual orgies.

Catherine Kroeger makes an excellent analysis of the implications of the original meaning of authentein:

“Chrysostom [the early church father] uses autheritia to denote “sexual license.” If the word in this context refers to sexual behavior, it puts a quite different interpretation on the entire passage. For instance, if we were to translate the passage, ‘I forbid a woman to teach or discuss higher algebra with a man,’ we would understand the prohibition to be directed against instruction in mathematics. Suppose it read, ‘I forbid a woman to teach or talk Japanese with a man.’ Then we infer that the injunction applies to the teaching of language. ‘I forbid a woman to teach or dangle a man from a high wire’ would presuppose that the instructor was an aerialist. ‘I forbid a woman to teach or engage in fertility practices with a man’ would imply that the woman should not involve a man in the heretical kind of Christianity which taught licentious behavior as one of its doctrines. Such a female heretic did indeed ‘teach to fornicate’ in the Thyatiran church mentioned in Revelation 2:20 (cf. 2:14f.; Num. 25:3; 31:15f.).

Too often we underestimate the seriousness of this problem for the New Testament church. A passage in 2 Peter expresses concern not only for those drawn into this error but also for the illegitimate children which it produced:

‘But Israel had false prophets as well as true; and you likewise will have false teachers among you. . . . Having eyes full of adultery, that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls, an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children which have forsaken the right way … following the way of Balaam…. They utter big empty words, and make of sensual lusts and debauchery a bait to catch those who have barely begun to escape from their heathen environment (2:1,14f.,18).’”

Others have conducted in depth word studies on authentein with similar results…

Dr. David H. Scholer sites Leeland Edward Wilshire’s exhaustive study of the word authentien.

“Wilshire is the first to use the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) computer database, which contains virtually all three thousand ancient Greek authors from Homer to A.D. 600. The database showed that authentein and its cognates occurred about 330 times and over a large number of centuries almost exclusively meant “a perpetrator of a violent act, either murder or suicide.”

But there is no evidence from the first century that authentein means ordinary or legitimate authority. Nothing exists until the late third and fourth centuries to suggest other meanings, and even then, the verse in question still translates authentein as “dominating men” or “domineer over men.”

Paul is not allowing a woman to teach others to dominate men, to teach the domination of men, nor to dominate a man themselves, but to be peaceable (heshucias). This verse has nothing to do at all with mature, trained christian women exercising their spiritual gifts and serving the body through teaching, preaching, or leading. These were women led astray by false teaching, whom Paul is correcting in these verses and who must start at the beginning with full submission to the gospel and sound teaching.

He ties in the creation story to draw a correlation between Eve being deceived by the voice of false teaching and these women. It is a reminder to the church of the devastating effects of false teaching and deception.

I know someone is going to say, “Well, if Paul is forbidding dominating others as opposed to holding mere authority and it’s wrong for all believers to dominate each other, why does Paul only address this to women?” Consider that HERE IN THIS LETTER, Paul is correcting the ones exhibiting specific behaviors. Consider that Paul only tells the men to lift up holy hands in prayer without anger or disputing. Now, just because he only directs the men here in this verse, does that mean women shouldn’t lift up holy hands? Does it mean women are free to be angry and constantly disputing in or out of church? Of course not. But the men in the body were the ones exhibiting this behavior, so Paul only addresses them, even though it’s inappropriate for all believers to behave that way. Likewise, he only addresses the women about dominating and seizing authority through false teachings, possibly sexual ones, because they were the ones doing it in this instance.

Consider this reality of ancient Greek culture pointed out by Catherine Koeger:

“Virtually without exception, female teachers among the Greeks were courtesans, such as Aspasia, who numbered Socrates and Pericles among her students. Active in every major school of philosophy, these hetairai (high-class, intellectual prostitues) made it evident in the course of their lectures that they were available afterwards for a second occupation. But the Bible teaches that to seduce men in such a manner was indeed to lead them to slaughter and the halls of death (cf. Prov. 2:18; 5:5; 7:27; 9:18). The verb authentein is thus peculiarly apt to describe both the erotic and the murderous.”

It becomes overwhelming clear from the the well-documented culture of Ephesus coupled with the original word meanings used in 1 Timothy 2:11-12, that this mandate is not a prohibition against all women teaching/preaching/leading in the church. It’s simply absurd to keep gifted and qualified women from teaching the truth of the gospel, leading church bodies in the ways of Jesus, or simply contributing their gifts by vocally participating in the gatherings of the entire body because of a verse that was originally a disciplinary action against women at Ephesus. who were lead astray by false teaching.