Peter Kirk

Thanks. Yes, this is starting to make sense. But I must get on with my Bible translation work – which today happens to be a check of 1 Timothy, so what I have learned from this thread may help me.

Well, I didn’t say I could understand the Bergen book, only that I have it! But I have worked on a translation of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the Greek NT, and so I do know a little Hebrew.

I now understand the issue you had with Genesis 2:8,19. In Bergen’s book Randall Buth rightly argues that NIV’s use of pluperfect tenses in these verses (“had planted… had formed” – apparently an attempt to harmonise these verses with chapter 1) is without linguistic justification. Buth writes: “What is happening here is that the creation story is purposely told from two different perspectives in chapter 1 and chapter 2”. This is equally clear in the Hebrew and the LXX Greek text, but may have been clarified in the Apostle’s Bible translation of LXX which you mentioned. So, yes, in chapter 2 there do seem to be acts of creation after the formation of the man, but before the formation of the woman who in fact seems to be the last to be created, the final crown of creation. So Adam would have witnessed this further creation and so been better educated than Eve. I still don’t see the relevance of this to the situation in 1 Timothy 2, but then maybe I need to get the DVD.

Thank you, Cheryl. You may well be right about the two groups of false teachers. Certainly the ones in verses 3 and 6 had not gone as far as Hymenaeus and Alexander had, and so had not been put out of the congregation. But they were potential teachers. I suppose the point is that they had not yet become like H&A, but were perhaps heading in that direction and were to be stopped before the situation went so far. But surely heterodidaskein in verse 3 means something like “to teach false doctrine”, and the present infinitive here implies that they were not stop doing it, not just not to start. In verse 19, however, the group seems to have rejected conscience rather than faith, and Paul’s action in delivering two of them to Satan suggests that they had not voluntarily left the church. But I agree with you on the basic point that “Paul wants the deceived ones to be taught and the deliberate deceivers he shuns them until they have learned how to stop their blasphemous ways.”

Thanks also for the Bergen reference. This book happens to be on my bookshelf. But I will make that a separate comment simply because I must now take a break and don’t want to leave unsaved material.

Why have you set things up on this blog so that biblical references are automatically linked to the website of ESV, a version which (as documented at the Better Bibles Blog) is fundamentally distorted (e.g. at 2 Timothy 2:2) towards a position opposite to that which you are promoting?

But at least ESV gives a reasonable rendering at 1 Timothy 1:3, whereas it is NIV (“certain men”) which is fundamentally misleading here. For the Greek word tines is clearly gender generic; the text gives no indication of whether these false teachers were male or female. But it is interesting that whereas at 2 Timothy 2:2 the ESV translators manipulated the text to rule out the possibility of women teaching the truth, they seem to have no problem with the idea of false teachers being women!

But I must say I am not convinced by point 4 above. It seems to me that the tines, “certain people” or “some”, of verse 19 are the same as those of verses 3,6. This group include two named men, but that of course does not imply that there were not also women in the group. The same misunderstanding continues in point 11: it is not true that “Paul never educates the deceivers“, for in 1:20 he takes steps that they may “learn”, using a Greek word explicitly of education and discipline; the intention is not to “shun” these people but to restore them.

But this small quibble doesn’t invalidate the main point here. The real issue is with the rather strange “a woman” and “a man”.

I don’t understand point 16. I don’t have the rather presumptuously named (and probably mis-apostrophed) “Apostle’s Bible”, but in the LXX of which it is supposed to be a translation there is nothing in Genesis 2:8,19, nor indeed anywhere between the creation of Adam and of Eve, to suggest that God taught anything to Adam which was not taught to Eve. Well, I guess Adam learned some zoology from naming the animals and birds, but that is in my Bible as well as in the supposedly apostolic version.

Actually if the subject in the first part of verse 15 is not the woman of verse 14, there is nothing to suggest that this refers to a woman rather than a man – since you don’t understand “through the childbirth” to mean that this person personally gives birth to a child. But I accept that it does most likely refer back to the woman of vv.11-12.

Yes, this exegesis does make sense. I wouldn’t claim that it is the only possible exegesis. But I think it is very reasonable to suppose, especially in the context of the negative word authentein, that didaskein “teach” in 2:12 refers to false teaching. And that in itself is enough to demonstrate that it is unsafe to rely on this passage to forbid all women from ever teaching Christian truth.