gengwall

OK (# 52), now we are getting somewhere. That is a legitimate question to ask me. To what end would Paul need to be generic since Timothy could assume that what applies to “the woman” applies to any subsequent woman like her. Very early on in these discussions I dealt with that. Timothy was young, needed encouragement, and obviously felt he needed to rely heavily on Paul for instructions. Moreover, this was a very dicey situation. I suggest that we can NOT assume Timothy would take the instructions as generic if Paul had been exclusively specific. I suggest that Paul was letting Timothy know that his instructions absolutely could be expanded to other cases through the intentional use of the generic at first. Then Paul finished by dealing with the specifics of Timothy’s test case.

Simlar situations are not necessarily identical. Although general instructions can apply to a point, each case has its unique circumstances as well. Paul developed a general guideline for similar situations so that Timothy had the confidence to move foward (he did this repeatedly in 1 Timothy), but then provided specific encouragement for the specific case that Timothy wrote about and that Paul, quite probably, knew far more details of then we will ever know.

In our work example, it is true for me to say the “nobody should do ‘X'” (a prohibition). But it may not be true for me to say “everbody can fix things if they do ‘Y'”. That solution may only apply to Cheryl.