Craig

Hi everyone,
I have been having a discussion about 1 Tim 2 with a comp friend. He is in 1st year theological college. He asked his Greek lecturer about some of the things I had mentioned. My friend has relayed to me his lecturer’s comments but admits he may not have understood everything perfectly. I was wondering if there are any Greek experts out there with any thoughts? My friend wrote:

“1. re: The identity of the woman in v14b
a) The conjunction ‘gar’/for at the beginning of verse 13 marks quite
strongly the start of a new clause. Therefore the most natural context
for ‘the woman’ in v14b would be in verse 13, that of Eve. It would
seem strange to go all the way back to verse 11 to refer to the woman.
b) As to the anaphoric use of the article, my understanding of what he
said (but not totally confident) was: An article by itself can refer
back to a previous noun that matches gender (kind of like a relative
pronoun). This use is only one of many options for the article which
can be quite flexible. Either way, in light of above, it seems more
natural for ‘the woman’ to refer to Eve in the more immediate context
of verse 13 rather than all the way back in v11, especially going
across the gar conjuction. As to why he called her ‘the woman’ rather than
“Eve”, it could be that he wanted to have a faint echo of v11? Hope that
makes sense.

2. The perfect verb in v14b
   The translation of the perfect as a ‘completed verbal action that
   occurred in the past but which produced a state of being or a result
   that exists in the present’ is apparantly a slightly out-dated idea.
   The more recent understanding is that verbs centre on verbal aspect
   rather than time/tense as they do in English. Please ask about this if
   you want me to try and explain verbal aspect more … anyway from the
   verbal aspect perspective, verse 13 – 14 has the 3 or 4 aorist’ verbs
   then one perfect verb of ‘to become’. This would suggest that the
   Aorist verbs are kind of like the background story while the perfect
   verb is emphasised as the ‘main point’ of the phrase. This is in
   contrast to understanding Greek verbs as primarrly describing
   tense/time so to ask if the woman was alive isn’t really the right
   question to ask of the verb.

3. As to the translation of v11-12, he said given that it the noun for
   woman is singular and indefinite, it would more likely be a general
   statement rather indicating than a specific woman in Ephesus (though I
   think he said that was a possibility).

4. He did briefly defend the NIV translation of verse 15 but it was
   quite brief and I can’t actually remember what he said … sorry!

Any quick comments from anyone would be appreciated before I attempt a reply. Thank you.