Michael Terran

1 Tim Cha 2.

The key to understanding the present
passage, then, is to recognize that it is commanding that women, too, should be allowed to study and learn, and should not be restrained from doing
so (v. 11). They are to be “in full submission”; this is often taken to mean “to the men,” or “to their husbands,”
but it is equally likely that it refers to their attitude, as learners, of submission to God or to the gospel—which of course would be the same attitude required of male learners. Then the crucial verse 12 need not be read as “I do not allow a woman to teach or hold authority over a man”—the translation which has caused so much difficulty in recent years. It can equally mean (and in context this makes much more sense): “I don’t mean to imply that I’m now setting up women as the new authority over men in the same way that previously men held authority
over women.” Why might Paul need to say this?

Read Acts Cha. 19:21-41
There are some signs in the letter that it was originally sent to Timothy while he was in Ephesus. And one of the main things we know about religion in Ephesus is that the primary religion—the biggest temple, the most famous shrine—was a female-only cult. The Temple of Artemis (that’s her Greek name; the Romans called her Diana) was a massive structure which dominated the area; and, as befitted worshippers of a female deity, the priests were all women. They ruled the show and kept the men in their place.

Now if you were writing a letter to someone in a small, new religious movement with a base in Ephesus, and wanted to say that because of the gospel of Jesus the old ways of organizing male and female roles had to be rethought from top to bottom, such that the women were to be encouraged to study and learn and take a leadership role, you might well want to avoid giving the wrong impression. Was the apostle saying, people might wonder, that women should be trained up so that Christianity would gradually become a cult like that of Artemis, where women did the leading and kept the men in line?

That, it seems to me, is what verse 12 is denying. Paul is saying, like Jesus in Luke 10, that women must have the space and leisure to study and learn in their own way, not in order that they may muscle in and take over the leadership as in the Artemis cult, but rather so that men and women alike can develop whatever gifts of learning, teaching, and leadership God is giving them.