Kristen
2010-10-28
Actually, Pinklight, I did make a claim that the phrase translated “husband of one wife” in most English translations is indeed gender-inclusive in the original Greek. The actual phrase is a Greek idiom, literally rendered “one-woman man.” The thing is that the masculine gender in the Greek language is inclusive, just as the masculine gender in the English language used to be. Even today in English, we still understand the word “men” in some contexts to mean “humans” — “men and women” — particularly if we’re reading an old book (including most translations of the Bible).
It is my understanding that the only time you can use the feminine gender in the Greek language is if you’re talking about a group that is all women; hence, the use of the term “wife of one husband” (literally, “one-man woman”) to describe qualified widows (females only) later in the same letter to Timothy. But if you have a group of both women and men, and you are going to talk about them as a group, you would call them “men,” and if you were going to talk about them being faithful to their spouses, you would call them “one-woman men.”
Here is a link to Philip Payne, Greek scholar, explaining this (and quoting certain complementarian Greek scholars who admit that “one-woman man,” in and of itself, does not exclude women from the group.
http://www.pbpayne.com/?p=426
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