Cheryl

Sam,

I don’t think that these kinds of conversations expose ignorance at all. I think they are wonderful at helping us as Christians to experience “iron sharpening ironâ€.

When I first understood that “aner” and “gune” together in a passage in relationship should be translated as husband and wife, I pondered on the same type of reasoning that you came up with. I thought perhaps that if a wife was to judge her husband’s prophecy along with the others and she found him wrong, that would embarrass him. However as I expanded my look at the verses to a larger view to include the entire chapter as well as chapter one where false deceived teachers are introduced, that view just didn’t make sense in the bigger picture. I found I had more problems than I could answer.

Now in your explanation that only the man was entrusted to carry or be the repository for Jesus’ words of life or the gospel, that would sound reasonable due to the restrictions on women at the time, but it has a big problem. The problem is that Jesus entrusted women with the gospel and Paul could not forbid what Jesus allowed.

For example to whom did the angel first reveal the good news that Jesus was risen? It was to the women at the tomb. In Matthew 28:7 the angel told the women to tell the good news to the disciples. In verse 10 Jesus meets them in person and tells them to pass on his message to the disciples. Here the women were the repository of the good news. When Jesus was still alive on the earth, the woman at the well was another woman whom Jesus talked to about the gospel and she went and spread the message in the town. In the New Testament and in the history of the early church no woman was ever stopped from giving out the gospel.

Rather than stopping the giving out of the gospel by women, verse 12 should rather be looked on as a verse surrounded by the problem of deception. If one takes into consideration the fact that Paul never told Timothy to forbid godly Christian women from teaching correct biblical doctrine (or the gospel for that matter!) to men, and his only concern was false doctrine and false teachers, verse 12 can attach it’s prohibition only onto the deception of Eve and the stopping of false deceived teachers from chapter one. There is no other explanation given and if we work outside the given context of deception and false teachers, we must read another explanation into the text. I think we are better off sticking to the context of false teachers and see how that fits first.

The last test of any view is how it fits with verse 15. In your view we would input it into verse 15 as “she (the woman who passes on the gospel to men) will be saved if all women continue on in faith, love and holiness with self-control. The problem fitting it into verse 15 is that it questions the salvation of the one passing on the gospel. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Also how does what all women do, relate to the salvation of the one who passes on the gospel to men? I think it makes much more sense that the question of whether one is saved or not is questioned because of false teaching, not because of speaking forth of the gospel.

You may need to ponder this for awhile. It is a new thought for you, I am sure. If you read through chapters one and two again and watch how easily and without forcing the explanations I gave, fit into the context verse after verse after verse. And when the last verse is considered, which is the questioning of her salvation in verse 15, the package is neatly tied up and it all makes sense. If you can do that with any other explanation going verse by verse through chapters one and two, I would love to hear it.