Cheryl Schatz

Andrew, welcome to my blog!

Unfortunately the view that you have of these hard verses is typical of the unsatisfying answer we have had for many years. Paul is indeed talking about deception and false teaching throughout the book of 1 Timothy, but the grammar changes to a current situation in Ephesus. There is no way logically we can take Paul’s words and create a ban against Eve (and all women) when God did not pronounce a judgment of “no teaching” against her in the garden. Also it makes an extremely unsatisfying answer why Eve’s deception would cause her inability to teach only men. Why not ban her from teaching women and children?

Paul isn’t saying that women’s nature (the way that God created them) is one of deception. That would make God the origin of what is “not good” as His original creation would be faulty, defective and the gifts He gives women in teaching would be ill advised.

It also makes women’s salvation to have an additional factor of works to provide a “service”. How are single women going to be “saved”? How are single women going to provide a service? And what about married women who are barren?

What we need to do is compare what we think Paul meant in these verses to what he said in the entire book and in his dealings with women. Paul never held them back or said teachers like Priscilla should not be teaching men nor did he remind the men to look out for the “easily deceived” women who were working right alongside Paul. Surely they should not have been working in the gospel but staying at home providing a “service” in making more children.

Instead of fanciful additions to the Scripture in saving women through child birth and blaming the woman’s deception on her nature rather than the serpent and the man who listened but was not deceived, let’s work through this passage in a manner that fits the rest of Paul’s writings to Timothy and the Church and not create a “law” that restricts women when no such “law” was ever produced in the church before or after Paul’s letter to Timothy.