Paula

The problem again is that this “she/they” isn’t in a vacuum. It is a conditional statement, and the condition is “remain faithful”. This isn’t a matter of what sounds right in English, or even English grammar, but of (1)basic reasoning and (2)an absence of precedent.

(1) The salvation of “she” depends upon the faithfulness of a pair or group. Why specify only that this is true of women? Where are the men in this discussion? Elsewhere when it’s clear that Paul is addressing groups of people he always includes all who are affected by the teaching: husband/wife, master/slave, Jew/Greek, etc. But here there is only mention of a woman or women, and it clearly is about false teaching. Are we to presume that only the women there were teaching falsehood, and only the women needed to quiet down and learn, and only women were forbidden to authenteo? And as stated repeatedly, it ignores the shifts in number, even within a sentence.

In other words, what is technically possible is often logically nonsensical. It reminds me of the Pharisees and their “any clause” reasoning. They were masters of minutia, nitpickers to the nth degree. Surely you’ve heard the expression about the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law… well, the argument that “she/they” could possibly and technically refer to “she” as a group disregards the context or “spirit” of the passage and the letter, as well as the whole of scripture, making Paul contradict himself at the very least.

(2) There is not one other instance in all of scripture that matches this construction. It’s either “s/he will… if s/he” (whether it is understood to refer to an individual or not), or “they will… if they”. Like the rare words authenteo and teknogonias, this construction is found nowhere else, so the context here is all we have to go on. Yet it must be consistent with all Paul’s teachings and his grammatical usage.