Chris

Cheryl,

Okay, you got me to tweak my understanding of the pronoun-antecedent relationships in 1 Tim 2:8-15 a little. There are some difficulties, though I’m not sure they are insurmountable, with making ‘she’ from verse 15 explicitly refer to ‘the woman’ in verse 14. I could still go with the inferred antecedent explanation, but here’s a way of thinking about it that avoids those issues better:
In verses 8-10 Paul is giving exhortations to men (plural) and women (plural). Then, in verses 11-12, he uses the indefinite noun phrases ‘a woman’ and ‘a man’ because he intends to argue from the representative man and woman, Adam and Eve, to establish his conclusion. In verses 13-14 Adam and Eve represent any man and any woman because they are the prototypical man and woman (see Belleville). So, ‘she’ in verse 15 becomes any woman from verses 11-12 who is represented by ‘the woman’. Keep in mind that Eve represents any woman. ‘[T]he woman’ in verse 14 is Eve. So, ‘the woman’ represents any woman. Consequently, ‘they’ in verse 15 refers back to those women in verses 9-10, each of whom is represented by the woman Eve. The difference between ‘she’ and ‘they’ is not in the set of women to which the pronouns refer, but in how the set is used. ‘[S]he’ refers to any woman in the set, but ‘they’ refers to every woman in the set. So, the method of reference is different.

In my understanding, there is a chiastic structure in this passage that goes like this:

A. Christian ‘women’ (plural) (8-10)
B. ‘a woman’ (singular indefinite noun) (11-12)
C. ‘Eve’ (generic / representative woman) (13)
C. ‘the woman’ (generic / representative woman) (14)
B. ‘she’ has the antecedent ‘a woman’ (15a)
A. ‘they’ has the antecedent ‘women’ (15b)

I think this avoids any grammatical “impossibilities”.