An implication of Paul’s statements is the responsibility of Christian men and leaders to educate women, and this would have stood out in the ancient world as a progressive ideal. As Keener states it, Paul “supports learning before speaking.”4 He adds that such an educational process would not “prohibit women in very different cultural settings from speaking God’s word.”5 Furthermore, we must pay special attention to the fact that women today are not uneducated—in fact, some male pastors are! This passage testifies to the importance of education—of knowing the Bible and theology and having pastoral gifts and skills—and once those basics are met, anyone with gifts should be encouraged to use their gifts.
This message in 1 Corinthians 14 is completely explored in 1 Timothy 2. So, let’s look at this most famous of silencing passages.
Silencing the Women at Ephesus
Because Paul’s instruction for the elders in Ephesus (note that Timothy was in Ephesus when Paul wrote this letter to him; see 1 Timothy 1:3) to silence women is a blue parakeet passage used by some to silence women, and because many think such a view is politically incorrect, the passage itself has become a blue parakeet and has been silenced by both sides!
A Brief Sketch
I begin with a brief summary of 1 Timothy 2:9–15. In this sketch I will anticipate some points I will clarify a little later.6 Before doing so, let me call attention to the significance of this passage in the history of the church—in particular, to its significance in the shaping of how the Great Tradition has understood the role of women in church ministries. This passage is number one in restricting women’s ministries from public teaching and preaching. In this and the next chapter, I will push against that Tradition. But because this passage has had such an enormous impact, I am asking you to plow through it with me. In the next chapter we will explore some of these verses in more detail.
Modesty (1 Timothy 2:9–10)
I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.
First, Paul expects the women to whom he is speaking to dress modestly; by that he means they are not to dress elaborately or to demonstrate their high status by their clothing nor are they to dress seductively but instead are to focus their attention on “good deeds.” The reason for this has to do with the respectability of the gospel and the church, and as we will explain in the next chapter, Paul is concerned with the influence of the new Roman women who threatened the reputation of the gospel by using public worship as an opportunity for finding a husband (more in the next chapter on this).
Learning before Teaching (1 Timothy 2:11–12)
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.
Second, and I highlight these verses because they are our concern here, Paul expects women first to learn in quietness and full submission to those who know, and only then does he say they are not to teach or exercise authority. Learning women—and this now sounds like 1 Corinthians 14—are to “be quiet.” Paul does not say that women are always to sit in the learning posture and never to be teachers; he does not say they are forever to remain silent, for that would contradict the WDWD passages and practices in the early churches. The main idea in this verse is that women are to become learners.
Adam and Eve (1 Timothy 2:13–14)
For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
Third, in these two verses Paul anchors the silencing of unlearned women in two points: (1) Adam was “formed first,” and (2) Eve was first to be deceived. These two statements surprise the reader. It is entirely possible Paul is responding to the new Roman women, whom we will describe in the next chapter. These new Roman women could have been claiming that the gender order should be reversed, with women subordinating men, and that the original creation was first females and then males.
We cannot be sure why Paul says what he says here. However one interprets these verses—and let’s be honest enough to say they are difficult—if we make them an inflexible rule that women should always be silent, we have a flat-out contradiction to the Story of the Bible, to the practices of Priscilla and Junia and Phoebe, and to Paul himself. My personal opinion is that Paul is responding to the claims of new Roman women that women were superior to men because they were prior to men in creation.
Childbearing and Salvation (1 Timothy 2:15)
But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
Fourth, Paul continues to say that if women—and here he is speaking to married women—continue in the faith, they will be “saved through childbearing.” Once again, no one knows for certain what this verse means. Many today think the verse has something to do with the new Roman women’s avoidance of marriage while others also suggest that he is responding to the growing attraction on the part of the new Roman women to terminate their pregnancies because motherhood was unworthy of them. Yes, if this is so, we may have an allusion to abortion in the New Testament. Paul discerns that these Christian (and married) women need to know that being married and being mothers are worthy vocations for women. (By the way, Paul is not here advocating that all women must be married.)
We must now examine the cultural context of Paul so we can discern both what he was saying in his day and in his way and how we can live this out in our day and in our way.
CHAPTER 18
SILENCING THE BLUE PARAKEET (2)
Women in Church Ministries 5
Kris and I once participated in a church where some women wore “head coverings” whenever we assembled for worship and teaching. These women (and their husbands) believed they were following Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 11:6, which reads: “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.”
There was some discussion, because of a book in the 1980s, about whether Paul meant a cloth head covering or just long hair drawn up over the head. More importantly, many of us had discerned a more historical intent to Paul’s words. We knew the research that suggested that the women at Corinth were “letting their hair hang down.” We knew that unkempt hair was how prostitutes dressed. So we discerned that Paul was concerned about how this appearance by women would impact the reputation of the gospel. These loose-haired women, in Paul’s opinion, gave off the suggestion that the Christian gatherings were sexual in nature.
One of my closest friends, a brilliant scholar of the New Testament, made this observation about the situation at our church in light of the context of Paul’s words: “Scot, some at your church don’t seem willing to ask if insisting on head coverings might do the opposite of what Paul was actually doing.” In other words, insisting on head coverings does as much (if not more) damage to the gospel today as not wearing head coverings did in the first century. How so? If we demand women do something so totally contrary to culture that non-Christians are offended or turned off, we should reconsider what we are doing. Paul didn’t want the dress of Christian women to bring a bad name to the gospel, so he asked them to wear head coverings; by contrast, demanding women to wear head coverings in our world may do the very same damage to the gospel. (In fact, I’m quite sure it would.)
My friend was right. Context is everything. Knowing context permits deeper and wiser discernment. So what was the historical context to Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:9–15?
NEW ROMAN WOMEN IN EPHESUS: Dress, Public Discourse, Anti-Marriage
When Paul wrote his letters to the Christians in Corinth and to Timothy in Ephesus, a gender and sexual revolution was observable in many of the major cities of the Roman Empire. What some today are calling the “new Roman woman”—
whether this description is the most accurate isn’t as important as knowing what was “in the air” when Paul was writing—describes an aggressive, confrontational public presence on the part of women during the very time Paul was writing these letters. The following paragraphs discuss its characteristics, and you can look at Appendix 4 for a specific text that illustrates the sort of thing Paul probably was referring to. Three features of the new Roman woman set our passage in its historical context.
First, the new Roman woman was expressing her newfound freedoms in immodest, sexually provocative, and extravagant dress. Rome was not terribly conservative, but these women were flouting even the limits of the Romans. A text I had not seen until a couple years back is a first-century Roman novel called Anthia and Habrocomes (sometimes called Ephesiaca). For some reason this text is nearly totally ignored or unknown to many New Testament readers. It describes a love affair, a glorious one, between Anthia and Habrocomes, two social elites of Ephesus. Some recent scholars date this novel to about AD 50, in other words, at about the time Paul is in Ephesus. Besides the love affair’s winding and twisting through the Mediterranean cities, there are two text features in Anthia and Habrocomes that demonstrate that Paul was worried about the influence of women connected to the Artemis cult in the church at Ephesus. Recall Paul’s words about modesty: “Not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls.” In Anthia and Habrocomes the young folks are in a procession through Ephesus and down to the Temple of Artemis, and this is what is said of Anthia’s appearance: “Her hair was golden—a little of it plaited” (1.2). Nearly exact words as one finds in 1 Timothy 2. But this is what matters even more. The young folks get to the temple itself and during the worship service, this is what the author (Xenophon of Ephesus) writes:
And so when the procession was over, the whole crowd went into the temple for the sacrifice, and the files broke up; men and women and girls and boys came together. Then they saw each other, and Anthia was captivated by Habrocomes, while Love got the better of Habrocomes. He kept looking at the girl and in spite of himself could not take his eyes off her. Love held him fast and pressed home his attack. And Anthia too was in a bad way, as she let his appearance sink in, with rapt attention and eyes wide open; and already she paid no attention to modesty: what she said was for Habrocomes to hear, and she revealed what she could of her body for Habrocomes to see. And he was captivated at the sight and was a prisoner of the god (1.3).1
Seduction in the middle of a worship service, that’s what Xenophon described in this novel, and that is why Paul says what he says about women in the church services at Ephesus.
Second, the new Roman woman was noted for snatching the podium for public addresses and teaching. Here are words that describe something like what Paul was concerned about:
But most intolerable of all is the woman who as soon as she has sat down to dinner commends Virgil, pardons the dying Dido, and pits the poets against each other, putting Virgil in the one scale and Homer in the other. The grammarians make way before her; the rhetoricians give in; the whole crowd is silenced: no lawyer, no auctioneer will get a word in, no, nor any other woman; so torrential is her speech that you would think that all the pots and bells were being clashed together. . . . She lays down definitions, and discourses on morals, like a philosopher.2
(See Appendix 5 for more of the text from Juvenal’s Satire 6 where men complain about educated women.)
Third, especially in Ephesus, alongside the presence of the new Roman woman was the Artemis religious fertility cult. This worship cult not only favored the freedom of women in public religion but it also surrounded these worshipers with eunuch (castrated male) priests. Part of their worship was the elimination of normal sexual relations; these women despised marriage and childbearing and child-rearing. Furthermore, this fertility cult extended their sexual and gender freedoms into open practices of abortion and contraception.3
The Roman Empire was hardly prudish when it came to dress codes, but this new Roman woman movement alarmed the establishment. Caesar Augustus, for instance, passed laws legislating what respectable women were to wear and how prostitutes and adulteresses were to dress. Naturally, these laws were debated and they were flouted by the new Roman woman.4 But our concern is with Paul and the women in Ephesus, who were under Timothy’s leadership. Paul was all for Spirit-led gifts on the part of women—a liberating impulse on his part. But he had deep concerns over the influence of certain Roman women and their behavior. They were beginning to jeopardize the holiness of the Christian church. Some critics of the church were apparently suggesting that the church was little more than a fertility cult.
This is the context for Paul’s statements in 1 Timothy 2:9–15. The big point Paul makes is not to “keep the women silent” but to “teach the women.” His principle was “learning before teaching.” If I am asked how this text “applies” to our modern world, I would discern that we need “learning before teaching.” I would also discern something Paul didn’t think he needed to say: men too need learning before teaching. Why? Because in that day men were more privileged in education than women. It’s that simple. Any reading of the Bible, especially a passage like this, that doesn’t recognize male privilege will not come to terms with the social codes in the text.
Now let’s make a connection that readers of 1 Timothy 2 do not make often enough. A major clue to reading 1 Timothy 2 is found in the very same letter—in 1 Timothy 5.
Problems in the Churches at Ephesus
Paul’s letter to Timothy is laced together with two strings—the danger of false teaching and the need for orthodox teaching. Of particular concern to Paul was a group of young widows whom we meet directly in 1 Timothy 5:11–14. Paul’s words there, which can strike the modern reader as terribly simplistic, are directed to a specific group of young widows who had behavior issues. When Paul silences women in 1 Timothy 2, he is almost certainly silencing especially the widows we find in chapter 5, and I would encourage you to read 1 Timothy 2 and 5 in comparison. Below are the words of Paul from 1 Timothy 5 about some young widows, and we need to read each word carefully because themes we have just touched appear over and over.
Sensuality among the Younger Widows (1 Timothy 5:11–12)
As for younger widows, do not put them on such a [widow] list. For when their sensual desires overcome their dedication to Christ, they want to marry. Thus they bring judgment on themselves, because they have broken their first pledge [of faith in Christ]. (emphasis added)
The language Paul uses for these women is noteworthy: he is describing a widow who has developed a promiscuous, sexual lifestyle and who is thus abandoning the faith. These are not ordinary Christian young widows; these widows are a group of young women with a well-known reputation of public sexuality. This sounds very much like the new Roman woman. Their sexual lifestyle is not the whole point, and it is the next verse that shows us that the women of chapter 2 are in view.
Busybody Teachers (1 Timothy 5:13)
Besides, they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not to.
If we set these words in the new Roman woman context, and if we remember what we read in 1 Timothy 2:9–15, we will see that 1 Timothy 5 is referring to young widows who, because they are not yet theologically formed, are being accused by Paul of idling and busybodying. What they were doing—visiting friends—is not Paul’s concern. What they were saying and teaching was Paul’s concern.
The Virtue of Marriage (1 Timothy 5:14)
So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.
This verse sounds yet again like 1 Timothy 2:15: “But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.” I doubt very much that Paul is demanding that all women everywhere marry, have children, and manage their homes. But if we factor i
n the new Roman woman’s desire to end marriage and childbearing and to pursue instead a sexually promiscuous life, Paul is countering those ideas with the virtue of marriage and managing a home.
Summary
Let me now sum all this up, for it is this context that gives rise to the silencing of women. Women in the Roman Empire and in particular in Ephesus were advocating counter-Christian ideas and practices. Paul was concerned about the reputation of the gospel and the respectability of Christian women for fear they might be associated with the offensive side of such behaviors. So Paul turns to the women in Ephesus—in particular, to a group of young widows. He urges them to live a life of holiness and to learn before they start teaching.
We are thus led to the conclusion that when Paul asks women to be silent in 1 Timothy 2, he is not talking about ordinary Christian women; rather, he has a specific group of women in mind. His concern is with some untrained, morally loose, young widows who, because they are theologically unformed, are teaching unorthodox ideas. Paul does not advocate, then, that women should not teach but that they should learn sound theology before they teach.
Context is everything, and in this case a little knowledge of the Roman world and a glance at 1 Timothy 5 provides all we need. Even if we lacked knowledge about the new Roman woman, what Paul says about widows in 1 Timothy 5 tells us about all we need to know to make clear sense of 1 Timothy 2.
The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Page 24