# 101 Women should be silent EXPLAINED + Dr James Sedlacek

1 Timothy 2 and the Question of Women Teaching

I'm curious, with 1 Timothy, I do not permit a woman to teach or authenticate a man over a man.

English translation in most Bibles for this verse doesn't reflect what the Greek is saying. What does it say in Greek? Misidentifying what Hesychia is doing causes the meaning of the whole passage to change.

My God.

Talking about how women should not be teaching. What does all of that mean? Who is Paul talking to? Why is he saying that? Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host.

In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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I'm your host, Cassie Imblino. And if you have been a loyal listener, first of all, thank you. But second of all, you would have known that we just covered a very controversial verse with Dr. Lynn Coak recently.

It was 1 Corinthians chapter 14, verses 34, 35. Women should remain silent in the church. Well, today we're going to look at a very similar verse in a different book. It comes up again. And so now you might be thinking, this might be why it's mentioned so much.

Women should be silent. Women should be modest. Women should be covered up. Because in 1 Timothy chapter 2, we see, I do not permit woman to teach or assume authority over a man. And this is so relevant for someone like me who has a microphone, who is a woman, who's trying to teach people and learn.

Can I do this? Because I remember distinctly early in the podcasting days a couple of years ago, someone telling me, I wouldn't go to an event if you were on stage. You're a woman and that's what the Bible says.

So if we're going to be biblically speaking, we also have to be biblically living. So today I've brought in one of my favorite guests. I have, I have favorite, I have preferences in the show. I'll admit it.

But Dr. James Sedlicek is back. And we're going to be discussing the exegetical, historical, and contextual understandings around 1 Timothy chapter 2, verses 12 to 15. Talking about how women should not be teaching.

They should not have assumed authority. They have to be quiet. What does all of that mean? Who is Paul talking to? Why is he saying that? Why does it sound like a repeat to what was just happening in 1 Corinthians?

It's going to be a great episode, but if you are new, perhaps you haven't heard the many episodes I've had Dr. James Sedlicek on. And you should know that he is a genius within his own right. I have your bio here.

Let me read it. You are a PhD in biblical studies. You focus on Greek language and linguistics for the New Testament. You have an MDiv in biblical studies on Hebrew, Greek, and biblical interpretations.

You currently serve as a professor of biblical languages at the Israel Institute of Biblical Studies. You also teach Greek exegesis and textual criticism at God's Bible School in college. And you are one of the rarest guests because you have such an in-depth understanding of both Old Testament and New Testament language translations and historical context, which is why I think it's just so rare that you find somebody that knows so much.

Thank you for coming back on my show.

Welcome back. Thank you, Cassian, for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you again and meet some of the guests that have come on your show and some of the listeners and watchers who asked the questions.

And I know one of the sessions we had, there was a bit of Q &A at the end, and that was a blast. Thank you so much.

No, thank you. I literally did a show this morning for someone else's podcast, and they were like, which episodes changed your life the most? And I always say The Bleeding Woman because you suggested that.

And I was like, why would we talk about The Bleeding Woman? That's like two verses. And lo and behold, you and I talked about that for like two and a half hours. I had to cut so much content out just to make it fit, I think, within an hour and a half.

I couldn't even make it an hour. You are just a wealth of knowledge. And I feel like every time you come on the show, it's because you have suggested that we discuss certain verses. It comes from your end on the verses that you want to get into.

And so I'm curious, with 1 Timothy, what is your, I want to say like background, like what is your experience? How do you, how have you come to know so much about the context of 1 Timothy?

Well, it starts with kind of one of my research agendas, which is if there's a debated text in the Bible somewhere, and there's people debating it, I want to know why. And partly it's because I have a high view of Scripture.

I believe that Scripture should be informing our lives. And if we are looking at the text and we don't know what it means, and we've got two different groups of folks who say it means this, know it means that, that produces a problem for anyone who wants to do what Scripture says.

So what does it really say? And this piece is less about how can we twist it so that it fits what we want. And it's more about what did it really say in the first place? And how has it been maybe accidentally twisted over the years?

I don't know if that's the right language to say, but some cases and some of what's in tonight's episode involves some linguistic reconfiguration that probably we should take a step back beyond it and see what was really going on.

Okay.

So let's do the thing that we do best and kind of back up a little bit, because let's pretend that everybody, you know, is loyal to the show and they just listened to Dr. Lynn Koek. We've already read, technically, if we're reading the Bible back cover to cover, 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 14 is saying women should remain silent in the churches, they're not allowed to speak, and they have to be in submission as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church.

And this is Paul talking to the church in Corinth. Why is he saying this to them? And then why does he say it again in 1 Timothy? Let's just like set the scene.

Sure. The first piece I will comment on briefly and then go to the main question is again. I don't think he's saying the same thing to both groups. We're reading it the same way because of our English translations and the context is different in both places.

The problems he's addressing are different in both places, and even the range of options of what he could be saying are different in both situations. And something else that often doesn't get asked is why doesn't he say something quite similar to every other church he writes to?

That's a good point, because to me it sounds like, well, he said it twice, he obviously meant it, but that's a good point. If he meant it, he would have said it to every church. Mm-hmm. So it sounds like only these two churches have an issue that's similar?

Or at least it could be translated in a way that's similar. Okay. I would go there. But I think both of these churches are Paul's two top problem churches.

They are the two top problem churches? In his whole circuit. Yeah. The church in Corinth and what is this church in Timothy? The... Ephesus. Ephesus.

Okay. It's on the west coast of Turkey. It's basically facing the part of the water where John gets exiled on the Isle of Patmos later. Okay. It's right there. And Corinth is on the opposite side of the water from Turkey.

And it faces the Ephesus. They kind of face each other across the water. But they're both two of the problem churches in the first century circuit. Okay.

And what time period is this happening? Like how many years after Jesus is this issue arising? Because you would think, I mean, I know you'll correct me, but Jesus just died. And so shouldn't everyone be kind of like on fire for God still?

Like, shouldn't like the fire of the Holy Spirit and Acts and Pentecost still be kind of blazing through the land? It seems like there's other religions taking place that he's addressing.

Yes. Jesus died approximately 20 years earlier, just to put it in a rough context. So a whole generation of people have grown up since then. Okay. Roughly. But many people that knew that day are still around.

So it's been two decades, roughly. The other religions have always been there before Christianity came along. And so you have the Greco religions. You have the Roman religions. And a new one that's on the scene as of just a few years before Jesus's birth is emperor worship.

So emperor worship.

Yeah. So like Julius Caesar, like the Roman emperor.

He is now a god. His grandson took on deity titles and became the god over all the other gods approximately, well, a couple of decades before Jesus's birth. So in addition to all the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, you now have Caesar as an ultimate kind of god.

And statues to Caesar are being built. Temples to Caesar are being built. And on the spectrum, Corinth is fine with this. This is what their city is. It's a pro-Roman city. It's actually, it was a destroyed Greek city that became rebuilt by the Romans.

And it's very pro-Roman, even though they're surrounded by Greeks. That's a pro-Roman city. And Ephesus is a pro-Greek city. And they don't really care so much about the Roman emperor worship. They care about one of the Greek gods, goddesses, and that's Artemis.

And that makes them very different from each other for some of the ways that will impact our understanding of this text in Timothy. But they're also very entrenched in their areas. So any Christian movement in both cities is going to be faced with constant struggle with these two major groups, the pro-Caesar worship group in Corinth and the pro-Artemis group in Ephesus.

If you were a Christian in Corinth or in Ephesus, were you attacked or were you accepted or what was the vibe?

The vibe was if you went shopping at the grocery store, certain items in the store were totally devoted to the gods and goddesses in ways that would cause you not to be able to eat that food. So you had to source your food a different way.

Like this food has been dedicated to this goddess or sacrificed to this goddess. And you're like, I'm not going to eat that.

Right. That kind of thing was common. So the typical Christ follower was sometimes pushed to the marginal edge of some of these societies and these cities. OK, OK. This was also true for the Jewish person.

It wasn't that different for Jews and Christians. It was pretty similar.

So why is he telling people to be quiet so often? Just because he's like, stop worshipping them. But it's specifically for women.

Yeah. For Corinth, the issue is different because the verbs are different in Greek, although they're translated the same way in English. Greek has a couple of verbs that strictly mean to be silent or to become silent.

And there's sipao and sigao. The difference between them is very muddy in the lexicons and dictionaries that we have. But there's one for if you're noisy, be quiet. And there's another one for maintaining silence, being silent and not raising some noise if something happens.

And that research is not completed on the difference between sipao and sigao. One of them is used in the Corinthian section that you mentioned in chapter 14. The other one is used when Jesus tells the storm to be quiet.

And it's a different verb. So that's hush up and be quiet. And so why a different verb? That's underexplored, really. And I haven't spent much time on the Corinthian language issues to sort that one out.

But it's not the same verb at all that's in the First Timothy passage. We have hesuchia, which is a noun. It's not a verb. And the meaning for hesuchia is related to the Greek goddesses more than it is anything about silence.

Because, I mean, in the English translation, like if I didn't have Dr. Sedlicek in the room, then I would have just read First Corinthians saying women should remain silent. They're not allowed to speak.

They have to be in submission. And then if I read First Timothy, you would say, I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man. She must be quiet. And then it talks about Adam and Eve all of a sudden.

And then it talks about how women are to be saved through childbearing. It's same, same, but different. So what should I, as a educated, exegetical Christian, be paying attention to?

The first thing to do is pay very careful attention to very slight differences in texts. They point to something different being the inferred thing. And it could be that the translators have missed the thing that's different.

There's always that chance. Now, without knowing Greek or in some cases Hebrew, a person reading their English Bible isn't necessarily going to be able to ferret out all of the things that are going on, produce the English.

But one thing you can do with English Bibles is grab about 10 or 12 of them, compare them side by side for one verse. And then if you think it's related to another verse, compare about the same 10 or 12 on that verse and see how many of them really say the same thing across the translation.

Is that what you do? That's one thing that can be done. I don't generally do that, but I do compare that sometimes, yes. Oh my gosh. That's not my first step. But that's something you can do just to see, even though it seems like these two texts are related and it got some of the same language, nine out of 10 Bibles don't have them translated the same way as each other, meaning they still see some difference here between these two texts.

Another thing to watch out for is that this involves at least looking up, not necessarily knowing Greek, but looking up that Greek word in a lexicon and just reading the English definitions. That you can do with the Strong's Concordance, which a lot of people have, or online tools, which a lot of people have.

And you'll realize that sometimes you have close synonyms, but they aren't the same word in both texts. They're close. They have something in common, but they're not exactly the same. And something that occurs to me as well, if you are reading the English Bible and you believe that it's saying this one thing, look at other English texts that do say something exactly like that.

Not about the women or the silence thing, but just about the verbal connection to its direct object or something like this, and see what is underlying that English expression. You'll often find it's completely different Greek words in word order.

And then you have to scratch your head and think, well, if Paul really wanted to say that, why didn't he use that phrase that's right there in the Gospel of Mark? He didn't. He used a different expression.

And this makes us scratch our heads and think, well, what is he really saying? One of the ways that I'll read, well, you've read the verse in English. I don't know which version it was. NIV, I think. NIV, yeah.

I've seen it where it says, exercise authority instead of assume authority. I don't permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. And the exercise authority has a completely different Greek words that go behind it.

It's echein exousia, and we see it all over in the Gospels when Jesus gives his disciples the power to exercise authority over the demons. Same language, exercise authority. Totally different Greek words.

Not the ones that Paul has in this text. So that started my brain. The other thing that made me completely, I don't know, what's the right word I want? Lit a fire inside me to research this thing out and really study it.

I went and looked up the keyword, authentain, which we have somewhere down in our notes a little further. Authentain is the word that's translated, assume authority here in the NIV, exercise authority in some translations.

And there's been a debate whether that word has been translated fairly. Some think it just has a pejorative meaning. And so they translated it domineer or something like that. And there are some fine scholars that think it means that.

They're trying to get away from an absolute reading that women are not to have authority. So they would say, oh, just don't domineer and you still... Well, the problem with most of this lexical research is they're trying to find a solution to a problem caused by the translations.

What does the Greek word authentain actually mean? You have to do, and this is where I do, this is one of my first steps, is I look up every instance of the verb authentain in all of the Greek literature that is known to us.

And what does it mean here? What does it mean here? What does it mean here? What does it mean here? I've worked up a data sheet of all of this stuff, and there's two prominent meanings for this verb. And none of which seems to fit our context if we're trying to take it as some kind of church rules kind of context.

One of them is that authentain has a common English word that almost nobody uses to translate it with, authenticate. The English verb authenticate directly derived from this Greek verb, and it doesn't mean anything about having authority over.

So what do we use it for is actually similar to what a lot of the Greek uses of authentain are. Let's say I wrote a book. In the ancient world, nobody has a printing press. Nobody's going to copy it. So the only way for people to get copies is for some scribe to sit down, hand write out a copy.

And if you know anything about people handwriting something where they're copying something, the chances they'll make mistakes are pretty high. So then that book gets copied for a scholar somewhere in a different continent.

And what they do is they send the book back to the author so the author can look at it and say, yep, that's my work. And they authenticate it and send it back to them. So now they have an authorized or an authenticated copy.

The author himself said, yep, that's a copy of my work. That's one of the main ways this verb is used. And this context doesn't fit that meaning. There's no way that he's dealing with an authentication issue here.

Yeah, it doesn't really seem like that would make sense with. I do not permit a woman to teach or authenticate a man over a man. Right. How does that work?

There's no real way to solve the puzzle with that meaning, but that's one of the main ways it's used. The other main way it's used is for a king or a general or some kind of leader who wants to tell somebody, I need that guy dead.

And they are worried, what if it's really not coming from the king? I need to make sure the king said so before I go execute this guy. And so then they get authorized that, yes, it's from the king. And so they go do it.

But what it is, is he authenticated a kill.

OK, and so kind of like gave the green light.

Yeah, it's similar to what militaries and big headquarters of nations or groups of nations sometimes do. And so that's another thing that it could mean. And there's no real way to see that happening here.

Like at first read, we wouldn't automatically think that Paul is dealing with a hitman. Probably not. And so we're struggling to find something that fits it. And then when we look at nouns, adjectives that are derived from the same verbal root, we have the same, we run into the same problem.

And so I went to Liddell Scott Jones. Liddell Scott Jones is one of the longstanding classical Greek dictionaries. You can also go to Bower, Arendt, Gingrich, and Danker. That's a fairly standard standby for New Testament Greek uses.

And both of them say that this verb means to exercise authority. In the footnotes in the entry, it's the main piece of evidence that they bring is that Saint Augustine, the church father from around 400, three something to four something, he certainly went over that century time.

He said it means that, but he said it meant that because red flag, red flag, red flag, because what we have, if we look this up in a standard dictionary is circular reasoning. Augustine said it means that because it means that in this verse.

If we're at this verse and we don't know what it means, we can't use the circular loop in our standard dictionaries to create that meaning for us. We can't depend on circular reasoning or logic. It's a faulty wheel.

That's when you've got to do what I suggested first is start looking up all the incidents and saying, what does it mean here? What does it mean here? And even in the classic literature, you'll sometimes find that the reference translation edition that's sitting in the shelf has a mistranslation in it.

So you can't depend even on the English translation of those texts, even though they're probably more secure than some of the other translations of our English New Testament are from various groups. Still, you still have to be able to critique it.

And I found a few of those were really at the core of the context was a hit that someone was authorizing, but it didn't get translated like it was. And sometimes deep contextual reading around each instance is needed, a couple paragraphs at least before and after.

So I did that. I did that for this root word. And when I first presented a paper on the problems in 1 Timothy 2 .12, just verse 12 alone, I realized that there's six problems in this one verse. And in the New Testament, when you're reading it to translate it, you're dealing with critical commentaries that critique each aspect of that translation to get to your typical English Bible.

Most verses are pretty clear cut and straightforward. Occasionally, you're going to come across a verse where the issue is huge on one thing. It's very rare that you have a verse that has six major issues in one verse.

This one does. And the first is the meaning of authentain. It has a huge problem with determining what it actually does mean. I've been to the SBL meetings and other similar conferences where the debate is thick and I look at the papers on each side and I still don't see a clear cut solution on the words meaning.

I can only see what the data piled up looks like. And both of the definitions I gave, which are the main two, don't neatly fit what Paul seems to be doing here. That's something to talk in the back of our minds.

It will build into something further. Okay. One of those matters. The other issue is we have two infinitives that are butted together. You can't see it in English, but to teach and to exercise authority over, well, the to preposition kind of lets us know they're both infinitives.

In Greek, it's rare to have two infinitives butted together. And it's even more rare to have them separated with words in between. And in English, they don't have words in between. They're put together, to teach and to whatever authority, right?

They're both right together. And in Greek, the teach one is first, and then the do not permit phrase, and then the alphantine or whatever it means, often translated exercise authority over is second. And that's a very weird syntax.

What differences should we understand from the meaning? Because the two infinitives are separated as if they're two clauses. That's odd. The third issue in here is that the translation committees have assumed mostly that the woman is the subject for teach and assume authority over.

In English, you can't tell why that's a problem. In Greek, the word woman is what's called a dative case. A dative case is a reference case, like two or four, two or four a woman. And that means it's not a subject.

And so the exercise authority over and the teach verb seems to be without a typical case that would be a subject for those verbs. Now, for infinitives, the main case that they take is accusative. They can on rare occasions seem to take a dative or genitive, but usually the context will support why it's not accusative.

Here, we don't have anything in the context that says the word for woman has to be in a special case. So in my typical Greek reading brain, I'm thinking I would expect the word woman to be a different case ending than the one it is if it is the subject of teach or exercise authority.

The grammar of the sentence could read, I do not permit to teach for a woman or to a woman something. No one translates it that way.

So how, how should I read it? If I read it the most translated, accurate way, Greek to English, who cares about grammar thrown out the window? Like, if it sounds crazy, this is what the translation says.

How should I read this? The English translation? Yeah. The, of First Timothy.

One of, one of my papers that I presented at one of the regional SPLs is that the English translation in most Bibles for this verse doesn't reflect what the Greek is saying. So you can't read the English and take something from it.

What does it say in Greek? That's what we're trying to sort out. So we've got, we've got the woman, which may not be the subject of these infinitives. We have two infinitives together, which may not be sequential infinitives, like they're presented here.

We have exercise authority over, which might not mean exercise authority over. And then we come to the word man. It's translated over a man. And in Greek, the word man is not in the right case for it meaning over a man.

The, the word man here, a genitive, you could translate it over, but over is only one of 36 options for the genitive case meaning. And almost nobody's explored the other 35. When I pull a reference Greek grammar off the shelf, I get about 36 meanings for genitive cases.

And so there's something about this man that's related to this alphantine word that we don't know the exact relationship for. And yet it's being translated as if it alphantine is over the man without a reason to pick that one.

Then we come to the last word, which is hesuchia in the verse. And hesuchia, and that's the sixth problem, is translated be quiet. Hesuchia is not the normal word for be quiet. The word sepao, which Jesus says to the storm as a verb, be quiet, is the normal one.

What this word is, is a noun. It's not a verb. And it's also the name of another Greek goddess. Artemis is one that's really huge in Ephesus, but hesuchia is another one. And she's actually related to Artemis, which we might not know unless we study the Greek goddesses a little bit.

And her role in the Greek goddesses world, gods and goddesses, is to solve problems of tension between gods that are about to go to war with each other. Her, her role isn't quietness, although she can assume the type, the, the role of quietness to get the job done.

Her role is making things peaceful between the gods that are about to upset each other.

And this word should be translated to hesuchia or sepao, and that is also the name of a goddess.

The word hesuchia is the name of a goddess, but the name of this goddess was used to talk about the quality of tranquility, peacefulness, and making peace. And so one question somebody might ask is, well, that's not the main word for peace either.

A different word is, and it's Irenae. Well, guess what? That's another Greek goddess. We don't realize how much these words are connected to these Greek deities, and therefore the meaning we associate with them needs to be a quality or a trait that those deities were epitomizing.

And the trait that hesuchia epitomizes is calmness and peacefulness, making peace at home, while Irenae, the other word for peace, is making peace with enemies abroad. And so some kind of peacemaker at home is the main meaning of hesuchia.

So I'll do weird things like this sometimes. I decided, let me see, because I know the Greek goddesses often have a Roman counterpart. What is the Roman counterpart for hesuchia? Okay. Silencia.

Silence? Like the opposite of being tranquil is to be silent? No, not the opposite.

The Roman counterpart, because the Romans copied a lot of Greek deities, just gave them different names. Like Artemis in Greek culture is Diana in Roman, while hesuchia in Greek is Silencia in Roman. So from the Roman perspective, they only appreciated the silence aspect of this goddess.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Sorry. And now that's why so many of our, and if you look at the Latin Vulgate, it's translated Silencia. In other words, that's what they expected women to do. But we're looking at a fourth century problem that was introduced in the Latin Bible and Augustine's understanding of the Greek word, because he's also a Latin father, not a Greek father.

He comes from the Roman side of the Greco-Roman world, not the Greek side. And he's making comments on the Greek language based on what's now obvious a Roman misidentification. And he's commenting on hesuchia and alphantine because of the translation of hesuchia.

Misidentifying what hesuchia is doing causes the meaning of the whole passage to change and therefore strange and foreign words get meanings that really aren't about those words.

So it's kind of like the same thing of being like, hey, you seem really angry. You should find your inner peace and calm down versus like, you need to shut up. Is that an accurate interpretation of like what has happened now?

Close. I would say that the women in the Ephesus church have the ability to create harmony. And Paul is just asking them to create this harmony.

But it's been translated as be silent. Yes.

Because of the connection to the Roman deity and to Augustine's statement, that must mean what he thinks it means. And that's how the dictionaries have had it. So this is getting, in order to solve some of these problems, you can't depend on standard Greek grammars and lexicons or dictionaries.

You have to get behind the brain work of how those were created and why and critique the process of how they're created and then expand our understanding of the first century world and then realize possible places where mistranslation can creep in.

Now, one of the things that happened in what we call the Reformation was a return to the Greek texts and not an over-reliance on the Latin texts. That helped in some places. At this place here, it never helped.

It never affected it. The Greek interpretations of this verse, the Western interpretations of this verse are still securely linked to the Latin Vulgate rather than the Greek Bible.

And on the Silencia part. So I understand that in itself is so valuable because I would have never thought how was the language formed, let alone what was it translated to and now that affects the modern day English understanding and translation of it.

So I feel like that creates so much context linguistically, but physically, the context of why did these women need to have inner peace? What were they doing that he had to show up in Ephesus and be like, guys, let's all zen it out.

What's going on? What's going on with these ladies?

What caused the problem? And one of the things that you can do, and you can probably do this with an English Bible with a fair degree of access to the problem is just notice all through the books addressed to Ephesus what the problem is around the women.

You can do this by looking at 1st, 2nd Timothy, the book of Ephesians, because all three of those are addressed to the people in Ephesus one way or another. And I'll address another problem that's not well known in New Testament studies, but it does affect things.

One of them is that we have all of the New Testament written out in our Bibles as Gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, other letters, which we sometimes call general letters, and then Revelation. So we've organized it by grouping of things we think are similar.

It's not chronological. Some people have gone through and restructured everything chronologically, putting James first and then Galatians, and then... I think I might have one of those Bibles, yeah. That's another way to do it.