Women Pastors: A look at 1 Timothy 2:11-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 - Podcast Episode 153, Part 2

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast, and joining me today again is Dr. Sandra Glahn from Dallas Theological Seminary.

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She's a professor who teaches all sorts of classes in different departments, but one thing that she is particularly passionate about is the role of women in the church.

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If you've not listened to part one of this where we discuss the issue kind of more generalities but with a focus on how churches could be doing better and being more biblical on this issue.

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But today we're actually going to dive into the biblical passages that kind of inform our viewpoints on this.

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Sandra, welcome back. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I find it very interesting that you wrote your doctoral work on an aspect of the passage in 1

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Timothy 2, and when I wrote my first master's thesis, I was assigned by the seminaries at that time to write it on women in ministry, and obviously 1

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Timothy was a huge focus for me as well. So really interesting to hear the interpretation that God has led you to through your study of the passage.

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So why don't I go ahead and dive into that, but before that, let me go ahead and read the passage so everyone's very familiar with the passage we're talking about.

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1 Timothy 2, verses 11 to 12 read, A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.

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I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be silent. And then verses 13 and 14,

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For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Eve was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

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And then of course I don't have verse 15 right in front of me, but verse 15 talks about that the women will be saved through childbearing.

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And I'm sure you can finish that for me. If they continue in, yeah. And you said the verse 15 is kind of, for you, become the key for the whole passage.

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So elaborate on that for me. It has, and I'm going to take a risk here and say that it came out of my own story.

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And the minute I say that, a lot of theologians go, well, then there's bias. And I just want to say, every time we approach scripture, we're coming out of our own story.

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So what drove me was I had good mentors who encouraged me in gifts of teaching.

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But my husband and I faced 10 years of infertility and pregnancy loss. And sort of the reigning scholars from conservative

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Christianity at that point were saying that what Paul is saying is that women can't teach, but they can minister to their children in a nuclear family.

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So all that teaching should be channeled to your nuclear family. And you can imagine how that didn't resonate for a couple of reasons.

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First of all, I didn't see the nuclear family really as a big key for Paul. That's a really

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Western way of looking at it. But also, Paul had told the Corinthians to think about staying single.

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So that didn't make sense when I thought about maybe a Priscilla who, in partnership with her husband, is having a conversation correcting

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Apollos. And so I wasn't really satisfied with how biblical it was to be telling women to channel all of their teaching into their nuclear family.

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But also, it says a woman will be saved through childbearing. And I couldn't have children.

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And I knew that Paul couldn't possibly mean save eternally because he would be contradicting

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Paul. That is just not his view of sin and salvation. So again, some of the more traditional interpreters were saying saved there means sanctified.

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And I got into seminary and I never found any use of shall be saved in a sense of being sanctified or discipled or matured.

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The phrase shall be saved, and so I pulled out all the New Testament uses of shall be saved, and they all meant either eternally or they meant physically in terms of physical health, saved from death.

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So that was interesting to me. And it was answering the question, where do

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I fit in? I'm willing to be silent the rest of my life as long as I'm sure that that's what

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God has. But also, I have to give account to Him for my gifts. So I really have to know here, is it you go girl or you're a pushy broad, basically, is how it was in my brain.

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One thing that's really interesting to me is the very next line after how that chapter ends is the phrase, this is a faithful saying.

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And we often put a colon after that and say, if someone aspires to be an elder, that person aspires to a good thing.

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But I noticed that Paul sometimes said this is a faithful saying before he said the faithful saying, and sometimes he put it after.

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And there was a little bit of a grammatical issue because the verse didn't actually say women will be saved, it said she.

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And the Greek is just she will be saved if they continue, basically continue in the faith. And that's not good grammar, which

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Paul is a brilliant, brilliant writer, and he knows good grammar. And I found a little note in some of my like my

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Greek dictionary that some people thought that that was a local saying that and Paul does have this habit of taking a local saying and then adding but and putting a

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Christian spin on it. Right. I can think of it like in Corinthians. It's good for a man not to touch a woman that will put in quotes and then say, but let every man have his own woman.

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Right. He does this all the time. And so I wondered, is it could this be a local saying?

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Is there something going on locally? Well, then I I'm noticing, OK, this is a letter to Timothy.

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First, Timothy one, three says, I left you in Ephesus to teach certain people not to teach false doctrine. Do I know anything about what's happening in Ephesus?

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And I don't have to learn archaeology to find that out. All I have to do is go over to Acts and I see there's a big brouhaha in Ephesus.

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First, you have massive magic book burning and then you have this event that happens relating to Artemis of the

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Ephesians. And, you know, the silver workers say Paul is cutting into our trade and he's losing money for us.

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And for two hours they're chanting great is Artemis of the Ephesians. And I'm curious, who is she at the time of Paul?

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And so that became my dissertation work to go to historical evidence.

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And the people that were vetting me were historians, inscription experts. They didn't even know about the arguments we're having in First Timothy.

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And honestly, friend, I didn't know where I was going to end up. I just wanted to go where the data would lead me.

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I had visited Ephesus and unfortunately they gave me sort of a synoptic

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Artemis from the 7th century B .C. to the 4th century A .D. I didn't care who she was for 11 centuries.

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I just needed to know, who is she at the time of Paul? Well, I'll just cut to the chase. After studying

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Homer and all the backstory, just focusing in, what do we have from approximately first century sources?

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And Artemis in Ephesus is the goddess of midwifery. Women are praying to her to be delivered in childbearing.

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And Paul, in other places, is setting himself up sort of as a midwife.

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And he does this with the Thessalonians. And he is addressing the number one fear of women, which is their number one cause of death.

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Some say as high as 50 percent are dying in childbirth. There's no such thing as a

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Caesarian section. There is no such thing as a, you know, whatever we do to expedite a birth when you've been in labor for 45 hours.

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And so the big fear is that you're either going to die in childbirth or you're not going to die in childbirth and you're going to labor for four or five days before you die.

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And Artemis was, excuse me, she was believed to either deliver you safely, and her name means,

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Artemis means delivered, or her arrows were considered to be euthanizing.

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So kill me painlessly. So either give me a quick death or, you know, kill me painlessly or deliver me safely.

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And so Paul comes in and he teaches she's a god made with hands. So the big test of whether you're going to stay with Jesus is childbirth.

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And I think that it's really interesting that Artemis is also born first.

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She's a twin with her brother Apollo. So she is the preeminent one in their creation story.

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Well, who's the preeminent one in our creation story? It's Adam. He was first.

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And and so if you are correcting views of people who are worshiping this and she was like the number one goddess in that city.

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And in fact, probably the number two goddess in all empire wide, just enormously popular.

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And so if you're if you're going to follow Christ, this is where we put it to the test.

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Long story short, I think that Paul is actually saying to Timothy in a private letter, the women in your church are not going to die in childbirth if they are trusting in Christ.

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In the same way that James says, you know, pray, have the elders pray and they'll be healed.

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He's addressing a local situation, but it has ultimate ramifications that are still important for us.

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But maybe not a one on one correlation in the same way that sacrificing meat sacrifice to idols doesn't have a one on one correlation, but definitely has application.

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That that's excellent. And that that fits really well with one of the most common questions we receive about the passage.

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But no, it's fascinating in that, I mean, obviously I knew about Artemis being prominent in the city of Ephesus, was not aware that this role went that specifically.

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So it's very interesting to hear both that that was probably what the mindset this may have been part of an actual saying, but even the focus on the

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Adam was formed first, resetting their perspective on how God created and sort of the who was created to be help me to who, who has the preeminence, not in the sense of lording it over, but just kind of correcting the way some people were were thinking based on that.

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But maybe the question that we get most often about this is trying to limit what first Timothy two is talking about to only

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Ephesus, for example, people will say, well, since women were so prominent in the worship of Artemis, they were coming to faith in Christ, coming into the church, and they were then trying to be the ultimate authoritarian leaders in the church of Ephesus as well.

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So Paul is correcting just that specific situation. And what he says here does not apply to the church at large.

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So how do you respond to that particular? The first thing I would say is I don't see anything in all my inscription reading and all my research that suggests that there is that kind of mentality coming out of Artemis worship.

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There's not like a proto radical feminism there, but there's also not a hatred of men.

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You had Artemis mentioned in the New Testament. I found over 100 different forms of the name

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Artemis that people gave their children, men, boys and girls alike. So she is definitely worshipped by men and women.

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She's not just a girl goddess or somebody who is worshipped by females.

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And I think that you said it well, he is correcting a creation story with a creation story.

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But that doesn't mean that he is saying that there's a principle here of firstness.

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And I think if you just take the line, Adam was formed first, that is not a principle. That is just a line from a story that is a true story.

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And it definitely would put you back down to size if you are saying I'm coming out of a cult that says woman first.

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But again, not in the sense of a radical feminism mentality, but I think it did have more to do with, well, let me back up.

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There's another scholar who, Immendorfer, who at the same time

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I was doing research, we didn't know about each other. And he was looking at what do we find in the book of Ephesians that is affected by Artemis worship?

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And you think about Artemis is carrying a bow and arrow. She is the prototype for Wonder Woman. And you have in the spiritual, the section where you put your armor on, the warfare section, he's talking about the fiery darts.

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Well, Artemis was all about darts and archery, and it's the only one, as far as I know, it's the only one of the pieces of armor that they're given that isn't a quote from the

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Old Testament. And then you see all these lines in Ephesians.

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Here's an example, and this is where I'll get to where it's relevant in a minute, because it is, I'll bring it back.

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In Ephesians, I found an inscription where a man was bringing his inheritance to Artemis.

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And Paul in Ephesians 1 says, no, we get an inheritance. We don't have to give up an inheritance.

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We as believers in Christ, not only do we receive an inheritance, guess what our inheritance is?

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God himself. And he basically takes on, and you see this both in Ephesians and in First Timothy, it's like using the word kryptonite to talk about Superman.

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But we don't know what words are Artemis words typically, so we don't see how overt it is.

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But Paul takes down all of Artemis' titles, if you combine First and Second Timothy.

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She's the goddess of the first throne. You've got proto in there. She is called

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God. She is called Savior. Soteria all over the place. She's called the female equivalent to Lord.

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And she's even called Lord with the male ending on it. And in every case, you just see

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Paul constantly referring to Jesus Christ with those titles. And so it's not just First Timothy 2.

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It's the whole book that is filled with these references, even women going house to house, which is the same phrase that Luke uses for the church.

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So it's not just like girlfriends gossiping with other girlfriends in their houses. The word we've sometimes translated gossip has a connection to magic.

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And Artemis inscriptions have all kinds of references to magic. So what are we saying?

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Paul is saying, my God is bigger than your God. So it's completely misguided to say there is nothing for us in First Timothy 2 when he's taking down Artemis worship.

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But to say that women are therefore more deceived than men, that that's what

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Paul is saying, that doesn't fit his logic, right? Because in Second Corinthians, he tells the

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Corinthians, I'm concerned for all of you that you'll be deceived, as Eve was, because it's a human thing to be deceived by evil.

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And it even doesn't fit his logic of women can't teach because they're deceived because then what's the next question?

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Well, if Adam full on sinned, you know, where's his limitation? At least she thought she was doing the right thing, right?

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It doesn't quite fit that kind of logic, but it makes perfect sense if he's saying our

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God is bigger than your God. I think I remember shortly after I became a

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Christian hearing a sermon on this passage and the pastor was definitely of the women shouldn't teach men because they're more easily deceived.

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And I was like, you make them like that doesn't make sense. So if men are supposedly better at recognizing deceptive teaching, wouldn't it make more sense for women to teach men?

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And if women are more susceptible to deception, why would you want women who are more easily deceived to be teaching women who are more easily deceived?

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And then children who are the most easy to deceive of anyone. So just the whole trying to make this passage about women can't teach because they're more easily deceived.

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That's not what Paul said. And that doesn't make any logical sense at all. Yeah, it solves a lot of the questions that that had raised of of this idea that women can't teach because they're more easily deceived.

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It didn't seem to fit. Paul, elsewhere, when you get into the qualifications for elders and deacons in the very next passage after this, some view the universal use of male pronouns in the passage up until you get to the point where it's either talking about their wives or women serving in leadership roles as a argument for only women, only men can serve as elders.

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Do you think that's a valid interpretation? And if so, or if not, why not? I suspect that Paul was limiting the word elder to men.

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But but he also outlines very similar qualifications over in chapter five.

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For widows and church history does bear out that the early church had widows.

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It looks like around the third century they morphed into deaconesses. And that's part of why we don't see women deacons in the early centuries of the church.

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An interesting piece of research that's been done recently in I think it's Cappadocia is that they're finding tombstones around an ancient church and they've had the inscriptions widow of the church, a widow of the church oven.

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They historians of the past just thought they were a bunch of widows buried together until they started noticing in the same graveyard widow of Sylvanus.

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And so widows of the church of Cappadocia, let's say, are are different from people who have been the wives of these men.

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And so I suspect Artemis is also a virgin goddess.

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And I think that accounts for why there are so many single women in the church that Paul has to divide them into three or four categories.

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You got your you know, the younger widows need to get married and have children, which is not what he says over in Corinth, right?

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In Corinth, he's saying, think about staying single. But in Ephesus, I actually want you to get married and have children.

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And then if you have family who can support you, great. Everybody who's raised family and doesn't have support, we're going to put you on the rolls.

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And we at times have seen that just as you're going to get food. But, you know, a Christian approach to feeding the hungry is not to require that they've been married or hospitable or whatever.

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It looks like he is killing two birds with one stone. We got these women who need to be on church support, but also they're the mothers in the church.

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So let's make them vocational ministers. And early on, they are called the altar of God.

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Church fathers refer to these widows. We see reference to them seated with the elders. So I think calling a woman an elder is like calling a mother a father.

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She has her own name and her own term and her own lane. At the same time,

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I would discourage men at Christian marriage conferences from teaching the white verses that you sometimes see.

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The older women are told to teach the younger women how to be wives. And it could be a little offensive for somebody who's never been a wife to be telling you how to be a wife.

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And I think Paul envisioned that there's a little more segregation there than we allow for.

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So there's encroachment, I think, happening both ways. And again, I don't see a segregated church, but I do think that our embodiment is important in those ways.

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So bottom line, I would not see a woman as an elder, but I would see her in a parallel office.

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I think as we talked about, and again, I would encourage our listeners to be sure to watch part one before, because a lot of what we're talking about here is informed by what we talked about in the first episode.

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It is vitally important for churches to be truly complementarian, and that means men and women serving alongside each other, valuing each other, learning from each other under the guidance of the godly shepherds whom

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God has appointed to lead the church. One more passage that we need to dive into just from the fact that we get a ton of questions about this one as well, and that's over in First Corinthians, chapter 14, verses 33 to 35, which reads,

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As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.

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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 the church.

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Now, what's most interesting about this is even I've met some very patriarchal, authoritarian men in churches, and I've never heard any of them say this passage actually means women have to remain absolutely silent in the church.

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So from that extreme, which again, I've never met anyone who holds that. Probably are people out there to the other side of completely throwing this out.

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Paul doesn't mean this, or it was added by a scribe later, or he's quoting something in order to deny it.

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I've heard the whole gamut. In your study of this passage, what have you learned that could be helpful for us in understanding it?

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That's a great question, and I think the same thing happens in approaching this that happens when you look at First Timothy 2, and that is it really helps to look at the whole of scripture.

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And this was a little easier because three chapters earlier, chapter 11 of First Corinthians, Paul is talking about when women pray and prophesy in the church, and whatever he means about the head coverings, and that's a whole other episode.

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But here's what he isn't raising. He's not saying, should woman prophesy in the church?

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It's a given that women are going to be speaking biblical content in the presence of men in a mixed congregation.

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So if we want to ask the question, can a man learn from a woman? Yes, the answer is yes, because we see this assumption that there are going to be prophets that are women, and we've seen it all the way through redemption history, right?

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You have Miriam who's a prophet, and Huldah who's a prophet, and Anna who's a prophet in the temple waiting on the redemption.

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And so did women have the gift of prophecy? Yes, Philip's daughters had that gift.

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That backdrop of the whole range of scripture and our telos, when we look at Revelation, are men the priests?

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No, we even have the priesthood of all believers now. That was like a rallying cry for the reformation.

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Women priests, what does a priest do? A priest brings people to God, helps bring offerings, you know, shepherds souls, whatever you want to, what word you want to use to describe that, we are partners in this ministry.

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And so all of that informs then when you're coming to 1 Corinthians 11, 14, I'm sorry, 1

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Corinthians 14, you are looking at what is the context? He's been talking in 11 about what's happening in the church, women prophesying, praying.

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Then he stops everything and says, wait, before we go any further, love is essential here.

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Like let us not lose track of this. You can speak with the tongues of men and angels, and it doesn't do you any good if you don't have love. You can have all kinds of prophecy and it doesn't do you any good.

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Okay, now that we've clarified love is the reigning principle, we're going to look at spiritual gifts.

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And I think that in the same way that the Corinthian church was making tongues the gift, the

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American church or the Western church has made teaching the gift. Being on the platform with the gift, rather than imagining a house church where one person has a psalm, one has a praise, one has a teaching, one has a giving, one has a, you know, we're all bringing our gifts together.

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So we got some cultural differences happening here too. But in the context of what's happening with spiritual gifts,

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Paul comes to the subject of judging prophecies or vetting prophecies.

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And when it says, let them ask their husbands at home, it's not the usual word for just ask a simple question.

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It's more like the word for vet or grill. So, and it's also, if you're going to translate men, husbands,

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I think you need to translate women as wives. So what we've done is we've said, let the women keep silent and ask their husbands.

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So that's made it all women. And then the limited husbands, instead of saying, let the wives keep silent in the church and ask their husbands at home.

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And then you look at the work of Bruce Winter, Roman widows, Roman wives, where he's saying, was there something that might've been a law, lowercase

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L, like civil law, not capital L Bible law, like the law of Moses.

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There's nothing in the law of Moses that we can find us as a wife submits, but there's all kinds of stuff in Roman law that might suggest that it could be a violation in some way if a wife is publicly correcting her husband.

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So, and is Paul concerned for the testimony of the church and, you know, how that's perceived? It seems more likely that Paul has a specific concern about judging prophecies in first Corinthians 11.

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And that's interesting, but that's the, the direction I've always been led on this passage and my study of it.

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And clearly it's not talking about women being silent at all times, because that would contradict what he just said.

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He said a few chapters before and contradict many of the things that we see described in the book of Acts or in the other epistles.

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Pentecost, right? I mean, it's kind of a spirit is the young daughters and, you know, women and men.

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In this one specific instance of we're here, we are judging whether the validity of a prophecy that someone else has given in the church and we're limiting who can speak into that situation in a very specific example, not, it's not a universal principle of no one can speak.

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And I'm sure that if it had been an issue, Paul would have said, children probably shouldn't be speaking in this instance as well, or just really thinking through what was going on and what was leading

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Paul to make this specific statement. It's incredibly helpful in understanding what Paul means and what he doesn't mean by it.

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It's complicated, but it's also accessible, I think, right? You don't have to have a seminary degree to know that if you read that there's prophecy in chapter 11, that he can't mean complete silence in chapter 14, right?

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And if you come to 1 Timothy 2 and you go, what's the background of Ephesus? You don't have to be an archeologist to turn back to the book of Acts and see that Artemis of the

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Ephesians is a big deal in this city. The text often gives us hints to how we can interpret it.

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Yeah, absolutely. So Sandra, this conversation has been very encouraging to me.

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Obviously, this is from having written my master's thesis on these issues to it being the number one question for the past 21 years.

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I got questions, something I've thought through a lot. And I'm always interested to hear how other people have been, who've studied it even more in depth than I have, the insights that they have.

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And I mean, some of what you shared today, and even in the part one, are not something

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I've ever really thought through in the exact way that you shared it. So I'm not even 100 % sure if I agree or disagree with you.

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But whether that's the case or not, I mean, I think we were talking before, and we don't want anyone to come away from this thinking, you have to divide from people whom you disagree with this issue.

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I think there are extreme issues on both sides. The Catholic creed is full of issues to divide over.

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From someone on an extreme misogyny, patriarchal side, to the extreme feminism side, where both are very umbiblical.

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And I think it is worth dividing those issues. But within the body of Christ, we can have differing opinions on what our conclusions are, how we work it out in practice, while still fully embracing each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

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I mean, I know women who take a more conservative view on this issue than I do.

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And I know men who take a more liberal view on this issue than I do. So let's focus on it as a matter of biblical interpretation, not a matter of, well, you think women can't serve as pastors over men, just because you hate women.

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Or you think women can do anything in the church, just because you hate the Bible. It's like, none of those extremes are true.

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It's not helpful, as you said, to go there. We are on the same page that we need to have a hermeneutic of charity, that these are issues where there is room for interpretation.

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We are not saying there's room for interpretation on the nature of Jesus Christ, or the nature of salvation, or the inerrancy of scripture.

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We're saying there's room for interpretation on the application of some of these issues, where Paul, even his own peers said, he writes stuff that's hard to understand sometimes.

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Yeah, it's still hard to understand nearly 2 ,000 years later. So, Dr.

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Glatt and Sandra, thank you so much for joining me again today. I've enjoyed both parts of our conversation. And again, please tune in, listen to part one, because it's very informative of the things we talked about here in part two.

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This has been the Got Questions podcast on women in ministry. Women Pastors is a specific focus on the passage in 1

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Timothy, and then a little bit less on 1 Corinthians. Those are the two passages we definitely receive the most questions about on this issue.

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Thank you for asking them and exploring them. It's a service to your listeners, for sure. And Sandra, it's truly a blessing to have you on the show again.

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We'll do this again sometime soon. So, Got Questions? The Bible Has Answers, and we'll help you find them.