Women and Christian Ministry

11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.

12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;

she must be quiet.

13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve.

14 And Adam was not the one deceived;

it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

15 But women will be saved through childbearing

if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

These verses are often understood to mean that the Apostle Paul forbade women to teach.

However, Paul worked with many women in ministry (see Romans 16),

so the Apostle could not have meant it to be taken that way.

Let's see what Paul actually said.

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.

These two verses are linked together,

and this is made clear by the deliberate repetition:

‘learn in quietness’ and ‘must be quiet’.

To begin with, Paul is not talking about teaching, he's talking about learning.

A woman should learn. That's his first instruction. The church at Ephesus began with believers who had left the synagogue (see Acts 19:8,9).

In the synagogues women were not encouraged to study God's word so this was a progressive idea.

in quietness

The Greek does not mean 'not speaking' but to be peaceable or in quietness, as is normal when listening or learning.

full submission

Submission could be understood as submission to God's word.

The King James Version uses the word 'subjection' rather than 'submission' and it can be used in the sense of submitting to God's word. For example, in 2 Corinthians 9:13 we find the phrase: 'subjection unto the gospel of Christ', and it's the same Greek word used here.

(However, submission to one another is also required of Christian people as we see in Ephesians 5:21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.)

I do not permit a woman to teach

or to assume authority over a man;

she must be quiet.

I do not permit! The Greek implies: 'I will not roll over for that.'

He's asserting his full authority as an Apostle: 'Do you think I'm a pushover?'

We may well be surprised that Paul makes such an issue of it.

 If it were merely a matter of respecting the prevailing culture,

would he speak with such force? Surely there must be something more at stake.

There is a conjunction in the original Greek: 'but I do not permit …'.  We have the sense of something which is entirely opposite to what has just been said.

If Paul is speaking of submission to the word of God, the complete opposite in every way is to teach without being submitted to God's word, which would be false teaching.

The other question is what it means to 'assume authority'.

Nobody really objects to women teaching. Even the most conservative churches allow women to teach children or women's groups. Everyone agrees that there is a close connection between teaching and assuming authority: even if they're two distinct things, they’re closely related (assuming authority by teaching).

However, 'assume authority' is one word in the Greek: 'authentein' which means more than 'to have authority'.

There are no other uses of authentein in the Bible, so scholars looked at the secular use of the word in Paul's day.

The best understanding seems to be that it means to control, or to bully or to domineer. Paul is not talking about the exercise of a healthy kind of authority but an overbearing and controlling attitude, which is obviously not in line with the Apostle’s teaching about submission in his letter to the Ephesians, where he exhorts us all to submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21).

Some have drawn our attention to the fact that Paul changes from speaking of women in the plural (as in 1 Timothy 2:9) and uses the singular in these verses (1 Timothy 2:11,12) and have suggested that there was a particular woman (or type of woman) who was trying to do this at Ephesus.

Authentein refers to an extreme domineering sort of authority, without the willingness to submit to others at all. If we combine this with the implication that this was about a woman expounding false teaching, we can see clearly what Paul was against: it does not forbid the exercise of a teaching ministry, but only forbids a woman trying to dominate the church with her own false teaching.

Does this make sense in context?

First, we go to the beginning of this passage 'let the woman learn': a woman who has been taught the word of God would not teach false doctrine, but anyone might well if they were not allowed to learn or were not willing to learn!

Second, go back to the beginning of the letter:

1 Timothy 1:3 … stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer.  It's hardly necessary to point out that Paul says certain people not just certain men. It's obvious that this is a major theme, if not the main theme, of the whole letter: his concern is about false teaching.

Also, Paul has not said here that he is talking only about teaching in the church meetings: there's nothing in the context to show that.

I'm arguing that gifted women should be free to teach in church meetings, but they would 'teach' anyway: in the marketplace or in the kitchen.

Forbidding women to teach in the meetings would not solve the problem: encouraging women to learn would! It's an inspired solution: instead of you men trying to keep control of things and forbidding women to speak and so forth, let the women also learn the word of God so that they can go around spreading the good news wherever they go! It's not a matter of if they teach or where they teach but what they teach.

'over a man' There's some debate about whether we should take this to mean men in general or their own husbands. It's not of course the same thing and we shouldn't confuse ideas about ministry in the church with what we believe about relationships between husbands and wives. However, the two things are not totally unconnected. Women will have an influence on others and obviously especially on the men they are closest to.

'she must be quiet' this is almost a repetition of the earlier 'in quietness' and you won't be surprised that we're dealing with the same Greek word.  It doesn't mean 'to keep quiet' but to be 'in quietness': not causing trouble or disruption which I suggest would result from spreading false doctrine.

13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.'

Does it make any sense that, because man was created before woman, men should always be in charge, or, because Eve was deceived, women can never be trusted again!

Could Paul, as an intelligent man, really think this?

However, this passage is not teaching such extreme views.

So, what can Paul mean?

In fact, his reference to Adam and Eve confirms what I've been saying.

Paul is not explaining why women should submit; he is using a well-known Old Testament passage to illustrate his point about why women need to be established in God's word!

Eve was deceived and went on to lead Adam astray.

Isn't this a perfect example of what I've been saying about false teaching?

If the women are not encouraged to study and understand God's word, they will remain ignorant and influence their men too with wrong ideas (not all men are strong Christians). Paul will not permit that!

This makes much more sense of the sentence about Adam and Eve:

it fits the context and agrees with Paul's whole teaching.