A plain reading of 1 Timothy 2:12 seems to clearly favor the complementarian position. "I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority." In this thread, I will quickly break this down so that anyone can see the "exegesis" of both positions.
2/ Kostenberger demonstrates it's grammatic structure as follows:
a negated finite verb (I do not permit)
governing an infinitive (to teach)
connected by the coordinating conjunction (or)
with a second infinitive (to exercise authority).
Pretty straightforward and simple.
a negated finite verb (I do not permit)
governing an infinitive (to teach)
connected by the coordinating conjunction (or)
with a second infinitive (to exercise authority).
Pretty straightforward and simple.
3/Paul doesn't permit women to do the infinitives, which are connected by the conjunction "or" οὐδὲ. Paul's word choice for teach (διδάσκειν) is his normal word for good or faithful teaching. So one can't say he is merely forbidding a type of false teaching (ἑτεροδιδασκαλεῖν)
4/ So a plain reading has women in the church being restricted from teaching or exercising authority. So how do egalitarians "exegete" the passage to show it to mean something different? Well, first, they insist on a definition for the word "exercise authority" (αὐθεντέω),
5/ thus claiming it can only mean to "wrongly domineer or usurp." If they are right, the text would still at this point forbid women from teaching. So what they do is they remove the coordinating conjunction (οὐδὲ) and read it as an adverbial clause. This now makes it modify
6/ the infinitive "to teach." See below:
a negated finite verb (I do not permit)
governing an infinitive (to teach)
remove the coordinating conjunction (or)
change the second infinitive into an adverbial clause (in a domineering way).
a negated finite verb (I do not permit)
governing an infinitive (to teach)
remove the coordinating conjunction (or)
change the second infinitive into an adverbial clause (in a domineering way).
7/ So they would translate the verse as, "I do not permit a woman to teach a man in a domineering way." But think about it. In order to get this rendering, they had to remove a Greek word (οὐδὲ/or), and they had to change the second infinitive into an adverbial clause.
8/ Exegetically, this is unjustified. If Paul meant it to be adverbial, he would use a preposition rather than a conjunction. The fact is the text as it stands has a conjunction that connects two infinitives. So it means what the complementarians say it means. Also, the narrow
9/ egalitarian definition of "exercise authority" is hardly proven. So again, the grammar makes it clear Paul forbids two things, not one, and those two thing are women teaching and having authority over men in the church. Our culture may shriek, but that's irrelevant.
10/ Egalitarians then appeal to an invented historical background dealing with church women smuggling in the pagan theology of the cult of Artemis, and this is all Paul is forbidding. Yet, there is not a single clue anywhere in 1 Timothy that this was an issue in the church. If
11/ anything, he dealt with Jewish myths, not pagan ones. So let me summarize. The egalitarian position requires the exegetical butchering of the words that are actually in the text, and then it requires an invented occasion of crisis that just happens to not even be hinted in
12/ the text, and on this basis they radically reinterpret the verse in a narrow sense to render it inapplicable in the 21st century. Let me just state plainly, it is obvious that no one would arrive at this position by an unbiased translation and study of the text. They instead
13/ must already possess an ideological bend that forces them to reject the clear complementarian nature of the text. Therefore, they change the text and the historical context to fit their a priori ideological bend. My friends, that is not exegesis. That is not even Christian.
