Women Should Refrain from Speaking in Church!?!?

Many people find themselves in hot water when they quote Paul’s first letter to Timothy and assume that he was suggesting that women should stay at home and that they should not be able to teach in church.

Two thousand years later and this text is being used to discourage women from entering the ministry or, if they do enter the ministry, it is used to stop them playing a full role.

Interesting, however, readers continue to make the same perennial mistake and take the text out of its socio-historical setting. They also fail to appreciate or to recognise that there are different kinds of passages within the Bible. There are those which a) describe events practices at that time and b) to describe teach principles for universal application.

The passage in 1 Timothy 2:9-15 describes events and practices.

Without putting much effort anyone who is interested can find out that Paul was encouraging Timothy to confront false teachings within the church at Ephesus because his own trip was going to be delayed. In the meantime, his set his words down on paper and suggested that Timothy tell the women in that day and at that time to refrain from teaching as their teachings were false. They were, however, not alone in giving false teachings. There was much of it going on in the church and the men had an equal part to play.

It is also clear from reading other passages that Paul was, in fact, supportive of women in the ministry. See for example Romans 16:1,2,7 and Philippians 4:2,3. Note that, it is in this passage that the only female apostle is mentioned and that, despite the ongoing debate among scholars about the identification of Junia, no record of the male name "Junias" has ever been discovered in extra-biblical Greek literature. (What ever you think about women as minister, read the book reveiw about Junia or even buy the book for yourself.)

Paul also referred to Priscilla as ‘a fellow worker in Christ’ Jesus (Rom 16:3) and of Euodia and Syntyche, he said, ‘these women who laboured with me in the gospel’ (Philippians 4:3).

In reality, there is neither the time nor the space in this blog to do justice to the depth of study needed to tackle the sort of comments thrown at women as they go through seminary but there are plenty of resources on the internet which can be used to help deal with the simplistic generalisations we all too often hear.

Whatever your thoughts, this would make a good dissertation for Greek scholars out there!


Carole Williams