Actually, the passage in Eph. 5 in Greek in the earliest manuscripts does NOT have the word "submit" in it with regards to women submitting to their husbands. Or having authority over them.
"submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord." Eph. 5:21-22 ESV
"ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Χριστοῦ.[SUP]22 [/SUP]Αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ," Eph. 5:21-22 Greek.
Notice that verse 21 has the word ὑποτασσόμενοι or hypottasomenoi. There is no word like this in verse 22.
Paul covered the behaviour of all Christians one to another in verses 21. Verse 22 merely says, "Wives, to own husband as to the Lord." I think the implication is that all wives need to keep Christ first and then treat our husbands as we would God. As for husbands, I guess they need to work on loving their wives.
The fact that some manuscripts of verse 22 do not contain hupotassonemoi/hypotasso further supports the 'complementarian' type approach to the passage.
Egalitarians read verse 22 and conclude that we need to submit to one another equally, in exactly the same way. (Eisegeting egalitarianism into the verse.) Complementarians look at the whole context of the passage and say that Paul says to submit to one another and then tells who specifically is supposed to submit to whom.
* Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ (5:21)
----wives to your own husbands, as to the Lord (5:22)
----Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.(6:1)
----Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ(6:5)
The fact that the 'submit' carries over from verse 21 to verse 22 in some manuscripts underscores the idea that delineation is going on here. Paul is telling who to submit to whom.
The egalitarian approach that 'submit to one another' means each to all others equally doesn't really take into account the whole context. Also, in the book of Revelation,men kill each other. If there are 10,000 men in a battle who kill each other, does that mean that each individual soldier has 10,000 wounds, each would equally responsible for his death as another wound? Or does 'kill each other' mean one kills one, and another kills another?
Even if you do take 'submit to one another' to mean everyone submits to everyone else, the Bible clearly emphasizes wives submitting to husbands more. It never says, 'husbands submit to your wives.' In addition to this passage in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3 tells wives to submit to their husbands. I've never heard of any debate about the word 'submit' in that verse not being there.
I Peter 3 tells wives to submit to their own husbands. He even exhorts wives to follow the example of Sarah's submission to her husband when she obeyed him, calling him Lord. The Bible never tells husbands to obey their wives.
By the way, if you have or had small children, do you submit to them to the same extent you expect them to submit to you? Do you obey your kids? Wouldn't an egalitarian interpretation of Ephesians 5-6 require that you do so?
If you wee a hired servant, an employee at a company, and your boss is a believer, would it be appropriate for you to be sitting at his desk in his office when he shows up to work, with your feet propped up on his desk. He's a believer, so you can explain to him, as you smack gum between sentences, "You see Mr. Grant, we are both Christians and the Bible tells us to submit to one another. So far, I've been following all your orders. But since you have to submit to me, we are going to drop that practice of filling out for B-11 for rush orders since it's just so time consuming, and you are going to give me the 15th off so I can go to my cousins wedding."
Why would the idea of 'submit to one another' implying equal submission to all parties only apply to marriage, and why is there no specific verse telling husbands to submit to wives but three passages telling wives to submit to their husbands, with one of them illustrating it with an example of a wife being obedient to her husband?
So sad you did not address one thing I said in my long post.
I did. I was reading posts backwards though, and used a few posts to respond. I said I didn't see how your commentary on not 'usurping authority' was that relevant to the conversation.
Just another cry of character assassination. I think you have to be important to be assassinated, like a president or governing official.
I'm pretty sure 'unimportant' people can be assassinated to. It depends on how the killing is done. People tend to think of heads of state as more important, but God is not a respecter of persons.
Btw, insinuating that someone isn't important isn't a kind thing to do, and we don't have the level of relationship to tease. If that's what your doing, it's not going to come across well through this medium.
I apologize. I was just trying to illustrate how ridiculous it is to say there can ever be a righteous dictator, except God.
I didn't say that. Whether men, or women, are righteous and in what since (imputed v. other ways) would be a whole 'nother discussion.
For proof of that one, you can look at any dictator in modern times, but you can also go back in history, through wars fought by kings and queens which killed millions, to the Old Testament where neither judges nor kings were able to be righteous with the people, and God had to punish his own people after repeated warnings, by having Assyria carry away Israel in 722 BC, and Judah in 536 BC. Israel was destroyed forever, although God preserved a remnant of Judah, in order for the Messiah to be born.
There were a few kings who seem to be commended in historical books (in 'the prophets'). Israel followed the Lord in the time of Joshua. Israel was a theocracy, but if we wanted to categorize Israel during the time of Moses, Joshua, and some of the judges with modern labels for their government, we might call it a dictatorship. Moses and Joshua were following directives of the LORD, but each of them served as leader of the nation and did not create a monarchy to pass their leadership down to their own children. Ultimately, God was King, the one they reported to.
I reviewed a book last night called "What Paul Really Said About Women" by John Temple Bristow. His thesis is that this lie about women, and complementarians are victims of Greek philosophy about women. He documents from Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, how women were only allowed to be in the house, and when Alexander "hellenized" the known world (made it Greek), the Jews absorbed this philosophy. Augustine certainly followed Greek philosophers, one of the founding fathers of the early church. Aquinas then picked it up, and it became doctrine in the Catholic church.
That's all interesting, but I think of us are more interested in what the Bible has to say on the issue. The Bible doesn't say women aren't allowed to leave the home. It does say that women are supposed to submit to their husbands. They are also to be diligent in the home. It doesn't say they can't do work outside of the home, like the woman in Proverbs 31 did.
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Gal. 3:28
This verses does not merely apply to salvation, but the way all people treat one another. Paul said this, because his message was contrary to the Greek and Roman message that women MUST be tucked away in their homes, totally subservient to their fathers and then their husbands. Christianity radicalized ancient society with regards to relationships between men and women, husbands and wives.
In the context, Paul talks about being heirs according to the promise. The idea of everyone acting and being treated exactly alike, and not having different roles to play in this life isn't consistent with the rest of Paul or the other apostles' teaching when it comes to Jews and Gentiles, slaves and masters, and males and females. He gives different specific instructions to each group. Galatians 3 and 4 don't talk about whether wives should leave their homes. Paul does tell wives to submit to their husbands and children to obey their parents, which is loosely in line with what Greeks would have expected of daughters and wives. But there is no command that wives must be tucked away in their homes. I suspect Greek culture wasn't always completely strict about this. if you red the opinions of men from a certain class, literate men who had time to write their opinions about such things, that doesn't mean every woman in the empire followed these ideas. It was a very multi-cultural empire. Lydia was able to have a business selling purple die, for example.
The call in Eph.5:24 "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her," was a radical rejection of Greek philosophy, for men did not love their wives, and in fact, usually loved another man, or a high level prostitute, called a hetaira, who were courtesans that were highly educated, and sophisticated companions.
I'm sure there were plenty of perverts back then. But they all weren't that way. I'm not an expert on all the Greek opinions about homosexuality, but I vaguely recall reading of Greeks who didn't care for it. And if every Greek man had a homosexual partner and a prostitute, Philo might have gotten lynched for writing to his apparently philosophical audience that transvestites and men who practiced homosexuality all deserved to die. The Jews were against this stuff, but probably there were some Greeks and Romans who cared nothing for homosexuality and thought prostitution was bad. Lots if not most Greeks and Romans were probably poor and couldn't afford an educated, class prostitute.
Stereotyping the whole culture as you do seems kind of almost like racist or something like that to me. Maybe racist isn't the right word. It reminds me of that song that says 'if the Russians love their children, too'-- written during a time when some of the propaganda may have led people to think the Communist Russians didn't love their children.
As widespread as these perversions were, I suspect there were monogamous men, too, who loved their wives, among the Jews and even among the pagans. Even some the Greek myths, which the Romans also studied (e.g. Cupid/Eros myths), had accounts of men who loved women. They had two false deities associated with the concept, Eros and Aphrodite. The love may have been primarily erotic in nature, but the concept would not have been totally antithetical to their thoughts or culture.
To love your wife was a foreign concept in that culture, but Paul here says that God's way is not to have a prostitute, but instead to love your wife.
The Bible is a radical document, from start to finish. When you accept pat answers and don't fully understand the culture and the language, the result is actually throwing the truth away and exchanging it for an ancient Greek lie.
I think we both have some familiarity with the Grecco-Roman culture. I just don't see how this takes away from the teaching of scripture that wives are supposed to submit to their husbands.
I'm not speaking of you specifically, Presidente, it sounds like you and your wife have a relationship that works. But the attitude is still not a Biblical one, in which men are head of a household, as in Greek and Roman household codes, rather than men and women both being equal in the sight of God as Galatians 3:28 so plainly states.
The Bible teaches that the husband is the head of the wife. There are ancient Greek manuscripts you could look at that show you the contexts the word kephale is used in. It was used of a general's relationship with an army. The egalitarians would have us believe that when kephale (head) is used in close proximity to hypotasso (submit) that it is stripped of its' hierarchical meaning and only means 'source.'
