Reading this caused me to pause and think. I had not read this argument before. In checking the Greek terms mentioned by Dr. Zodhiates, I found that there was some validity to his points. Indeed, in Ephesians 5:22, where we find the admonition “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord,” the Greek words translated as “wives” and “husbands” are the same as the words normally translated as “women” and “husbands” in 1 Corinthians 14:34,35. So the question naturally follows as to why we have the same Greek word translated one way (“wives” in Ephesians 5:22), but translated a different way (generically “women”) in 1 Corinthians 14:34. This curious situation led me to look more deeply into the passages people use to prohibit women from preaching and teaching.
The Greek of 1 Timothy 2:11,12 and Dr. Zodhiates
After looking into the Greek of 1 Corinthians 14:34 and finding that it may have been mistranslated, I then decided to look into the Greek of 1 Timothy 2:11,12. Again, Dr. Zodhiates made this interesting point:
Observe 1 Tim. 2:11. It does not say women but a woman, and better still, a wife. The word in Greek is gune (1135), which indicates either a woman generically speaking or a wife, depending on the context. In this instance, since it stands in apposition to the word andros (the genitive singular of aner here meaning only “husband” and not “man” generically, 435), it must be translated as “a wife.” It is because of the mistranslations of these passages that the Christian world has had so much difficulty in understanding the proper position of a woman in the Christian Church…Verse 12 is again poorly translated in the K.J.V. It should not be “But I suffer not a woman to teach,” but “I suffer not a wife….”
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Two very interesting and substantive points were made in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia regarding our primary passage, 1 Timothy 2:11-12:
Favoring this suggestion, it may be noted that elsewhere in Paul’s writings aner occurs fifty times and gyne occurs fifty-four times in close proximity within eleven distinct contexts, and in each case these terms bear the meanings “husband” and “wife” rather than “man” and “woman”…Indeed it may be argued that, if Paul had intended to speak about man in relation to woman in 1 Tim. 2, rather than about husband in relation to wife, he would have used anthropos, “man,” rather than aner, in contrast to gyne, as he did in 1 Cor. 7:1. Alternatively, Paul could have used the very terms that most stress gender, arsen, “man,” in contrast to thelys, “woman,” as he did in Rom. 1:26f.[SUP]32[/SUP]
This would seem to be one of the most powerful and significant arguments against the idea that Paul in 1 Timothy 2 had men and women in general in mind. Apparently, Paul could have specified “male” and “female” in the most general terms as he had done before in Romans 1:26. The fact that he chose to use words that are mainly translated as “husband” and “wife” when in close contextual range of each other makes a more compelling case for the argument that both 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 may have a more limited application than many would like to admit.
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Regarding the exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34,35, we find that L.E. Maxwell and Ruth C. Dearing in Women in Ministry make some interesting observations.t Two of the most important ones concern the disciplinary nature of the prohibition and the conditional nature of the “keep silent” commands in contex. First, they observe that this passage does not prohibit women from teaching or preaching, but instead enjoins order in a form of discipline by the apostle:
Why such an exhortation? Because the women were disturbing the church service by asking questions of their husbands during the preaching…Hence their questions produced an undertone of noise which was confusing to an audience. No wonder Paul corrected them. So we see that the Apostle is not dealing with the subject of women preaching, but with discipline. He is simply correcting disorder.
This analysis seems to hold contextual weight, especially since Paul does tell others (some of whom were male) to “keep silent” so that order is preserved (vv. 28, 30-33), which brings us to their second important observation about the conditional nature of the “keep silent” commands:
The injunction to “silence” occurs three times in 1 Corinthians 14—twice to men and once to women. In each case the silence commanded is manifestly conditional rather than absolute and for all time. To man Paul says, “let him keep silence in the church” (v. 28), referring to a man speaking in tongues when there is no interpreter…Paul is not meaning that these men remain forever silent, but that they simply refrain from any speaking that causes confusion.34
Along with these important points on 1 Corinthian 14:34,35, Maxwell and Dearing seem to agree with previous sources that argue for a more limited husband/wife application to the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:11,12, as they quote George Williams:
A married woman (v. 12) was not to teach or to claim authority over her husband but to be in subordination. Many misunderstand this command; they divorce it from its context, which is the family, and they carry it into the prayer-meeting [dealt with in vv. 1-10], and argue that a woman is forbidden to preach or pray—she is not to teach men—not even her dying husband how to escape from the wrath to come! This is a popular error. What God says here is that a wife is not to govern her husband.