Angela, is husband standing for a he ore a she?
Husband definitely is a man, which I have already said on this this thread! This is specifically directed to men, in a culture where polygamy was accepted and practiced. Men were not to have more than one wife, the passage is self-explanatory.
So does it mean women should not be pastors? No! It means that Paul did not have to address the women on this issue, because polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) was not a practice in Roman or Greek society, so God didn't have to set a rule for the women. They already had only one husband.
The fact that no male nouns or pronouns appear in the passage in Greek is extremely important. It means that men have been mistranslating this passage to suppress or limit women. It means certain people on this thread who constantly quote the KJV, which has been wrongly translated, therefore basically supporting their position with a lie!
Further, there are many other words translated wrong, punctuation in the wrong places, which again was King James forcing his translators to translate the way he wanted it, not the original Greek! Even the very late, corrupted manuscripts do not have male nouns or pronouns in these supposed passages which say man. Yet, somehow many Bibles have the masculine nouns and pronouns in their translations, which is not faithful or true to any of the Greek manuscripts!
My church has a woman as an assistant pastor, and she is so much better than our senior male pastor, who is a heretic. Our woman pastor has great theology, no "open theology" nonsense for her, like the man pastor preaches! Women are not excluded from being pastors and preachers anywhere in the Bible. There is no verse that says "women cannot be pastors!" In fact that opposite! As many have shown with. All the women God used in ministry.
Most of you men won't read what I write, nor simple explanations which rely on good exegesis of Greek, within the context of the verse. Instead, they rely on wrong English translations. Seriously, there is no point in me explaining how "authentein" which is translated "exercise authority" or even "usurp authority" is simply wrong. Yet they have "proven their point" by using a bad English translation! Authentein is a hapax legomena, only used once in the Greek NT. You can't compare it to other uses in Scripture. But you can look at the word "authority" all the other times Paul uses it to mean "authority over." Romans 13 uses the word "exousia" along with many other places. Authority = exousia! So why did Paul use a completely different and rare word in 1 Tim. 2:12. He uses an infinitive, authentein, not a verb and a noun. Contemporaneous readings reveal many possible meanings, but "to domineer" is the most common use.
Paul says a woman is not to domineer a man. That makes a lot of sense! Paul was writing to Timothy in Ephesus, which had the temple of Artemis or Diana, one of the 7 wonders of the world, the woman priestesses ran the city, and dominated the men. If these woman came to the church in Ephesus, and tried to boss everyone around, of course Paul would tell Timothy not to let the women dominate. Christians should never dominate one another. Rather, we all need to be mutually submissive, as Paul says in Ephesians.
"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Eph 5:21
But, I tire of these obstinate men. They are not teachable, and their hearts are hard and legalistic. I know what God has called me to do. So I am doing it, regardless of the opinions of a few uneducated men!
