All of us are supposed to go and make disciples not just men and so I think it's I think it's important for us to recover this because there seems to be a sort of awkwardness or hesitance in the church that like well the women should just hang back and let the men do this and I would argue like we need all we need the whole body of Christ to do this to carry out this commission well this point but here here's why I think women In Ministry makes sense because of the edenic ideal the edenic
ideal okay to me that that that is that is a point of resolution in my head why have some people taken those three verses and made an entire church policy out of it and been very Fierce about it which has happened particularly again in America we thought we'd kind of got beyond that and how do they fit um because the way that I see people Appealing to those texts in Paul and the the things that they're building out of those it is a disconnect for in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile neither slave nor
free no male and female for all or one in Christ welcome to another episode of ring them Bells where we exist to help you ReDiscover the Bible on its own terms we found that the supernatural focus of the Bible has been suppressed and we are Bringing that back into the light we're doing that with interviews and content from great Scholars like NT Wright Tim Mackey of the Bible project also we have a huge announcement to release to you today ring them Bell has partnered with visual first films and we are going to be producing a
top rate documentary going over the teachings and life of Dr Michael Heiser I want you to stay tuned for ways that you can get involved and help support This project but for now take a moment to subscribe so that you're aware of all the alerts that'll be coming up and releases about this documentary and other great content that we have coming your way let's get started [Music] all humanity is God's image this is what we learn in the first pages of the Bible where Adam and Eve in Hebrew their names mean human and life they're
called God's image which means they represent God In His holy space and that Holy space space is a garden in a land called Eden yes and the story is designed to show that Eden is the reality that the later Tabernacle symbolized and pointed back to for example look close at the descriptions of Eden there's the larger region on the land that's called Eden but then within Eden God plants a garden and then in the center of that Garden God plants the Tree of Life the design of Eden matches the Tabernacle design Yes and there are
details in the Eden story that are developed much later in the Bible showing how Eden is on a high mountain because they're in a place where Earth meets Heaven exactly and God tells these humans to work and to keep the garden these are the same words that are used later in the Bible to describe what priests do in the Tabernacle So Adam and Eve are God's image and are like priests working and worshiping in a type of Heaven on- Earth Temple yes they Represent creation before God and as God's image they represent God to all
of creation and they do all of this in this Sacred Space that's saturated with the life and presence of God and so God tells them to rule creation on his behalf they're like priests who embody God's Heavenly wisdom and Rule here on Earth you could call them Royal priests exactly now this whole setup the Royal priests in God's presence where there's abundance and life in the Book of Genesis this is called God's blessing but it doesn't last very long no humanity is deceived by this rebellious creature they're unsatisfied with being images of God and so
they make a grab at being God ruling creation on their own terms at this point but here here's why I think women in Ministry makes sense okay this is a little bit different because of the edenic ideal the edenic ideal okay to me that that that is that is a Point of resolution in my head for this I can argue against Junia Julia I can argue for it I can argue this and that qualific oh wonderful women women passed the tests of of Elders in these passages well why don't we have women priests in Israel
and then you could say oh well we kind of did because Zapora in Exodus 4 performs the duty of a priest doesn't she now there's no priesthood but she still does it she they even use the technical term for the knife for Circumcision that the priest I can go on and on and on and on I am a master of both positions what do you do with de okay what was that what do you do with Deborah she's a propheus are all prophets pastors are all pastors prophets I mean there's a division of the gifts
so again if if you're if you're going to say this and you're if you're going to Loop the prophecy thing over to the to the eldership and the ministry thing it's not quite doable Because Paul says that not everybody has the same gift well all women have the same well really like where does he say that in other words again I can argue both sides of this and shoot at the other side real nicely so what what resolves it in my head what what what makes me feel positive about uh an egalitarian position is ultimately
I think if we were to trans if we were to go back to Eden and ask this Question which one of these two are supposed to be servant Steward rulers of Eden I think the answer is going to be yeah like why are you asking me to pick okay and to me it is it is that simple I don't really care about any of the other arguments because I can build them and I can tear them down it's just the way it is so it's not as bad of a situation as as chronology and eschatology
but it's one of these things Where if if you can't if you can't sort of reduce it to one thing and come up with a resolution then I think you're you're going to end up spending you know so much more time on it than and and where where is it going to end you end for you for me it ends with Eden that's that's the mic drop moment there people right there it's the identic ideal settles [Music] it so like like we said uh in the opener We're a huge fan of Dr Carmen Imes here
at ring them Bells I believe one she's one of the top scholars in her field I believe she's one of the best communicators in the world personally um and she has a gift from God uh to communicate biblical knowledge we're going to do uh to that point uh Carmen Imes Tim Mackey Ray Lubeck um and NT Wright have all been very pivotal in my recent discovery on how wrong we've been to hold women back from leadership and Preaching positions our local churches um I wonder if you'd watch this collaboration with me with Carmen and uh
JM over at disciple Dojo on a video uh what does the bible actually say about women in Ministry let's check this [Music] out isn't it striking that Jesus never gives instructions that limit women from doing anything like so we got two verses in Paul that seem to do so but we have Jesus with three years of Earthly Ministry and he had opportunities where he could have said no women this isn't a good place for you um but he allows women to travel with him to provide for his needs he allows Mary to sit at his
feet learning from him like a rabbi and when she's when her sister says she should be in the kitchen uh Jesus says no she's chosen what's right to to be my disciple and then and then I think what was maybe the first thing that just sort of knocked me off my feet uh as I was Thinking about this issue was that was recognizing that all four gospels record for us that Mary Magdalene was the first to see Jesus after his resurrection and that he commissioned her to bring the most important theological message in human history
to his own disciples it is true that Jesus chose 12 male followers I think in so doing he was reconstituting Israel like a new Israel around himself so he's symbolically choosing the 12 uh tribes again but the Go the gospels are very clear that women traveled with him that they were part of the disciples as he sent them out two by two to do gospel Ministry that the women are among them that um at the day of Pentecost there are women present who begin prophesying that um at his Ascension there are women who are seeing
him received from their sight so women are witnessing the most important aspects of Jesus ministry where he's commissioning them all of us are Supposed to go and make disciples not just men and so I think it's I think it's important for us to recover this because there seems to be a sort of awkwardness or hesitance in the church that like well the women should just hang back and let the men do this and I would argue like we need all we need the whole body of Christ to do this to carry out this commission well
and we can say Amen to that uh very informative video in Channel there uh from disciple Dojo and Carmen I was wondering just before I say anything what was your take on this subject of women leading in the church yeah um that's funny that's funny that you play that video because when you sent me the questions beforehand I I put that in my notes that to recommend uh that interview if anybody out there was watching I think that um even what she said about the two passages in Paul I think one of the things that
Tim Mai does really well And uh Heiser and uh Caron Imes is you know reading the Bible in biblical Theology and reading it through the entire lens of all of scripture and I think when you take two one or two passages in Paul and then just start proof texting and kind of clobbering people with it I think that we can get into dangerous territory um I wanted to bring up that passage 1 Timothy 2:12 that is often quoted against women who shouldn't be preaching and then I wanted To kind of contrast that with 1 Corinthians
11:15 so if you say that a woman should never teach in church at all and have no teaching U role or preach at all then how would she go up in front of the church in need to have her head covered when when prophesying so I think that's one thing that people often don't don't think about like you're are do you want to say that Paul's contradicting himself or or do you want to reconcile that Somehow uh when you're not looking at things in the scope of biblical Theology and you're just pick it you know
like picking passages like a tree I mean like an apples off of a tree I just don't think it works no dude that's incredible well well said and I even have like a as my one of little discussion points with you like head coverings and women not speaking and and you just you touched on that that wonderfully but another thing uh and maybe you've heard me say it Before in this channel is that the beginning is near and and that can mean a few different things for for me but one of them specifically is that
the the as we read through scripture uh there's a focus and connection to the Garden of Eden and to Genesis almost consistently uh throughout as as we go through to to understand that the beginning is near and when we enter into the discussion of understanding uh the equality or roles of men and women we need to start at the Beginning and in that same um video that you you highlighted agree uh they they talked about this so well and this is something I learned from Carmen to really understand uh the the the roles of male
and female is that we both represent the image of God God didn't choose just one to represent the image he used a a community of male and female connected together um and her work uh on something I'm going to be sharing recently uh soon is uh on the AER uh When it says helper how how we have it defined it uh she she has Ally and um she's Carmen im's definition is Ally and then even Tim Macky says that it's like a redeeming or recovering Ally he kind of even expounded further on and I love
that because that's what it is when we look at the Garden when we look at Genesis it gives us a clear picture of men and women made in the image of God ruling as priests in Authority with no distinction And and you know it's it's it's it's very apparent even you know as we get into the gospels and the few verses in Paul we have to wrestle with those and not just push them to the side and I'm so a I'm so proud of you for how you just explained that because we're not pushing them
to the side we're going to wrestle with these things and understand them in the full scope of scripture like you just did Resurrection I want to go to the resurrection stories of Jesus in The in the first light of Easter day uh actually you know know without the resurrection of Jesus everything falls apart anyway there's no Christianity and within that culture the idea that the prime witnesses to the most important event in the whole story would be women in tears is so counterintuitive that as a historian I have to say nobody would ever make up
that story interestingly in First Corinthians 15 when Paul quotes What is now the shaped up and Polished tradition the women have disappeared already by the early 50s here's our tradition and we know that people aren't going to believe us if we say he appeared first to these women but Matthew Mark Luke and John it's all very clear the first person to see the Risen Jesus were the women and particularly the first people to be told to tell other people that Jesus is alive again Mary Magdalene and the others now All Christian Ministry flows from the
announcement that the crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead and is now the lord of the world and this is just a cultural revolution that Jesus had up until then chosen 12 men um who all let him down in various ways he now transforms that this is part of the newness of New Creation it seems to me by saying now actually this extraordinary explosive message is so subversive that the best people to take It are strange women who no one's going to believe and indeed the disciples themselves don't but they were telling the truth
and it seems to me we need to inhabit that story and that way of looking at that story and say so was this just a flash in the pan and was this just well Jesus you know had a special thing about his mother or Mary Magdalene or whatever but after that it all went and the answer is absolutely not read Romans 16 now of course most People studying Romans find it hard to get to chapter 8 let alone 11 or let alone 16 but Romans 16 is explosive Paul greets all these church leaders in Rome
many of whom are women who are church leaders in their own right one of whom is an apostle he says so Junior and there's been a huge attempt to try to make out that this is Jun ass a man but the scholarship is quite clear this is a female name and she is an apostle for Paul that means somebody who has seen The Risen Jesus and is thereby commissioned to be an authorized representative and here's the crunch the first woman mentioned in Romans 16 is the bearer of the letter to Rome now if you're Paul
and you know in your bones you have just written a letter which is the most explosive piece of theological writing you can imagine who you going to give it to to take it to be read under Caesar's nose in Rome well presumably some strong man no a deacon Woman from the church in krai we assume she's an independent businesswoman Phoebe and she's on the way to Rome and what we know about um the way letters worked in the ancient world was if you sent a letter via a friend or somebody the chances are you can't
prove this the chances are they will be the one to read it out they might well be the one to explain it to people who I mean faced with Romans we'd have a thousand I'd have a thousand questions so so phebe Tell us what so the probability is that the first person to expound Paul's letter to the Romans was a woman a deacon from the church in ki and I want to say get used to it guys you know this is explosive but it's the sort of thing that happens when new creation is going forwards
and to row back from there and to say well you know Paul didn't really mean that and so now we've I I then want to say what are the forces in our culture today particularly I have to say In America which are forcing some Churches and some people to fasten on one or two verses from elsewhere to say oh no no we can't have women doing this and that and the other because that's a highly highly selective reading of scripture and as with all other theological answers the best place to start is with the resurrection
of Jesus and then everything that flows out from there so in summary in a sense to aby's question here is it biblical for a woman To preach uh to lead a Congregation of men and women you would say on balance yes I I I would miss out on balance I would just say yes it is it is biblical yes that there are particulars I mean do you want me to get to let's talk about that because that comes up in the next question Lisa in California interestingly two two women asking these questions um 1 Timothy
2 13 to 15 though you could expand beyond that uh can you explain what these verses have to do or Say specifically about women teaching if they do at all and specifically what your thoughts are on verse 15 in particular would you like to read that from yeah yeah yeah um well I think there's there's a few things to say and and let me say I've written a piece on this which is printed in my book surprised by Script and so all I can do here is summarize some of the arguments I've set it out
more fully and indeed in Paul for Everyone the Pastoral Epistles there's there's a chunk on it there and that those overlap inevitably and the first thing to say is that in verses 8 and n and 10 Paul is saying men and women don't go with the stereotypes the men must lift up holy hands without getting angry and having arguments in other words men we all know about testosterone just now your Christians learn to deal with that and don't be all sort of power Brokers and so on women don't think that Your life is defined by
having an elaborate hairo or by having jewelry as that just plays into the idea that women are the pretty little things the decoration on the side while we men are doing the fighting as it were so he's saying let's get rid of the stereotypes and learn a wise way of Being Human which avoids those in other words he it isn't that he's cross with women for wearing Jewels it's that don't get trapped in thinking that that's all that It means to be a woman to be a pretty bit of decoration on the side and then
he says this is my second main point um a woman should learn in peace in all submissiveness the idea the word manthano let her learn is the same route from which we get mathetes disciple and hesia is what you have if you're a student you have the Leisure to study um the the word scholar actually comes from having Leisure to study and it looks to me as though this is similar to what you Have in Luke chapter 10 where Jesus is in the home of Mary and Martha where Mary shock horror is not in the
back room where the women should be doing the cooking she is in the front room sitting with the men disciples which means she is in training to be herself a a learner and then it's like somebody's sitting at the Fe of a rabbi is sooner or later going to be a rabbi themselves I remember when I've I had Paula gooda on my unbelievable Podcast discussing this with Franchesca stavra aulu who takes the view that it's all inherently sexist and patriarchal and and Paula was Keen to say of course it came out of a very patriarchal
culture so we're bound to see C aspects of that but pointed out that in this specific instance simply saying women should learn exactly was exactly quite quite radical in his day and age it is and and and women would regularly ever since Aristotle who saw women as a Deficient form of men um that actually women were regarded as as not that sort of thing and this of course has gone on in the western world and still in some circles does to this day but then um The crucial thing then I think is the possibility and
it is only a possibility that this is written to the context of Ephesus and what we know about Ephesus in the first century is that as we know in Acts the Great temple in Ephesus is or emis in in Greek and the cult of emis Which has this vast temple one of the wonders of the world is a female only cult and various people have argued this isn't my idea but I think it has some mileage that actually what Paul is opposing here is the idea well of course we in Ephesus know that religion is
basically a female thing so if there are any men there um then the women is going to have to take over the leadership from them and because we we want to hold our heads up like the emis pre is um where Where men aren't allowed to look in and this would then be verse 12 would then be a rebuke to that that women should not usurp or try to take over Authority from men now I want to say I don't know that that's what that means but the key Greek word in the middle alentine um
is a very strange word which when you look it up in the dictionary it's got about 12 different meanings one of which is actually to murder I mean it it covers a huge range and then the question about The men there is does this mean women shouldn't be usurping Authority from any man or from their husbands or they shouldn't be teaching their husbands as though there's a a husband wife thing going on here as though yes women teachers fine but maybe not if it's so I really don't know um on that and then the argument
about Adam and Eve um rather like the one in 1 Corinthians 11 um if you read it out for us we sorry yes Adam was made first and then Eve and Adam was not deceived but the woman was deceived and um got herself into trouble and parabon and she she she became um in transgression I should make clear for those who can't see but you're actually reading from the original Greek here translating it's just some people might assume um why why is why is he sort of questioning how to do you I just want to
make clear you're not reading from an English Bible at this point do that if you like but but but I mean so so for Paul this is a flicker of Adam and Eve story right and it's I've heard it expounded both ways I've heard well um Adam was not deceived but he Jolly well sinned whereas the woman was deceived so that's all the mor fault for Adam but you could read it as as that Adam was above that sort of thing but in the story Adam did eat um so it's not quite clear to me
or not at the moment the different ways of possibly reading that and then verse 15 which was was Specified that the woman will be saved through childbirth if she continues in faith and love and and Holiness with wisdom um the the uh the point there is that in Genesis 3 there is this uh warning to the woman that you will have great pain in childbirth which goes with the warning to the man that the ground will bring forth thorns and thistles in you you'll have hard work digging it um and so it seems to be
Paul saying okay that was the eve problem the eve story But that doesn't mean that all is now lost that Eve will be saved through child birth it doesn't mean she'll only be saved if she gives birth to lots of children it means that the the the apparent curse on this painful child birth is not the be all and end all that God will make the way through now so all of that pretty well everything I've said could be contested and has been contested it seems to me that is as good a way of reading
the passage as any I've Come across and my question is why have some people taken those three verses and made an entire church policy out of it and been very Fierce about it which has happened particularly again in America we thought we'd kind of got beyond that and it's now come back again um what's going on in the culture to make people say this is the defining thing when they miss out so many other things in the New Testament you know that's one little passage how many times do we have Teaching about riches and poverty
in the New Testament how many times we have teaching about generosity to the poor and all of that and many people who fix at on that don't actually seem to bother about all those other things at [Music] all the other thing which pertains the middle of this I think part of the difficulty with the New Testament we don't actually know with a lot of these documents where they were written to but There is some good evidence for suggesting that first Timothy is written to the church or to somebody who's in Ephesus in Ephesus there is
one big Temple which you can still see the ruins of today which is the Temple of of Diana or Artemis in Greek and the thing about the cult of emis is that it was a female only cult it was a female goddess they had female priestesses and though there were other plenty of other religions in Ephesus it was a great Metropolis this Was the big one the big local Civic religion was one in which women were the key leaders now what's going to happen when a little group discover Jesus and discover that there's hey this
whole new thing going on which people are calling the way or following the Messiah or whatever it is one of the most natural things would be since men and women are drawn into this for people to assume local Al that the women should take over the leadership and the key word here uh It says assume Authority is uh it's actually a very difficult word there's I think I looked it up not long ago there's 12 different meanings in the Lexicon and they're quite significantly different meanings but I think in the context the most likely meaning
is I'm not saying by telling you that women have a different way of doing stuff that actually women have got to take over leadership here that's not where it's at but the point About quietness and submission I don't think refers to women being quiet and submissive in relation to men in the congregation the word quiet is the word for leisure which comes through as somebody who has time to study now you've asked me you know it's a complicated question I'm going on a little bit little bit longer but think about Mary and Martha in Luke
10 um Mary notoriously is sitting at the feet of Jesus Martha is busy in the Kitchen and gets cross yes our normal picture of that in the modern Western world is Mary sitting there Dewey eyed gazing up in raptures at this wonderful teacher and there may be a free s of that as well that Martha would actually like to be doing that and she doesn't feel she's able to whatever but to sit at the feet of a teacher think of Paul sitting at the feet of galio Paul wasn't gazing up Dewey eyed at galio Paul
was learning how to be a Torah scholar so That he could be a teacher Mary has as it were invaded the male space in the house which is where the disciples are learning from the teacher and disciples learn from a teacher in order to be teachers themselves and Jesus says she belongs here that's one of the most explosive little scenes in Luke's gospel I the way I forget the exact words I use in my translation but I think he's saying women have to be given as the men might Not want to give them the Leisure
to study submissively submissively in the sense of they've got to learn from God like the rest of us and that then she must have the Leisure to do that but I'm not saying that the women have got to take over the leadership because we're not like the cult of emis down the road now that doesn't solve all the problems in this passage I have written about this in various places but I think that's at the heart of it that he's Wrestling with this very difficult issue which we still have have of men tending to fall
into the stereotypes and women tending to fall into the stereotypes saying no we've got different ways of doing being male and being female but I mean you are still male and you are still female but here's how to move from where we are towards where we need to get with appropriate male and female leadership so that's that's how I taken this passage I there's I know there's Half a dozen other issues in there which we could look at sure but what's interesting though Tom is that for most of us we would read read our Bibles
we'd read it like the way that I had read it and understand it in a particular way you've now just given a completely different understanding to it so for most of us we're reading scripture and interpreting it ourselves yeah yeah and in interpreting it wrongly well we all have to go through this and this is why The task of both historical scholarship and translation has to go on but because every generation will have blind spots and it's the task of the Next Generation Um to say oh pity about that right now we're going to do
some more work on this and you know some archaeologists had dug up some new manuscripts with different uses of that word hey well maybe that means this now and one of the joys of being a Biblical scholar is watching that going on whether or not you're Doing that particular bit to yourself somebody publishes an article and suddenly scales fall from your eyes and that's what Isaiah was getting at in chapter or whatever it is so what about the last bit of that that women are going to be saved through child yeah does that mean every
every woman has to have a baby wouldn't that be interesting no CLE clearly not they seem to have been reading Genesis three in a way which said that the pain that a woman Has in childbearing is a sort of special curse on Eve for being the first to sin or whatever it was and uh it seems to me that what is being said here is look okay she will have to bear children and that will be painful but this doesn't mean that she's under some special curse in and through that process God will be at
work and will rescue her and deliver her I mean it's I think it's a much more positive thing than we've now and you know I might be Wrong and this translation might be wrong there may be a third alternative I'm I'm not saying this is absolutely necessarily right but the more I read it the more this is where I think it is and part of the reason I think that is because of all the other things that are said in the New Testament about women who are actually in positions of leadership in the New Testament
and Romans 16 is an example oddly 1 Corinthians 11 is an example the bit About women's um headdress headgear we've been so bothered about the headgear that we've often ignored the fact that Paul is talking about women who are praying or prophesying in the community in other words these are women who are leading being part of the worship yes they're not just being silent um Paul's concerned that when they're praying and prophesying within the leadership of the church they actually look like women when they're Doing it you know allow encourage yeah women in leadership positions
and and we were talking earlier how you've you've shifted on that where you were on a more complementarian that only men men should be in leadership positions in the church but more recently out of studying the Bible you switched your view can can you unpack that a bit for yeah yeah you know it has gone in steps um and you know I've only once for about five years been in a position where I Could speak into that issue in a local church so I was here in Portland at dorar Hope Church I served as a
pastor for about five years so you know that was my I had five years in environment where it wasn't just about figuring out theologically and biblically how it works but actually what does this look like practically um so those have been two really different important learning environments for me um but I've always I seriously I remember reading Bible for the first reading pause letters for the first time it's still like a memory that I have and uh um there were so many puzzling things in there but definitely 1 Corinthians 14 and 11 um these are
some of the classic passages where Paul says comments about some women in these churches what they were doing and I was just like whoa that's really interesting like that that doesn't Fit um well let me say it this way I was introduced to the Bible through Jesus um I didn't care about the Bible Jesus became beautiful and compelling to me and so I just I just really read the gospels a lot and didn't that was the first my first entry way into the Bible and so I I remember from the very beginning just thinking like
H the thing that Jesus was doing with these kingdom of God communities and then what I see Paul carrying that on but then there's Just these handful of passages Corinthians there's a couple letters of Timothy there's a couple and how do they fit um because the way that I see people appealing to those texts in Paul and the the things that they're building out of those it it a disconnect um so before I even add language for it I've always tried to what's going on here always a disconnect for me um so anyway yeah where
where I'm at now um and I I'm not happy with the Terms of the debate but in terms of I'll try and summarize it quickly because I'm bad at being concise I that so um I think what we see in the New Testament what we see in Paul's letters is an Urban Missionary who is trying to uh Steward the announcement of good news about King Jesus that through his death life death and Resurrection whole new future open to humanity and through the spirit the life And love of Jesus can remake us individually and corporately together
um in Paul's Gospel of Freedom right not slavery to idolatry or to certain interpretations of the Torah anymore and if you look at what Paul like the people people that he mentioned in in his letters who he talks about as his co-workers he mentions men and women like all over the place as his co-workers um and you know in in the first Century to have women in the roles that Paul puts them in where he that in his like in his greetings you know when he talks about aqua and Priscilla or Phoebe or Junia I
know there's some debate on Junia but there shouldn't be um uh I mean it's really remarkable like the on the ground uh communities that he describes and that we see at work in the book of Acts are communities where women are being given a social mobility and a status and honor in those communities That was unknown in the first century there was no parallel um to it and so this for sure why one of the many reasons Larry herado and Rodney start historians of early Christianity tell us that this was one of the main reasons
Christianity grew so all that stuff started to sink in and then all of a sudden I was able to come back to 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul um is telling certain um women I mean these are really Complicated passages about head covering and so um in 14 1 Corinthians 14 about evaluating prophecy um and The more I've read and studied those texts the more I see Paul um using contextual strategies so that the witness of the Gospel isn't compromised um by people abusing this new freedom of these uh that men and women have in the
in these communities um I think that almost every time you see Paul hedging in a particular Church Comm there's not that many there's cor and there's ethesis basically um is are precisely Contex where new Christian women would be most likely to uh overuse their New Freedom found in the early Christian communities and then that's precisely that's precisely what you see I'm not being concise am I okay so let let's go to and we don't need to get nitty-gritty but the first Timothy 2 I mean that's yeah yeah yeah that's Right yep that's right and I
know there's a massive debate about when he says I do not perit women to teach or exercise Authority that's right yep in particular and and again I done a lot of study on it but the exercising Authority a autan or whatever it's a really unique word and a lot of debate whether he it's in it's an intrinsically negative kind of authority which would rule out all types of Authority or whether he is ruling out all types of authority yeah Yeah and then you have them appealing to the creation account it's just it's kind of a
messy passage I remember looking at the bibliography of a commentary a few weeks actually and I'm like I just want to give up I'll just focus on easy like lgbtq question yeah yeah I don't have time to read literally like 25 books written just on this verse hundreds of Articles all with good arguments you know so the the problem is you know that one paragraph attracts all the attention To me it was most helpful was starting to read people who were talking about the communication strategy and the themes of that letter as a whole from
the opening paragraph to the final paragraph he's that letter is putting out a whole bunch of fires in Ephesus okay specifically for opening lines caused by false teachers who were deceiving um people in the community especially by their interpretations of the Torah he says it in the opening Paragraph that that Gene myths and genealogies connected to the Torah are at the root of the false teachers and what they're doing and then in more than one place throughout the letter he makes clear that the false teachers are targeting wealthy influential women in the community and some
of whom are widowed with that whole thing about the widows and like wealthy widows who have means to take care of themselves and that whole thing it's all connected and So um in my mind the most compelling explanation is that Paul's putting the kabash on a group of influential Elite wealthy women who treat the Sunday Gathering as a fashion show and have grabbed the mic and but they're not theologically trained yet and so he just says dude get like start over those right the ladies don't teach let them gain a theological education let's do this
whole thing over again so when he says women I do not Allow women to teach exercise Authority he is thinking specifically of a well specific kind of woman in the church at Ephesus in that particular cultural context like those kinds of women I don't allow that's right and I I actually think that makes the most sense of his appeal to the Genesis 3 story as well yeah that one always throws me off yeah um because Eve when he says you talks about you know it was the woman deceived and not the man many people Take
him to be deriving a universal principle from that so somehow women are more susceptible to being deceived um but Paul talks about Eve Eve's deception and Temptation in his uh second letters the Corinthians and he T he tells the whole church of Corinth not to be deceived like Eve so for Paul the eve deception story uh he can use it to describe all kinds of different people um not just women does that make sense words so he's Not he's not appealing to to Eve as a symbol of femal hood like what what Eve that's right
did that's right is based on her femaleness and therefore all females were prone to decep yeah that's right saying he's just using that as as just an example it's an example of um how there's there's actually there's that little glitch in the Genesis 3 narrative and Jewish interpreters from long time ago have picked up on this where it's the in it's the Adam male Human given the Divine instruction in Genesis 2 but then in chapter three the woman just she knows about it but we're not told how she knows about it we're not told of
the conversation and then um it's precisely she misquotes the Divine command you know she says God don't eat of it and don't touch it there's a whole bunch of really interesting other things going on there and then that's what the snake capitalizes on is now it all becomes these series of little Misquotations and so what Paul highlights um is precise it's precisely that breakdown of passing along the Divine instruction which creates a a perfect parallel with these women they haven't been properly instructed and so what they need to do is take a time out and
get get an education and they shouldn't be the ones teaching the community right now so I actually think it makes better sense of his um comment Ben witherington has a a commentary on The Pastoral Epistles yeah and uh he works really carefully through that text ways through the master bibliography if we're going to talk about women and their roles in the first century ad there are really two things we need to to talk about women and their roles in the family and women and their roles in the ministry we're going to talk about women and
their roles in the family in the world of Jesus and Paul first first thing you need to know about The context is all of these cultures that the New Testament talks about were patriarchal cultures that is they were male dominated cultures so the structures of society the structure of marriage the structure of property everything was geared towards a male centered kind of world so when you're looking at the New Testament what it says about uh women and their roles in the family what you need to look for is not primarily affirmations that women Were part
of a man's world only in a secondary set of roles what you need to look for is trajectories of change and difference let's take an example when we're talking about Jesus for example he holds up two models for his disciples as viable models to follow when it comes to marriage and family on the one hand he says celibacy in singleness he calls this being a unic for the sake of the Kingdom on the other hand he says Fidelity in marriage with no divorce Permanent marriage or being single for the sake of the Kingdom those are
the two options now what's not surprising about that is that Jesus had a definite opinion on this it was a very important topic in early Judaism what is surprising about that is his exaltation of the viability of being a single person for the sake of the kingdom and that's something pretty new really because most early Jews thought that that commandment back there in the Old Testament be fruitful and multiply it was a commandment on every able-bodied Jew male and female now what that meant if that was a commandment was that women's roles were pretty much
circumscribed to being mothers to being wives to working in the home or working in an agrarian setting that's connected to the home but certainly not to have prominent religious roles women in early Judaism could be priests we don't see them as rabbis we don't see them as uh Teachers in various settings uh they are pretty much confined to what we would call domestic roles enter Jesus what Luke 81 through3 tells us about Jesus is simply this that Jesus had traveling female disciples like Mary Magdalene Joanna the wife of Chua and Susanna as well as male
disciples so what's new is not male disciples what's new is female disciples so far as I can tell before Jesus there is no evidence of women as disciples up to that point and what is The effect of Jesus's teaching on marriage and divorce and singleness the effect is this twofold number one it gives women far more secure in their marriages because men can't just divorce them for various excuses or supposed causes is and secondly the second thing is is it allows women to remain single for the sake of the Kingdom like a Mary Magdalene this
is important because it means that roles outside of the home are clearly opened Up to such women who are not simply wife not simply a daughter not simply a mother but something other or even more than that you have to look at what is new in the teaching of Jesus in regard to these things well what about when we get to Paul what about the household codes where we hear a lot about um submission and we hear about the husband and his headship and those kinds of things even there you need to look at Colossians
3 and 4 and Ephesians 5 and 6 In light of the larger Pauline Corpus and in light of the historical context and when you do that what you see is Paul dealing de facto with the existing patriarchal family and household structure and injecting into it the yeast of the Gospel so that women are now allowed to have a variety of roles do a variety of different things not simply be mothers or wives again so what's shocking and surprising in those household codes is not that there are Places where Paul says wives submit to your husbands
Christ uh as Christ uh was a servant of the church now now what's surprising about that is that he goes on to say let's all submit to one another out of reverence for Christ this idea of mutual submission is a novel thing a new thing and so what you need to look for when you're looking at the teaching about women and their roles in the family uh is the new things that Jesus or Paul offered uh in the in their Teaching and when you read the book of Acts you can see the effect of the
teaching in Jesus and Paul you find women who are prophetesses you find women who act like deaconesses you have a woman in Romans 16 Phoebe who's called a deacon you have women who are teachers like Priscilla so what you see is the opening up of a variety of roles for Women Within the household structure and also in the church as well one last thing about women and their roles in the Family Jesus made clear there were these two options what would happen if a husband died well Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 a woman is
not obligated to remarry she can remain single for the sake of Christ or if she's going to remarry she should remarry in the Lord in the Lord and Paul says you know some people have the grace gift the Charisma to remain single some have the grace gift to be married in the Lord but either way it should be done to the Glory of God and for the good of the body of Christ that's a very interesting teaching one more thing that's really radical about Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul says the body of the
husband belongs to the wife just as the body of the wife belongs to the husband now what he's doing is balancing the scales and eliminating the sexual double standard because in the Greco Roman World women didn't need to men didn't need to be limited to just their spouse In the way they sexually Express themselves Paul's having none of that he says the woman has the right to say to the husband this is what you can and can't do with your body so what you see is Paul interacting with the existing structure of society and introducing
the Levan of the Gospel one of the most controversial topics we could discuss in regard to what the New Testament says about women has to do with women and Ministry roles on the one end of the Spectrum you have whole Christian Traditions that say women cannot be priests women should not be ordained ministers uh these roles are actually forbidden in the New Testament on the other end of the spectrum you have more charismatic Traditions that say whoever's got the gifts and whoever's got the Holy Spirit should be able to express their gifts in the body
of Christ and that's not a gender thing so what's the truth about this what should We think well let's deal with the two so-called problem passages that have often been used by br Protestants and Catholics and the Orthodox to rule women out of ministry 1 Corinthians 14 1 Timothy 2 the first thing to be said about both of those passages is they are correcting problems let me say that again they are correcting problems in First Corinthians the problem is you have women more specifically wives who are asking questions in the worship Service and disrupting the
worship service Paul's not happy with that he says to these women if you've got any question questions ask your man at home don't be turning worship into a Q&A session it's a correction of a specific problem it's not a Banning of women in from Speaking In Worship in general or a command that they should always be silent in worship look at First Corinthians 11 only three chapters before what Paul said about this subject Is it's fine for women to pray and prophesy in the worship service as long as they do it in a decent and
orderly fashion he wanted them to be having their hair covered uh for a variety of reasons not the least of which is only God's glory should be seen in worship and as Paul says a woman's hair is her glory so only God's glory should be seen cover the woman's hair and then she can pray and prophesy and worship no problems with women Speaking In Worship Leading in worship offering inspired speech in worship leading the prayer in worship not a problem but it needs to be done decently and in order for God is a god of
order says Paul and not a god of Chaos 1 Timothy 2 a little bit different problem you have high status women that he's trying to correct now what we know about high status women in the Greco Roman world is they were more likely to be educated than other kind of women and they were more likely to assume that They could immediately assume important roles in whatever religion they participated in after all in the temple of emus or in the temple of Aphrodite or this goddess or that goddess they could be priestesses they could be the
Vestal virgins in Rome so when a gentile woman comes into the church and she's educated and she's had important even teaching religious roles in other religions the natural assumption is well I should be able to do this in Christianity as well Paul is saying not so fast you need to learn before you teach you need to listen and learn before you teach so what Paul says is in that context first of all he says I am not now permitting women to teach or usurp authority over the those who are all the already the male teachers
in Ephesus what I want them to do instead is to listen and to learn now that verb I am not now permitting doesn't ever in any Greek text that I know of mean I would never Permit I don't permit he's correcting a problem he's correcting a problem of eager beavers who want to jump in and do some teaching and even usurp the roles of those who are already the author teachers Paul is saying no way Jose we're not going to do this we're going to do this orderly in good fashion if you back up to
the beginning of that passage Paul is an equal opportunity critiquer of men he says I want men to lift up holy hands without grumbling no Grumbling please men no bling please women and please don't interrupt the already authorized teachers it's correcting problems not ruling out women from being Ministers of various kinds when we look at the actual examples of women in ministry here are some of the surprising things that we discover in the book of Acts we have women who are prophetesses the daughters of of Phillip we have women who are teachers Priscilla teaches a
famous male Christian teacher Named Apollos in Acts 18 we have women who take on the role of Deaconess Phoebe is mentioned in Romans 16 but we also have Tabitha in the book of Acts we have women Apostles yes you heard me right women Apostles Romans 16 says that andronicus and Junia were noteworthy among the apostles that is they were notable Apostles the criteria for being an apostle was having seen the Risen Lord and commissioned by him to serve him in Various Ministry tasks in Philippians 4 Paul cor corrects two women uod and CI who are
his quote unquote co-workers which means co-workers in Ministry because they're causing a kaaf in Philippi and he wants to put a stop to it he would not be correcting a mere domestic dispute unless it was disrupting the House Church worship and he calls them co-workers so there's plenty of evidence that the basis for Ministry roles is not gender in the New Testament the basis for Ministry roles is who is called who is gifted by the Holy Spirit and who is given opportunity and training to serve in some kind of task of ministry and it could
be in a Ministry couple like andronicus and junor or Priscilla and Aquilla it could be as a single woman like Phoebe who Paul says was his patroness and looked after him when he stayed in Corinth in the town of kria which is uh one of the port cities of kenth in other words we Have all the evidence we could possibly need to show that in the new Covenant in the New Order with the coming of the kingdom in the eschatological reality of the new thing called Christianity women and men could indeed serve a variety of
roles both in the family and in Ministry or as Paul puts it in Galatians 3:28 for in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile neither slave nor free no male and female for all or one in Christ this has been called the magn Carta of Human freedom and those that it most set free in so many ways were [Music] women we've got so much to be grateful for I am grateful for you for liking subscribing and sharing the content content it does so much for us I wanted to take a quick second and if you
haven't done that ask you to subscribe like and share the content it does so much for us to help get the message out but what God has done for this world Through Jesus and the power of the Cross and the resurrection [Music] [Music]
