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Friday, 12 October 2012

Hard Teaching 6 - No women please, we're Christians

So what are we to make of this passage?

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

I suggested four possibilities in my last post.

  1. It wasn't written by Paul.
  2. It wouldn't have sounded so bad in that culture.
  3. It's the Bible, stupid. Stop whining and believe it.
  4. Let's just rip this bit out, shall we?

I challenged people to tell me which they would choose - nobody rose to the challenge, so I suppose I'd better tell you how I deal with it.
It's tempting to do number 4. Just to refuse to accept that these words have any authority over me. But there is the strength of number 3 to reckon with. If I genuinely believe that the Bible can be God's word to me, it's hard to ignore any part of it. At the very least, I'll need to think long and hard before I do so. Otherwise, I'd be guilty of assuming I know better than God.
And we all know that's not true.
So what about the first two options? Could this little bit have been added by some later writer, and not in fact be what Paul wrote? Well, possibly, but there is no evidence for it except that it contradicts what we know to be Paul's attitude elsewhere.
The argument that the whole letter is not by Paul, but by someone else, has more going for it. It was a common technique in the ancient world, and 1 Timothy isn't as incisive as 2 Timothy, so scholars often suggest that it isn't really Paul who wrote it.
The problem is, that even if I accept that, it's still in the Bible. It's been through the process of selection that every other bit of the Bible has, a process that has sifted out some of the more outlandish gospels for instance and left us with the solid four that we can trust.
So what's left? Number 2? Culture has changed, and the process of selection that has left us with the canon of scripture (the list of books that are in the Bible) would have read this passage and not found it objectionable.
Here's the rub. Different cultures dislike different things. I dislike the idea of excluding women. Or excluding anybody, really. But I'm sure I've got my own blind spots that others would point out, and for which I deserve to be hauled over the coals.

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