“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28
Women and the Bible Part 2: When we look at the ministry of Jesus, it is undeniable that He flatly refused to keep women on the sidelines, as was the growing pressure of the times, and as we wrote previously in “Women and the Bible.” He broke every social barrier of His day by trusting a Samaritan woman to evangelize her village, through whom many believed because of her testimony. He chose Mary Magdalene (from whom He had previously cast out seven demons) to preach the very first Resurrection (Easter) sermon to His apostles and disciples, who could not understand her words at the time. Most famously, and probably most misunderstood, we see this spelled out plainly in Luke 10:38-42 with the story of Mary and Martha. When Mary sat at the Lord’s feet to listen to His teaching, she was not being lazy, or wanting to just relax in the room with Jesus and the men. She was taking on the official posture of a theological student training under the rabbi himself, Jesus Christ. In that culture, formal religious training was strictly a male privilege. When Martha got frustrated by this and demanded that Jesus send her sister back to traditional housework, Jesus flatly refused. By publicly defending Mary’s right to learn, think and engage in spiritual discourse, Jesus did not reinforce a culture of female silence; He actively disrupted it. Yet, despite this powerful blueprint of freedom, why is the modern church still plagued by division and strict rules regarding whether or not women are allowed to speak in church?
If we truly want to understand how centuries of human tradition managed to twist the liberating message of the Gospel into a system of restriction, we have to look past the modern surface and dig directly into the timeline of history.
To understand how we arrived at our present state regarding women’s roles in the church, we have to look at what happened right after the last apostle died. But first, we must understand why Paul’s letters were actually written. When we read 1 and 2 Corinthians, we are reading Paul’s direct response to written letters and urgent reports he received from people like Stephanas, the house of Chloe and others in the Corinth churches. (Check out www.BibleGateway.com to look up scripture references.) Because we do not have those original letters, reading these chapters is like listening to only one side of a telephone conversation. We see this exact back-and-forth dynamic play out sharply in 1 Corinthians 14. In verses 34 and 35, the text lists the rigid command for women to be silent and ask their husbands at home, claiming it is required by “the law,” which there is actually no such law in the Old Testament. But immediately in verse 36, Paul cuts off that train of thought with a sudden, massive rebuke, exclaiming: “What? came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you only?” In other words, the prior verses are excerpts from the letters Paul is reading. Because we are only reading Paul’s side of a phone call, traditional teaching assumes Paul wrote the silence rule himself. But when you look at his sharp reaction, it becomes clear that Paul was actually quoting a legalistic rule back to them from the letter they had sent him. He was not enforcing the ban; he was flatly rebuking the Corinthian men for trying to invent their own unscriptural laws to silence women. Without this context, it easily sounds like Paul is overstepping and trying to usurp Jesus’s own authority of including women. But when you look at the historical timeline, you see that Paul was simply troubleshooting local, chaotic emergencies.
When we read the Corinthians and 1 Timothy passages side by side, it can easily look like Paul is hopelessly contradicting himself, protecting a woman’s right to speak in one city, while ordering silence in another. But when we look at the actual issues on the ground in these cities, we see that Paul is not changing his theology; he is acting like a consistent referee enforcing the exact same rule book of order and mutual respect. In Corinth, legalistic men were trying to invent fake laws to forcefully silence women, so Paul stepped in to put those proud men in their place. In Ephesus, the situation was completely flipped: untrained women were the ones trying to forcefully hijack (authentein) the meetings and dominate the men, so Paul had to step in and blow the whistle on them. Paul was not building a permanent cage to trap women; he was simply fighting ungodly pride and protecting orderly worship on both sides of the field.
To see the world Jesus and Paul worked in, it helps to look at the years before the New Testament. A book called Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus) was written a couple of centuries before Jesus. As discussed in “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Sirach and 13 other books were removed from English-translation Bibles by men, not by God, but they still show us how much cultural prejudice against women existed back then. The reason a book like Sirach is so relevant is because it reveals the exact religious prejudice and cultural baggage that people were carrying when they walked into the early church. Written a couple of centuries before Christ, Sirach did not just stop at the Biblical fact that Eve sinned; it went much further by attacking the very nature of women. The author explicitly claimed that “any iniquity is insignificant compared to a woman’s iniquity” Sirach 25:19, and even declared that “better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good Sirach 42:14). This man-made religious mindset, combined with secular historians like Josephus writing that women were too untrustworthy to give legal evidence, created a world where people were deeply conditioned to view women as a walking source of shame who needed to be kept quiet. This is the exact cultural baseline Paul and Timothy had to cut through. It explains why the legalistic men in Corinth tried to invent fake laws to mute women, and it shows why Jesus’s actions, like inviting Mary to sit as a disciple and sending Mary Magdalene to preach, were so completely revolutionary.
When Paul later wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” he was flipping that whole culture upside down, and putting to rest any perceived confusion about his responses to Corinth, and pastoral stewardship of Timothy, his young protégé in Ephesus. This sharp contrast shows why the Bible must be studied. The Scripture commands us to “Study to show thyself approved…” – and when you look closely at 1 Timothy 2:12, the wording makes a massive distinction. Paul wrote, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man…” He uses the word “I,” showing this was his personal directive for a local mess on the ground, not an eternal command from Jesus’s spoken word. “I suffer…” Not God or Jesus suffers. Paul suffers them not to speak, to control the uproar in Corinth and Ephesus. Furthermore, the actual Greek word used for authority here is authentein. This is a rare, aggressive word used only once in the entire Bible. It does not mean normal, healthy teaching authority; it literally means “to domineer, dictate, or violently control.” Paul was not banning women from a quiet, godly ministry, which is proven when he states, “No woman prophesies in silence.” But he was stopping them from forcefully hijacking the church services with pagan beliefs.
In these cities, new converts were coming straight out of pagan temple cultures where chaos, wild yelling and ritual prostitution were completely normal. Because their old religions often taught that female deities were supreme and created first before man, these untrained, unruly women were jumping right into the Christian assemblies, bringing that ungodly baggage with them, and trying to domineer over the men while claiming secret knowledge, and professing God’s approval of their actions. And what example did Paul use to teach them? Look at 1 Timothy 2:13: “For Adam was first formed, then Eve.” He is not making a universal rule about male dominance; he is using the Genesis story as a local analogy to correct a specific problem. Paul writes verse 13 to set the facts straight based on true scripture: Adam was formed first and got the instruction first, meaning he had a head start on education. Paul’s point is about chronological order and training: you cannot teach until you have been taught. The untrained women needed to sit down, be quiet and learn the truth before they tried to preach it.
The pressure of the world was building up even while the apostles were preaching, but as long as they were alive, they fiercely protected the freedom Jesus gave women. Because of this protection, women were not pushed to the sidelines. They traveled, evangelized and spread the gospel as full partners. They openly prophesied and taught in church services, they served as deacons, and led the early house churches, such as the house of Chloe. But the moment a leadership vacuum opened after the last apostle died around 100 AD, the church caved to the outside world. To stop brutal persecutions by the Roman empire, a new generation of church leaders slowly walked away from the freedom Jesus established, writing theology that adopted the rigid structures of the world rather than the graceful and all-inclusive teachings and actions of Jesus.
This institutional shift became so aggressive that later church copyists actually used their pens to change the names of multiple female leaders to match their changing assumptions. For example, Paul praises a woman named Junia in Romans 16:7 as “of note among the apostles.” For the first thousand years of church history, early records unanimously recognized her as a woman. But during the Middle Ages, a masculine print error (“Junias”) was introduced into the manuscript streams. This happened to other women in leadership, too. In Colossians 4:15, Paul greets Nympha and the church in “her” house, but later copyists changed her name to the masculine “Nymphas” and altered the text to read “his house.” In Philippians 4:2-3, Paul commends Euodia and Syntyche for “laboring with me in the gospel,” yet early translators changed Euodia’s name to the masculine “Euodias” to make it sound like Paul was preaching alongside a man. Perhaps this systematic erasure of Holy women in the Bible is part of what Jeremiah 8:8 warns about: the “lying pen of the scribes” handling the text falsely. God always protects His core truth through the ages, and that truth cannot be hidden forever. It took until the late 20th century for modern scholars to thoroughly search the earliest manuscripts, expose these gender-swapped print errors, and finally fix them so readers could accurately read the women’s names, and the infallible word of God as intended.
When we study the Bible, we see that Jesus always ignored the cultural baggage of His day. He did not care about the biases of secular historians or old historical books. He trained, validated and sent forth women to preach His gospel. Likewise, Paul spent his ministry proving that Christ broke down the walls between different races and ethnicities, and between slaves and free people, between women and men. It is unreasonable and unsupported by Scripture or history to think that he would then build a permanent wall to trap women in eternal silence. When God pours out His Holy Spirit, and gives a spiritual gift to a man, a woman or a child, it is a blessing meant to be spoken out loud, shouted from the roof tops even, for the comfort, encouragement and hope of the entire body of Christ – for we are all One in Christ.
“And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:” Acts 2:17
“Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings.” 1 Thessalonians 5:19-20
In the Love of Christ.