In recent weeks I’ve been enjoying a conversation with author Andrew Bartlett on complementarianism and egalitarianism. I picked up the other day that he has also put some work into another conversation on the subject, this time with YouTuber Mike Winger.
Just on 1 Timothy 2, Mike Winger apparently spent a year researching the subject and distilled this into 11 hours worth of YouTube material. Now, I’ve a confession to make, I simply don’t have the time, energy or patience to sit and listen to half a day’s worth of YouTube content. I suspect that neither do most of the people behind the many hits to the site. However, Andrew and Terran Williams have put a bit of time into engaging and so their resource, here might provide a useful resourve both for getting to the heart of Winger’s argument and seeing a thought out response.
I wanted to pick up briefly on part of their response here as this is something that we will probably get down to discussing at some point in relation to Andrew’s book.
They write in response to Winger:
Authenteō – a key question unanswered
One of the key debates concerning 1 Timothy 2 is what Paul meant by the very rare word authenteō in verse 12. This word is not used anywhere else in the Bible. It is extremely rare in Greek in and around Paul’s time and across all the centuries before Paul’s time. It is what Paul is not permitting a woman to do to a man. Is Paul referring to the regular exercise of legitimate authority by an elder or is he referring to some kind of action that would not be godly behavior?
For Mike’s complementarian view to be correct, Paul has to be referring to the regular exercise of legitimate authority, which (so the theory goes) would be fine if done by a qualified man but should not be done by any woman.
A key question is: why did Paul use this very rare word here in this letter?
We will explain why that question is so important.
Paul was a skilled communicator.
If you want to communicate effectively, and be understood, you don’t use a word that is extremely rare in your language, without explaining it, unless there is some special circumstance which means that you know it will ring a bell with your audience.
If Paul were talking about who should exercise authority in the church, why didn’t he use one of the regular Greek words for authority or leadership, like he does everywhere else that he mentions authority or leadership? The Louw-Nida Greek-English Lexicon for the New Testament identifies 13 words in the semantic domain “exercise authority” and 48 words in the semantic domain “rule, govern”, but authenteō is not among them. (Just to be clear, we are not suggesting that Louw-Nida is better than other lexicons; our purpose is to illustrate the oddity of using authenteō.)
If, as Mike says, Paul is referring in v12 to “church leadership, in particular, eldership functions”, then why does Paul not employ one of his own words for an elder’s function which he uses later in the same letter (proistēmi = “to preside, lead” in 5:17; or epimeleomai = “to care for” in 3:5), or the word for the elders’ responsibility to “shepherd” a church (poimainō), which we find in his speech to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20:28; see also John 21:16; 1 Peter 5:2), or even the word which the writer of Hebrews uses for the function of church leadership (hēgeomai) (Hebrews 13:7, 17, 24; see also Acts 15:22)?
Why does Paul use, instead, this very unusual word authenteō? It cries out for an explanation.
If we can understand why Paul used it, that should help us to understand it correctly.
Andrew’s book, Men and Women in Christ, devotes a section to that question, under the heading “Why does Paul use the rare word authenteō?”
In Mike’s video on 1 Timothy 2, Mike talks about the meaning of authenteō for about ½ hours, corresponding to about 50 pages of his 122 pages of notes. The main title of his video is “ALL The Debates Over 1 Tim 2:11-15”. He claims it’s “a thorough examination”. He spends a long time on peripheral matters, such as the meanings of some other words, which Paul does not use, which are related to authenteō. Mike says how confident he is about his conclusion (0hr4m). He has Andrew’s book. But he nowhere addresses the basic question: why did Paul use this very rare word, instead of an ordinary word for authority or for an elder’s function? Mike has no answer for this question. He proceeds as if this question did not even exist.
Mike starts his Part 12 video by saying that he has spent a year of his life on making it. He promises to expose poor scholarship (0hr4m). To spend a year on trying to understand 1 Timothy 2, without paying attention to one of the basic questions that needs to be answered, suggests to us that Mike’s efforts have not been well directed.
Now, I’m not going to get into assessing Winger’s material here. However, I do want to pick up on one crucial issue. The authors in their response describe the Greek word as rare. It’s important to be clear about what we mean by “rare.” What they seem to mean is this. First that the word’s usage in Scripture is rare, limited in fact to this specific place here. It’s not a usage used by Paul in his letters. Secondly, they may mean that it is not the word we tend to find used in other written Greek texts available to us today.
Both points are fare comment and have relevance to our understanding of the text. It means that when we are seeking to understand Paul’s meaning then we have a challenge because we have very little to go on for comparison. We cannot see how else Paul uses it, nor do we have so much to go on when looking at how others used it.
However, what this does not mean is that the word itself was rare. It simply means that it wasn’t used elsewhere in the New Testament and that we don’t have many other ancient manuscripts available to us today. Remember though the old adage that an absence of evidence is not an evidence of absence. It is possible that the word was used consistently orally, that it was used more in some cultural contexts or that it was used widely in every day documentation that we do not have access to.
It is possible that it wasn’t a word used extensively. However, this does not mean that understanding was limited. It simply means that for whatever reason, other words were preferred.
This has implications for us. It means that we should not confuse our difficulty in understanding with potential difficulties at the time. It means that we may want to ask why Paul used the specific word here. This could be because there was a specific nuance he wished to communicate, or it could be that he was using it because his particular audience would be more familiar with it (or even his scribe). It could even be that he is reflecting a specific wording back to Timothy in response to a question asked by the church via Timothy.
Or perhaps Paul wasn’t choosing the word for a specific reason here. Perhaps he was just varying his vocabulary. Indeed perhaps we might want to ask why other words for “authority” were chosen instead of this one in other contexts.
In the end though, what we have to do with this word is the same as we do with any other bit of interpretation. We need to be alert to what the possible meanings of the word are from its known usage. From there, we need to look at the specific context in 1 Timothy 2 to see what Paul intends by it.
Faithroots 