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Text:God's Word to Women:Lesson 43

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== PAUL’S WORDS TO TIMOTHY EXPLAINED.==

327. We should translate and punctuate 1 Timothy 2:8-15 as follows:
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Verse 8. I desire that the men pray everywhere lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting, and the women likewise [or “in like manner”]
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Verse 9. [I desire women] to array themselves in a befitted catastola, with reverence and restraint, not with braids, or gold, or pearls, or costly garments.
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Verse 10. But as becomes women proclaiming godliness, with good deeds.
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Verse 11. Let a woman learn, quietly, in all subjection [to God].
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Verse 12. Now I permit a woman neither to teach nor exercise authority over a man, but let her be in quietness.
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Verse 13. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
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Verse 14. And Adam was not deceived [when he sinned]; but the woman, having [first] been thoroughly deceived, became [involved] in the transgression [of Adam],
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Verse 15. And she will be saved by the Child-bearing [i.e., the bearing of Jesus Christ], if they abide in faith, and love and sanctification with self-restraint.
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We should remember that St. Paul himself must, in such perilous times, be cautious how he writes. He could hardly say, in unambiguous language all that he could wish to express, without imperiling Timothy and his church.

328. Now for the explanation: Bloomfield says: “Here almost all modern expositors take the sense to be, ‘And in like manner I wish women to adorn themselves,’ etc. But there is no correspondence such as is expressed by ‘in like manner.’ Now as it is likely that the Apostle would address something to the women as well as to the men, on the subject of prayer, I agree with the ancient and a few modern expositors (as Grotius), that we must repeat not only ‘I desire,’ from the preceding, but also ‘pray.’ Grotius indeed repeats the whole sentence.” Conybeare and Howson say, “After ‘women’ we must supply ‘pray’ (as Chrysostom does), or something equivalent (to take part in worship, etc.), from the preceding context.” Prof. Ramsay (Expositor, Sept. 1909) says: “The necessary and inevitable sense of the word [“likewise”] is that the whole body of women is to be understood as affected by what has been said about men.” In other words, Paul wishes that the women too would “pray everywhere,” etc. Wrongly punctuated, as it is in our Bible, it teaches that women are to dress likewise to men praying with uplifted hands. Strange costume that!

329. “Lifting up holy hands,” was the customary attitude in public prayer, seeming to express a helpless appeal to God. A century later, Tertullian writes, “For Emperors we supplicate the true, the living, the eternal God, in whose power they are . . . with hands extended because harmless: with head uncovered because not ashamed; without a prompter because from the heart we ask long life and every blessing for them . . . Then, while we stand praying before God, let the ungulae [instruments of torture] tear us, the crosses bear our weight, let the flames envelop us, the sword divide our throats, the beasts spring upon us; the very posture of a praying Christian is a preparation for every punishment.”¾”without wrath and doubting,” because in such times, only grace could restrain wrath against their cruel tormentors; only strong faith could preserve from doubt as to God’s goodness.

330. Verse 9. “To array themselves in a befitting catastola, with reverence and self-restraint.” Under the conditions of peril to women, it was very appropriate for the Apostle to impress the need of a very unobtrusive costume for the women who took part in public meetings. Indeed it were well if the Christian women of our own day would obey the Scriptural injunctions regarding plain and unobtrusive dressing; women sin greatly in this regard. The catastola is mentioned in Scripture only here and in the Greek O. T. version at Isaiah 61:3. It was a loose garment that reached to the feet, and was worn with a girdle. The word may be used as an equivalent for “garment,” yet it seems more likely that the Apostle should have used this rare term (rare in Scripture), rather in its specific application. A spirit of “reverence and self-restraint” would ever prevent a woman from becoming a mere tool of fashion. The word ”reverence” (aidos) translated “shamefacedness,” is used in only one other place in the N. T.,¾Hebrews 12:28. It was not necessary for the translators to concoct an “unmeaning corruption,” as Dean Alford calls “shamefacedness,” in order to describe what the word means, because it applied to women. The Revisers changed it to “shamefastness,”¾an obsolete word without meaning to the average mind; excepting that both words convey the sense that women should always be ashamed of themselves. There was no such “travail in birth” to bring out a sense for the word when the word applied to men also, even when before God, “a consuming fire.”

331. Verse 10. “But as becometh women proclaiming godliness, with good deeds.” The reference may be to Dorcas (Acts 9:36). We must study that phrase rendered “professing godliness.” It conveys an idea to modern thought such as “professing conversion,” “religion,” or “sanctification.” But the N. T. word for what we call Christian profession is “confession,”¾see Matthew 10:32, 1 Timothy 6:13. It is the Greek word, homologeo, or exhomologeo. But here we have a totally different word, epaggelomai. Two “g”s coming together are pronounced “ng” in Greek. This is a word from which we get “angel, messenger.” The first letters, ep, are for the Greek preposition epi, “to.” The verb means, “I bring a message to.” The verb is often used as meaning “I promise,” but though in the reflexive form, it takes a direct object after it, something is promised to somebody. But the word can hardly be separated from the idea of a “message;” and it is also far-fetched to imagine it means to “promise to be godly,”¾rather, it means to “promise godliness” to someone else.

332. The only other passage in the N. T. where the word is translated “profess” is in this same Epistle (6:21), “which some professing have erred concerning the faith.” Read the connection. It means that the “babblers” themselves “promised” these things to others,¾that is, proclaimed them. Prof. Ramsay, in the Expositor (July 1909), says of this very word in 6:21, that it “regularly implies that the person mentioned came before the public with promises, in order to gain supporters; it is applied to candidates for municipal favor and votes in the Greek cities, who publicly announced what they intended to do for the general benefit, if they gained popular support.”

333. If this be the meaning “regularly implied” by the word, then why not here, where it relates to women? These women preachers would seek “to gain supporters,”¾not, however, for themselves, but standard-bearers of the Cross; and they “promise godliness” in place of a sin-burdened heart, to those who will accept the offer of salvation. In such a time of peril, women might not be safe teaching and controlling the work of men, for this would involve a certain freedom of manner between the sexes. But there would be much less danger of scandal in women praying and speaking in the generally small meetings in private homes of the Christians, in which case all could testify as to what was said. Indeed it is difficult to imagine that when men assembled in the home of some woman, who was their hostess, that they required their hostess to veil herself and lapse into silence before they began the meeting. The practical difficulty would be to get hostesses to open their homes to men on such insulting terms. We must not think of great churches and cathedrals as existing when Paul wrote these words.

<center>(To be continued).</center>

==See Also==
[[God's Word to Women]] |
[[God's Word to Women Table of Contents]] |
[[Foreword to the 1943 Edition]] |
[[Foreword to the 2005 Edition]] |
[[Author's Note]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 1 | Lesson 1]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 2 | Lesson 2]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 3 | Lesson 3]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 4 | Lesson 4]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 5 | Lesson 5]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 6 | Lesson 6]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 7 | Lesson 7]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 8 | Lesson 8]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 9 | Lesson 9]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 10 | Lesson 10]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 11 | Lesson 11]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 12 | Lesson 12]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 13 | Lesson 13]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 14 | Lesson 14]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 15 | Lesson 15]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 16 | Lesson 16]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 17 | Lesson 17]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 18 | Lesson 18]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 19 | Lesson 19]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 20 | Lesson 20]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 21 | Lesson 21]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 22 | Lesson 22]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 23 | Lesson 23]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 24 | Lesson 24]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 25 | Lesson 25]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 26 | Lesson 26]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 27 | Lesson 27]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 28 | Lesson 28]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 29 | Lesson 29]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 30 | Lesson 30]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 31 | Lesson 31]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 32 | Lesson 32]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 33 | Lesson 33]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 34 | Lesson 34]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 35 | Lesson 35]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 36 | Lesson 36]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 37 | Lesson 37]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 38 | Lesson 38]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 39 | Lesson 39]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 40 | Lesson 40]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 41 | Lesson 41]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 42 | Lesson 42]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 43 | Lesson 43]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 44 | Lesson 44]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 45 | Lesson 45]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 46 | Lesson 46]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 47 | Lesson 47]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 48 | Lesson 48]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 49 | Lesson 49]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 50 | Lesson 50]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 51 | Lesson 51]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 52 | Lesson 52]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 53 | Lesson 53]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 54 | Lesson 54]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 55 | Lesson 55]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 56 | Lesson 56]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 57 | Lesson 57]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 58 | Lesson 58]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 59 | Lesson 59]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 60 | Lesson 60]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 61 | Lesson 61]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 62 | Lesson 62]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 63 | Lesson 63]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 64 | Lesson 64]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 65 | Lesson 65]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 66 | Lesson 66]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 67 | Lesson 67]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 68 | Lesson 68]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 69 | Lesson 69]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 70 | Lesson 70]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 71 | Lesson 71]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 72 | Lesson 72]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 73 | Lesson 73]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 74 | Lesson 74]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 75 | Lesson 75]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 76 | Lesson 76]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 77 | Lesson 77]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 78 | Lesson 78]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 79 | Lesson 79]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 80 | Lesson 80]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 81 | Lesson 81]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 82 | Lesson 82]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 83 | Lesson 83]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 84 | Lesson 84]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 85 | Lesson 85]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 86 | Lesson 86]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 87 | Lesson 87]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 88 | Lesson 88]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 89 | Lesson 89]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 90 | Lesson 90]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 91 | Lesson 91]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 92 | Lesson 92]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 93 | Lesson 93]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 94 | Lesson 94]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 95 | Lesson 95]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 96 | Lesson 96]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 97 | Lesson 97]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 98 | Lesson 98]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 99 | Lesson 99]] |
[[God's Word to Women Lesson 100 | Lesson 100]] |
[[Index of Scripture Texts]] |
[[Dictionary]]
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