One common understanding among
Christians is that Jesus did not really speak to gender roles in the church.
They tend to think this is only covered in the epistles of Paul. However, this
is not the case. Not only did Jesus cover gender roles in the church, he did it
in a way that is very similar to how Paul did. This is from something I am
writing,
“There
is a reason Jezebel is seen as an archetype of feminist religious power. She
represented a reality in some parts of the Ancient Near East that is picked up
by modern feminists. In condemning Asherah worship and Jezebel and women like
her, the Bible is explicitly condemning what we would later call feminism, or
women leading men. To unleash Asherah (or Ishtar, or Aphrodite, or Astarte
etc., etc.) worship on a society was to unleash feminism on a society and the
chaos which that causes.
So,
we can see that the Bible, and surrounding cultures, acknowledge the reality of
women being powerful in both religion and statecraft, and the Bible challenges
it directly. But there is another example of this in the New Testament, and it
is a woman also called Jezebel.
We
read in Revelation 2:18-21,
“18
And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write: ‘The words of the Son of God,
who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze. 19
“‘I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and
that your latter works exceed the first. 20 But I have this against you, that
you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching
and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food
sacrificed to idols. 21 I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of
her sexual immorality.”
The
similarities between this Jezebel here, and the Jezebel of Old Testament fame,
have led some to believe that this not a similar woman called Jezebel, but a
Jezebel-like woman, that is a woman with a Jezebel spirit. She is teaching
pagan cultic rituals, not dissimilar to the practices of Baal or Ashtaroth, and
leading these people into deep and horrible sin.
But
notice Jesus’ rebuke. He is angry that they “tolerate that woman Jezebel, who
calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing” his servants. Some
might skip right to the third element of this rebuke, the “seduction to sexual
immorality” for the crux of this rebuke. But there are three elements of the
rebuke: 1) That she calls herself a prophetess, 2) that she is teaching, 3) and
that she is seducing them to practice sexual immorality and eat in pagan food
rituals.
This
is important to note, because the first two things Jesus has against this
woman, are that she is “assuming authority and teaching”. This should sound
familiar, because Paul says in 1 Timothy, “11 Let a woman learn quietly with
all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise
authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”[i]
Paul does not permit a woman to teach or “assume”/“exercise” authority over a
man. Jezebel is presuming to do exactly what Paul had said that women should
not do.
I
need to pause here and acknowledge that there are female prophets in the Bible,
from Deborah, to Anna, to Phillip’s daughters, we see women exercising this
empowered gift of the Holy Spirit in different parts of the Scripture. Prophecy
and teaching can overlap in Scripture, but they are not the same gift. Just
because someone prophesies does not mean they are a teacher and vice versa.
Prophecy is often an ecstatic gift, where the Holy Spirit overcomes a person
and speaks through them in a foretelling or forthtelling way. And no one, man
or woman, has the right to say God is limited in who he can speak through in
this way. It is clear in scripture he will speak through men, women, children,
angels, donkeys and more, at his discretion. It is also clear from Genesis 2
onwards that he expects men to exercise authority and teach, not women.
Jezebel
had at least doubly broken the prohibition Paul made in this passage. It is
interesting when you hear preachers seek to explain away 1 Timothy 2:11-12, I
cannot remember ever hearing one of them connect their explanation to this
passage in Revelation 2. Paul wrote the letter of 1 Timothy to Timothy who was
in Ephesus, which is one of the brother churches of Thyatira, where Jezebel had
entrenched herself as the pagan priestess of this church. The culture here
would not have been very different to the culture in Ephesus. The kinds of gods
they worshipped, the religious practices and the way people lived would have
been roughly the same. And there is no doubt that they would have known about
this letter from Paul. He founded the Ephesian church and it likely had a
patriarchate role in these seven churches. So, the relevance of this Revelation
passage to the Timothy passage is striking, and more so for the deliberate
avoidance you see among scholars and teachers of this passage.
It
is especially striking when you notice that Jezebel has not just doubly broken
this proscription, but triply. She presumed authority where she should not
have. She is teaching when she should not be as well. But what is the third
transgression? She was being sexually immoral and idolatrous in precisely the
way Paul said women should not, and in the way that ancient sex cults like
Asherah, or Aphrodite encouraged them to be.
Note,
1 Timothy 2:13-15 – “13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14 and Adam was
not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. 15 Yet she
will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and
holiness, with self-control.” How was the woman deceived? She partook of the
fruit to gain access to the divine mysteries that were offered to her by the
serpent: the forbidden knowledge. Some in Church history saw this as talking
about sexual sin[ii],[iii] though
it is not taken this way so often anymore. But it is idolatry, Eve looked to
the devil over God, and to herself over God as well. This is idolatry, which is
spiritual adultery. But note that Paul says a woman will be saved via
“childbearing - if they continue in faith and love and
holiness, with self-control.”
This
can only be taken one of two ways. Either Paul is saying that women will be
saved by their works of having children, added to by faith, love, holiness and
self-control. In this reading the apostle of saved-by-faith-not-works would be
saying women are saved by their works. This does not fit with what we know
about Paul. Or, the better reading is really very simple; a faith filled
Christian woman is one who is focused on motherhood, and they are the kind of
mother whose faith, love, holiness and self-control are evident. In other
words, he is saying that a Christian woman looks like a woman who does not seek
to rule over men, but who learns submissively, and is faithfully focused on
motherhood. Radical right? Only in the last 170 years. But note, this is the
exact opposite of Jezebel.
Jesus
is telling us that Jezebel is presuming authority, is seeking to teach men, and
is seducing his “servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food
sacrificed to idols.” Eve was the first woman to eat in honour of a false idol.
She was the first Satanic Feminist in this sense. And this is why Per Faxneld
is showing us in his book Satanic Feminism that the inherent foundation
of feminism is to seek to make what Eve did in the garden an act of liberation
- she can have authority, she can teach, she is a sexually promiscuous agent –
when really it is an act of enslavement to a false deity.
The
passages in Timothy and Revelation we have just looked at are very clear, and
very simple to understand, as are all the others on this topic. But in a post
Satanic Feminist inversion of the world’s order they appear to many to be much
harder to understand. Not because they are not clear, but because they rub up
against our modern and post-modern beliefs about how things should be on the
gender front. There is no end to the propaganda about the equality of men and
women, and that men and women are interchangeable, and can do all of the same
things. How many movies do we see with a 140 pound wringing wet woman
dominating in combat five or six special forces trained soldiers in a few deft
moves? It is absurd. The propaganda is strong with our modern society on this
issue, and it clouds how many modern people think about these issues and can
cause people to just assume the Bible is presenting an outdated view.
As you can
see Paul and Jesus agree. Women should not be teachers in the church.
List of
References
[i] 1
Timothy 2:11-12.
[ii] "And
as regards Adam and Eve we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins
in Paradise: but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were
immediately married." - St Jerome (c. 320-420) source: http://www.godrules.net/articles/earlychurch-on-sex.htm
[iii] Justin Glenn, “Pandora and Eve: Sex
as the Root of All Evil.” The Classical World, Nov., 1977, Vol. 71, No.
3 (Nov., 1977), pp. 179-185, Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
on behalf of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States; p180.
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