An
Embarrassing Fact
Those who
say that Paul did not allow a woman to teach in Timothy, because we was
following the culture of his day, have either believed a lie or are
deliberately deceiving. From something I am writing:
"But Paul based his theology of Church leadership and
teaching on this understanding of Genesis 3, “2 I do not permit a woman to
teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. 13
For Adam was formed first, then Eve; 14 and Adam was not deceived, but the
woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
When people say Paul didn't allow women to teach because the culture of
the day didn't allow it, they are either deceived, ignorant, or liars and
deceivers themselves, because that was not the culture of the day. I can
demonstrate this from many directions, but I want to show this from a source
you may not expect: the 19th century Feminist Suffragettes themselves. They
note themselves that Christianity put an end to something that the pagans
allowed,
"In Rome she had not only secured remarkable personal
and property rights,178 but she officiated as priestess in the most holy
offices of religion. Not only as Vestal Virgin did she guard the Sacred Fire,
upon whose preservation the welfare of Rome was held to depend, but at the end
of every consular period women officiated in private worship and sacrifice to
the Bono Dea, with mystic ceremonies which no man's presence was suffered to
profane…All Pagandom recognized a female priesthood, some making their national
safety to depend upon them, like Rome; sybils wrote the Books of Fate, and
oracles where women presided were consulted by many nations."[1]
This is from the official history of the Suffragettes written
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others.
Take a moment to contemplate what these suffragettes have
noted here. Contrary to popular belief and popular opinion, Paul did not stop
women from teaching in Ephesus and Corinth because he wanted to work within the
culture of ancient Greece and Rome. No, Paul didn't allow women to teach in
Church because it was pagan practice that contradicted the will of God and can
be traced all the way back to Eve receiving the “divine mysteries” or “hidden
knowledge” from Lucifer and passing them onto the Adam. In the same way that
Genesis 3 shows us how things went wrong, for many ancient pagans the idea of
the serpent giving wisdom to man through the woman was a model of how religion
should or could be done. Note, an important part of the occult and many ancient
religious practices is the idea of attaining secret knowledge through various
means and sacrifices. What God is also doing through Genesis 3, therefore, is
commenting on the pagan practice of instituting female priesthoods that offer
secret knowledge and showing how it is a source of evil, and not good.”
One of the
interesting things about Bible College in my observation was how poverty
stricken the depth of history teaching was. I don’t think this was done
deliberately to obscure the history of the church on matters such as this. I
think it comes about as a result of many modern people not thinking that they
need history, because we are in many ways what I have previously referred to as
modern supremacists. We think that by virtue of living in “current year” we are
more advanced than those who came before us. When this is clearly not the case
in many ways, especially intellectually. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological
snobbery, and it is especially abundant amongst academics of all streams.
What Lewis
noted was progress is meaningless if you have taken a wrong turn somewhere
along the path. Really the best way to examine whether church teaching has
taken a wrong path is to have a deep and intimate knowledge of history and how
the ideas which are commonly subscribed to today came about in the Church, so
you can evaluate whether they stem from a worldly source or a godly source. Much
of the Church is teaching worldly ideas as biblical wisdom and not realizing
it, because they are not aware that their teachers, or their teacher’s
teachers, deviated from the correct course and have travelled a thousand miles
in the wrong direction.
The idea
that women were not allowed a prominent place in ancient religious worship is
one of those examples of that kind of error. There are others too. But the fact
that even the early progressive feminist advocates were aware of this, is a bit
of an embarrassment to those who continue to rest their practice on such a
clear lie.
List of References
[1] Stanton,
Elizabeth Cady; Anthony, Susan B.; Gage, Matilda; Blatch, Harriot Stanton;
Harper, Ida H.. The Complete History of the Suffragette Movement - All 6 Books
in One Edition): The Battle for the Equal Rights: 1848-1922 (p. 1061). Musaicum
Books. Kindle Edition.
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