Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
They do speak. They say something. But only someone with the view of a patriarchal system where women are property or second-class citizens would presume that what it is saying is that it was ordained to be that way.
It was ordained that Cain would kill Abel. It was ordained that slavery would be commonplace for centuries. It was ordained that women be excluded from any important acts in society other than bearing and raising children and cooking meals.
What you fail to consider is that it may simply be saying that the doors were locked and two big guys named Bruno and Rufus were standing outside with Glocks.
This is how Lee came up with so many of his novel teachings (and Nee too). Read something. Declare that nothing except his version of how it should be understood is valid. Declare a new prescriptive doctrine.
The stupidity of your opening sentence is that it is simply an observation of action by people who are acting in concert with the very problem that we are trying to figure out. The fact of their action cannot be accepted as the reason that their action was correct. That is circular reasoning. It is classic begging the question.
Planes flew into the World Trade Center. What principle does this prove? That it was correct for planes to fly into the World Trade Center.
It does not occur to you that in what was still mostly a male dominated society that hiding the fact (if it is a fact) of a woman writer for Hebrews was the way to get it read by the dim-witted men that would otherwise just reject it without as much as a second look? And that men are still doing that to this day? Your mention of Luther and others yet no women is hardly surprising given that Christianity has continued to understand its primary source text as relegating women to the back row, or outside watching video monitors.
The question as to whether that is the right thing to do in light of all of the scripture (not just one or two verses) must be studied from within the scripture, not by reference to how the people who already had an opinion on the subject did things. If your way was the way to go, then slavery would still be the norm because the fact that there was slavery would prove that there should be slavery.
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So what is being dealt with here is much more than just a few lemon translations of the bible. The "dim-witted men" have existed since the apostolic times. They defined the Canon, the Trinity, the Creeds, without inclusion of the female bishops (of which there were none).
Perhaps there were books and letters authored by females that never made it into our bibles? Perhaps Hebrews was one book that was lucky enough to make it, but only under an anonymous author.
It has been claimed here that the translators from the original Greek or Hebrew are to blame for not properly translating the bible. But I would suggest that any faulty translations are simply the norm of that period and even the norm of the apostolic period. So I would say that the bible translation is accurate if they correctly represent the apostolic and historical church norms.
So what we are doing is not only questioning the bible translators but also the judgement of those that gave us the Trinity, the Canon, the Creeds etc.
(These historical norms have largely been maintained up until today in the Catholic and Orthodox etc churches.)
This is not about the bible translators making some mistakes in a few "lemon verses". Male domination is largely entrenched in the original manuscripts themselves.
For example - the Bible is so male dominated that it does not even mention the names of Adam and Eve's daughters. God gave the name Adam to the first man, but the woman was just called "the woman". The woman was given a name only after she sinned against God. Eve would forever be known as the woman who deceived the man:
1 Tim 2:14:
And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
I think what the history shows is that there was no Utopia of male and female equality before the bible translators got their hands on it. If there was we would find such. A simple example is female bishops, the Bible says a bishop must be a husband of one wife, it is clearly a male role. There are no female bishops in early church history that I am aware of. There were no females involved in deciding the doctrine of the Trinity or what books should go into the Bible. I think this rules out at least, the notion of female bishops in the church and even female church leaders. It is true that by and large, women were "kept silent". I think it is a true statement to say that no woman has made a major contribution to the doctrine and teaching of the church.