LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2007, Page 377

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS 377

Authentein

A Summary

The Greek term authentein occurs only one time in the New Tes-
tament at 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul writes: “I do not permit a
woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be
silent” (NIV; the English Standard Version has “exercise authority
over”). Given this single occurrence in the New Testament itself,
scholars have had to look elsewhere for clues as to its probable
meaning in this passage. Until recent years they have been ham-
pered by the relatively few occurrences of the word discovered in
ancient Greek literature, including writings contemporaneous with
the New Testament. However, thanks to the Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae project founded in 1972 by the University of California,
Irvine, and a data bank of ancient papyri at Duke University,
researchers now have access to the collected and digitized texts
of over 3300 authors and 11,000 works stretching from the 8th cen-
tury BC to 1453 AD.

During the past 20 years a number of major studies of authen-
tein have been conducted making use of the vastly expanded data-
base available. L. E. Wilshire who isolated 314 references to the
term and its cognates published the first of these studies in 1988.
Scholars have now been able to refine their conclusions and to limit
significantly the probable range of meaning for this New Testament
hapax legomenon (occurring once). In this response to a request
from the Atlantic District of The Lutheran Church—Missouri
Synod regarding the meaning of authentein, the Commission on
Theology and Church Relations has summarized this current re-
search and the conclusions drawn from it, focusing on the most thor-
ough and comprehensive of them. The Commission has limited
itself to the more narrow task of describing the lexical aspects (re-
lating to word meaning and vocabulary) of the research, rather than
to an exegetical analysis of ] Timothy 2:12 itself.

Debate surrounding the meaning of authentein in 1 Timothy
2:12 has focused on whether the term is to be viewed as a general
OF positive concept, with no pejorative connotation, or whether it
has a negative or pejorative meaning (such as “domineer”). The re-
search of those who have examined in detail all the evidence now
available to us shows that the predominant meaning of authentein
in the Greek-speaking world during the time of Jesus and Paul was
the non-pejorative or positive meaning “to exercise authority over.”

Authentein
Atlantic District Request

1, The Assignment.

In a letter dated June 8, 1994, the President of the Atlantic Dis-
trict of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod forwarded a reso-
lution from the Atlantic District Convention (June 3-4, 1994)
requesting that the Commission on Theology and Church Relations
address concerns related to the “terms and definitions” of the fol-
lowing “as they explicate how women function as the church”:
Priesthood of Believers, Order of Creation, and the Greek word “au-
thentein” as used in 1 Timothy 2:12. At the Commission’s Sep-
tember 1994 meeting, its Executive Committee forwarded this
request to Standing Committee II “as it continues its work on the
document ‘Service of Women in Congregational Offices.’” While
it did not become possible for the Commission to incorporate a treat-
ment of these topics in its 1994 report on The Service of Women in
Congregational and Synodical Offices (adopted in November
1994), these subjects remained on the agenda of the Commission
for inclusion in other studies related to the role of women in the
church (e.g., the study on Biblical Revelation and Inclusive Lan-
guage [1998] and the “Comprehensive Study of the Scriptural Re-
lationship of Man and Woman” requested by the 1995 convention).

In reviewing the Atlantic District’s assignment, and in light of
significant advances in the lexical study of the Greek word authen-
tein (1 Timothy 2:12) in recent years, the Commission is now bet-
ter able to respond to this portion of the District’s request by
providing a summary of the current research on this word. It is not
the Commission’s intention in what follows to present a detailed
exegesis of | Timothy 2:12ff., or to address contemporary applica-
tions of this text in the church’s life and work. A review of the con-
siderable literature on this word quickly reveals, however, that a
determination of its definition (it occurs only once ih the New Tes-
tament at 1 Tim. 2:12) is a matter of no small importance. In his
comprehensive and landmark study in 1995, H. Scott Baldwin has
made the observation that “the various definitions proposed result
in surprisingly different interpretations of the verse” (1 Tim. 2: 12).!

2. Background.

David K. Huttar, professor of Bible and Greek at Nyack Col-
lege in Nyack, New York, has recently written a highly technical
article on the occurrence of authentein in a 9th century A.D. man-
uscript of Aeschylus’s [d. 456 B.C.] Eumenides. He begins the
article by noting that “numerous articles have been written on this
word, trying to establish whether it may have a general sense of
holding authority over or whether its predominating sense is that
of a certain kind of authority (illegitimate, violent, abusive, etc.).”?
During the past two decades at least 15 studies examining in some
detail the lexical data* have appeared, mainly among evangelical
scholars holding opposing positions on the role of women in the
church (commonly referred to as a debate of complementarians vs
egalitarians).*

In 1979 Catherine Kroeger, a classics student at the University
of Minnesota, published an article in which she argued that
authenteo is an erotic term best translated “to engage in fertility
practices,” the implication being that in | Timothy 2 Paul is coun-
tering specific heretical aberrations in ancient Ephesus and hence
not laying down a principle applicable for all time.> Kroeger’s arti-
cle prompted a series of responses that challenged the methodology
and substance of her study, leading one scholar to conclude that her
proposal was “more curious than substantive.”® In 1992 Kroeger
and her husband Richard argued for a different meaning, suggest-
ing that Paul used authented to mean “proclaim oneself author of a
man” in response to “a Gnostic notion of Eve as creator of Adam.””

The appearance of a 1988 study by L. E. Wilshire based on a
University of California database of the Thesaurus Linguae Grae-
cae significantly advanced the lexical study of the term authenteo.®
Wilshire examined every known occurrence of authenteo and its
cognates (about 314 references) and concluded the following:

Sometime during the spread of koine, the word ab@evtém went beyond the

Attic meaning connecting it with murder and suicide and into the broader

concept of criminal behavior. It also began to take on the additional mean-

ings of “to exercise authority/power/rights” which became firmly estab-
lished in the Greek Patristic writers to mean “exercise authority.”?

In a subsequent article Wilshire attempted to “clarify” his ear-
lier work, proposing that authented probably meant “instigating
violence.”'° However, in an extensive and scholarly study surpass-
ing earlier studies in scope, Albert Wolters of Redeemer University
College, Ontario, Canada, has shown that the work of Wilshire and
some others!' is methodologically and lexicographically flawed.
This is principally because these studies have failed to distinguish
carefully not only between the verb authented and the noun au-
thentés, but more seriously between two meanings of authentes
having two distinct semantic fields,!? only one of which can be
established to have a direct relationship to authented."

We may look with appreciation at the scholarly contributions
that have been made during the past 20 years to the study of the
Greek word authented. These studies show conclusively, among
other things, that the term was not nearly as rare in ancient usage as

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