LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2007, Page 379

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS 379

‘master’ has a very different history.” Wolters has identified 30 ex-
amples of this meaning in extant Greek literature from the turn of
the era to 312 AD (none of the uses having a pejorative sense), and
observes that this became “the dominant sense of the word.” The
third meaning mentioned above, “doer,” is extremely rare, and is
unattested in the first three centuries after Christ. On the basis of his
examination of the data, therefore, Wolters concludes that the
meaning “master” eclipsed the meaning “murderer” and became the
“ordinary meaning” of authentés in Hellenistic Greek—the mean-
ing “murderer” being no longer understood “by the great majority
of Greek-speakers.”°
Wolters then examines three derivatives of the noun authentés,
including authented.*' Looking at eight occurrences of authented
before 312 AD, Wolters concludes that all of these examples derive
their meaning from authentés, “master,” and “have to do with the
exercise of authority or sovereignty, almost always in a non-pejo-
rative sense.”** Wolters’ overall conclusion is that “there was a great
semantic divide in ancient Greek between av6évtng ‘murderer’ and
all other members of the av6évtn¢ family. They belonged to sepa-
rate semantic domains.”*
With respect to the implications of his study for the interpreta-
tion of 1 Timothy 2:12, Wolters states, in summary:
First, the verb av@evtéw [authented] should not be interpreted in light of
av0eving [authentés] ‘murderer’ (but) ... in the light of the meaning
which that word had in the living Greek of the day, namely, ‘master’.
Secondly, there seems to be no basis for the claim that av@evtéw [aw-
thented] in 1 Tim. 2.12 has a pejorative connotation, as in ‘usurp au-
thority’ or ‘domineer’. Although it is possible to identify isolated cases
of a pejorative use for both av€evtéw [authented] and avGevtia [au-
thentia; ‘authority’], these are not found before the fourth century AD.
Overwhelmingly, the authority to which av@évtns [authentés] ‘master’
and all its derivatives refer is a positive or neutral concept.”*

5. Concluding Observations.

a. It is important to repeat the point made at the beginning of
this response, namely, that it is not the Commission’s intention in
this response to engage various exegetical questions that arise in
the interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12. Nor is it the Commission’s
purpose here to draw conclusions regarding the application of this
verse in the contemporary church. For a discussion of what the
New Testament says in general about the service of women in
the church the Commission recommends the continued study of
its 1985 report The Service of Women: Scriptural Principles and
Ecclesial Practice.

b. In commenting briefly on the term authentein and the ren-
dering of the Revised Standard Version (“having authority”), the
Commission on Theology and Church Relations in its 1968 report
on Woman Suffrage in the Church expressed the view that “it would
seem that such a translation does not fully reflect the significance
of this particular term.” The Commission stated that “this term re-
ally means ‘usurping authority, domineering, lording it over’ some-
one,” meaning that women “are not to undertake such things as give
evidence of their exercising authority over men in their own right,
as persons created to be subject to men.”! This conclusion was based
on the evidence available to the Commission at that time, which was
limited largely to the data presented in the standard lexicons.

In its 1985 report on Women in the Church the Commission un-
derstood authentein in the general sense of “have authority,” not-
ing that “there is no explicit Scriptural background for interpreting
its meaning” and that “it is open to varying definitions, some of
them quite incongruent with Paul’s actual concern.”** When this
report was being prepared, the Commission was aware of some of
the studies of authenteo that had begun to appear, most notably
those prepared by Armin J. Panning in 1981 and George Knight in
1984. Though Knight’s study was based on a limited database, he
concluded in that study: “The R.S.V., N.A.B., N.LV. and The
Translator’s Testament have caught the essence of the meaning of

avG_evtéw [authented] and present probably the most satisfactory
rendering with their phrase ‘to have authority’ .”? Though they have
expanded and refined Knight’s analysis, the lexical studies con-
ducted since 1985, in the Commission’s view, have strongly con-
firmed Knight's basic conclusion. The studies have confirmed that
the term ought to be translated “exercise authority over.” In the
Commission’s view the English Standard Version accurately trans-
lates 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to
exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”

Adopted April 16, 2005

Notes

1. Andreas J. Késtenberger, Thomas R. Schreiner, and H. Scott
Baldwin, eds., Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timo-
thy 2:9-15 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 66.

2. David K. Huttar, “AUTHENTEIN in the Aeschylus
Scholium,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 44 (De-
cember 2001): 615-25, esp. 615.

3. There are, of course, countless discussions in various com-
mentaries, books, and articles, but the reference here is to lexical
studies as such.

4. A comprehensive review of this debate and the various ques-
tions at issue is presented by Wayne Grudem in his recently pub-
lished 850-page book Evangelical Feminism & Biblical Truth
(Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2004).

5.C. C. Kroeger, “Ancient Heresies and a Strange Greek Verb,”
Reformed Journal 29 (1979):12-15.

6. Carroll D. Osburn, “AYOENTEQ (1 Timothy 2:12),” The
Restoration Quarterly 25 (1982):1-12. Also responding to the
Kroeger proposal were: G. W. Knight, “AYOENTEQ2 in Reference
to Women in | Timothy 2:12,” New Testament Studies 30 (1984):
143-57 [the most comprehensive lexical study to this point]; A. J.
Panning, “AYOENTEQ—A Word Study,” Wisconsin Lutheran
Quarterly 78 (1981): 185-91.

7. Richard and Catherine Kroeger in J Suffer Not a Woman:
Rethinking 1 Timothy 2:12 in Light of Ancient Evidence (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1992), 103. See note 13 below for responses to this
latest proposal of the Kroegers.

8. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a research center at the
University of California, Irvine founded in 1972, has collected and dig-
itized most literary texts written in Greek from Homer (8th century
B.C.) to fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. Itcurrently contains over 3,300
authors and 11,000 works, approximately 89 million words (this in-
formation is taken from www.tlg.usi.edu/~tlg/about.html. See note 18
in Baldwin’s study [Késtenberger, Schreiner, and Baldwin, 72-73] for
information on two CD-ROMs available with the full database from
TLG and a Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri).

9. L.E. Wilshire, “The TLG Computer and Further Reference to
AYOENTEQ in I Timothy 2:12,” New Testament Studies 34
(1988):131.

10. L.E. Wilshire, “1 Timothy 2:12 Revisited: A Reply to Paul
W. Barnett and Timothy J. Harris,” Evangelical Quarterly 65
(1993): 53. See Paul W. Barnett, “Wives and Women’s Ministry
(1 Timothy 2:11-15),” Evangelical Quarterly 61 (1989): 225~38;
Timothy J. Harris, “Why did Paul Mention Eve’s Deception? A
Critique of P. W. Barnett’s Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2,” Evan-
gelical Quarterly 62 (1990): 335-52; Paul W. Barnett, “Authentein
once More: A Response to L.E. Wilshire,” Evangelical Quarterly
66 (1994): 159-62.

11. See, for example, A. C. Perriman, “What Eve Did, What
Women Shouldn’t Do: The Meaning of av8evtéw in 1 Timothy
2:2,” Tyndale Bulletin 44 (1993): 129-42.

12. The term “semantic field” or “semantic domain” refers to a
way of classifying the meaning of words according to families of
meaning (e.g., words for various plants, words related to each
particular human emotion, virtue, kind of behaviors, etc.). The two

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