One Philip Payne has written an article in which he finds a way to claim that Paul is not preventing women from teaching here, but only preventing women from teaching in a way that would include them having authority over men. The full article is here:1 Tim 2:12 (N.A. 27)
διδάσκειν δὲ γυναικὶ οὐκ ἐπιτρέπω, οὐδὲ αὐθεντεῖν ἀνδρός, ἀλλ' εἶναι ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ.
http://www.pbpayne.com/wp-admin/Payne20 ... im2_12.pdf
from which I quote his summary:
There are many problematic things about this article. In fact, I think it is a textbook instance of all the bad things one can do with Greek to get to the "real meaning" behind the text. I won't go in to all of them right now. If someone wants to defend Payne, I can go through and show how fallacious are his methods and conclusions, but for now I just want to confirm my own sense that it is virtually impossible to understand this passage to mean "I do not permit women to teach with authority over men," "I do not permit women to teach in a way that involves them having authority over men," and that in fact the only natural way to construe the text is "I do not permit women to teach and I do not permit women to have authority over men."Paul typically uses οὐδέ to convey a single idea, as do the two closest syntactical
parallels to 1 Tim 2.12. In the overwhelming majority of Paul’s and the NT’s οὐ...οὐδέ...ἀλλά
syntactical constructions, οὐδέ joins two expressions to convey a single idea in sharp contrast to the following ἀλλά statement. Furthermore, the earliest known commentary on 1 Tim 2.12, Origen’s, treats it as a single prohibition.
Accordingly, the most natural reading of 1 Tim 2.12 conveys, ‘I am not permitting a
woman to teach and [in combination with this] to assume authority over a man’.
Again, Payne is claiming that the text should be understood as if Paul wrote:
orοὐκ ἐπιτρέπω γυναικὶ διδάσκειν αὐθεντοῦσαν ἀνδρός, ἀλλ' εἶναι ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ.
But that cannot be right, right? οὐ... οὐδέ...ἀλλά cannot work that way, right? You can't say, that is,οὐκ ἐπιτρέπω γυναικὶ διδάσκειν μετὰ ἐξουσίας ἀνδρός, ἀλλ' εἶναι ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ.
οὐ θέλω ἐσθίειν κρέας οὐδέ πίνειν γάλα, ἀλλὰ ἐσθίειν μόνα λάχανα.
and have it mean "I don't want to eat meat and at the same time drink milk, (i.e. mix milk and meat) but I rather I want to only eat veggies" instead of "I don't want to eat meat, neither do I want to drink milk, but only to eat veggies." It's not possible, is it, to read this sentence and construe it that I don't mind eating meat as long as I don't do it along with drinking milk? (This is what Payne does with 1 Tim 2:12)
I want to be sure that I am not overreacting to how wrong I think Payne gets this. It seems to me that no one who really knows Greek could possible read the text the way he does, that this supremely fails the smell test. I would like those whose Greek is pretty good to take a look at this and tell me what you think.
(Just as a point of order, I happen to agree largely with Payne that men and women should have equal roles in the Church, and I also find this to be a "hard" saying. I would be forced to come up with my own solution to this problem. I just think that Payne does monstrous damage to the Greek here.)
τί νομίζετε ὑμεῖς?
Thanks.