Part of a series of interactions with God’s Yes to Women: Why the Bible’s Vision of Partnership Is Good News for Us All.
This is the first of two articles responding to Michael Bird’s chapter in God’s Yes to Women: “Leadership, Teaching, and Women in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus.” Bird frames his chapter with a conversion story of sorts. Not his conversion to the Christian faith, but his conversion to a specific interpretation of this passage. His former belief, as he reports it, was highly chauvinistic. His description of his past view evokes, for this reader at least, the language of gendered violence and toxic masculinity:
Once upon a time, I thought that 1 Tim 2:11–15 was the biblical door slamming in the face of women who believed they were called to preach, teach, and lead in the church. (pp. 94–95, cf. p. 80)
I once believed that this text was a defensive wall erected to keep women, feminists, and liberals from accommodating church leadership to worldly values. (p. 80)
However, Bird no longer believes the text is designed to “establish a masculine moat around the teaching and leadership offices of the church” (p. 81). He has converted to a new interpretation:
I hope to show that in God’s design, women have a place and valued roles at all levels of leadership in the church and its ministries. (p. 80)
By framing the chapter this way, Bird implies that his readers have only two options: either follow his former interpretation, as he describes it in retrospect, or accept his new interpretation. This is a false dichotomy, which I reject. There are other, far more common, ways to read this passage, that are not fairly described in such harshly negative terms. A bit of historical perspective helps us to see this.[1]
In this article, I will outline a widespread traditional interpretation of 1 Timothy 2 that Bird overlooks. Then, the majority of the article will be devoted to evaluating the evidence for the general claim that the worship of Artemis is highly significant for the interpretation of this passage. A follow-up article will look in more detail at Bird’s reading of the passage itself.
The Traditional Interpretation
Prior to the advent of the second-wave of feminism in the 1960s–1980s, there was a widespread, basic understanding of the core command about women teaching in 1 Timothy 2:12. In my research, I’ve checked out sermons and commentaries by six highly influential representative interpreters: Origen and Chrysostom in the early church, Luther and Calvin at the time of the Reformation, and Matthew Poole and Matthew Henry in the following centuries. Despite some differences, they share across time a broadly stable interpretation of this verse—one that differs from both Bird’s former and present views.
First, these traditional interpreters are aware of—and are usually at pains to stress—numerous passages in Scripture in which women rightly and capably teach spiritual truths to men. Between them, they cite Miriam, Deborah, Abigail, Huldah, Mary, Anna, Philip’s daughters, Priscilla, Lois, Eunice, and others. Second, they emphasise that the prohibition in 1 Timothy 2:12 needs to be read according to the context of the passage, which is about gathered worship. They say that Paul is not here prohibiting women from any form of teaching we could imagine among God’s people. Instead, Paul is talking about the regular, central task of the minister teaching the church in gathered worship. Thirdly, they see this regular ministerial teaching activity in gathered worship as inherently authoritative. Therefore, they think it’s logical for Paul to move from prohibiting a woman teaching in gathered worship to prohibiting a woman having authority (or usurping authority, depending on the translation they’re using) over a man in more general ministerial circumstances. Conversely, they see that this task—authoritative teaching during gathered worship—is instead assigned to qualified, spiritually mature men who are able to teach (1 Tim 3:2).[2]
Bird, however, doesn’t engage with this traditional interpretation. Instead, he targets the more radical view that the passage is “a broad-brush prohibition against all women teaching any men everywhere in all circumstances,” which creates “an unceasing festival of tortured exegesis” involving “acrobatic interpretive moves” to explain away examples of women teaching in various circumstances (p. 87). As a result, he does not engage with the long-standing traditional view of the passage. Rather he moves straight to his proposed alternative.
The “Looming Shadow” of Artemis?
Bird’s proposal is an example of a form of interpretation that argues that when Paul says that he doesn’t permit a woman to “teach”, he’s referring to an activity that was bad. He wouldn’t have wanted men to do it either. But (according to this revision), this bad activity was a particular problem for women in these special circumstances in Ephesus (the destination of 1 Timothy). The argument for this kind of revision usually relies on a historical reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the letter. For Bird (and quite a few others), the figure of the goddess Artemis is central to the reconstruction.
Bird regards the “Artemis cult” (“cult” here means system of devotion) in Ephesus as vital for understanding 1 Timothy 2:
The prohibition on women teaching in 1 Tim 2:12 is anchored in the particular circumstances in Ephesus associated mostly with the towering religious and sociocultural influence of the Artemis cult on Ephesus and its people, including upon new converts. (p. 82)
Artemis was a goddess known and worshipped throughout the ancient Greco-Roman world. Although the worship of Artemis was waning at this point in Ephesus’s history, she was still a venerable influence, especially on the city’s economy through the tourist trade. A significant factor in the Artemis-based tourist trade was her spectacular building just out of town (cf. Acts 19:35). As Bird points out, “The Artemesion, a massive temple complex, was to Ephesus what Disneyland is to Anaheim in LA” (p. 85). I’ve seen its ruins, on the edge of Selçuk near ancient Ephesus. Today, there are just some fallen stones and a lonely rebuilt column standing upright (currently with a huge Stork’s nest on top). Even they are huge and striking. In the first century, it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (think: bucket list destination for rich tourists). Bird’s comparison with Disneyland isn’t too far off the mark.
The New Testament book of Acts attests to Artemis’s varied influence in the city. In Acts 19:23–41, Luke describes how a group of (notably male) makers of Artemis souvenirs feared losing their trade because Paul was persuading people in Ephesus to abandon handmade gods. This vested-interest group tried to whip the city into a frenzy against Paul and his companions by instigating the chant “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”, hoping it would catch on (v. 28). Luke pointedly states that the crowd was “in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together” (v. 32). Still, the souvenir-makers were eventually able to get a riotous Artemis chant happening. This was helped in large part by the crowd’s general anti-Jewish sentiment (v. 34); the Jews in the city didn’t worship pagan gods like Artemis.
The key question we need to ask is: does this mean that Artemis must be lurking behind 1 Timothy? Imagine a scholar today who insists that we can’t truly understand any letter written to anyone in Anaheim unless we factor in Disneyland’s influence; that every reference to mice must be an allusion to Mickey Mouse. This isn’t self-evident; we would want to evaluate the evidence, case by case. Now let’s consider Bird’s view that “the Artemis cult cast a looming shadow upon everything in Ephesus” (p. 83)—including Paul’s prohibition against women teaching in 1 Timothy 2:12. The passage, he argues, is not generally applicable but speaks to “a specific episode that only restricts women from certain roles because they remain mired in the worldview of Ephesus … and need to be further instructed” (p. 85). This isn’t self-evident.
Evaluating the Evidence
Bird cites several scholars, including Michael Immendörfer, who “wrote a whole thesis” describing “similar language in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and inscriptions and coins about Artemis” (p. 83).[3] He also points to Paul’s prohibition on flamboyant clothing in 1 Timothy 2:9, a feature of the Artemis cult as seen in a romance novel set in Ephesus (pp. 88–89). Bird is especially indebted to the more recent theories represented by Sandra Glahn.[4] Like Glahn, Bird rejects the earlier scholarly excesses about the Artemis cult—i.e., that it was “hyper-feminist” or “run by females only”—and claims more modestly that the Artemis cult included some women in prominent roles and was “particularly popular with women” because of its association with childbirth and virginity (p. 84). Following Glahn, Bird sees the “smoking gun” as verse 15, where Paul mentions women being “saved through childbearing.” This is (in Bird’s view) a “clear allusion to the Artemis cult” (p. 87, cf. p. 94).[5]
But this evidence doesn’t add up to very much. Shared language is, at best, circumstantial evidence. Susan Elliott, in her review of Immendörfer in Review of Biblical Literature, points out that his identification of supposed parallels between the letter to the Ephesians and language found about Artemis in Ephesus suffers from serious methodological flaws. The main problem is that the language Paul uses was shared throughout the ancient world. Hence, it was “hardly unique to this location [Ephesus] or this cult [Artemis].”[6] We always need to be wary of “parallelomania”—the tendency to see parallels based on apparent similarities without a rigorous method. As for flamboyant clothing, Bird himself notes that prohibitions in verse 9 are found in “many Biblical passages” (p. 88).
Most importantly, Artemis is never mentioned in 1 Timothy, which Bird acknowledges (p. 83). This really is a problem for his argument. Australian scholar Lyn Kidson points out that we should take our primary cues about what’s going on in 1 Timothy from the text of 1 Timothy. There is no clear reason in the text to drive us to see Artemis’s shadow looming. This connection “is more assumed than argued.” She raises an additional issue of plausibility: “Why would a Christ community, which at this stage was a sect of Judaism, be relying on pagan ideas?”[7] Kidson herself isn’t advocating a traditional reading of 1 Timothy 2 (for her own distinct reasons, she rejects it). But she is a significant scholar on 1 Timothy, and she and others, raise strong arguments about the lack of real evidence for the influence of the Artemis cult.
While some scholars are saying, “Great for our interpretation is Artemis of the Ephesians!”, I (and others) are unconvinced. In my next article, I will examine the details of how Bird seeks to apply the Artemis theory to the text of 1 Timothy 2:8–15.
[1] Because I believe that men and women working well together in ministry really matters for the sake of the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s glory, I’ve recently conducted my own deep dive into common revisionist interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:12. I’m planning to publish a longer essay on the issue in the near future.
[2] There are differences among these interpreters about whether Paul would permit women to perform other kinds of less authoritative speech in the public gathering, such as prophesying (see 1 Cor 11:5). Origen, Chrysostom, Luther, and Calvin regard Paul’s prohibition in 1 Tim 2:12 as extending to any form of public speech in gathered worship (they do not think 1 Cor 11:5 applies to gathered worship). Henry is very positive about women being “eminent professors of Christianity” but does not explicitly discuss the question of whether women could give a less authoritative profession of Christianity in gathered worship; he is only concerned with the question of women as “public teachers in the church; for teaching is an office of authority.” Poole, on the other hand, does affirm that extraordinarily gifted women may prophesy “in the public congregation,” explicitly distinguishing this activity from “ordinary teaching.” It’s also worth noting that Henry and Poole, commenting on 1 Tim 2:14, do not appeal to the patristic and medieval notion that women are “more gullible than men” (Bird, p. 93); their argument is based on order rather than on inherent natural characteristics of women.
[3] Michael Immendörfer, Ephesians and Artemis: The Cult of the Great Goddess of Ephesus as the Epistle’s Context, WUNT 2/436 (Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
[4] Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament (InterVarsity Press, 2023).
[5] Glahn herself is more circumspect about her application of Artemis to the text of 1 Timothy: she consistently uses tentative words and phrases such as “might” (p. 117), “perhaps,” “may also be hinting” (p. 118), “veiled references” (p. 126), “one might surmise that” (p. 132), “Perhaps” (p. 132), “probably” (p. 156).
[6] Susan M. (Elli) Elliott, review of Ephesians and Artemis: The Cult of the Great Goddess of Ephesus as the Epistle’s Context, by Michael Immendörfer, Review of Biblical Literature (June 2019).
[7] Lyn M. Kidson, “Review of Sandra L. Glahn’s ‘Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament.’ Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2023.,” Engendered Ideas, 1 January 2024. Kidson especially critiques Sandra Glahn’s version of the Artemis theory.
