13For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 14Adam
wasn’t deceived, but the woman, being deceived, has fallen into disobedience. 15But
she will be saved through her childbearing (σωθήσεται δὲ διὰ τῆς τεκνογονίας),
if they continue in faith, love, and sanctification with sobriety. (1 Tim 2:13–15)
In light of its
historical legacy: What a terrible statement![1] It
is a ghastly travesty of *Pauline teaching and of his appreciation of women.[2] Here,
the narrative hierarchy derived from Genesis
2 becomes theological norm: creation order implies a chauvinist moral
order that connects the salvation of women—married women, others do not seem to
be thought of[3]—with childbearing and the
implied pregnancy, labor, pain and motherhood, understood as “penal suffering.”[4] The
woman is not merely created second, she is made culpable, while Adam is exonerated by priority. It is the
Christian beginning of an unending story of female temptation and seduction, as
we can see, for example, in Marcion’s commentator Tertullian.
“Do you not know that you are Eve? The
sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on in this age: the guilt must of
necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway. You are the one who unsealed
the forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are she
who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.”[1]
Tertullian
blames Eve, and by extension all women, for the fall of man, portraying women as the origin of male seduction into sin. A
little later in the same book, he adds:
“First, know that the desire to please by
adorning oneself does not spring from a clear conscience, but from decor
designed to entice lust. Why, then, do you stir up that evil in yourself? Why
do you invite someone foreign to you whom you claim to be? Moreover, we must
not open the way to temptations that sometimes accomplish by pressure what
God’s calls would seem to fail to; indeed, they at least move the spirit to
stumble.”[2]
Women’s use of
beautification, so his male gaze throughout this text, he accuses to be a form of seduction, recalling Eve’s
role in leading Adam astray. Adornment is portrayed as an invitation to lust, and thus morally
dangerous. How persistently this message of 1 Timothy resonated with the
fathers can be seen from the influential John Chrysostom who in his homilies on
this text preaches to his congregation: “You have crushed the head of your
husband… it was you who expelled him from paradise! It was you who made him a
subject of death… Do you not know that you are Eve?”[3]
[1] Tert., De Cultu Feminarum 1.1: Et
nesciebas te Evam esse? Dei sententia in hanc sexum vestrum vivit in hoc
saeculo: ergo et delictum necesse est vivat. Tu es porta diaboli, tu es prima
desertrix legis divinae, tu illa es quae persuasisti eum quem diabolus aggredi
non valuit.
[2] Tert., De Cultu Feminarum 2.6: Primo
quod non de integra conscientia venit studium placendi per decorem quem
naturaliter invitator libidinis scimus. Quid igitur excitas in te malum istud?
Quid invitas cuius te profiteris extraneam? Tum quod temptationibus viam
aperire non debemus, quae nonnumquam quod Deus a suis abigat instando
perficiunt, certe vel spiritum scandalo permovent.
[3] John Chrys., Homiliae in 1
Timotheum, Hom. 9.
[1] Brox judges: “These reflections, so utterly alien to us” (“Diese
uns völlig fremdartigen Überlegungen”), N. Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe (1969), 136.
[2] 1 Tim 2:13-15 is read as a fighting off the Pauline teaching from 1
Cor 7 in G. Wohlenberg, Die Pastoralbriefe (der erste
Timotheus-, der Titus- und der zweite Timotheusbrief); mit einem Anhang:
Unechte Paulusbriefe (1923), 120. According to Brox, this passage suggests that “it is hardly
imaginable” that it “derives from the hand of Paul,” N. Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe (1969), 135.
[3] See the criticism in N. Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe (1969), 136.
[4] So G. Wohlenberg, Die Pastoralbriefe (der erste
Timotheus-, der Titus- und der zweite Timotheusbrief); With an appendix:
Unechte Paulusbriefe (1923), 121.
