The Tangent Series

Episode 9

The Bible Is NOT a Boys' Club

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I can hear the echo of my mom’s voice as clearly as if she were standing in the next room. She’s
not, of course. She’s thousands of miles away on the other side of the country. But I would almost
​ guarantee that the first words out of her mouth when she reads the title of this Tangent will be,
“Where does she come up with this stuff?” Honestly, Mom, most of the time I have no idea. My dad may be
wondering the same thing, although his response would probably sound more like: “Me sonny b’ys!”
For the record, “me sonny b’ys” is entirely generic Newfinese. No actual sonny boys are required.

​I never quite know what will send me crawling down one of these rabbit holes. Sometimes it starts with a
random thought that pops into my head. Sometimes it is a single Bible verse that refuses to leave me alone.
Other times, it is one of those relentless 3:00 a.m. circular arguments that keeps coming back no matter
how many sheep I count or how many breathing techniques I convince myself are definitely going to work
this time. Apparently, my brain considers sleep more of a suggestion than a requirement.

What I can tell you is that this Tangent has been circling me for quite a while. I just had not clued in yet.
Now that I am finally writing it, it seems so obvious that I cannot help but wonder why I missed it in the first
place. Then again, hindsight is always 20/20. It has a remarkable way of making yesterday’s blind spots
look embarrassingly obvious once we are far enough removed from them. I often joke that life got the
packaging wrong. It gave us youthful bodies before it gave us any real wisdom, and by the time
the wisdom shows up, the warranty on the body has usually expired. Perhaps God knew that if He
gave us old-age wisdom in young bodies, we'd spend the first half of our lives being
completely insufferable... and the second half reminding everyone we told them so.

Unfortunately, the same is true when it comes to the way we read Scripture. Sometimes we
have to live long enough, question enough, and become humble enough to realise that what we
thought was in the text was sometimes the lens we brought to it all along.

There was a time, and honestly, it was not that long ago, when I believed much of the hierarchical propaganda
I had been handed. I tried to reconcile myself to it. I even tried to come alongside it. I tried to make it
fit as best I could. But I was never settled. 

Something always felt deeply wrong, and I could not shake it. More often than I care to admit,
I went back to my counsellor presenting myself as the broken specimen. What is wrong with me? Is this my
childhood trauma speaking? Am I too sensitive? Am I being difficult, rebellious, or unsubmissive? Am I
expecting too much? Am I disobedient? What do I need to change? Am I causing division simply because I am
naming what feels wrong? How can I respond differently? How much smaller do I need to become
before this finally feels like peace? I did not yet understand that the system feeds itself, and that I had been
indoctrinated into playing my part in keeping it alive.

It took me far too long to recognise that the well had been poisoned and I had become collateral damage.
But Scripture had not changed. The lens through which generations of readers were taught to interpret it had.
Through masculine grammatical conventions, translation choices, editorial decisions, and
inherited theological assumptions, readers were gradually taught to see men as the default subjects of
Scripture and women as the exceptions. This tangent examines how that lens developed, how it narrowed
the breadth of the biblical text, and why faithful interpretation requires us to distinguish between what
Scripture actually says and what tradition has trained us to see.
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Seeing What We Expect to See

There's a well-established concept in cognitive psychology called schema theory. A schema is a
mental framework your brain builds from repeated patterns. Once a schema is formed, your
brain naturally filters new information through it. You literally begin to notice what fits the
framework and overlook what doesn't. This isn't because you're unintelligent or dishonest; it's
how human cognition works.

And this isn't unique to patriarchal theology. We all do it. The question isn't whether we have a
lens. The question is whether we're willing to examine it. Every one of us reads Scripture
through a lens. We cannot help it.

- Our family.
- Our culture.
- Our denomination.
- Our favourite pastor.
- Our Bible headings.
- Our study notes.

They all quietly shape what we expect to find before we have even read the verse. The brain is
a pattern-making machine. Once it learns a pattern, it starts looking for evidence to confirm it.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Before long, we stop reading what is actually on the
page and begin reading what we expect to find.

Which is precisely why humility matters so much when approaching Scripture. If we spend generations reading
the Bible through a masculine lens, eventually the lens begins to feel like the text itself.
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Reading Through an Invisible Lens

Once the lens becomes invisible, questioning it feels like questioning Scripture itself. That may
be precisely why these conversations become so heated. People are not consciously defending a lens.
They believe they are defending the Bible. At least, I choose to believe this for the most part.

From that position, disagreement is rarely received as simple disagreement. It can feel like
rebellion against God, rejection of biblical authority, compromise with culture, or an attack on the
faith itself. The person asking the question is no longer merely interpreting the passage
differently. They are perceived as dangerous, deceptive, worldly, or malicious. Women, in
particular, are often chastised for being “too emotional” when they speak plainly, while male
anger, ridicule, and contempt are routinely baptised as righteous conviction.

And, to be fair, people on every side can fall into this trap. We tend to assume that our own
convictions arise from faithfulness while the convictions of others arise from pride, ignorance,
fear, rebellion, or hidden motives. We read ourselves charitably and the other side suspiciously. Yet most
people in these conversations genuinely believe they are standing up for truth. The problem is that
believing we are defending truth does not automatically mean we are defending it truthfully.

We can stand for what we believe is biblical while behaving in ways that are anything but
biblical. We can defend Scripture with contempt, protect doctrine through intimidation, and claim
allegiance to truth while refusing to listen, examine evidence, or consider that we may have
mistaken an inherited interpretation for the text itself. Conviction does not excuse cruelty no
matter how many times we quote Jesus flipping tables and using that as our excuse. Defending
the Bible should never require us to abandon the character of Christ.

Masculinised readings did not simply produce a few unfortunate translation choices.
They created space.

- Space for assumptions.
- Space for hierarchy.
- Space for entitlement.
- Space for traditions that slowly became so familiar they were eventually mistaken for doctrine.

Before long, the lens became the umbrella under which entire theological systems found shelter.
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The Masculinisation of the Reader

However we insist on telling the story, the inherited lens is not confined to old translations or dusty
commentaries. Repeated translation choices, interpretive habits, editorial headings, and inherited
assumptions created an interpretive environment in which hierarchical theology could flourish.
We can see its effects plainly in the conversations taking place around us now. We are hearing
claims that patriarchy protects women from, wait for it, “themselves.” We are hearing calls to repeal
the Nineteenth Amendment. Christian women are calling other women witches, pathetic feminists,
victims of “Miss Piggy Syndrome,” hellbound religious ones, Satan’s children, liars whose father is Satan,
and dangers to the faith. And those are among the kinder examples I could use. We are even hearing
terms like “antibirther” thrown around as though attaching a label to someone is the same thing as
making a biblical argument. I am still not entirely certain what an “antibirther” is.

At times, I honestly wonder whether some of it is satire. Unfortunately, it often is not.

We live in a time when some who profess faith in the Gospel have built entire platforms around rage bait
while simultaneously attacking other Christians with language that bears little resemblance to Christ. Sure,
it may be entertaining, but have we really reduced the Bible to that?

And as for the word feminist, I am never quite sure which definition is being condemned on any given
day. That raises another question: what does careful exegesis of Scripture have to do with feminism?

If someone points out that Genesis 1:27–28 gives both male and female the image of God and
the commission to exercise dominion, is that feminism, or is that simply reading the passage? If
someone uses words such as mutuality or equality, or, heaven forbid, quotes the creation
account as it is written, out come the theological claws.

Suddenly, the conversation is no longer about the text.

The question may have been, “Where does Scripture say that husbands are commanded to
lead their wives?” The response becomes, “That is feminism.”

The question may have been, “Why is the mutual submission of Ephesians 5:21 excluded from
this interpretation?” The response becomes, “You are imposing modern equality onto Scripture.”

The question may have been, “Why are the ministries of Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla, Deborah,
Huldah, and the women at the resurrection repeatedly minimised?” The response becomes,
“You are reading the Bible through a feminist lens.”

Instead of providing the Scripture being requested, explaining the grammar, addressing the
historical setting, or demonstrating how the interpretation fits the whole counsel of Scripture, the
person assigns a label. Once the label has been attached, the argument is treated as though it
has already been disproved.

It is a remarkably efficient tactic. Call the woman a feminist, and apparently no further
engagement is required.

Psychologically and rhetorically, several things are happening at once. It is an ad hominem
attack because the person is targeted instead of the argument. It is poisoning the well because
the audience is warned that anything the person says should be distrusted before the evidence
is even considered. It is also a genetic fallacy because the argument is rejected based on its
alleged source or association rather than whether it is faithful to the text. The word itself
becomes a thought-terminating label, a term used to end inquiry rather than encourage it.

The tactic also protects the existing system from examination. Honest questions create discomfort
because they may expose assumptions that have been presented as biblical certainty. Labelling
the questioner shifts that discomfort away from the interpretation and onto the character, motives,
faithfulness, or supposed rebellion of the person asking. The accusation essentially becomes the argument.

That is a perfect deflection.

Perhaps that is why the definition of feminism seems to change with the wind. At times, it
appears to mean believing women are superior to men. At other times, it means believing
women should be permitted to vote, speak, teach, work, study Scripture, question authority,
identify abuse, or possess moral agency before God. Sometimes it seems to mean little more
than a woman who has noticed that the verse being quoted does not actually say what she was
told it says. When a word can mean everything, it eventually means nothing. It becomes less of
a definition and more of a warning label placed on anyone who disturbs the hierarchy.

I do not organise my theology around the label feminist. I do not consider myself beholden to
feminism, patriarchy, complementarianism, egalitarianism, or whichever theological team
currently has the loudest merchandise table. I am interested in the Gospel and in allowing
Scripture to say what Scripture says.

Is there a label for that?

I thought it was Christian.

For the record, a label cannot answer a textual question. And it doesn’t matter if your favourite
biblical scholar or theologian came up with it.

Calling an interpretation feminist does not prove it false. Calling hierarchy biblical does not
prove it is present in the passage. Calling a woman rebellious does not supply the missing
verse. And invoking the word “order” does not relieve anyone of the responsibility to
demonstrate where God established that order in the text.

And this is precisely why the masculinisation of the reader matters. When generations have
been taught to regard maleness as the biblical default, anything that challenges that assumption
can begin to sound suspicious, ideological, or even rebellious, regardless of what the text itself says.

These are not harmless disagreements over secondary doctrine. This kind of language pits
brothers and sisters against one another, rewards contempt, and baptises cruelty as
discernment. It is the same old system established in the garden, and every insult, accusation,
and dehumanising label simply waters the grass.
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The Boys' Club Nobody Notices

Put aside the labels, the name-calling, the accusations of rebellion, the spiritual intimidation, and
the weaponised threats of hell aimed at Christians who do not submit to patriarchy. None of it
answers the question still sitting plainly on the table:

What does Scripture actually say? That is the question we should be asking.

And yet, when we begin reading Scripture more carefully, a tension can emerge between what the
text actually says on paper and what we have always been told it means. At first, it may feel like nothing
more than a pebble in your shoe. You notice it, but you keep walking. You shift your footing, adjust
your stride, and try to ignore the discomfort. But as the passages accumulate, so do the questions.
The discomfort follows you. What once seemed small becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss,
until eventually you have to stop, take off the shoe, and find out what has been there all along.
Perhaps the problem is not with Scripture, but with the framework through which we were taught to read it.

What is creating this tension between the text itself and the conclusions we have inherited? Why
does Scripture so often appear more exclusively male in translation than the underlying
language, grammar, and context require? Where does the text itself end, and where do masculine
grammatical forms, translation choices, editorial headings, and inherited assumptions begin?

Long before we had modern language for patriarchy, Christian nationalism,
complementarianism, or any of the other labels now attached to these conversations, those
assumptions had already settled comfortably into the furniture. They were tucked into translation
choices, reinforced through headings, repeated from pulpits, passed down through commentaries,
and eventually presented as though they had arrived directly from the mouth of God.

That is the tricky thing about a boys’ club. It rarely introduces itself as one. There is no sign on
the door and no membership card tucked inside your wallet. It is usually much subtler than that.

It sounds like a “plain reading” of Scripture. It feels like tradition, familiar and comforting, like
turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. It settles so naturally into the room that eventually we stop
noticing it is there. We simply assume this is how things are, how they have always been, and
therefore how God must have intended them to be.

No questions asked.

Well, I have questions.

A lot of them.

I have come to recognise just how easily translation, interpretation, and theological habit can
blend together until the reader can no longer tell where Scripture ends and assumption begins.
A masculine word appears in English, a male-only conclusion follows, and before long the entire
structure is being defended as “biblical order.” If we are going to claim that Scripture restricts,
excludes, silences, or subordinates half of humanity, then surely the text itself should be able to
withstand examination without requiring tradition to hold it upright.

This tangent is not an attack on Scripture. It is quite the opposite.

It comes from the same place much of my writing comes from: the painful realisation that what I once
wanted to reject was often not Scripture itself, but the way Scripture had been handled, framed, narrowed,
and sometimes masculinised until the translation began carrying more weight than the text beneath it.

And yes, I know the word masculinised will make some people uncomfortable. As the saying
goes, some may prefer to shoot the messenger rather than examine the message. Go ahead. I
will still write what I believe I am called to say. The evidence will speak for itself.

Without diving headfirst into every current debate surrounding patriarchy, Christian nationalism,
church hierarchy, or women in ministry, I want to begin somewhere more basic. These debates
are not the root of the problem. They are symptoms of something much deeper. There is little
point in treating the symptoms if we are unwilling to examine the source.

So, I want to look at the words.

- How were they written?
- How were they translated?
- What was inclusive in the original language but narrowed in English?
- What was feminine, neutral, collective, or role-based before tradition quietly handed it a necktie?
- And what may have been added, narrowed, or assumed along the way?

Generation after generation, certain translation choices, editorial headings, theological
assumptions, and church traditions quietly accumulated until many of us began reading things in
Scripture that the text itself never explicitly says. Sometimes the most influential words in our
Bible...are not the ones God inspired. They're the ones we assumed He meant.

Maybe what I had been reacting to all those years was not Scripture itself. Maybe it was the way
Scripture had been handed to me and the certainty with which I had been taught never to question
it. People have been remarkably certain about things that later proved untrue. The earth did
not suddenly become round when people stopped believing it was flat. They had been standing on
the same ground all along. What changed was their understanding of what had always been beneath their feet.

Perhaps Scripture had not changed either.

Perhaps I was finally seeing it from a different vantage point.
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The Bible Was Written Before English Existed

Recognising the lens of Scripture is only the beginning. The next question is how it became so
deeply embedded that generations of readers stopped noticing it was there.

To answer that, we need to begin with something remarkably basic: The Bible was written
before English existed.

I realise this is not breaking news. Nevertheless, we often read an English translation as though
God dictated it in precisely the form now sitting in our laps, complete with chapter numbers,
paragraph divisions, headings, punctuation and every masculine pronoun. He did not.

That does not diminish the truth that Scripture is God-breathed. It simply distinguishes the inspired
text from the necessary human work of carrying that text from one language into another. Inspiration
and translation are not opposing ideas, but neither are they identical processes.

The biblical writers wrote primarily in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Those languages organise
thought differently from English. They use grammatical structures, collective expressions and
gender conventions that do not always transfer neatly into the language we speak today.
Translation therefore requires choices. That is not an accusation. It is the nature of translation.

There is rarely a perfect one-for-one correspondence in which every word in one language has
a single English word that carries precisely the same meaning, range, tone and implication. A
translator must consider the word itself, its grammatical form, its immediate context, the larger
argument and what will make sense to the intended reader. Most of those choices are
reasonable and necessary. But necessary choices still shape what the English reader sees.

And sometimes, after enough repetition, what the translator chose begins to sound like
something God explicitly said.

Grammar is Not Biology

One very important necessary distinction is the separation of grammatical gender from biological sex.

In grammatically gendered languages, words can be classified as masculine, feminine or, in
Greek, sometimes neuter. That classification does not automatically tell us whether the person
or people being discussed are biologically male or female. Grammatical gender is part of how a
language organises words. It is not always a declaration about who is included.

English does not work in quite the same way. Modern English relies more heavily on explicitly
gendered words and pronouns such as man, woman, he, she, husband, wife, brother and sister.
When translators bring a grammatically masculine expression into English, they must decide whether
to preserve the masculine form or translate the inclusive sense conveyed by the context.

The translation decision matters because English readers tend to picture what the English word names.

Consider an ordinary sentence:
“Every student must bring his book.”

For generations, English speakers were taught that his could include both male and female
students. Grammatically, it was intended as a generic masculine. But ask someone to picture
the student, and there is a good chance the person in their imagination will be a boy. The girls
may be included by rule, but they can disappear from the reader’s mental picture.

Something similar can happen when we read Scripture.

Brothers, Sisters and Adelphoi

Paul often addresses congregations using the Greek word adelphoi. The word can refer to male
brothers, but in the appropriate context it can also refer to siblings or fellow believers of both
sexes. Women were members of those congregations. They gathered with the church, heard
the letters read aloud and were included among the believers being addressed.

Yet many traditional English translations rendered adelphoi as brothers or brethren.

Those translations may have intended the word generically. The average modern reader, however,
sees brothers and pictures men. I can almost bet you are picturing men as you read this right now.

The reader subconsciously imagines Paul addressing a male audience, even though the congregation
before him included women. Many contemporary translations now use brothers and sisters in
these contexts precisely because adelphoi can refer to the whole community of believers, not merely
its male members. However, even though we’ve made the transition to honour the original
language in translation, we often now find ourselves arguing or trying to prove that position of
inclusion simply because of the influence of translators' choice. It may appear to be subtle,
but the impact has been nothing of the sort.

That mental picture was not necessarily created by Paul. It may have been created by English.

And once that picture is repeated across letter after letter, it begins to do more than influence
how we imagine the congregation. It can influence whom we believe Paul instructed, corrected,
commissioned, encouraged and entrusted with the work of the church.

One word may seem insignificant. A repeated pattern is not. Of course, we also understand how
“repeated” patterns affect other areas of our life. Why should we think it's any different here?

Masculine Does Not Always Mean Male

This does not mean every masculine word in Hebrew or Greek should be translated inclusively.
Sometimes a masculine term refers specifically to a man or to a group of men. Context still
matters. That is precisely the point.

We cannot assume that a masculine grammatical form either excludes women or includes them
without examining how the word functions in its sentence, passage and historical setting.
Grammar gives us information, but it does not excuse us from interpretation.

The same care will be required when we encounter words such as:
anthrōpos, often referring to a person or human being;
anēr, commonly referring to a man and, in some contexts, a husband;
adam, which can refer to humanity, a human being or the individual Adam;
ha-adam, often meaning the human or the earthling before the narrative distinguishes male and female.

Masculine plurals that may refer to mixed groups; collective nouns that include people whom the
English wording can cause us to overlook. These words are not interchangeable. Nor can their
meanings be decided by looking at an English word and working backwards.

That is where English readers can mistake the grammatical decisions required by translation for
theological declarations made by the original text. And it's certainly easy to insert a personal bias
in here and then run with it.

A translation may need to choose man, person, humanity, brothers, brothers and sisters, he,
they, husband or male. But once that choice appears on the page, the reader may assume that
the English specificity was equally explicit in the original.

Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was not. This does not make translation untrustworthy. It
makes careful reading necessary.

The question is not whether translators made choices. They had no alternative. The question is
what those choices taught generations of English readers to picture, and what theology was
later built from that picture. This is what we have to keep in mind.

When brothers repeatedly becomes a room full of men, or when humanity repeatedly becomes
man, and when a grammatically masculine form is repeatedly treated as proof of male exclusivity,
translation can begin doing more than carrying the text. It can begin steering the interpretation.
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When Translation Starts Driving Theology

I am going to repeat something here that I have written in previous Tangents: Scripture is not a
sliding scale of absolutism, no matter how determined we are to make it one. Your full-size
luggage is not fitting into that carry-on sizer, regardless of how loudly you argue with the
attendant at the gate. In much the same way, some translated words have been made to carry
more theological luggage than the underlying language can reasonably hold.

Before we continue, we need to distinguish between three related processes that are often
blended together until they appear to be one and the same:

- Translation: carrying meaning from one language into another.
- Interpretation: deciding what that translated language means within its context.
- Theology: building beliefs, doctrines and practices from those interpretations.

These stages inevitably interact, but they are not identical. I am not arguing that the Bible has
been corrupted. I am arguing that interpretive assumptions can accumulate around translation
choices until readers have difficulty distinguishing what the original text says, what a translator
selected, and what later theology concluded from that selection.

Masculine Defaults

So, what is a masculine default? The name itself seems almost self-explanatory. Biblical Hebrew,
Aramaic and Greek often use masculine grammatical forms as the default when referring to
mixed groups, people whose sex is unspecified, or humanity more generally. In other words, a masculine
form may refer specifically to males, but it does not automatically exclude females.

I’d like to add here that this is where many arguments from silence are made. It’s a distinction that becomes
very important in translation. When a masculine form is rendered in English as men, brothers, sons or he,
the English reader may understandably assume that only males were intended. Sometimes that is exactly
what the context means. Sometimes it is not. The problem begins when a grammatical default is treated
as proof of male exclusivity without first examining the word, the context and the people being addressed.

Generic Masculine Language

Older English routinely used man, men, brothers and sons generically. A writer could use a
masculine term while intending to include both males and females. Earlier translators and
readers often understood that convention automatically, while many modern readers do not.

When we read men, we tend to picture men. When we read brothers, we tend to hear males.
When we read sons, we may assume daughters have been excluded. The original translator
may have intended the language inclusively, but the modern reader can receive it narrowly.

That means the problem is not always that a translation was careless or deliberately restrictive.
Sometimes the English language changed while the wording remained the same. What once sounded
collective can now sound male-only. When that older convention is treated as proof that Scripture was
addressing only men, a change in English usage can quietly become a theological conclusion.

Translation Versus Interpretation

Sometimes a translation does more than carry a word from one language into another. It must
choose between several possible meanings, and that choice can place an interpretation directly
onto the page. That is not necessarily dishonest. Translators cannot place every possible
meaning into the sentence at once. They must decide which English word they believe best
communicates the author’s meaning in that particular context. The difficulty begins when
readers are unaware that a choice was made.

Take Paul’s description of Phoebe in Romans 16:1. He calls her a diakonos of the church at
Cenchreae. That word can be translated as servant, minister or deacon, depending on its context
and whether the translator believes Paul is describing general service or a recognised ministry role.

Some English translations call Phoebe a servant. Others call her a deacon, deaconess, minister
or even helper. The Greek word remains the same, but the English reader is handed a different
first impression. Servant may sound informal. Minister sounds vocational. Deacon may sound
like an established church office. The translation has not merely supplied an English word. It has helped
the reader decide what kind of role Phoebe held before the discussion has even begun.

The same thing occurs in the next verse. Paul describes Phoebe as a prostatis of many people,
including himself. English translations have rendered the term as helper, patron and benefactor.
Those words overlap, but they do not create the same picture. A helper appears to assist from
the sidelines. A patron or benefactor may possess resources, influence and social standing.
Choosing one English word over another can quietly enlarge or diminish the reader’s perception
of Phoebe before any theology is discussed.

First Timothy 2:12 provides an even more consequential example. The rare Greek verb authentein
has been translated in different English versions as have authority, exercise authority, assume authority,
usurp authority or domineer. Those expressions do not prohibit precisely the same thing.

To prohibit someone from exercising legitimate authority is not identical to prohibiting someone
from seizing authority, acting domineeringly or misusing power. Yet whichever rendering appears in
the reader’s Bible can strongly influence what the reader believes Paul forbade and whether the
prohibition is understood as universal, situational or directed toward abusive behaviour.

This is the point we all need to understand when studying Scripture:
A translation may preserve the range of possibilities, or it may select one possibility and place it
in the main text while moving the alternatives to a footnote. The average reader may never see
the footnote. They simply assume the English wording reproduces every layer of the original
with exact precision. But sometimes the English sentence is already an interpretation.

That does not mean every possible translation is equally convincing, nor does it mean context
cannot help us determine the most likely meaning. It means we should be honest about where
the original word ends and the translator’s interpretive decision begins. Theology should not be
built on an English wording without first asking whether that wording is the only meaning the
original language can reasonably carry.

Editorial Headings

Headings are not part of the inspired text. They are publisher and editorial choices added to help
readers navigate Scripture. I personally find them to be very useful and I tend to use them often in my
own writing. They can help shape what we expect to find before we have read a single verse.

A heading tells the reader where a section begins, what the subject is, and often how the
passage should be understood. Once that frame is in place, we may unconsciously read
everything beneath it through the heading rather than through the larger argument of the text.

Consider Ephesians 5. A heading such as Wives and Husbands or Wives, Submit to Your Husbands
can cause the reader to begin at verse 22 and treat Paul’s instructions as a separate teaching on marital
hierarchy. Yet the grammatical flow reaches back to verse 21: “Submit to one another out of reverence
for Christ.” The heading may divide what the original argument connects.

The same thing can happen when a passage is titled Qualifications for Men in Ministry, The Fall
of Man, or Jesus and the Adulterous Woman. Those headings may feel natural, but they are still
interpretations. They select a focus, identify a subject and sometimes introduce assumptions
that are not stated in the text itself. After enough repetition, we may subconsciously remember
the heading more clearly than the verse. This is something we need to deeply consider.

A heading can guide the eye, but it should never govern the theology. Before treating a title as
the meaning of a passage, we need to ask where the sentence actually begins, how the
argument flows, and whether the heading clarifies the text or quietly narrows it.

Punctuation and Paragraph Divisions

The earliest biblical manuscripts did not arrive with the modern punctuation, paragraph
divisions, chapter numbers and verse numbers now printed in our Bibles. The familiar structure
on the page includes editorial decisions made to help readers follow the text.

Those decisions are certainly useful. Reading an entire Pauline letter without punctuation or
paragraph breaks would not be high on my list of recreational activities. But usefulness still does
not make the divisions inspired.

Consider the difference punctuation can make:

“Let’s eat, Grandma.”

“Let’s eat Grandma.”

The words are identical. The comma is not. In the first sentence, Grandma is invited to dinner. In
the second, Grandma is dinner. Punctuation helps us understand meaning, but it also shows
how much interpretation can rest on a mark that was added later.

A period tells us where an editor believes a sentence ends. A paragraph break tells us where one
thought appears to stop and another begins. A heading can make the next verse appear to introduce
an entirely new subject, even when the grammar connects it directly to what came before.

This becomes particularly important in Paul’s letters. Paul builds arguments through repeated
words, contrasts, questions and answers, parallel phrases, and other recognisable rhetorical
patterns. Today, teachers may describe these arrangements as triads, parallelism, chiasm,
inclusio or diatribe. I personally have difficulty pronouncing some of these terms, let alone trying
to attach them to a grouping of Scriptures.

Some are easier to understand than others:
- A triad is a group of three related ideas.
- Parallelism occurs when phrases or sentences are arranged in corresponding patterns.
- A chiasm is a proposed mirrored structure in which ideas appear and then return in
reverse order, perhaps A-B-C-B-A.
- An inclusio occurs when similar words or themes frame the beginning and end of a section.
- A diatribe is a rhetorical style in which the writer anticipates questions or objections from an imagined
conversation partner and then responds to them. This one sounds suspiciously like my style of writing,
not to mention those circular internal arguments I regularly find myself trapped in.

Recognising these patterns can help us follow the movement of a passage. But identifying them
still involves interpretation. Two scholars may agree on every Greek word and still disagree
about whether Paul intended a particular chiasm, where a paragraph should begin, or which
statement serves as the conclusion.

I recently watched a podcast in which the speaker presented a lengthy and carefully
documented argument from Ephesians 5. He began at verse 22. When I commented that his
reading had omitted verse 21, the hinge that introduces submission into the passage, he
responded rather confrontationally that Paul was clearly organising his material into contextual
groupings of three. On that basis, he insisted that verse 21 did not belong with the instructions
that followed. That was his interpretation of the structure.

Sure, but a proposed literary pattern does not erase the grammar. Verse 22 does not contain its
own verb for “submit” in the Greek. It depends upon the verb carried forward from verse 21.
Whatever triadic arrangement someone believes Paul may be using, the sentence itself still
crosses the editorial boundary.

This is precisely where a helpful interpretive tool can become a controlling lens. Instead of
allowing the grammar to test the proposed structure, the structure is used to exclude the verse
that complicates the conclusion. At that point, the pattern is no longer illuminating the text. It is
protecting an interpretation.

That does not mean literary structures are imaginary or unhelpful. It means they should emerge
from the text rather than be imposed upon it. The pattern must answer to the grammar, not the
other way around. Paragraph divisions can influence theology in the same quiet way. If an editor
begins a new paragraph at Ephesians 5:22, the instructions to wives may appear to introduce
an independent teaching. If the reader follows the grammatical movement from verse 21,
however, the passage remains connected to Paul’s instruction to submit to one another. The
words have not changed, but the visual frame has.

Punctuation, paragraph divisions and proposed rhetorical structures can all help us understand
Scripture. But they remain interpretive aids rather than part of the inspired wording itself. When an
argument depends heavily on where a sentence ends, where a paragraph begins, or which clause belongs
with which statement, it is worth comparing translations and examining the underlying grammar.

Sometimes the smallest mark on the page carries a surprising amount of theological luggage.

Commentary Influence

A biblical commentary is a written explanation of Scripture. Commentaries may examine the original
language, historical setting, literary structure, theology and possible meaning of a passage.
They are written by scholars, pastors and teachers to help readers understand the text more fully.

They can be extremely useful. They can also become so familiar that readers begin to
remember the explanation as though it were part of the verse itself.

The more often we read a particular interpretation, the more easily it settles into our thinking.
Before long, an idea derived from the text can begin to sound like something explicitly stated in
the text. Inference slowly hardens into certainty. Study notes and commentaries can explain
language, history, culture and competing interpretations that the average reader may not
otherwise encounter. But they are still commentary.

They are the conclusions of scholars, editors and teachers attempting to explain Scripture. They
may be thoughtful, informed and persuasive, but they are not inspired simply because they
appear beneath an inspired verse.

This is why we have to keep asking:
- What does the text actually say?
- What is being inferred from it?
- And what has been repeated so often that we no longer remember the difference?

A commentary should help us examine Scripture more carefully. It should never become the
reason we stop examining it.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lost in Translation

Personally, one of my favourite examples of an argument from silence is the commandment:
“You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.”

Unless we are prepared to argue that women were perfectly free to covet their neighbours’
husbands, we already understand that a command can be written from a masculine social
vantage point without its moral force being restricted to men. We recognise that instinctively in
some passages. In others, the masculine wording becomes the theological argument.

That is why the following examples need to be examined slowly. For each one, we will ask:

- What is the original Hebrew or Greek term?
- What range of meaning can it carry?
- How has it traditionally been rendered in English?
- What does that English wording cause the reader to picture?
- Does the context refer specifically to males, or does it include women?
- What theological conclusion develops when the narrower English wording is treated as
the only possible meaning?

Not every masculine word is inclusive. Sometimes a man is a man, a husband is a husband,
and a group of brothers really is a group of male siblings. Context still matters. The point is not
to flatten every distinction between male and female. It is to stop treating grammatical
masculinity as automatic proof of male exclusivity.

1. When a Mixed Group Becomes Male

This section examines words used for groups that may include both women and men but can
sound male-only in English.

Examples:
- adelphoi: brothers, siblings, brothers and sisters
- anthrōpoi: people, human beings, men
- huioi: sons, sometimes emphasising inheritance or status
- saints
- disciples
- believers
- co-workers

The central question is: Who was actually included in the audience or community? A
congregation may contain women and men, but the English word brothers can cause the reader
to picture a room full of males. The women remain present in the historical setting while
disappearing from the reader’s imagination.

2. When Humanity Becomes “Man”

This section examines words referring to humanity or a human being that have often been
rendered with the English word man.

Examples:
- Hebrew adam
- ha-adam
- Greek anthrōpos
- humankind
- humanity
- a human being
- the individual Adam

The central question is: Is the text speaking about males, or about humanity? English man can refer to
an adult male, an individual person or humanity as a whole. When those meanings are blended together,
a collective statement about humankind can begin to sound like a statement specifically about men.

3. When Children Become Sons

This section examines masculine family and inheritance language.

Examples:
- sons
- children
- heirs
- adoption as sons
- sons of God

The central question is: Does sons exclude women, or does it grant women the same inheritance
status historically associated with sons? This category requires nuance. Translating sons as children
may make women’s inclusion clearer. At the same time, it can soften the radical nature of women
being granted the legal and covenantal standing traditionally associated with sons.

Sometimes inclusive language restores the breadth of the audience. Sometimes retaining the
masculine metaphor reveals how revolutionary that inclusion was.

4. When a Role Acquires a Male Body

This section examines titles and ministry terms that may be grammatically masculine or
traditionally rendered differently depending on who carries them.

Examples:
- servant
- minister
- deacon
- apostle
- co-worker
- patron
- benefactor
- overseer
- elder

Relevant Greek terms may include:
- diakonos
- apostolos
- synergos
- prostatis
- episkopos
- presbyteros

The central question is: Does the grammatical form establish male eligibility, or has the English
reader supplied a male body to a role word?

This section must be handled carefully. Grammatical form and eligibility are related questions,
but they are not identical. A masculine form does not automatically prove that a role is male-
only. Likewise, grammatical inclusivity alone does not settle every question about church office.
The conclusion must come from the syntax, context, qualifications and wider witness of
Scripture, not merely from the gender of the English noun.

5. When English Requires a Pronoun

This section examines what happens when translators must choose an English pronoun for a
person whose sex is unspecified.

Possible renderings include:
- he
- he or she
- they
- anyone
- the person
- whoever
- the one who
- the person

The central question is: Did the original text specify a male person, or did English require a
pronoun that later readers interpreted as male-exclusive? A grammatical masculine form does
not automatically mean the instruction, promise or qualification applies only to males.

Sometimes he accurately identifies a man. Sometimes he is an older English convention for an
unspecified person. Sometimes whoever, anyone or the one who communicates the original
sense more clearly to the modern reader.

The pronoun may appear small, but the theology built from it may not be. That is really the
lesson we need to keep in mind.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Ripple Effect

A single translation choice may look harmless enough sitting quietly on the page. One word.
One pronoun. One masculine rendering among thousands.

What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

A translation choice becomes an interpretation. The interpretation becomes a teaching. The
teaching becomes doctrine. The doctrine shapes church structure. The church structure
determines who may speak, lead, teach, decide, submit and obey. Seminaries teach it.
Commentaries defend it. Books repeat it. Sermons reinforce it. Tradition preserves it.

Eventually, nobody remembers where the first domino stood. All they know is, “The Bible clearly
says.” But does it? Or did an English word become an interpretation, which became a
theological conclusion, which was then handed back to us as though it had been explicitly
stated in the original text?

That is the ripple effect. We are living in it right now.

A single masculine rendering may appear insignificant. But once it has been repeated from
pulpits, defended in commentaries, taught in seminaries and built into church structures, it no
longer feels like a translation choice. It feels like the natural order of Scripture.

Then something even more consequential happens: that conclusion becomes the lens through
which every other passage is read.

- Passages that support the system are “enlarged.”
- Passages that complicate it are “minimised.”
- Words that appear to confirm it are treated as plain and obvious.
- Words that challenge it suddenly require twelve footnotes, three cultural disclaimers and
a theological escape hatch.

Before long, the lens is no longer being tested by Scripture. Scripture is being filtered through the lens.

So let me be very clear about the ground on which I am standing so there is no
misunderstanding of why I write and study the way I do. God created humanity male and
female, and He called the two to become one flesh. That is the design He established. The Fall
did not rewrite that design. It fractured it.

The resulting distortion did not harm women alone. A masculinised reading of Scripture has also
shaped what men have been told they must be.

- Men became the assumed spiritual authorities.
- Husbands became responsible for the spiritual condition of their wives.
- Leadership became attached to masculinity.
- Control was confused with protection.
- Dominance was renamed responsibility.
- Emotional restriction was presented as strength.

Men were handed an entitlement Scripture may never have granted them and a burden
Scripture may never have imposed.

Women are diminished when they are treated as secondary image-bearers, perpetual assistants or spiritual
dependants. Men are diminished when they are told their sex automatically makes them leaders,
authorities, interpreters and final decision-makers, regardless of gifting, wisdom, character or calling.

Neither one is permitted to appear fully as Scripture presents them.

Words shape pictures. Pictures shape assumptions. Assumptions shape theology. Theology
shapes people. And once those beliefs are built into marriages, churches, institutions and entire
cultures, removing one mistaken assumption can feel less like correcting a word and more like
pulling out a load-bearing wall. No wonder people panic.

But if the wall was never part of the original design, propping it up does not protect Scripture. It
protects the structure we built around it.

The ripple effect is not proof that every traditional interpretation is wrong. Nor is it evidence that
translators gathered in a dimly lit room plotting how best to hide the women. Most of these
patterns developed far more quietly than that, through ordinary linguistic conventions, cultural
assumptions and inherited conclusions that accumulated over time.

One generation selected a word. Another generation inferred its meaning. The next built
doctrine from the inference. Eventually, the doctrine became tradition, and tradition began
introducing itself as the plain reading of Scripture.

That is how the ripple becomes a current.

And if we never trace it back to its source, we may spend generations defending the waves
without ever asking what first disturbed the water.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What the Lens Taught Us to See

A lens does more than influence how we translate individual words. Over time, it trains us where
to look, whom to notice and what to expect. Once men become the assumed subjects of
Scripture, we begin to read them first, even when the passage is speaking about humanity. We
follow their movements through the story while women remain at the edge of the frame. We
enlarge men’s titles, absorb women’s actions into male-centred retellings and explain away the
women who refuse to remain in the supporting cast we assigned them.

It’s like the rabbit in the hat magic trick. The women have not disappeared from Scripture. They
have disappeared from the way we learned to tell the story.

The following sections are not an attempt to insert women into places where they were never
present. They are an examination of how readers were trained to overlook, minimise or reinterpret
the places where they plainly were. And this does not harm women alone. When men are treated as the automatic representatives, leaders, authorities and spiritual decision- makers, they too are handed identities,
expectations and burdens that may owe more to the inherited lens than to the text itself.

The question is no longer merely, “How was this word translated?”

The question is, “What did generations of those choices teach us to see?”

We Learned to Read Men First

Long before most of us knew enough Hebrew to order a coffee, we already had a picture of the
creation story firmly planted in our minds. God created Adam. Adam was a man. Then,
sometime later, God created a woman to help him.

Man came first. Woman came second. Man was the original. Woman was the addition.

There she is, arriving midway through the story like an accessory that was not included in the original packaging.

But is that actually how Genesis tells it?

As we have already seen, the Hebrew word adam does not always refer to the individual male later known
as Adam. It can refer to humanity, humankind or a human creature. With the definite article, ha-adam
can be understood as the human or the earthling, a creature formed from the adamah, the ground.

Genesis 1 does not introduce male as the sole or original bearer of God’s image. It says:
“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

The movement of the verse is from humanity to male and female. Both are named as the
image-bearing humanity God created. Both receive the commission that follows. Neither is
presented as a supporting version of the other.

Yet the traditional English wording, “God created man in his own image,” has often left a
different picture behind. Many readers hear man and imagine a male individual. By the time the
verse reaches male and female, the man has already occupied centre stage in our minds, while
the woman appears to arrive as a second category.

The Hebrew term in Genesis 1:27 can refer collectively to humankind, while the verse itself
explicitly identifies that humanity as male and female. The English word man may have been
intended generically. The mental image it created was often anything but. We did not merely
learn that the first human was later identified as male. We learned to treat maleness as
humanity’s original setting and woman as the subsequent variation.

Male became the standard model. Female became the specialised edition.

And once that picture settles into place, it begins answering theological questions before we
have even thought to ask them.

Who represents humanity?
The man.

Who receives God’s original purpose?
The man.

Who carries the primary calling?
The man.

Where does the woman fit?
Usually somewhere after the word helper.

Genesis 2 is then read through the picture Genesis 1 supposedly established. The human
formed from the ground is assumed to be fully and exclusively male from the first moment of
existence. The woman is later taken from him, so the story becomes a sequence of rank: first
man, then woman. But the narrative itself deserves closer attention.

Before the differentiation of man and woman, the creature is repeatedly called ha-adam, the
human. When the woman is brought forth, the language changes:
“This one shall be called woman, for out of man this one was taken.”

Here the Hebrew words ish and ishshah, man and woman, appear together. The distinction
becomes visible in relationship. He recognises her as sharing his bone and flesh, not as a
separate order of creature added beneath him. The point is not that the human creature
possessed no sex before this moment, or that every question about the passage can be settled
by one Hebrew article. The point is that the text does not begin by announcing:

“God created the male representative of humanity, and later constructed his female assistant.”

That conclusion requires more than the text explicitly gives us.

Genesis 1 presents male and female together as God’s image-bearers and jointly addresses
them with the commission to be fruitful, fill the earth and exercise dominion. Genesis 2 slows the
camera down and tells the story through one human creature’s formation, solitude and
differentiation into man and woman. But somewhere along the way, the slower narrative was
made to outrank the explicit declaration.

“Male and female he created them” became secondary. “Man came first” became theology.

We began treating chronology as hierarchy, as though appearing first in the narrative
automatically conferred authority over whoever appeared next. By that logic, the ground should
probably be running the household, vegetation should have authority over humanity, and the
animals may wish to schedule a leadership meeting.

Sequence tells us what happened next. It does not automatically tell us who is entitled to rule.
Nor does being formed from another necessarily establish inferiority. The man was formed from
the ground, but we do not conclude that soil possesses authority over him. The woman was formed
from the human’s side, and the human immediately identified her as his own bone and flesh.

Yet generations of readers learned to see derivation as subordination when the person derived
was female. That is the lens at work.

Once that picture has been absorbed, masculine language elsewhere in Scripture feels perfectly
natural. Of course brothers means men. Of course man represents humanity. Of course a masculine
pronoun identifies the person God has in mind. Of course leadership belongs to males.

The conclusion begins to feel self-evident because the reader has been trained to see the male
body before the text has identified one. That does not mean every use of adam is gender-
neutral or that the individual Adam never emerges as a man. He clearly does. It means we must
allow context to tell us when the word means humanity, when it means a human creature and
when it refers to the individual Adam.

We cannot allow the English word man to make that decision for us in advance. This is how we
learned to read men first. We were not necessarily told to erase women. We were taught a
picture in which man represented everyone, and then assured that women were included somewhere
inside the word. And once male became the face of humanity, women could appear throughout
Scripture and still be perceived as exceptions to a story that had already been cast as male.

We Learned to Read Women Through Men

Ask most readers what happens in Exodus 4:24–26 and they will probably tell you that God
nearly killed Moses. That is true. But no surprise, it is only half the story.

The other half is that Zipporah recognised the danger, acted decisively, performed the
circumcision and prevented the death of the man who would lead Israel out of Egypt.

Yet we rarely ask: “What did Zipporah do?” We ask: “What happened to Moses?”

The camera remains fixed on him, even while she is the one moving the story forward. Without
Zipporah’s intervention, the story of Moses may have ended before he ever returned to Egypt.
The future deliverer of Israel was preserved because she saw what needed to be done and did it.
She acted in obedience to God.

Still, she is most often remembered simply as “Moses’ wife,” if indeed she is recalled at all.

That description is accurate, of course. She was his wife. But it is not the whole of her
significance in the passage. Her relationship to Moses identifies her. Her action reveals her.

This is one of the quieter ways a masculine lens shapes biblical reading.
Women are frequently introduced through their relationship to men:

- his wife;
- his mother;
- his daughter;
- his sister;
- his mother-in-law;
- the wife of;
- the woman who belonged to a particular household.

That kind of identification was common in the ancient world, and relational descriptions are not automatically
degrading. Scripture also identifies men through families, tribes, fathers and places of origin.

The problem begins when the relationship becomes the limit of the woman’s meaning.

- We learn who she belonged beside, but not always to ask who she was before God.
- We remember whose wife she was, but not what she discerned.
- We remember whose daughter she was, but not what was done to her.
- We remember whose mother she was, but not what she believed, risked, suffered or accomplished.

Relational language may tell us who a woman was connected to. It should not prevent us from
asking who she was within the story or what God entrusted to her.

Sometimes the description is all the text gives us. But even then, readers can choose whether
the description becomes the whole person. And really, it does sometimes feel like Scripture has
not depicted women as whole people. A masculine lens does not always remove women from
the story. Sometimes it leaves them exactly where they are while teaching us to read their
significance through the nearest man, the role they fulfilled for him, the condition they carried or
the effect their actions had on his life.

After generations of retelling, the movement becomes almost invisible. Men remain the subjects
of the verbs. Women become the means by which something happened to them.

And aren’t we still sold that story today?

We say, “The woman was assaulted,” rather than, “A man assaulted her.” The harm remains visible,
but the person who caused it quietly disappears from the sentence. She becomes the subject of the story,
but not the actor. He is the actor, yet somehow escapes the grammar altogether.

Even our grammar has learned how to centre what happened to women while concealing who
did it. This does not mean every biblical account must place equal narrative attention on every
person present. Stories have central figures, and Moses is undeniably central to Exodus. The
point is not to push men out of the frame so women can stand in the middle.

The point is to notice who is already in the frame. Reading women through men can cause us to
miss courage, discernment, obedience, leadership, faith and decisive action that Scripture itself
did not omit. Their relationships matter, but those relationships do not exhaust their identities.

Zipporah was Moses’ wife. She was also the person who understood the danger and acted while
Israel’s future deliverer lay helpless before it. Both statements are true. Only one tends to make it into the sermon.

We Learned to Cast Women as Supporting Characters

Sometimes women are not removed from the biblical story. They are simply moved to the edge
of the frame. Their presence remains in the text, but our retelling shifts the camera.
- Their words become part of a man’s ministry.
- Their actions become part of a man’s story.
- Their courage becomes the circumstance through which something important happened to him.
They are still there. We have simply learned to see them as supporting characters.

Consider Mary Magdalene and the women at the resurrection. They did not merely stumble across
an empty tomb and pass along a useful detail. They went to the tomb, encountered the risen Christ and
were instructed to carry the news to the others. Mary Magdalene announced, “I have seen the Lord.”

That is proclamation. That is witness. That is the first announcement of the resurrection. Yet
when the story of the Gospel’s spread is retold, we often move quickly from the empty tomb to
the apostles. The women become the opening scene, while the men become the messengers.

The women announced the resurrection to the men.

Later, we say the disciples proclaimed the risen Christ.

That statement is not entirely wrong. The disciples did proclaim Him. But the category of “the
disciples” often becomes male in our minds, even though women followed Jesus, learned from
Him, supported His ministry and remained present through the events surrounding His death
and resurrection. The collective language absorbs them.

The problem is not that men receive attention they do not deserve. Paul did extraordinary work.
The apostles carried the Gospel into the world. Moses was central to Israel’s deliverance. The
problem is that women’s named actions are repeatedly absorbed into male-centred
narratives until they seem incidental to the work they helped accomplish.

Their names remain but their agency fades. This is not an argument for pushing men to the edge so
women can occupy the centre. It is an invitation to stop treating the biblical story as though only
one sex can stand in the foreground at a time. The text does not require that competition.

- Mary Magdalene proclaimed the risen Christ.
- Priscilla explained theology to Apollos.
- Abigail confronted David with wisdom.
- The women travelled with Jesus and helped sustain His ministry.
- Euodia and Syntyche laboured beside Paul in the Gospel.

Those statements do not diminish the men. They simply return the verbs to the women who performed
them. Their presence remains in the text. It is time our retelling stopped moving the camera.

We Learned to Explain Women Away

This is one topic that really rattles me. Men receive titles. Women receive qualifications,
disclaimers and footnotes.

There is a curious pattern in the way biblical women are often interpreted. When a man appears
in Scripture with a title, a calling or a significant role, the title is usually allowed to stand. When a
woman appears with one, an explanation is often required.

Apparently, a woman can appear plainly in the text, carry the title, perform the work and receive
God’s approval, yet still be treated as insufficient evidence that a woman may do precisely what
she has just done. That takes a remarkable amount of theological flexibility.

The words remain on the page. The woman remains in the story. The only thing that changes is
the explanation added to make her fit the framework.

Deborah is one of the clearest examples. The text identifies her as a prophet and judge. Israel
came to her for judgment. She summoned Barak, delivered God’s command and accompanied
him into battle when he refused to go without her.

Judges does not introduce Deborah with an apology. It does not say God reluctantly used a woman
because no qualified man could be found. It does not call her appointment a punishment,
a temporary embarrassment or a divine object lesson designed to shame the men of Israel.

It simply tells us that Deborah was judging Israel. The later explanation often sounds quite
different. Deborah was only there because the men failed. Her leadership was an indictment
against weak men. God used her, but only as an exception to His preferred order.

That explanation does not come from Deborah’s title or from any explicit statement explaining
why she held it. It is supplied to protect a framework in which her role should not have existed.
The woman does not challenge the interpretation. The interpretation explains away the woman.
And so the story goes.

Barak’s hesitation is then made to carry the weight of Deborah’s entire calling, even though she
was already functioning as prophet and judge before he entered the scene. Her authority does
not begin with his reluctance.

But once the inherited lens requires male leadership as the divine norm, her presence must
become evidence of male failure rather than evidence of female faithfulness.

Junia has endured an even more dramatic shrinking process.

For centuries, many readers understood Junia to be a woman associated with the apostles.
When that became difficult to reconcile with later assumptions about women and authority,
interpreters proposed that she was actually a man named Junias. The difficulty is that the
masculine name is poorly attested, while Junia was a recognised female name.

When changing the person became difficult to sustain, attention shifted to the description.
Perhaps she was not an apostle. Perhaps she was merely known to them.
Perhaps “among the apostles” does not mean what it appears to mean.

The interpretive options deserve careful examination. But the recurring instinct is worth noticing.
When the text appears to identify a woman in a significant role, the first question is often not:

“What does this tell us?”

It is: “How can this mean something smaller?”

She Could Act, but Not Authoritatively

Another common method is to acknowledge that a woman performed the action while denying
that the action carried any authority.

- Priscilla helped explain the way of God more accurately to Apollos. But she did not “teach” him.
- Mary Magdalene announced the resurrection to the disciples. But she did not “preach.”
- Women prophesied. But prophecy apparently involved no authoritative theological speech.
- Women laboured in the Gospel. But their labour did not constitute ministry in the same sense as men’s labour.

This creates a strange interpretive system in which women can perform the action as long as
we refuse to name it with the word ordinarily used for that action.

- Priscilla may explain theology to a learned man, but calling it teaching would create difficulties.
- Mary may be commissioned by the risen Christ to announce the resurrection, but calling
it proclamation might sound uncomfortably significant.
- A woman may speak a prophetic message before the gathered community, but
somehow the act must remain entirely separate from instruction, authority or edification.

The verbs survive. Their implications do not.

No one needs to argue that every act of speaking is identical or that every form of ministry
constitutes the same office. The point is more basic: why are women’s actions so often
renamed, narrowed or stripped of their ordinary significance precisely when the ordinary
meaning would challenge the inherited framework?

- A man explains Scripture, and he teaches.
- A woman explains Scripture, and she has a private conversation.
- A man announces the Gospel, and he preaches.
- A woman announces the Gospel, and she passes along information.
- A man speaks God’s word, and he exercises ministry.
- A woman speaks God’s word, and she receives a carefully constructed footnote
explaining why it does not count in quite the same way.

Sure, the distinction may occasionally be legitimate. The consistency of the pattern is still difficult to ignore.

She Is an Exception and Therefore Proves Nothing

When a woman’s role cannot be denied, reduced or renamed, she is often placed in the category of exception.

- Deborah was an exception.
- Huldah was an exception.
- Junia was an exception.
- Phoebe was an exception.
- Priscilla was an exception.
- The women at the resurrection were an exception.

Apparently, Scripture contains an astonishing number of exceptions, all of whom happen to
challenge the same rule. Calling someone an exception may describe rarity. It does not make
her irrelevant. An exception still establishes what God is willing to do.

- If God called a woman as a prophet, then God called a woman as a prophet.
- If God entrusted a woman with theological instruction, then God entrusted a woman with theological instruction.
- If God commissioned women to announce the resurrection, then women announced the
resurrection under divine commission.

Rarity does not erase reality. Nor can an exception be used to prove an absolute prohibition. At
most, it forces us to examine whether the prohibition was ever as absolute as we assumed.

The Theology of “Yes, But”

- Deborah was a judge.
- Huldah was a prophet.
- Phoebe was a diakonos and prostatis.
- Junia was associated with the apostles.
- Priscilla was Paul’s co-worker and participated in instructing Apollos.
- Euodia and Syntyche laboured beside Paul in the Gospel.
- Women prophesied in the gathered church.
- Mary Magdalene announced the risen Christ.

Yet women’s titles and actions routinely arrive accompanied by qualifications:

- Yes, but she was an exception.
- Yes, but it was private.
- Yes, but she was under male authority.
- Yes, but she was only delivering a message.
- Yes, but the men had failed.
- Yes, but that title did not mean what it usually means.
- Yes, but not in the authoritative sense.

The repeated but does a surprising amount of work. It permits us to affirm the words while denying
their weight. It allows the woman to remain in the Bible without allowing her to disturb the system
built around it. That is how women are explained away. Not by removing them from Scripture. By
surrounding them with so many qualifications that they can no longer say what their presence says.

The pattern is revealing because men rarely receive the same treatment.
- When a man is called a prophet, readers do not usually ask whether his prophecy was
authoritative enough to count.
- When a man is described as a minister or co-worker, no one assumes he merely
assisted quietly behind the scenes.
- When a man teaches, we do not search for a woman nearby whose authority made his
words permissible.
- When a man is used by God despite weakness, failure or unusual circumstances, his calling
is not automatically reduced to evidence that women were inadequate. Men are generally
permitted to be complicated individuals. Women become theological problems requiring resolution.

That is the difference.

The question is not whether every contested title has only one possible interpretation.
Language, history and context still require careful study. The question is why ambiguity so
consistently travels in one direction.

- Why does uncertainty enlarge men but diminish women?
- Why does a broad word become official for him and informal for her?
- Why is his title accepted at face value while hers arrives with a theological warning label?
- Why must her calling pass a test that his calling is rarely asked to take?

At some point, the accumulation of qualifications becomes evidence of the lens itself.
- Perhaps these women are not interruptions in an otherwise male story.
- Perhaps they are part of the story we were trained not to see.
And perhaps the text does not need us to protect it from the women God placed there.

We Learned to Read Hierarchy Into Relationship

Once male becomes the assumed human standard, hierarchy begins to appear almost
everywhere we look.

- A helper becomes subordinate.
- A head becomes a ruler.
- Submission becomes obedience.
- One flesh somehow becomes a chain of command.
- Order becomes rank.
- Naming becomes ownership.
- A husband becomes the spiritual leader.
- A wife becomes the spiritual dependant.

The recurring question is: Does the Word itself carry that hierarchy, or did the reader arrive
expecting to find it?

A hierarchical lens does not merely tell women to become smaller. It tells men they must
become larger than Scripture ever asked them to be.

- Men are told leadership belongs to them whether gifted or not;
- Husbands are held responsible for a wife’s spiritual condition;
- Authority is treated as an entitlement attached to sex;
- Tenderness is feminised;
- Dominance is confused with strength;
- Control is renamed protection;
- Men who prefer mutual discernment may be accused of passivity.

When Helper Becomes Subordinate

The woman is described in Genesis as an ezer kenegdo. The phrase has often been reduced to
“helper,” and helper has then been heard through the modern image of an assistant: someone
who supports the person doing the important work.

The man has the mission. The woman helps him accomplish it.

Yet ezer does not inherently describe a subordinate. The word is frequently used elsewhere in
Scripture for God as the help of His people. No one reads those passages and concludes that
God occupies an assistant position beneath Israel.

The second part of the expression, kenegdo, conveys correspondence, one who stands
opposite or alongside as a suitable counterpart. The phrase describes relationship. The
hierarchy is added later.

Once the reader already assumes that man is the primary human and woman the secondary addition,
even a word describing strength and correspondence can be made to sound like an employment classification.

He is management. She is support staff. And apparently Eden came with an organisational chart.

When Head Becomes Unilateral Authority

The word head creates another familiar mental picture. In modern English, we speak of the
head of a company, the head of a department or the head of a household. The word easily
sounds like leader, ruler or person in charge.

So when Paul refers to the husband as the kephalē of the wife, many readers assume that
authority is already contained within the word. But the meaning of kephalē must be established
from its usage and context, not imported from a modern English idiom. Interpretations may
involve source, origin, prominence or relational connection, and the surrounding passage must
do the theological work.

The English word head cannot simply arrive wearing a crown and declare the discussion settled.
Yet once hierarchy has become the expected framework, the metaphor is treated as a job title:
- Head means leader.
- Leader means authority.
- Authority means final decision-maker.
- Final decision-maker means the husband.
By the time the chain is complete, several interpretive steps have been compressed into the phrase:
“The Bible clearly says.” But the conclusion is not the word. It is what readers have built from it.

When Submission Becomes Obedience

Submission is also frequently made to carry more weight than the text assigns to it.
- Wives are told to submit.
- Children are told to obey.
- Slaves are told to obey.
Those are not identical instructions. Yet in many Christian settings, a wife’s submission is
described in language remarkably similar to a child’s obedience. She is expected to defer,
comply and ultimately yield whenever agreement cannot be reached. The relationship may be
called loving. The structure still places one adult beneath another.

This becomes especially revealing in Ephesians 5, where the instruction to submit
appears in verse 21 as part of the life of the Spirit-filled community:
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Verse 22 depends grammatically on what precedes it, yet the mutual frame is frequently treated
as optional background while the wife’s submission becomes the controlling command. The
hinge is removed. The door is then made to swing one way. Again, the larger exegetical debate
belongs elsewhere. The point here is the assumption attached to the word. Submission is heard
as rank because the reader already expects marriage to contain rank. The hierarchy does not
merely emerge from the sentence. It arrives with us.

When One Flesh Becomes a Chain of Command

Genesis describes husband and wife as one flesh. One flesh is union, kinship and shared life.
It is not obviously an organisational diagram. Yet one flesh is often explained through a
hierarchy in which two people may be equal in value while one possesses final authority. Make
it make sense. The language of unity is converted into a procedure for breaking a tie. Someone
has to make the final decision, we are told.

Why?

Two business partners may require a contractual mechanism for deadlock. Marriage is not a
corporate board meeting, and a husband is not issued a divine casting vote with the wedding
licence. Mutual discernment may be slower. It may require patience, humility, prayer, listening
and the willingness to delay a decision rather than overpower the other person. Perhaps that is
not a flaw. Perhaps that is part of becoming one.

The assumption that every relationship requires a final human authority reveals how deeply
hierarchy has shaped our imagination. We struggle to picture unity without rank because rank
has been presented as the only alternative to chaos. We’ve forgotten, or intentionally
overlooked that love is not chaos and mutuality is not disorder. And refusing to dominate is not a
failure to lead. That last one is significantly important.

When Naming Becomes Ownership

The man names the animals in Genesis. He later calls the woman ishshah, and she is eventually named
Eve. From this, some interpreters conclude that naming establishes authority or ownership. Because he
names her, he must rule her. But that conclusion is not simply sitting in the word name. It is an inference.

Naming can indicate recognition, description, relationship or significance. Whether it establishes
authority must be demonstrated rather than assumed. The man’s first response to the woman is
not a declaration of ownership. It is recognition: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my
flesh.” Yet once the reader expects hierarchy, even recognition can be rearranged into rank.

When Husband Becomes Spiritual Leader

Perhaps one of the most influential assumptions is that the husband is the spiritual leader of the
home. The phrase is repeated so often that it sounds like a direct quotation from Scripture.
But where is the command? Suspiciously, it is nowhere to be found.
Where exactly does Scripture say: “Husbands, lead your wives”?
- Where is a husband made responsible for his wife’s relationship with God?
- Where is he appointed as the spiritual intermediary between Christ and another adult
believer who also bears God’s image, receives the Spirit and stands before God in her own right?
Husbands are commanded to love.
- To give themselves.
- To honour.
- To live with understanding.
- To refuse harshness.
Those are demanding commands. But love does not require authority in order to be sacrificial,
and responsibility does not automatically confer rank.

The spiritual leader model can also place an impossible burden on men. A husband may be told
that he is accountable for every decision, every doctrine, every spiritual practice and even the
condition of his wife’s faith.
- If she is more knowledgeable, he must still lead.
- If she has greater discernment, he must still make the final decision.
- If he does not feel called or gifted to teach, he must perform the role anyway.
His sex has already supplied the qualification. That does not honour men. It traps them inside a role
Scripture may never have assigned. Why can we not see this model does not work for either spouse?

When Protection Becomes Control

Hierarchical language often presents male authority as protection.
- The husband leads because women need protection.
- He decides because responsibility ultimately rests on him.
- He restricts because danger is real.
- He controls because he loves.
But protection that removes another adult’s agency can quickly become control wearing respectable
church clothes (or not so respectable). A woman may be told that questioning her husband is
rebellion. A man may be told that permitting disagreement is weakness. Her discernment
becomes a threat to order. His willingness to listen becomes passivity. Before long, control is
renamed covering, dominance is renamed responsibility and entitlement is renamed biblical leadership.
True protection does not require the protected person to become smaller. Nor does love require one
image-bearer to surrender conscience, wisdom or moral agency to another.

The Cost to Men

A hierarchical lens does not harm women alone. It also tells men what they must become.
Men are told leadership belongs to them whether they are gifted for it or not. It’s certainly a 360
from the way in which women are treated throughout Scripture.

- Husbands are made responsible for the spiritual condition of their wives.
- Authority is treated as an entitlement attached to sex.
- Tenderness is feminised.
- Emotional restraint is confused with emotional absence.
- Dominance is mistaken for strength.
- Control is renamed protection.
- Men who prefer mutual discernment may be accused of passivity, weakness or failure to
fulfil their God-given role.
- A gentle man must prove he is strong.
- A listening man must prove he can lead.
- A husband who trusts his wife’s wisdom must explain why he has supposedly
surrendered his authority.
That’s a pretty tall order. What it is not, is freedom for men. A man may benefit socially from
hierarchy and still be deformed by it. Entitlement harms the person who receives it as surely as
subordination harms the person required to live beneath it. One is taught to occupy too much
space. The other is taught to occupy too little. There is no one flesh depicted and neither is
permitted simply to become more like Christ.

We Learned to Trust the Frame

None of these habits came from one translation, one commentary, one pastor or one generation.
They accumulated.
- A masculine rendering shaped the mental picture.
- The mental picture shaped the interpretation.
- The interpretation appeared in a commentary.
- The commentary informed a sermon.
- The sermon reinforced a tradition.
- The tradition influenced the next heading, study note, translation choice or theological conclusion.

Around and around it went. Eventually, the frame became so familiar that we stopped seeing it.

We simply called it the Bible.

- But the heading is not the verse.
- The commentary is not the text.
- The sermon is not the grammar.
- The tradition is not automatically the doctrine.
- And familiarity is not faithfulness.

That does not mean headings, commentaries, sermons or traditions are inherently untrustworthy.
They can guide, teach, preserve and illuminate. But they must remain accountable to the text
they are attempting to explain. The frame should help us see Scripture. It should not decide in advance
what we are permitted to find there or try to explain away what we do find.

This is why better interpretation often begins with better questions.

Not merely: “Can women preach?”

But: “What words does Scripture use for preaching, teaching, proclaiming, prophesying and
ministering, and to whom are those words applied?”

Not merely: “Can women lead?”

But: “How does Scripture define leadership, and where does it assign spiritual authority on the
basis of sex?”

Not merely: “What role was this woman permitted to have?”

But: “Why does her calling require a defence that a man’s calling is rarely asked to provide?”

Not merely: “Does this verse contain a masculine word?”

But: “Does the original language refer specifically to males, or have we treated a grammatical
form as a theological restriction?”

Those are all different questions. And different questions can reveal assumptions that the old
ones were designed to protect. Perhaps the problem is not that Scripture has failed to answer
us. Perhaps we have been asking questions shaped by conclusions we had already decided
were true. And perhaps we do not want to accept the truth of Scripture because it dismantles
the bias built around it.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Gospel Changes the Conversation

God’s patience with human hardness is not the same thing as God’s approval of human distortion.

God called His creation of humanity very good. Male and female bore His image. Male and
female received His commission. That was the design established before sin fractured relationship,
distorted desire and introduced domination. The Fall did not rewrite God’s design. It fractured it.

But the Gospel does not arrive to preserve the fracture. Christ does not come to build a more
respectable hierarchy on top of the ruins. He comes to reconcile, restore and form one new
humanity. At Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out on sons and daughters. In Christ, Jew and
Greek, slave and free, male and female belong to Him, receive the Spirit and inherit together.

That changes the conversation.

The question is no longer how much of the old distortion we can baptise and carry forward. The
question is what life together looks like under the lordship of the One who said:

“Not so with you.”

Christ did not teach His followers to measure greatness by rank, entitlement or control.
- He knelt.
- He served.
- He carried a cross.

As followers of Christ, we get to personally decide if we embody His “Not so with you” calling.
The Gospel did not come to build better hierarchies. It came to make better disciples.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Design vs Distortion

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that a boys' club does not simply steal from God's daughters. It
steals from His sons too. Boys' clubs don't build godly men. They build entitled ones. They teach men to confuse
leadership with position, authority with privilege, and power with faithfulness. In doing so, they rob women
of opportunity and men of Christ’s example. Take a good look at the fruit entitlement produces, then ask
whether it resembles the fruit of the Spirit. We place expectations upon men that Christ never did,
then wonder why so many feel burdened beneath them..

The irony is difficult to miss.

While we have been arguing over who gets to stand behind the pulpit, we have often overlooked
what Christ was actually.

We live in a world that’s gotten fairly comfortable with entitlement, and more times than not,
we’ve learned how to dress it up in just enough Scripture to make it sound respectable.
Patriarchy didn’t start in the heart of God, it showed up in the fallout, and we’ve been trying to
pass it off as design ever since.

But the thread of Scripture is not nearly as confusing as we have made it.

Creation reveals the design.
The Fall introduces the distortion.
The Law steps in to contain the damage.
The narratives expose where hierarchy, entitlement and domination lead.
And Christ restores the clarity we keep trying to complicate.

- Calling hierarchy “biblical order” does not place it in Genesis 1.
- Calling entitlement “spiritual leadership” does not make it Christlike.
- Calling control “protection” does not turn domination into love.
- And calling a masculine reading “plain” does not prove that the text itself is male-exclusive.

The words were always there.

Male and female bearing God’s image.
Male and female receiving His commission.
Sons and daughters receiving His Spirit.
Women prophesying, proclaiming, teaching, ministering and labouring in the Gospel.
Men being called away from rank and toward sacrifice.
One new humanity being formed in Christ.

The Bible did not change. The lens did. Was that intentional?
Well now, I will leave that among the “secret things” Deuteronomy 29:29 says belong to the Lord.

And if that sounds a little too tidy for all the theological luggage we have been forcing into the overhead compartment,
​perhaps that is precisely the point.