Mounce Archive 2 — Are Women Saved through Bearing Children? Mounce Explains 1 Tim. 2:15
Everyone needs a sabbatical once in a while, and Bill Mounce is taking one from Koinonia blog until September. Meanwhile, we’ve hand-picked some of our favorite and most popular posts for your summer reading and Greek-studying pleasure.
Today's selection from Dr. Mounce's archive addresses what he calls one of the strangest verses of the Bible:
"But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety." (1 Tim. 2:15)
Really? Women are saved through child bearing? If so, what's that all about? Read an excerpt below of how he answered the question, and then go read the full post to better understand what Paul originally meant.
1 Tim 2:15 has been labeled as one of the truly strange verses of the Bible, and appropriately so. I know of no one who takes it “literally” (although I assume that someone somewhere has tried to do so).
But actually it does illustrate an interesting concept in Greek, and that is the overlapping of semantic ranges. There are two Greek words meaning “to save.” The most common is σωζω. It has a wide range of meaning, from “to preserve or rescue fr. natural dangers and afflictions, save, keep from harm, preserve, rescue” to “to save or preserve from transcendent danger or destruction, save/preserve from eternal death” (BDAG). σωζω is the normal word for spiritual salvation.
The other word is ῥυομαι...
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William D. [Bill] Mounce posts about the Greek language, exegesis, and related topics at Koinonia. He is the author of numerous works including the recent Basics of Biblical Greek Video Lectures and the bestselling Basics of Biblical Greek. He is the general editor of Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee for Bible Translation for the NIV.
Learn more about Bill's Greek resources at Teknia.com and visit his blog on spiritual growth at BiblicalTraining.org/blog/life-journey.
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