Greek Word Study Wednesday: ἐπιτρέπω & αὐθεντεῖν (epitrepō & authentein)
The Verse That Launched a Thousand Arguments
Hello brothers and sisters.
I want to be upfront with you about something before we get started. This study is going to wade into one of the most fiercely debated passages in the entire New Testament. People I love and respect are on both sides of this, and the last thing I want to do is pretend the answers are easy when they’re not.
What I can promise you is this: I’m going to show you what the Greek actually says. I’m going to present both sides of the argument with the strongest evidence each has to offer. And then I’m going to tell you what I think and why.
You may disagree with me. That’s fine. In fact, I’d be surprised if every reader landed in the same place. But I believe the best gift I can give you is the evidence itself, presented honestly, so you can study it for yourself and let the Holy Spirit guide you to the understanding He wants you to have.
Here’s the verse:
1 Timothy 2:12 (NKJV): “And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.”
1 Timothy 2:12 (NRSV): “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”
That sounds pretty clear in English, doesn’t it? A woman can’t teach. A woman can’t have authority over a man. Case closed.
Except it isn’t. Because when you look at the Greek beneath the English, you find two words that are far more complicated than any translation can capture. One of them appears throughout the New Testament. The other appears exactly once in the entire New Testament. And it is nowhere in the Septuagint either.
Let’s dig in.
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The First Word: ἐπιτρέπω (epitrepō)
Pronunciation: eh-pee-TREH-poh
Strong’s: G2010
Meaning: To turn over (transfer); to permit, allow, give leave; to entrust
Root: From ἐπί (epi, G1909, “upon, over”) + the base of τροπή (tropē, G5157, “a turning, shifting”). The literal sense is “to turn something over to someone,” to hand them permission for a specific thing.
NT frequency: 18 occurrences in 17 verses
Now, ἐπιτρέπω is not a rare word. It appears throughout the Gospels and Acts, and it’s always used in a very specific way. It’s not a word for establishing permanent rules or universal commands. It’s a word for granting (or withholding) permission in a particular situation.
Look at how it’s used elsewhere in the New Testament:
Matthew 8:21: A disciple says, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” A one-time, situational request.
Matthew 19:8: Jesus says Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of their hearts. A concession for specific circumstances, explicitly identified as not God’s original intent.
Mark 5:13: Jesus gave permission to the demons to enter the swine. A one-time allowance in a specific situation.
Acts 21:39-40: Paul asks the commander to permit him to speak to the crowd. Again, a specific, situational request.
Acts 26:1: Agrippa tells Paul, “You are permitted to speak for yourself.” Permission granted for a particular occasion.
1 Corinthians 16:7: Paul says, “I hope to stay a while with you, if the Lord permits.” Conditional. Circumstantial.
Hebrews 6:3: “And this we will do if God permits.” Same pattern.
Do you see it? In every single New Testament occurrence, ἐπιτρέπω is used in the context of situational permission. It is granting or withholding it for specific circumstances, not establishing universal, timeless regulations.
The same pattern holds in the Septuagint. The LXX uses ἐπιτρέπω in passages like Genesis 39:6, Esther 9:14, and Job 32:14, and in every case the permission is situational and limited in scope.
Andrew Perriman, in his analysis of this word, notes that the use of ἐπιτρέπω in the New Testament “is in every case related to a specific and limited set of circumstances.”
Now, here’s what’s critical: Paul does not use a command tense in 1 Timothy 2:12. He doesn’t use the imperative. He uses the present active indicative: οὐκ ἐπιτρέπω (ouk epitrepō): “I am not permitting.” This is a statement about Paul’s current practice, not a decree for all time. “I am not allowing” is grammatically and functionally different from “It shall never be allowed.”
Does that prove the restriction was temporary? No. The present indicative can express ongoing reality, not just present-moment action. Complementarian scholars like Douglas Moo have rightly pointed out that this verb form allows for a limited application but doesn’t require it. That’s an honest assessment, and I respect it.
But here’s what we can say with confidence: Paul chose this word. He had other options. When Paul wanted to establish universal principles or give binding commands to churches, he typically used stronger language: the imperative mood, or words like δεῖ (dei, “it is necessary”) or παραγγέλλω (parangellō, “I charge/command”). He uses παραγγέλλω elsewhere in this very letter (1 Timothy 1:3; 4:11; 5:7; 6:13, 17). But here? He chose ἐπιτρέπω. A word of permission. A word that, everywhere else in the New Testament, describes situational allowances.
That choice matters.
The Second Word: αὐθεντεῖν (authentein)
Pronunciation: ow-then-TANE
Strong’s: G831 (the verb αὐθεντέω, authenteō)
Meaning: This is where things get complicated. Possible meanings include: to have authority over; to domineer; to control in a domineering manner; to act on one’s own authority; to assume a stance of independent authority; and in its earliest classical usage, even to commit violence or murder.
Root: From αὐθέντης (authentēs): “one who acts on his own authority; a master; one who commits an act with his own hand.” The noun form in its earliest classical appearances (Aeschylus, Euripides) referred to murderers and perpetrators of violence. By the Roman period, the meaning had broadened significantly.
NT frequency: 1 occurrence. That’s it. This is what scholars call a hapax legomenon: a word that appears only once in the entire New Testament corpus. It also never appears in the Septuagint.
Let me explain why that matters. When a Greek word appears dozens or hundreds of times in the New Testament, we can compare its uses across different contexts and nail down its meaning with high confidence. When a word appears only once, we’re dependent on how it was used in extrabiblical Greek literature, which introduces much more ambiguity.
And αὐθεντεῖν is not only rare in the Bible. It’s rare in all of ancient Greek literature. Leland Wilshire’s exhaustive computer search of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database found only 314 occurrences of the word and its cognates across the entire surviving Greek corpus from the 6th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D.
So what did it mean?
The Complementarian Reading: “To have/exercise authority over”
Scholars like Andreas Köstenberger and Thomas Schreiner argue that by the first century A.D., αὐθεντέω had settled into a relatively neutral meaning: “to have authority over” or “to exercise authority.” They point to later usage in patristic writers and Byzantine Greek, where the word does sometimes carry this more neutral sense. Henry Baldwin’s study of the word (published in the influential volume Women in the Church, edited by Köstenberger and Schreiner) concluded that the predominant meaning in the centuries surrounding the New Testament period was “to exercise authority” without an inherently negative connotation.
Under this reading, Paul is saying: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” The two infinitives (διδάσκειν, “to teach,” and αὐθεντεῖν, “to have authority”) are two separate prohibitions: no teaching men, and no exercising authority over men. This is understood as a universal principle rooted in the creation order (Paul’s appeal to Adam and Eve in verses 13-14).
The most recent edition of the major Greek lexicon BDAG defines αὐθεντέω as “to assume a stance of independent authority, to give orders to, to dictate to.” Notably, the previous edition (BAGD) had included “domineer over someone” in its range of meaning. The updated edition dropped that connotation, though it still doesn’t define it as simple, benign authority.
The Egalitarian Reading: “To domineer/dominate”
Scholars like Linda Belleville, Philip Payne, Cynthia Westfall, and Michael Bird argue that αὐθεντεῖν carried a much stronger, more negative connotation in first-century usage. Something closer to “to domineer,” “to control in a domineering manner,” or “to usurp authority.”
Their evidence is significant:
The earliest translations. When αὐθεντεῖν was translated into other languages while Koine Greek was still a living language, the translators consistently chose negative terms. The Vetus Latina (Old Latin, 2nd-4th century) rendered it as dominari (”to dominate”). The Vulgate (4th-5th century) also has dominari in virum (”to dominate over a man/husband”). The Sahidic Coptic (3rd century) translated it as erjoeis (”to be lord”). The Peshitta Syriac (4th century) used a word whose root relates to insolence and bullying. Early Arabic translations used words meaning “to plot, to be domineering, to be imperious.”
These were people translating from Greek while Greek was their living language. They understood αὐθεντεῖν as domineering behavior, not neutral authority.
The KJV and Geneva Bible. Even the King James Version (1611) didn’t translate this as “have authority over.” It translated it as “usurp authority over,” providing a much more negative rendering. The Geneva Bible (1560) did the same. It wasn’t until the 20th century that English translations began softening αὐθεντεῖν to simple “authority.”
Paul’s own vocabulary. This is perhaps the most telling point. When Paul wanted to talk about legitimate authority in the church, he had a perfectly good Greek word for it: ἐξουσία (exousia). He uses it repeatedly throughout his letters (1 Corinthians 6:12; 7:4; 9:4-6, 12; 11:10; 2 Corinthians 2:8; 10:8; 13:10; Colossians 1:13; 2 Thessalonians 3:12; Romans 6:15; 9:21). If Paul meant “I don’t permit a woman to exercise normal, legitimate authority over a man,” why didn’t he use ἐξουσία? Why reach for a rare, ambiguous word that his readers would have had to puzzle over?
As Linda Belleville puts it: “The obvious reason is that αὐθεντεῖν carried a nuance (other than ‘rule’ or ‘have authority’) that was particularly suited to the Ephesian situation.”
Cynthia Westfall’s comprehensive linguistic study concluded that in the surviving uses of αὐθεντέω contemporary to the New Testament, “the people who are targets of these actions are harmed, forced against their will, or at least their self-interest is being overridden because the actions involve an imposition of the subject’s will, ranging from dishonour to lethal force.”
Chrysostom’s usage. John Chrysostom, writing in the 4th century— and a native Greek speaker —used αὐθεντέω in his homilies. In his tenth homily on Colossians, commenting on Colossians 3:19 (a verse addressed to husbands), Chrysostom says a husband should not αὐθεντεῖ his wife. This is translated in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers as “act the despot.”
Chrysostom clearly understood this word as describing domineering, despotic behavior rather than benign authority.
The Grammar: One Prohibition or Two?
There’s a further grammatical question that affects everything. In Greek, the two infinitives— διδάσκειν (”to teach”) and αὐθεντεῖν (”to domineer/have authority”) —are connected by the conjunction οὐδέ (oude, “nor” or “and not”). The question is whether οὐδέ links two separate prohibitions or creates what’s called a hendiadys, which is two words joined by a conjunction to express a single idea.
If it’s two separate prohibitions, Paul is saying: (1) I don’t permit a woman to teach [a man], and (2) I don’t permit her to have authority over a man.
If it’s a hendiadys, Paul is saying something like: “I don’t permit a woman to teach in a domineering way” or “I don’t permit a woman to teach so as to domineer a man.”
Philip Payne has argued strongly for the hendiadys reading. Others have pushed back, noting that Köstenberger’s research on parallel constructions in Greek suggests the two verbs typically have the same positive or negative valence— meaning if αὐθεντεῖν is negative (domineering), then διδάσκειν should also be negative (false teaching), and if διδάσκειν is positive (legitimate teaching), then αὐθεντεῖν should also be positive (legitimate authority).
Both arguments have merit. I present them because I want you to see that this verse is far more linguistically complex than the English lets on.
One More Detail: γυνή and ἀνήρ — “Woman” or “Wife”?
Here’s something most people miss entirely. The Greek word γυνή (gunē) can mean either “woman” or “wife.” The Greek word ἀνήρ (anēr) can mean either “man” or “husband.” Both are used without the definite article in 1 Timothy 2:12, which means the text is grammatically ambiguous. Paul could be saying:
“I do not permit a woman to teach or domineer a man.”
Or he could be saying:
“I do not permit a wife to teach or domineer her husband.”
These are very different statements. If this is about wives and husbands, it’s about the dynamics of marriage relationships within the congregation, not about women in ministry in general. And the surrounding context (verses 13-15, with the reference to Adam and Eve, childbearing, and the marital dynamics of creation) could support either reading.
The Elephant in the Room: Ephesus
Here’s where this all comes together.
1 Timothy is a letter to Timothy, who was overseeing the church in Ephesus. This isn’t incidental. Paul tells us in the very first chapter why he left Timothy there: “that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies” (1 Timothy 1:3-4, NKJV).
The entire letter is about false teaching. That’s the problem Paul is trying to solve. And Ephesus was a city uniquely positioned to produce a specific kind of false teaching.
Ephesus was home to the Temple of Artemis, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and four times the size of the Parthenon. The Artemis cult was female-led. Its priestesses held enormous social and religious power. And the cult’s mythology taught, among other things, that the female was created first and was superior to the male. In the Artemis origin myth, Artemis was born before her twin brother Apollo and helped deliver him.
Now read 1 Timothy 2:13-14 again: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.”
Paul isn’t making a universal argument about female intellectual inferiority (which would contradict his own practice of working alongside female leaders). He’s correcting a specific false teaching that was circulating in Ephesus, the aforementioned Artemis-influenced idea that the woman came first and was therefore superior. His appeal to Genesis isn’t establishing a permanent hierarchy. It’s doing exactly what good teaching does: it’s using Scripture to refute a heresy.
And verse 15— “she will be saved through childbearing” —makes almost no sense as a universal theological statement. Saved by having babies? That contradicts salvation by grace through faith, which Paul hammered home in virtually every other letter he wrote. But it makes perfect sense if you understand that the Artemis cult taught that Artemis was the savior of women in childbirth, and that women who abandoned Artemis would die in labor. Paul is reassuring these women: you won’t die because you left Artemis. You will be brought safely through childbearing, if you continue in faith, love, and holiness.
The whole passage, from verse 8 through verse 15, is addressing specific problems in a specific church. Angry men who need to pray without wrath (v. 8). Women who were flaunting wealth through elaborate dress as they had done in Artemis worship (vv. 9-10). Women who needed to learn sound doctrine before they could teach it; women who had come out of the Artemis cult and were still spreading its ideas (vv. 11-12). And the correction of Artemis-influenced creation mythology (vv. 13-15).
The Evidence Paul’s Own Ministry Provides
If 1 Timothy 2:12 is a universal, permanent prohibition against women teaching or exercising authority over men, then Paul himself violated it. Repeatedly.
Priscilla (also called Prisca) was a leader of the church in Ephesus. Yes, the very church Timothy was overseeing. Along with her husband Aquila, she taught Apollos, correcting his theology and explaining the way of God “more accurately” (Acts 18:26). Luke mentions her name before her husband’s in four of the six times the couple appears in the New Testament. This is an unusual choice that many scholars believe indicates she was the more prominent minister of the two. Paul calls her a “fellow worker in Christ Jesus” (Romans 16:3).
Phoebe is called a διάκονος (diakonos, “deacon” or “minister”) of the church at Cenchreae (Romans 16:1). The same word is used for male church leaders throughout the New Testament (including himself, in the context of denoting his commission as a minister of the Gospel). Paul also calls her a προστάτις (prostatis, “patron” or “benefactor”), a word that in its masculine form (προστάτης) means “leader,” “chief,” or “presiding officer.”
Junia is named by Paul as “outstanding among the apostles” (Romans 16:7, NRSV). For the first twelve centuries of church history, virtually every commentator understood Junia to be a woman and an apostle. It wasn’t until the 13th century that some began arguing the name was masculine (”Junias”), and modern scholarship has overwhelmingly returned to the feminine reading.
Paul also mentions other women in ministry: Euodia and Syntyche, who “contended at my side in the cause of the gospel” (Philippians 4:2-3); Nympha, who hosted a church in her house (Colossians 4:15); and the women who prayed and prophesied in the Corinthian assembly (1 Corinthians 11:5), which was an activity Paul regulated but never prohibited.
If Paul believed women could never teach or exercise authority over men, his own ministry makes no sense.
Where I Land
I believe 1 Timothy 2:12 is Paul addressing a specific crisis in a specific church. The Greek supports this. The context demands it. And Paul’s own ministry confirms it.
ἐπιτρέπω is a word of situational permission, not universal legislation. αὐθεντεῖν is not Paul’s normal word for authority. It’s a rare word with strong overtones of domineering control that was specifically suited to the kind of behavior coming out of the Artemis cult influence in Ephesus. The grammar is ambiguous in ways that English translations flatten. And the surrounding verses (the Artemis-influenced false creation theology, the childbearing assurance) only make sense in the Ephesian context.
Paul isn’t saying women can never teach men. He’s saying: I am not currently permitting these women, in this situation, to teach in a domineering way that spreads false doctrine influenced by the Artemis cult. They need to learn sound doctrine first. And they need to stop asserting a pagan-influenced superiority over men that has no basis in the Genesis creation account.
That’s not a soft reading. It’s actually a harder one. Because it means Paul was taking false teaching so seriously that he shut it down at the source. He wasn’t being misogynistic. He was being anti-heresy. And the women who were spreading that heresy needed to stop teaching and start learning.
But I want to be clear: I understand why many faithful believers read this differently. The complementarian position has real arguments. Paul does appeal to the creation order. The word αὐθεντεῖν might carry a neutral sense. And there are other passages (1 Corinthians 14:34-35, for instance) that seem to point in a similar direction, though those verses have their own significant textual and contextual issues.
I don’t think people who hold the complementarian view are being dishonest with the text. I think they’re reading it through a lens that provides a very different set of assumptions about what kind of statement Paul is making. They see his phrase here as a universal one rather than a situational one. And the text is genuinely ambiguous enough to support both readings.
What I’m not willing to do is pretend the text is clear when it isn’t. Two rare and disputed Greek words, ambiguous grammar, a context saturated with false-teaching concerns, a city dominated by a female-led pagan cult, and a letter-writer who worked alongside female leaders throughout his ministry. That’s not a simple verse. That’s a verse that demands humility, careful study, and a willingness to hold our conclusions with open hands.
Study it for yourself. Pray about it. And whatever you conclude, treat those who disagree with the grace that Paul himself modeled when he wrote to churches wrestling with hard questions.
If this study challenged you, encouraged you, or made you think, please share it with someone who’s wrestling with these questions. These conversations are too important to have in an echo chamber.
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Thank you for breaking down the Greek and giving historical context for these passages. I agree that woman teachers is a gray issue. Each individual's situation is different and needs to be evaluated according. But it's nice to know that there was more going on behind the scenes than what we see the English.
Appreciate how you’re helping readers contextualize this hapax and suggesting how a potential hendiadys interpretation complicates the possibilities. I’m wondering about vernacular variants from what could be considered a parallel passage. The Lamsa translation offers a perspective that goes along with the teacher training process you mentioned in this post: “Teach the older women likewise, to behave as becomes the worship of God, not false accusers, not enslaved to much wine, but to become teachers of good things” (Titus 2:3). And the Douay-Rheims mentions clothing, which compares with the Vulgate’s “in habitu sancto,” as part of this paragraph: “The aged women, in like manner, in holy attire, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teaching well: That they may teach the young women to be wise, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, sober, having a care of the house, gentle, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2:3-5). Is there perhaps any source you might recommend on this related topic?