This whóle thing has gone right over my head althogether. As a classicist, to me, anthropos means human, it is that simple. I still haven’t understood where or how it means male at all. Think about philanthropy – has it ever even 1% meant love of a male? It just isn’t there at all. That anthropos is used to refer to males doesn’t make it mean male at all. An American is assumed to be male, that does not mean that it has a male meaning.

Think of my quote of the Greek theologian, did he understand anthropos to mean male at all, even a tiny bit? No.

There is no choice, either ‘human’ or ‘man’ in the completely generic sense, All else is an oddity, a misunderstanding of Greek, which I see is shared by many.

Somehow I really think that Fee and Waltke et al. knew what they were doing.

Peter H, you wrote: “neither translations are good translations because they are both the products of the sub-cultural polarisations within American evangelicalism.” Possibly, although you should remember that many of the TNIV translation team, the CBT, are complementarians and so can hardly be accused of being at the opposite pole. TNIV in fact tries to take a middle ground on many such points – this is perhaps the real lesson behind my posting A Complementarian Agenda in TNIV? But, if you think that neither translation of 1 Timothy 2:5 is good, can you suggest an alternative which avoids polarisation and so is good?

I am not sure how it appeared that I was accusing anyone of heresy. Maybe my mention of a ‘pagan ethic’ inspired you. But for me, soaked in the classics, ‘pagan’ is far from heresy. Many Christians quote Aristotle, with impunity. and I, in mentioning Prometheus, would not intend anything so negative as heresy. Prometheus is often compared positively to Christ, that is not such a negative at all. Not Biblical exactly, but not heresy either.

Viewing the Bible through the classics is no worse than viewing the Bible through any other cultural lense.

My sense is that Köstenberger and Grudem were accusing the NIVI translators of ‘neutering’ the male in the Bible. I am saying no -it is time for them to back off. So I am reacting to their extensive publications on this matter.

Second, I wrote,

then we end up with a pagan ethic

meaning there is a trajectory, which if completed leads to one set of truth for men and another for women. But already, this is evident in the writing of the CBMW, that women should have a separate set of skills and knowledge. In studying evangelical mission history from the late 1800′s it was amazing to me that those conservative women went for exactly the same training as the men. They believed that they should take the same set of skills and character traits, strength, courage, education, etc, to the mission field, as the men.

Now, some of these CBMW authors write that men have the ‘courage of command/leadership and women of subordination/following’ – but Aristotle wrote that, not Paul.

But, no, I would not accuse the ESV of heresy, I only mean that the TNIV is better in expressing the Greek, and if people criticize the TNIV, then it indicates a weakness in language skill.

There is no heresy in calling Christ a man, as the ESV does, – the heresy is in saying that those who call a man a human ‘neuter’ the man. Unless of course, we understand ‘being human’ as neutering. I suppose it could be undertood this way, as a good thing. I would not have thought of it that way. (I am not the kind of feminist that thinks men should be new age, effeminate or whatever. I have lived in and appreciated the oil fields and logger culture. No, woman do not handle chain saws or oil rigs. Yes, women may run companies.) But the connotation of ‘neutering’ is surely intended to be negative when used by these authors.

And there is a basic misundersatnding of works like the Imitation of Christ by A Kempis.

Grudem writes that

Husbands are imitators of Christ and wives of the church which is subject to Christ. page 148 here

But when Grudem writes this he isn’t really talking just about marriage, he is talking about the role of women in general. He goes on,

yes the Bible gives honour to all members of the body of Christ, but it refutes the erroneous aspects of feminism. Feminísm replaces biblical honour with a misguided attempt to wipe out all diffrences in people with respect to prominence, order, leadership, and representation.

So women have honour but as imitators of the Church. But now 50% of people my age are single, and for the women where I work more than that. So women need to develop independence, leadership, strength, courage, care for others in an equal way to men. They have to care about others without running around looking for a man to be subordinate/subject to, or be represented by.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this and critiquing it.

1 Tim 2:5 (NIVI): “For there is one God and one mediator between God and human beings, Christ Jesus, himself human.”

Apart from the awkwardness of the phrase “Christ Jesus, himself human,” in English, this rendering dilutes the maleness of Jesus during his incarnate state similar to the previous reference. The translators are correct in observing that part of Paul’s point here is the humanness of Jesus: he was able to mediate between God and man because he himself was a man, that is, a human being. But Paul is also clearly thinking of Jesus’ earthly life and sacrifice on the cross which he made as a man, a male. Thus both truths are emphasized here by Paul, that Jesus was a human being and that Jesus, in his incarnate state, was a man. However, by changing “man” (which, it is important to be reminded, is not necessarily a gender-exclusive term in English) to “human being,” the NIVI unduly focuses merely on one aspect of Paul’s statement, Jesus’ humanity, while deleting any reference to his earthly identity as a man. This is therefore another instance where the NIVI blunts or blurs gender distinctions in Scripture.

This tells us at least that for Köstenberger the “men” between God and whom Christ is the mediator are all humans, not just males. So at this point we seem to have a translation error rather than a deliberate heresy.

But surely not part but all of Paul’s point here is the humanness of Jesus. It is a novel doctrine that there is any theological significance to Jesus’ maleness. This doctrine is not at all taught in this verse, in the Greek. I suspect that this heresy has arisen now because in the 1960′s and 1970′s people like Grudem and Köstenberger read “man” in English Bible translations (e.g. RSV, known to have been Grudem’s favourite at the time) and misunderstood it as gender specific, when in fact it was intended by the translators as gender generic, just as is anthrōpos. So, if NIVI, and TNIV which is identical here, blunt any gender distinctions, they are distinctions which are not in the Greek but are artefacts of using older English translations at a time when the English language is changing rapidly. And of course such false distinctions need to be blunted as quickly as possible, before they become the pretext for destructive heresies.

I don’t know where you get “since humanness can’t be expressed in a non-gendered way“. You seem to have presupposed that anthrōpos is always gendered. But that is simply untrue, it has no gender-related component at all when used in contexts of contrast with God, animals etc.

I suppose Paul affirms Adam’s maleness in 1 Timothy 2:13-14, although it might be better to say that he presupposes it. He also presupposes Jesus’ maleness. But I fail to see where he uses this as a significant part of any argument of his.

Surely the point is that in using ANTHRWPOS in certain key texts Paul does not have to choose between the two ideas of Christ’s humanness and the particular male expression of that humanness (since humanness can’t be expressed in a non-gendered way).

Christ as second Adam is the true human being, but he is also the true human man standing over against the first human being/man, Adam (whose humanity and maleness Paul affirms).

It might be felt that in today’s English ‘man’ can no longer function as a word that does both these things. That is, that the maleness component of ‘man’ in modern colloquial idiom prevents and obscures the possibility that it can also function as an inclusive term. That is a judgement call about contemporary idiom.