By Andy Hale
Ephesians is one of those books of the Bible used by certain Christian traditions to reinforce the idea of women’s inferiority. After all, Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians is where you get those peculiar passages about wives submitting to their husbands right after he said to submit to each other, some wonky matters on childbearing, and the whole silent stuff.
“Some people said to forget the guy who wrote the words ‘saved through childbearing.’ He was confused, they said. But Paul was a brilliant scholar, theologian, and rhetorician. Two thousand years later, people across the world still marvel at his mind. It seemed unlikely that he would contradict himself within three chapters of the letter,” said Dr. Sandra Glahn on the CBF Podcast Conversation.
Depending on your understanding of how the Bible was written, your theology might allow you to see the humanness of the writers. And what we sometimes do not factor in is what else the Biblical writers were reading and hearing at the time they were writing themselves.
Glahn, the professor of media arts and worship at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of Nobody’s Mother, sat down with us to explore her new book that examines the influence of Artemis, the Ephesian goddess of fertility, on Paul’s writings.
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Andy Hale is the creator and host of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Podcast. Hale is the Associate Executive Coordinator of CBF North Carolina. He’s also served as CBF’s Church Start Specialist, the founding pastor of Mosaic Church of Clayton, and the senior pastor of University Baptist Church of Baton Rouge. Follow on Twitter @haleandy.