Gene Edwards is well known as a spokesman for the house church movement.  Some time ago he was scheduled to speak at another ministry’s house church conference when he heard a statement that needed a response:  “You would not let an eleven year-old child stand up in a meeting and talk.  Then why should you allow a woman to speak in a meeting?”  Edwards walked out and started writing The Christian Woman … Set Free.  Recently OpenHeaven.com spoke with him.

             From 30 to 100 AD how did Christian attitudes toward women compare with pagan and Jewish attitudes?

             We know a great deal from 30 to 70 AD.  As far as I know there is not one quotable word of Christian history from 70 to 100 AD.  From the time of Jesus until the destruction of the Temple, Jesus Christ had an incredible place in Christian community.  On Sunday, May 29, 30 AD, one hundred twenty men and women were meeting together in a second floor room, praying together as the Lord had instructed them.  Women are squarely in the middle of the activity of God on earth. Here we find the answers to the questions, “Can women prophesy?  And can women pray in public and in the church?”  The Day of Pentecost forever settled that question.  It seems as though almost immediately things slipped right back into the world of the Greeks. 

             My guess is that the Jews slipped into the Greek customs and attitudes from the Greek culture that surrounded it.  Alexander the Great came sweeping down around 300 BC and brought Greek culture to what in Paul’s day would be the Roman Empire.  Cultures tend to invade and destroy other cultures.  Previous to that we have no evidence other than Scripture as to where a woman was ranked in everyday living.  What was life like for a woman living in Athens?  Women led a life of seclusion.  For a woman to speak in an assembly in Greece, would be unlawful and a terrible embarrassment to her husband.

             Your book reports the first positive treatment of women with Jesus.  How did He elevate the place of women?

             It could only be called shocking.  No woman was allowed to sit at the feet of a rabbi.  No woman was allowed to complain in the presence of a man.  So we have Mary and Martha just upsetting that whole thing.  No man on earth would have believed the report of a woman that a man had risen from the dead.  That had to be a culture exclusive to the Christian faith.  When Mary Magdalene ran into those men, those men listened to her.  One of the most touching stories in the New Testament is the story of Jesus and the woman at the well.  She was shocked that Jesus would speak to her.  This was unthinkable.  A man, talking to a woman in public, alone, just did not happen.

             Before we get into Paul’s writings in detail, can you tell how Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, inserted his own spin on certain texts?

             When he did the Latin Vulgate, he was writing to create a Bible for a few people who spoke Latin and he happened to be living in an area where they did, just a little pocket there in North Africa.  Augustine of Hippo, who had an incredible influence at that time, called the Vulgates the only inspired version that should ever exist.    And now, you go back to Jerome’s Latin translations and find that that man did a horrendous, horrible translation of Greek into Latin.  In one place he translated a Greek word that referred to a man as to keep quiet and then when he got to the same word referring to a woman he translated it as to be silent. 

             Today we can see the insertions of Jerome by looking for the italics in a text, but the ancients had no lower case letters, just uppercase, and no punctuation marks.  Does that mean that the rare person who got to gaze on the only official translation, could not tell what was added because italics had not yet been invented and had to accept Jerome’s decision on when a sentence began and ended?

             That is correct.  Most of this changed only with Guttenberg.  They began to pull the words apart.  Later they had paragraphs.  I think it was not until the beginning of the hot letter press that we actually introduced italics. 

             Some of the hardest to understand scriptures about women are in 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2.  The Christian Woman … Set Free deals with these cases.  Can you give us an example from one of these?

             Until I Corinthians, everything we know about Paul was pro-women.  It ends with I Corinthians 11 and 14.  Therefore I challenge 11 and 14 as being accurate in the way they were translated.   

             I Corinthians 11:10, properly translated, turns everything upside down.  “For this cause ought a woman to have a symbol of authority on her head ….” (version not specified)  Those three words—a symbol of—are not in the original text.  In the original language, the word which is translated “authority” here has another meaning.  The Greek word exousia is best translated “having the right” … “having the privilege” … “having the prerogative” … “having the dominion” and … “having the jurisdiction.”  Now let us read this same passage again.  “… a woman ought to have the right, the privilege, the prerogative, the dominion and the jurisdiction over her head ….”

             I Peter 3:1 starts off with, “Wives be submissive to your own husbands ….”   Several verses later Peter directs our attention to Sarah, who called her husband Lord.  Peter seems to recommend that kind of attitude for Christian wives, at least that’s what a lot of male preachers have told us.  What’s your take on this?

             It’s interesting.  My wife has never called me lord.  It’s not the Lord, actually.  If we’re going to be scriptural, we ought to do that.  I would be happy for my wife to call me lord, but I’ll tell you this.  I would immediately turn around and call her lady.

             We don’t see an explicit mention of women elders in the New Testament although there is disputed evidence of a woman apostle, Junia in Romans 16:7, which  was  spelled as Junias, a male equivalent name in some translations.  Is the lack of women elders a cultural phenomenon unique to Bible times or can women serve the church that way now?

             I belong to the house church movement.  We have discovered every church has elders.  They’re there and everyone knows who they are and they’re almost always the gentlest, the most servant-like people in the church, the most godly.  We don’t pick elders in our churches because it tends to destroy them.  No matter what you do, once you hang that on them, everyone treats them differently.  They start acting differently.  The thing that is so important to understand is that it’s not a permanent position. 

             Here’s how you know who your elders are.  You get all the women in the church together.  Ask them to list the three brothers in the church that they trust the most.  You will then find out who your elders are because the women do not like to be run over.  They will invariably pick brothers who are very gentle, have a servant’s heart and give their lives much to the Lord.

             So alternatively, you could ask the men to do the same thing?

             Ask, “Who are the three women in the church that you trust the most?”  As far as I’m concerned, those women are elders.  Those women handle problems in the church that have to do with women and the men handle problems in the church that have to do with men.  When you have a problem that doesn’t fit this way, those men and women handle the problem together.

             How does the church benefit by recognizing what it says in Galatians 3:38--that in Christ there is neither male nor female?

             I’ll tell you exactly what’s missing otherwise—the power of seeing things that are exciting and dynamic that men don’t have the imagination for.  Brothers will just keep doing the same thing over and over.  The ladies will come in, you ask them and suddenly you’ve got a church doing all sorts of exciting things. 

Read Steve Eastman’s review of Gene Edwards' The Christian Woman .. Set Free.

To visit Gene Edwards' website, click here.