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‘Saved in childbearing’
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1 Timothy 2:15
In the NKJV, 1 Timothy 2:14-15 reads like this: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.” We begin with “she will be saved”; ‘she’ is a pronoun, that stands for a noun, and in the context the reference is clearly to Eve. So how is Eve to be saved? (To render ‘preserved’ is basically meaningless.) Neither Eve nor any other woman is saved by bearing a child. In the Greek Text we find ‘childbirth’, a noun, not a verb. Further, there is a definite article with the noun, so it is ‘the childbirth’. There is only one childbirth that could result in salvation for Eve, and the rest of us, the birth of the Messiah. Of course Eve bore Seth, thus beginning the line that culminated in the Messiah (Genesis 3:15). In the middle of verse 15, and of the sentence, Paul breaks the rules of grammar and switches from ‘she’ to ‘they’—what is true of Eve is applied to all women. Well, strictly speaking, since ‘they’ has no antecedent I suppose it could include men as well, everybody (unless someone wants to argue that women are saved on a different basis than men [which I think would run afoul of other passages]). Still, the paragraph is about women. Any sisters in Christ who have been troubled by this verse, thinking that they must bear a child, may relax on that score.

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© 2016 Wilbur N. Pickering, ThM, PhD