Where have all the women gone?

Translucent butterfly on green leaf: gone? or present, even when unseen?

It was the year I finally began to question what I had been taught about women, the church and God. An odd version of the 1960s song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” kept playing in my head.

Where have all the women gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the women gone?
Long time ago …

Women hadn’t gone anywhere, of course. Females make up more than half the earth’s population.

Yet as I prepared to look again into the Scriptures I had studied since childhood, and as I asked the Lord to give me eyes to see, I wondered:

Why does the New Testament – and especially Paul – speak numerous times of man and men, only rarely of women, and then often negatively? Where have all the women gone?

You are all sons

This disparity particularly perplexed me in light of Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:26–29:

In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to the promise. (NET)

How revolutionary! In these verses, God announces: All that sonship involved in the Old Testament – favored status, inheritance, authority, covenant blessing – now accrues to everyone who believes in Christ Jesus.

All God’s children, male and female, are sons. All, regardless of gender, inherit everything God has promised.

Some truth offends us. Some confounds us. Yet, we welcome truth when our spirit receives what the Holy Spirit speaks, even before our mind can grasp it or our emotions embrace it.

So I received what God says about sonship, even while questioning why much of the New Testament seemed to relegate women to the invisible and decidedly unequal status of Old Testament daughters.

Unafraid of my questions – in fact, delighted by them – the Spirit of God sent me on a treasure hunt. Since Paul seemed the most intent on lifting up men and putting down women, I searched Paul’s 13 letters, Romans through Philemon. I began my search in the King James Version (KJV), the hugely influential English translation first published in 1611.

Man, or human?

Initially,
I found the English word man and its derivatives
329 times in Paul’s epistles.¹
I found woman and its derivatives
a total of 39 times.
Quite a discrepancy!

But the Spirit of God pressed me to dig deeper and, in particular, to probe those 329 occurrences of the term man in Paul’s writings. So first, I looked up the two Greek words most often translated “man” in English-language New Testaments: aner and anthropos.

Aner means “man” or “husband.” According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary, it refers to a man “in distinction from a woman” and “is never used of the female sex.”
Anthropos, on the other hand, refers to “‘a human being, male or female,’ without reference to sex or nationality.” Hence the term anthropology, the study of humans.²

Aha. One of two main words rendered man in English New Testaments actually means human.

That’s interesting, and concerning. When translators render these two very different Greek terms with the same English word, we who read the Bible in English have difficulty knowing when women are included and when they are not.

Crunching the numbers

As I continued to crunch the numbers for Paul’s letters, the results stunned me. My calculations showed …

Out of 329 occurrences of the term man
in Paul’s epistles in the KJV,
only 24 translate aner,
the Greek word for man.

Let that sink in.

305 times,
the KJV says man
when the original says something else.

In perhaps five of those instances,
the KJV uses man
to render the Greek word for male
or a similar gender-specific term.

However:

127 times,
the KJV says man when Paul wrote anthropos,
which includes both men and women,
or, if speaking of a man,
focuses, not on his maleness,
but on his humanness.

Indeed:

Every time the Greek word for human
appears in Paul’s letters, the KJV renders it man.

Even more astonishing:

More than 170 times
where man occurs in the KJV,
translators simply inserted it into the text.

Where the Greek says “all,” KJV says, “all men.” Where the Greek says “any,” KJV says, “any man.” Where the Greek says, “none,” KJV says, “no man.” Where the Greek says “these” or “such” or “a certain one,” KJV says, “these men” or “such men” or “a certain man.”

Occasionally, KJV adds the word man after an adjective describing people. For example, KJV renders “not many wise” as “not many wise men” (1 Cor. 1:26), “righteous” as “a righteous man” (Rom. 5:7) and “covetous” as “covetous man” (Eph. 5:5).

In some passages, this slight change has huge implications. For example, when Paul chastises the Corinthian believers for going to non-Christian judges to settle their legal matters, the KJV renders his words this way:

Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren?

Yet, the original Greek does not convey the idea that only men can judge disputes. Indeed, quite the opposite. As the New Living Translation asks:

Isn’t there anyone in all the church who is wise enough to decide these issues? (1 Cor. 6:5)

Good news and bad news

As to the prominent English translations of the 20th century – New International (NIV), New King James (NKJV), New American Standard (NASU) and Revised Standard (RSV) – I have good news and bad news.

The good news: These translations tend to abandon the KJV practice of randomly inserting the word “man” where no corresponding Greek term exists (although they sometimes insert “man” in places the KJV did not).

The bad news: In most instances, these translations follow the KJV lead in rendering anthropos, not as human, but as man. Thus, they continue muddying the waters as to what Christ offers all people.

In Paul’s epistles, the KJV uses the term man a whopping 300 times when the Greek calls for a more inclusive word. The NKJV does the same thing 175 times; the 1995 NASB, 194 times; and the 1984 NIV, 207 times.

To find anthropos rendered more consistently as the gender-inclusive term it is, we have to visit such newer translations as New Century Version, New Living Translation, New Revised Standard and the 2011 update of the NIV.

Not invisible, but included

I began this search wondering, “Why did Paul speak numerous times of man and men, only rarely of women and then often negatively?”

Now I know: He didn’t. But it had seemed that he did, because of the stark contrast between what Paul wrote – and what I had read.

In his New Testament letters:

Paul used the Greek word for woman or wife, 64 times; and the Greek word for man or husband, 60 times.
He used the Greek word for persons or human beings, 126 times.
And habitually, he also used other inclusive language – words that gender bias may have conditioned us to read right past (everyone, anyone, all, etc.).

In short, Paul did not emphasize men and ignore women. What he did is to speak of both genders together, far more than either alone.

So what do the numbers tell us?

“Long time ago” translators’ language choices obscured the presence of women alongside men in Scripture. Yet, in the New Testament, women aren’t invisible. They’re included.

People qualified to teach

What’s more, numerous passages throughout the New Testament – including passages in Paul’s letters – speak inclusively of people, male and female, serving in ministry roles that involve speaking and leading.

Regretfully, we may not see how often that occurs, due to the translation bias we’ve observed. Here’s just one example:

In 2 Tim 2:2 in the 1984 NIV, we read …

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.

The KJV, NASB, NKJV and RSV concur that Paul instructed Timothy to teach “men” who can in turn teach others.

Yet, Paul did not employ the word aner here, but rather, anthropos. He said:

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.

Hear the Spirit’s voice

Tragically, Bible translations we have trusted have muddied and minimized the New Testament’s inclusivity.

To pursue truth in this matter, I recommend using a translation that more correctly conveys this inclusiveness.

But regardless what translation you use, this is key: Seek earnestly every time you open Scripture to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice.

Every Bible translator has biases – and not just pertaining to women. Each of us has biases too. Further, none of us can rightly divide any Scripture apart from the Holy Spirit.

My prayer, for myself, for all of us, is that we will submit to Jesus Christ as Lord and to the Spirit the Father has sent to teach us all things. That we will wait for him, listen to him, yield to him. And that we will remain humbly teachable – leaving room for mystery and for our own fallibility.

As we seek the Lord and search the Scriptures in this way, he will guide us step-by-step into truth, no matter how much our own fear or preconceived ideas or a translator’s bias obscures it.

Heirs according to promise

One thing I did not know for so very long, because I was afraid to look:

In letter after letter, the man with the reputation for putting women down, instead treats women as fully human, fully adult – and welcome into the fullness of the redemption that is ours in Jesus Christ.

Continually, Paul declares that Christ reversed the curse for everyone. Repeatedly, he affirms what he wrote in Galatians 3: “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus … There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus … and heirs according to the promise.”

Where have all the women gone?

Hidden for centuries by translation bias, but included from eternity by our Creator and Redeemer, we’re right here – alongside men, counted among our Father’s sons and heirs.

This post is excerpted and adapted from chapter 3 in What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay

Footnotes

All references to the English “man” in the NT also include its derivatives, “men,” “man’s,” “men’s,” along with “menpleasers.” ↩︎

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