She's Not Permitted to Teach; Rich, Junia, and who gets to read the Bible

She's Not Permitted to Teach
Rich, Junia, and who gets to read the Bible
Oct 25, 2026 · @Jua
What happened
My wife runs an LGBTQ+ page on Facebook. A few days ago, she posted a quote from a minister. His point was simple: some christians treat a handful of verses about sex as god's law for everyone, but treat the thousands of verses about caring for the poor and the stranger as optional.
Then she called me over and told me to go look at what one man was saying on her post.
The guy is the man I'll call Rich. He had made himself the Bible expert of the comment section. He wasn't interested in the point of the post. He was interested in who was allowed to talk about it.
When someone pointed him to Monte Mader, a woman who writes about the Bible, he didn't read a word of her work. He said:
"Women aren't permitted to teach men, so no, I will not be wasting my time on whoever gave you such poor theological training."
Then, looking at her profile picture:
"Based on the thumbnail, she's also dressed like a whore, so get out of here with that nonsense."
He told another woman that "biblically illiterate women should learn to be quiet." When one woman told him to sit down, he asked whether she thought he was "some cuck that would ever follow orders from you."
I spent almost 40 years in the church and studied to become a pastor. I've heard men like Rich my whole life. But he showed how the trick works so clearly that I want to break it down.
He didn't argue. He disqualified.
Look at what Rich never did. He never quoted Monte Mader and explained where she was wrong. He never answered the women in the thread point by point. He didn't have to. He'd already decided they didn't count.
There's a name for this. The philosopher Miranda Fricker calls it testimonial injustice. It's when you refuse to believe someone because of who they are, not because of what they said.
Rich gave three reasons to ignore Monte Mader: she's a woman, women can't teach, and her clothes make her a whore. Not one of those tells you whether she's right about the Bible. All three mean he never has to find out.
That's why this matters. You can answer an argument. You can't answer being shut out before you open your mouth.
What the Bible actually says
Rich leans on two passages. Both are real, and both say something limiting about women. The question is whether they say what he needs: that no woman, in any church, ever, may teach a man.
1 Timothy 2:11-12. This is the one he quoted. It's shakier ground than he thinks.
Most Bible scholars don't believe Paul wrote 1 Timothy. They think someone wrote it later, using his name.
The key word in verse 12, authentein, shows up nowhere else in the New Testament. Nobody is quite sure what it means. It may mean "bully" or "take control," not just "teach."
Almost nobody follows the rest of the passage. Verse 9 bans braided hair, gold and pearls. Verse 15 says women are saved by having children. Rich keeps verse 12 and quietly skips the rest.
1 Corinthians 14:34-35. This one tells women to stay silent in church. But three chapters earlier, in 1 Corinthians 11:5, Paul takes it for granted that women are praying and prophesying out loud in church. Some old copies of the Bible also put these two verses in a different spot. That's one reason scholars like Gordon Fee think a later copyist added them. Not everyone agrees, but it's far from settled.
What Paul actually did. In Romans 16, he praises Phoebe as a deacon, using the same word he uses for his own work. He greets Prisca, who helped teach the preacher Apollos (Acts 18:26), and he usually names her before her husband. And in Galatians 3:28, he writes that in christ there is no male or female.
To be fair, some serious scholars still read these passages the strict way. Thomas Schreiner, for one, argues that 1 Timothy bases its rule on the creation story, so it applies to everyone, everywhere. That's a real argument, and it deserves a real answer.
But here's the difference between Schreiner and Rich. Schreiner makes his case in public and expects pushback. Rich used the conclusion so he'd never have to face any.
The woman they turned into a man
If you want to see Rich's trick at work over centuries, look at Romans 16:7. Paul sends greetings to Andronicus and Junia, and says they stand out among the apostles.
Junia is a woman's name. It was common in Roman times and shows up more than 250 times in old records. The early church read it as a woman too. John Chrysostom, a bishop in the 300s who was no feminist, was amazed that a woman had earned the title of apostle.
Then she disappeared. Around the 1200s, a writer named Aegidius of Rome first read Junia as a man. Later scholars invented a male name, "Junias," that has never been found anywhere in the ancient world. In 1927, a standard Greek New Testament changed one accent mark and made the name male. For about a hundred years, from the 1870s to the 1960s, most English Bibles went along with it.
The historian Bernadette Brooten put the logic in one line: "Because a woman could not have been an apostle, the woman who is here called apostle could not have been a woman."
Eldon Jay Epp tells the whole story in his book Junia: The First Woman Apostle (2005). Most modern Bibles have now put her back. Some scholars now argue she was only well known to the apostles, not one of them, and a few translations like the ESV go that way. But that argument only started once nobody could pretend she was a man anymore.
That's the part Rich misses. When the Bible didn't keep women quiet, men changed the Bible. The problem was never what the text said. It was what men couldn't imagine it saying.
Rich isn't a one-off
It would be easy to write Rich off as one angry man in a comment section. But he didn't make any of this up. He's saying out loud, and more crudely, what big churches still practise.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. In 2023, it threw out Saddleback Church for having women pastors on staff. In 2024, it threw out First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, after a nearby church reported that a woman was its pastor for children and women. Attempts to write the ban into the convention's constitution narrowly failed in 2024 and 2025. In June 2026, a new version passed its first vote, 6,028 to 2,026. It needs one more vote in 2027.
Rich's comment about Monty Mader's clothes didn't come from nowhere either. Purity culture, which shaped a generation of church kids, taught girls that their bodies and clothes were to blame for men's lust. Linda Kay Klein's book Pure (2018) shows the shame it left behind. When Rich looked at a woman's photo and saw a whore, he was looking through glasses someone handed him.
The idea that christian men sit at the top goes back a long way. Historian Magda Teter's Christian Supremacy (2023) shows how early church claims of superiority were written into law and later tied to race. Khyati Joshi's White Christian Privilege (2020) shows how those ideas still shape everyday American life. Rich's version is small, but it's the same shape: one group decides what's true, and who else gets to speak.
Why I left
I know men like Rich because I was raised by the system that makes them.
I grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church in apartheid South Africa. My father was a colonel in the Prison Service. Our faith was about order, obedience and the father's word being law. Everything had its place, and anything out of place was sin. I'm a transgender woman, and doctors later told me I'm intersex. As a child, I didn't have those words. I just knew I was out of place.
So I did what the church taught me. At eight, I knelt by my bed after Sunday service and begged Jesus to fix the mistake. At sixteen, I walked up at an altar call and made god a deal: my heart, if he'd make me normal. In my twenties, I joined a charismatic church, went to Bible school, and became second-in-charge of a small prayer group, guiding other people while I was falling apart. When everyone around me spoke in tongues and I couldn't, I faked it. I was faking salvation the same way I was faking being a man.
In 2011, in my early thirties, I went for deliverance, the church's word for having a demon cast out. A kind woman read from the Bible, told me who I was came from a demon, and had me repeat after her: "I renounce the spirit of Juanita." When I sobbed, she said that was the demon leaving. It wasn't. It was me, turning on the only person who had ever really loved me.
The church didn't lose me over one rule. It lost me over a pattern. The leader of my prayer group, the man counselling me about my feelings for a woman, used his position to go after her himself. That's when I saw it. The holy men were just men. They policed everyone else's morals and didn't follow their own. The church wasn't a safe place. It was one more ladder where men took what they wanted and called it god's plan.
Later, a man who helped run a Facebook group I belonged to told me: "I am a christian man... Everything about you is wrong and goes against god and nature." He didn't argue with me. He ruled me out. Others joined him, and they drove me out of the group.
When I read Rich's comments on my wife's post, I knew that voice straight away. Different man, different decade, same move. Monty Mader is "dressed like a whore." Women should "learn to be quiet." It's never about what the Bible says. It's about who gets to speak, and the answer is always men like him.
I left because I finally saw that the system wasn't broken. It was working exactly the way it was built to. It makes women, and people like me, prove we have a right to exist, while men like Rich never have to prove anything. Rich will tell you this is about the Bible. I spent most of my life inside it. It was never about the Bible.
Sources
Southern Baptist Convention vote fails again, 2025 (RNS)
Law Amendment rejected, Alexandria church expelled, 2024 (Baptist Report)
SBC approves amendment on women pastors, 2026 (Christian Post)
Eldon Jay Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Fortress Press)
Review of Epp, attestations of Junia and Chrysostom
Review of Epp, Aegidius and the 1927 Nestle accent change (EEWC)
Magda Teter, Christian Supremacy (Princeton University Press)
Khyati Joshi, White Christian Privilege (RNS)
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, 2007)
Linda Kay Klein, Pure (Touchstone, 2018)
Thomas R. Schreiner, "An Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:9-15," in Women in the Church (Köstenberger and Schreiner, eds.)
Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Eerdmans)