Yesterday, I introduced you to a couple of difficult passages regarding women in the church.
1. THE DIFFICULT PASSAGES (1 Timothy 2:8–12; 1 Corinthians 13:33-35)

Then, we looked at Paul’s own description of who he was before he met Jesus.
2. PAUL’S VIEW OF WOMEN BEFORE HE MET JESUS

Philippians 3:5–6 (ESV)
5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;
6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

From this understanding that Paul gave us before he was saved, we can infer the social implications regarding the way that he lived his life.

From the beginning of his life to the time of his conversion, Paul was Jewish through and through. Jewish in his thinking. Jewish in his eating. Jewish in his social life. He knew nothing but Judaism.

And based on that, there are few things we can know about Paul and his upbringing. Because according to the Jewish custom in which Paul had been raised, women were looked upon as less than a man. In fact, women were considered only a little higher than a dog. Every good Jewish boy was taught to pray every morning as part of his morning prayers, “God, I thank you that I was born a man and not a woman. Better to be born a dog than to be born a woman.”

I want you to think of what it would be like to grow up as a young boy and every morning in your prayers you would say: “God, I thank you that I was born a man and not a woman. Better to be born a dog than to be born a woman.”

His view of women was so poor. In fact, in the Jewish role, women were not allowed to attend synagogues. If this were a synagogue there, there would only be men present because women were forbidden to attend the synagogue life. To see a woman in the public setting with men would be impossible; it would be intolerable. This would never never never happen. Women and men in a synagogue simply did not mix.

During the time of the Babylonian captivity, listen to what was written by the Jewish sages concerning women. This was written during the time of Daniel. And this was the general thinking of Jewish men about women.

“The world cannot exist without males and females, but happy is he whose children are sons and woe to him whose children are daughters”

“He who teaches his daughter the Torah leads her to lewdness”

“Let the words of the Torah be burned rather to be entrusted to the care of a woman”

“Our sages command that one should not teach one’s daughter the Torah because the minds of most women are incapable of concentrating or learning and thus because of their intellectual poverty, they turned the words of the Torah into words of nonsense.”

“A woman is slave to her husband just as a slave is to his master”

This was typical Jewish thinking concerning the difference between man and woman.

When you look at Paul’s pedigree about how he was born and raised and trained, this also was thinking of the apostle Paul before he met Jesus.

But, we also need to understand how women thought because women were affected by the same teaching:

The women were taught that they were less than a man; therefore, they thought that they were less than a man.

The women were taught that they were not going to the public assembly; therefore, they wouldn’t even think of going into a public assembly.

The women were taught that they were to be out of sight and quite — that this was a virtue if they weren’t seen and they weren’t known.

When they went out of the public, they were commanded to keep their face covered because women were not to be seen. No attention was to be brought to the woman. All of the attention was to be given to the man.

Making this even more serious was that they lived under the Greek-Roman control. When you came into Greek and Roman cities, they were almost completely vacant of women because Roman custom demanded that they stay at home. It was considered a Greek-Roman virtue for women to be out of sight.

Roman society gave no legal status to women, none whatsoever. A woman could not own property, except in very rare occasions. A woman could not receive inheritance from her parents, except in very rare occasions.

A woman could not file for divorce, which means they basically had the same status as a slave which means they can never be released from their marriage unless the man initiated the divorce.

And when babies were born in Roman society, as soon the baby was washed and cleaned of all the afterbirth everything connected to the mother was washed away. Then the baby was brought to the father, who now received the baby who was completely free of the mother’s connection.

If it was a boy, he held him up in the air and blessed him and called him one of his inheritors.

But if they brought him a girl, he wouldn’t even touch the girl. He would just give the order for the baby to be fed, so the baby would not die.

So even in birth, boys were winners and girls were losers.

In Roman culture, a man could marry women as young as 12. These young girls were viewed as the property of their dad, like a car or like a house. So when a man married the dad’s daughter, she was transferred to being now the husband’s property. In fact, he would place a wedding ring on her finger as a symbol that a legal transaction had taken place and he was now the new owner of his wife.

Women legally weren’t even allowed to go shopping. If you saw a woman in the market she most likely was a prostitute, because it was considered beneath a woman’s dignity to go into a market where people were doing transactions.

No women can serve publicly, except in very rare occasions. No woman had the right of citizenship, which means no woman could vote. So women basically had no role, no public right, no public speech. They remained silent, stayed home, stayed out of sight.

If they were in public they had to be veiled. This was considered a virtue, hiding her face to show that she was not available to anyone else, much in the way it is done today in Muslim countries.

That was the situation in the Roman world.

So, when you combine that with the Jewish view of women, the future did not seem very bright for women.

And this was the culture that Paul was a part of. His view of women was shaped the same way.

But, something happened. Something drastic. Paul met Jesus!