188 FEMINIST VIEWS BASED ON UNTRUTHFUL CLAIMS
did about women in 1 Timothy 2, but that was a unique situation unlike
any situation in today’s churches.
But once again, where is the actual evidence? The Kroegers offer no
proof from any first-century material outside the New Testament, and
their lack of care in the use of later sources has opened up their work to
significant criticism. For example, Thomas Schreiner says,
Unfortunately, the Kroegers’ reconstruction is riddled with method-
ological errors. They nod in the direction of saying that the heresy is
“proto-gnostic,” but consistently appeal to later sources to establish
the contours of the heresy. The lack of historical rigor, if I can say this
kindly, is nothing less than astonishing. They have clearly not grasped
how one should apply the historical method in discerning the nature
of false teaching in the Pauline letters.^2Other reviews of the Kroegers’ work by New Testament experts
offer deeply troubling evaluations. Steven Baugh, New Testament pro-
fessor at Westminster Seminary (California), whose Ph.D. thesis is on the
history of ancient Ephesus, wrote an extended review called “The
Apostle Among the Amazons.”^3 As Baugh’s title indicates, the Kroegers
rely heavily on nonfactual myths (such as myths of Amazon women
“warriors”) to paint a picture of ancient Ephesus where women had
usurped religious authority over men: a “feminist Ephesus” in the reli-
gious realm. But their historical reconstruction is just not true. Baugh
says, “the Kroegers... have painted a picture of Ephesus which wan-
ders widely from the facts” (155). With his expertise in the history of
Ephesus, Baugh affirms, “No one has established historically that there
was, in fact, a feminist culture in first-century Ephesus. It has merely
been assumed” (154). He says the Kroegers’ foundational claim that the
religious sphere of life could be led by women, but not the social-civic
spheres, “betrays an astonishing innocence of how ancient societies
worked” (160). After analyzing their data, he concludes, “It is difficult
(^2) Thomas Schreiner, “An Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:9-15: A Dialogue with Scholarship,”
in Women in the Church: A Fresh Analysis of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, ed. Andreas Köstenberger,
Thomas Schreiner, and H. Scott Baldwin (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995), 109-110.
(^3) Steven Baugh, “The Apostle Among the Amazons,” Westminster Theological Journal 56
(1994): 153-171; also reprinted in Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth
(Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2004), 658-674.