26: STRANGE MEANINGS FOR “AUTHORITY” 203with the verb examples of two different nouns with the same spelling
(authent∑s).
Baldwin correctly limited his examples to the verb that is found here
in 1 Timothy 2. He found eighty-two occurrences of authenteøin
ancient writings, and he listed them all with the Greek text and English
translation in a long appendix.^11 He found that in all uses of this verb,
“the one unifying concept is that of authority.”^12 He found only one
example in which the verb seemed to take a negative sense, but because
language changes and meanings of words change over time, even that
one Chrysostom quotation from A.D. 390, coming more than three hun-
dred years after Paul wrote 1 Timothy, is of limited value in under-
standing the meaning of what Paul wrote.
What is most striking about Baldwin’s exhaustive study is the com-
plete absence of some of the other meanings that have been proposed
for authenteø, meanings that are unrelated to the idea of using author-
ity. These meanings turn out to be speculation without any demon-
strated basis in actual examples of this verb.
Two additional reasons also support the positive meaning (“exer-
cise authority”) of the verb authenteø. First, the grammatical structure
of 1 Timothy 2:12 rules out any negative meaning (such as, “to misuse
authority, to domineer, or to murder”) and shows that the verb must
have a positive meaning (such as “to exercise authority”).^13 Second, a
recent extensive and remarkably erudite study of cognate words now
(^11) Baldwin, “Difficult Word,” 269-305. I have listed all of these examples in English transla-
tion in Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth, 675-702. The citations with the orig-
inal Greek texts can be seen at http://www.efbt100.com, under “Appendix 7.”
(^12) Ibid., 72-73. On page 73, Baldwin summarized his findings on the range of possible mean-
ing for authenteøin a table. What becomes evident from his chart is that there are no negative
examples of the word authenteøat or around the time of the New Testament.
(^13) Note especially Andreas Köstenberger’s study, “A Complex Sentence Structure in 1 Timothy
2:12,” in Köstenberger et al., Women in the Church, 81-103. His study examined one hun-
dred parallel examples (52 in the NT, 48 from literature outside the NT, ranging from the third
century B.C. to the end of the first century A.D.) to the construction found in 1 Timothy 2:12.
In all of these cases, where two activities or concepts were joined according to the construc-
tion found in 1 Timothy 2:12, both activities were either viewed positively or negatively. No
exceptions were found. (Cf. Dan Doriani’s observation that when an activity that is viewed
positively is joined with another viewed negatively, a different construction is used—e.g., Matt.
17:7; John 20:27; Rom. 12:14; 1 Tim. 5:16 [Dan Doriani, Women and Ministry (Wheaton,
Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 179].) The importance of this for 1 Timothy 2:12 is that if the activity
of “teaching” is viewed positively in the context of 1 Timothy, then the activity of “having
authority” must also be viewed positively. Köstenberger goes on to demonstrate that, in fact,
“teaching” is viewed positively by Paul in 1 and 2 Timothy (1 Tim. 4:11; 6:2; 2 Tim. 2:2). For
further discussion, see Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth, 314-316.