How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Timothy was living in Ephesus when this letter was written, and much like the letter to the Corinthian church, the church in Ephesus had significant problems. Remember, there was no “New Testament” and these churches were all new. Much was being figured out, and many of the people in these churches were coming from pagan backgrounds that included the worship of other gods. In Ephesus, the main religion was the worship of the goddess Artemis, and this posed a serious challenge to the new church, even leading to riots against those who were telling others about Jesus.† Many women in Ephesus were leaving the worship of Artemis and learning an entirely new way of relating to God through Jesus. The Temple of Artemis (whom the Romans called Diana) was an all-female religion with castrated men serving as priests. Artemis was a fertility cult where worship involved sexual rites, including prostitution, practices that would shock people today. But the people of Ephesus, and many others at that time, believed these practices were what it meant to worship a god. All of this forms the backstory to the letter Paul is writing to Timothy. Some women in Ephesus were now part of the new faith, part of the worship gatherings of this new church, following Jesus, a man who died and returned from the dead.