Saving Wealthy Ephesian Women from a Self-Centered Way of Life (1 Tim 2:15): Salvation by Childbearing in the Context of Ancient Arguments against Sexual Intercourse, Pregnancy and Child-rearing, in: Troubling Texts in the New Testament, Hg. M. Klinker-De Klerck u.a. (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 113), Leuven: Peeters, 2022, 257-283:
„As far as I am concerned, one of the most troubling texts in the New Testament is 1 Tim 2:15: ‚She (i.e., the woman) will be saved through childbearing …‘ … Many Bible readers regard Paul’s statement in 1 Tim 2:15 as very unfair in several respects. First, what about women who live as singles, voluntarily or involuntarily? What about married women who cannot have children for medical reasons? Further, why did Paul admonish just women to have children and not also men? Why did he lose sight of gender equality? And finally, is this passage not irreconcilable with passages such as Gal 3:28, where Paul advocated the soteriological equality of the sexes, and with 1 Cor 7:8, where Paul encouraged unmarried women and widows to remain single? I suspect that because of these issues most Christians and Christian churches find it difficult to do anything constructive with this troubling passage of Scripture and simply ignore it.
One of the harshest scholarly verdicts on 1 Tim 2:15 was pronounced by Annette Merz. She believes that according to this passage ‚women are reduced to the status of uteri‘. For women, ‚the consummation of a marriage becomes in and of itself a redemptive act‘. Therefore, ‚the husband becomes the redeemer of his wife. Christ attains his eschatological goal for women only by means of the husband’s expropriation of his wife’s body‘. Consequently, 1 Tim 2:15 ‚constitutes nothing less than the annulment of the soteriological equality of the sexes‘ by preaching ‚a unique way of salvation for women that disqualifies them as a matter of principle from an ascetic way of life‘.It is obvious that Merz emphatically disapproves of such an unfair view of women. And her sense of revulsion against these views is quite comprehensible …“