If women were forbidden to teach, who taught Apollos?

The text names her: Πρίσκιλλα (Priscilla, G4252). And it names what she did: ἐξέθεντο (G1620, "they expounded"). Acts 18:26 reads:

"He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. And when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and expounded (exethento) to him the way of God more accurately." — Acts 18:26

Three things are worth seeing in that sentence.

Priscilla is named first. In the Greek of Acts 18:26 the order is Priscilla and Aquila — the wife before the husband. This is not the only place Luke does this. Acts 18:18 names "Priscilla and Aquila" in the same order; Romans 16:3 names "Prisca and Aquila"; 2 Timothy 4:19 names "Prisca and Aquila." Of the six New Testament references to the couple, four name Priscilla first (Acts 18:18, 18:26; Rom 16:3; 2 Tim 4:19) and two name Aquila first (Acts 18:2, where the husband is being introduced as a Jewish refugee from Rome; 1 Cor 16:19). The pattern is unusual enough that ancient and modern commentators have noticed it. The simplest explanation is that Priscilla took the more prominent role in their joint ministry — and Luke and Paul both register that.

The verb is plural. Exethento (ἐξέθεντο, G1620, V-2AMI-3P) is third-person plural, aorist middle indicative — "they themselves expounded." Both of them taught Apollos. The verb is not assigned to Aquila with Priscilla as a silent presence; it is assigned to both of them as subject. Luke could have written exetheto (singular, "he expounded") and named Priscilla as Aquila's wife in passing. He did not. He used the plural and named her first.

Apollos was already a serious figure. Two verses earlier Luke describes him:

"A certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man (anēr logios), came to Ephesus. He was mighty in the Scriptures (dynatos en tais graphais). This man had been instructed (katēchēmenos) in the way of the Lord, and being fervent in spirit, he was speaking and teaching (edidasken) accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John." — Acts 18:24–25

Apollos is anēr logios — an eloquent, scholarly man. He is dynatos en tais graphais — mighty in the Scriptures. He is already teaching (edidasken, G1321, the same verb that appears in 1 Timothy 2:12). What he is missing is precision about the post-John baptism reality of Jesus. And the people who supply that precision, in Luke's narrative, are Priscilla and Aquila together.

Priscilla — a woman — supplements the doctrine of a male teacher who is already publicly teaching. The verb is the same root didaskō family that 1 Timothy 2:12 prohibits women from doing toward men. And Luke reports it without apology, without explanation, without a comment that this is unusual.

This raises the obvious question: how does Acts 18:26 fit with 1 Timothy 2:12?

Three observations are owed before the full answer comes in Part 8 of this series.

First, the same author wrote both texts. Luke is the companion of Paul. His narrative is not naïve about Pauline practice. Luke writes Acts knowing what Paul believes and how Paul operates in cities. When Luke records Priscilla teaching Apollos, he is not contradicting Paul's later instructions to Timothy. He is reporting what Paul's traveling missionary household looked like in practice.

Second, the setting is private instruction, not the assembly. Proselabonto auton — "they took him aside" — locates the teaching in a private home or workshop setting, not in a public assembly. 1 Corinthians 14:35 ("if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home") and 1 Timothy 2:12 are framed in terms of assembly practice. Acts 18:26 is set in the household. The contexts are different.

Third, Priscilla is one name in a longer list. The full development of Pauline practice — Phoebe the diakonos in Romans 16:1, Junia the apostolos in Romans 16:7, the women co-workers Paul names in his greetings, Lydia in Acts 16, Philip's four prophesying daughters in Acts 21:9 — belongs to Part 8 of this series. The Priscilla-and-Aquila evidence is one strand. The full picture requires the other strands.

What can be said now, before Part 8: the same New Testament that contains 1 Timothy 2:12 contains Acts 18:26, and the same apostolic circle that received the Timothy letter knew Priscilla as a teacher of Apollos. Whatever 1 Timothy 2:12 means, it cannot mean a categorical prohibition that contradicts what Luke reports about Pauline practice without comment three letters earlier. The tension is real, and any reading of the Pauline evidence has to hold both texts.

The Ephesian situation in 1 Timothy is calibrated to a specific problem-set: false teachers wanting to be nomodidaskaloi (1 Tim 1:3-7), women in 1 Timothy 5:13 going from house to house "speaking what they ought not," predator teachers in 2 Timothy 3:6 who "creep into households and capture gynaikaria — gullible women — always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth." This is the pastoral situation Paul writes Timothy into. And Priscilla — by the time Paul is writing 2 Timothy 4:19 to greet her in Ephesus — is one of the women he trusts in that very city.

For the full discussion of Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, and the named women of Pauline practice, see Part 8 of What God Commands (forthcoming).

For the analysis of authentein and the didaskein prohibition in 1 Timothy 2:12 that this question presupposes, see I Do Not Permit a Woman to Teach: Three Commands, Three Problems.

For the broader pattern of women prophets across the canon, see Deborah, Huldah, and the Women Who Led.