Paul names women constantly, and not as spectators. Then he writes two sentences that appear to say the opposite. This page does not skip either half.
The ones he names
Phoebe. He introduces her to a church that has never met him, and the translation this site uses does not soften it: she is “our sister in the Christian faith and a deacon of the church in the city of Cenchrea.” He asks them to give her a welcome and to provide her with whatever she needs. On the usual reading she is the one carrying this letter to Rome — which in the first century meant she was the one who read it aloud, and answered the questions it raised. Paul does not say that outright. It is an inference, and a reasonable one.
Junia. Greeted alongside Andronicus as a relative, a fellow prisoner, and — in this translation — “prominent among the apostles.” They were Christians before Paul was. Older English Bibles printed the name as a man’s, Junias, a form nobody has found anywhere else; the woman’s name Junia was common. Most modern translations have put it back.
Prisca. She and her husband Aquila hear Apollos preaching, take him aside, and explain the way of God to him more accurately. She is usually named first, which was not the ordinary way to write a couple. Acts calls her Priscilla; Paul calls her Prisca. Same woman.
Lydia. A dealer in purple cloth, the first convert in Europe, and the church at Philippi meets in her house.
Euodia and Syntyche. Two women at Philippi who are quarrelling, and Paul asks the church to help them — because, he says, they contended at his side for the gospel.
And then two passages that seem to say the opposite
One tells the women in Corinth to keep silent in the churches. The other says a woman is to learn quietly, and that the writer does not permit her to teach or to have authority over a man.
There is no use pretending those are not there, or that they are gentle. If you have heard anything about the Bible and women, you have heard these.
1 Corinthians 14:34–35 · 1 Timothy 2:11–15
How I read them
Start with something inside the same letter. Three chapters before Paul tells the Corinthian women to be silent, he is giving instructions about how a woman should pray and prophesy when the church is gathered. He regulates it. He does not forbid it. So whatever the silence means, it cannot mean that women do not speak — Paul has just told them how to.
Then set that beside the man who wrote it. This is someone who says he becomes all things to all people so that by every possible means he might save some. He gives up his own rights to avoid putting anything in the way of the gospel.
I take these instructions as belonging to that. They are choices made inside a culture with fixed expectations about women, by a man unwilling to spend the credibility of the gospel on an offence he did not need to give. And what he actually did — commending a deacon, greeting an apostle, thanking a woman who corrected a preacher’s theology — tells you what he thought was possible.
The other side, at its strongest
Many sincere readers take these passages the other way, and their case deserves stating properly rather than waved at. The argument in 1 Timothy 2 is not grounded in local custom. It reaches back to Adam and Eve. If that reasoning is about creation rather than about Ephesus, then it does not expire when the culture changes, and the instruction stands.
I do not read it that way. But that is the argument, and it is not a foolish one. Weigh it yourself.