2. Questions about Questions—1 Corinthians 14:34–35
Questions about Questions—1 Corinthians 14:34–35
For God is not the source of disturbances, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.[1] Let women remain silent in the churches, for it is not permitted for them to speak; rather let them remain submitted, just as the Law also says. And if they want to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is a shameful[2] matter for a woman to speak in church. Or did the word of God issue from you? Or has it come to you alone? (1 Cor. 14:33–36).
This chapter will be one of the shortest ones in this book, since it deals with the briefest passage we will cover: 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. But due to the overlap of its cultural context with the subject of our next chapter (on 1 Tim. 2:9–15), we will introduce here some of the background that will be important for both chapters.
After we have surveyed several problems for interpretation and some of the most significant interpretations of this passage, we will turn to what seems to be the most likely interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35: Paul was addressing relatively uneducated women who were disrupting the service with irrelevant questions. The immediate remedy for this situation was for them to stop asking such questions; the long-term solution was to educate them.
PROBLEMS FOR INTERPRETATION
Paul’s words in this passage have been interpreted and applied in many different ways mainly because his words, taken by themselves, can lend themselves to this bewildering array of interpretations. The following survey of problems is meant to show the need for an objective, contextual interpretation.
At first view, 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 would appear more restrictive toward women than nearly any church is today. Paul’s language, if taken to mean all that it can mean, forbids all speaking in church and does not explicitly limit this to public exposition of Scripture. It appears that even a woman’s leaning over to whisper a question to her husband is considered out of order. This goes even beyond the position required by most of today’s strictest interpreters of the passage,[3] but if we are going to take the text to mean all that it can without regard to its specific situation, this is how we must read it. Is this passage as restrictive as it appears, or does the situation implied in the text narrow down the restriction it actually addresses?
Certain helpful points for answering that question can be noted simply from the context. Paul is carrying on the preceding argument concerning “order” in the use of spiritual gifts in the church service, and he inserts here a brief digression related to order: the women must stop disrupting the service.[4] This digression naturally suggests that women were disrupting the service.
But the probability that women were disrupting the church services in Corinth, and needed to stop, raises another question. Should we view the disruptiveness of women as a problem specific to the Corinthian church, or as a problem universal to all churches? (If the text addresses a specific situation yet is to be applied to all situations, the Corinthian situation must be universal.) And is Paul’s solution particular to the church in Corinth, or could he have written it to any church in any period?
If Paul addresses all churches in all societies, not only his assessment of the problem but also his solution grates on modern ears. It would sound insulting enough to women to suggest that they are consistently disruptive in church; but the restrictions that Paul seems to impose in response sound even more offensive. Is Paul actually demanding the silence of all women, across the board, a silence so restrictive that wives could not even ask their husbands what was happening during the church service? Is such silence a necessary way to express their submission (14:34)? And does “submission” relate only to their husbands (cf. 14:35) or is it a general submissiveness to all church leaders (cf. 16:16)?
Compounding this apparent offense, if we ignore the situation and simply read the passage for all it could mean, it could also imply that Paul wants wives to learn only from their husbands at home, rather than being allowed to learn anything in the church services (“if they want to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home,” 14:35). But this proposal, however supportable by the words of the text taken at face value, would unfairly ignore the context. If Paul did not want the women to learn in church, then when he suggests that “all” may “learn” from the prophecies (14:31; cf. v. 6), he means by “all” only the men, without bothering to point this out.
More likely, Paul could be saying, “If you can’t learn it in church except the way you’re doing it, you need to ask your husbands at home.” In this case, he is not saying, “Let women learn only from their husbands at home, and not in the church services”; he is saying, “Don’t learn so loudly in church!” He uses the same construction in 11:34: “If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, lest you come together for judgment.” In 11:34, Paul does not there mean that no one should eat at the Lord’s Supper, or that it is wrong to be hungry when one gathers in church; his point is that it is better to eat at home than to disrupt the Christian community by the way one eats at church. Since he uses the same construction here, we may guess that his argument is roughly the same: the way women are trying to learn, rather than the learning itself, is problematic.
But how are these women disturbing the Corinthian worship services? The context is the best place to begin looking for clues. Women are not the only ones on whom Paul enjoins silence under certain circumstances. “Silence” is also preferred to using the gifts out of order (1 Cor. 14:28–29); if no interpreter were available, tongues-speakers were to pray in tongues only to themselves,[5] and prophets were to restrict their speech voluntarily if another arose with a message from God. In the context, “silence” thus relates to keeping the church service orderly. The context need not mean that Paul is demanding women’s silence only with regard to spiritual gifts; Paul may be commenting on another kind of silence equally necessary to preserve order in the congregation. As we shall see below, it is unlikely that he is restricting women’s participation in spiritual gifts at all, given the fact that he permits the activity in 11:4–5.[6] What is clear from the context is just that restricting one’s own speech is sometimes necessary to preserve congregational order.
But once we have decided that the women are causing disturbances by their lack of appropriate silence, we still must ask what kind of disruptive speech Paul had in view when he dictated this passage. We shall argue in this chapter, in agreement with some other writers, that Paul does not address the preceding context of spiritual gifts here, but the immediate context of questions (14:35). Paul does not need to state this plainly at the beginning of the passage because both he and the Corinthians are familiar with the situation; we, however, have to infer it from clues in the text. We shall look for these clues and also try to show the specific cultural setting in which women’s questions in the church service were likely to have been a problem.
No one takes this passage today to mean all that it could. Everyone allows that the text is somewhat more specific than its general injunction for all women always to be silent in church. Indeed, Paul’s earlier permission to women to pray and prophesy publicly in church allows no way around it (11:5). The issue, then, is just what Paul specifically means here. Those who insist that this passage prohibits women from teaching must appeal to more than his general injunction to silence here; they must show that Paul had teaching specifically in mind. Unfortunately for their position, nothing in the context or situation indicates that the women were teaching.
Since Paul wrote this directive specifically to the Corinthians, we may assume that the problem was specific to Corinth and perhaps a few other cities like it.[7] After all, his other instructions in this chapter address specific abuses of the gifts at Corinth; had they obtained generally, we can be sure that Paul would have already given these regulations during his extended stay with them (Acts 18:11, 18).[8]
Whether the problem was specific to the Corinthian church because only they allowed women to speak at all, or because only they had a problem with women speaking in a certain way, must be decided by careful study of the text.
We shall argue below that Paul’s solution, like the Corinthians’ problem, is appropriate to a specific cultural context, and that it thus does not apply to every conceivable situation we face today. This is not to question the universal relevance of Paul’s teaching; it is to say that we have to catch Paul’s real point in addressing this situation before we try to apply his point to very different situations.
Is 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 Paul’s Passage After All?
Since 1 Corinthians 11:4–5 allows women to pray and to prophesy in church as long as their heads are covered, and since 14:34–35 sounds like it “silences” women and digresses briefly from its context, this passage has often been regarded as an addition to chapter 14 by a later editor rather than a teaching by Paul himself.[9]
A number of scholars hold this view, including Wayne Meeks,[10] Hans Conzelmann,[11] Robin Scroggs,[12] F. F. Bruce,[13] and the expert evangelical text critic Gordon Fee.[14] Although several of these scholars are among the world’s best text critics, it seems to me that the textual evidence for this position is very weak.
A few manuscripts, mainly later Western texts with a narrow geographical distribution, admittedly relocate these verses, probably because they do not seem to fit their immediate context very well.[15] But there is no real evidence for omitting them entirely; those who hold them to be later additions must argue that they occurred too early in the text’s history to leave evidence,[16] i.e., before subsequent manuscripts were copied from the original.
This idea of an early accidental addition of several verses is not easy to defend. It is not certain that Paul intended his letters to the Corinthians to be published and circulated,[17] but since Clement of Rome is familiar with 1 Corinthians in the 90s,[18] it is likely that 1 and 2 Corinthians had been in circulation for some years by his time. Unless only the wrongly edited text happened to survive the process of circulation, then a scribe added several verses to this Pauline letter, purporting to be instructions to the Corinthian church, when this document was still being read in its original form in Corinth. This proposal does not suggest a mere scribal mistake, but a deliberate change of the sort that ought to have been extremely rare in the earliest stage of the manuscript tradition.[19]
The main evidence adduced to prove that this is a later addition is not so much textual as contextual—the awkward way it fits its context. But such evidence is not very convincing; Paul frequently digressed, and digressions were a normal part of ancient writing.[20] Nor need we read this passage as a direct contradiction to 11:4–5; it is actually addressing a more specific issue than 11:4–5, as we shall observe below. To regard this as an addition on such slender evidence would lead us back to the scissors-and-paste approach so common in source criticism early in this century. Digressions and parenthetical notes can too easily become “interpolations” by “later editors.” (I am grateful that my own works are not read so carefully, or I might not be thought the author of everything in my own books!)
Although I think that this passage is Pauline, I concede that some text critics far more capable than myself believe that it is a non-Pauline addition. I can only say that, if they are right, we may conclude quickly that Paul does not oppose women speaking in church. Because if Paul did not write it, this text clearly supplies no evidence for his position. I continue with this chapter, however, in the event that many of my readers, like myself, believe that these words are part of Paul’s original letter to the Corinthians and must be understood in that context.
A Refuted Quotation?
Because Paul seems to cite and then to qualify or refute Corinthian positions earlier in his letter (e.g., 6:12–14; 7:1–5),[21] it has naturally been proposed that he is following the same procedure here. In other words, on this view Paul is citing the Corinthian position in 14:34–35 and then refuting it in v. 36.[22] This would mean that Paul actually disagrees with the apparently chauvinistic view reported in 14:34–35.
Paul’s use of the Greek particle ἢ (ē) in verse 36 has led some scholars to see a disjunction in thought in verse 36; they point to the fact that Paul elsewhere begins with this particle when he wishes to challenge the Corinthian Christians’ behavior. In 11:20–21, for instance, he states the situation in Corinth and then goes on to challenge their behavior in 11:22.[23] Some have further appealed to the masculine form of “alone” in verse 36 to suggest that Paul is reproving men in the congregation for trying to keep the place of power for themselves.[24] But Liefeld is right when he responds: “What Paul negates by his use of the adversative Greek particle ἢ is not the command in verses 34–35 but the assumed disobedience of it, just as in the structurally similar passage 6:18–19.”[25] Nor does the masculine form help the case; masculine forms are used in Greek whenever a group includes even one male, so Paul’s use of the masculine form of “alone” may refer as easily to the whole congregation as to the men in particular.[26]
What ultimately leaves this explanation most unconvincing is that Paul’s citations of the Corinthian positions elsewhere are at least partly affirmed, though seriously qualified.[27] Ancient literature includes many cases of a writer or speaker correcting an imaginary interlocutor, but where Paul is completely correcting such a statement, as in Romans, he introduces the objection with a rhetorical question or another kind of rhetorical device (e.g., Rom. 2:3–4, 21–23; 3:1)[28] and often answers with “May it never be!” (e.g., Rom. 3:4).[29] The evidence that Paul is here correcting a Corinthian position seems strongly outweighed by the evidence that he is not. The burden of proof remains on those who argue that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 do not reflect Paul’s own position.
Segregated Church Services?
Some readers have thought that Paul did not want women asking questions because they would have noisily disrupted the service even to question their husbands. These readers propose that husbands and wives met in separate parts of ancient synagogues,[30] and that the Corinthian church had carried this practice of gender segregation over into its own worship services. Although these scholars concede that the church normally met in homes, they suggest that the practice could have carried over from the Corinthian Christians’ earliest meetings in the synagogue (Acts 18:4–8).
But the evidence for this practice is problematic at best. Although the temple in Paul’s day did not allow women into the court of Israel,[31] there is no clear architectural segregation in the average local synagogue.[32] The custom of gender segregation in the synagogue seems to have first arisen in the Middle Ages, and earlier rabbinic literature presupposes that men and women met together there.[33] Most ancient sites provide no clear indication of galleries, and if they did it would still not be clear that these were reserved for women.[34] Still more problematic is the absence of architectural evidence that would allow any gender segregation in the homes; very unnatural dividers would have had to have been constructed.
We may therefore safely dismiss this suggestion, unless new evidence on behalf of the segregation of women in Diaspora synagogues (and architectural features that would permit it in Corinthian house churches!) is forthcoming.
As noted in our introduction to the various interpretations of 14:34–35, some writers have argued that Paul is disturbed by how some women were using certain spiritual gifts. His call for silence could thus be a prohibition of women’s participation in prophecy or tongues or both. This suggestion has the merit of dealing with the context of the whole chapter, which does deal with abuses of gifts of the Spirit.
The main weakness of this argument, however, is that Paul permits women to pray and prophesy publicly in chapter 11, and in this context appropriate public prayer would include praying in tongues if it is accompanied by an interpretation. The context of spiritual gifts in chapter 14 does not require us to suppose that Paul’s words to women address their use of such gifts; the specific context of church order is sufficient reason for Paul to digress.
Then again, it is possible that the women could be using spiritual gifts improperly, and that Paul seeks merely to regulate, not terminate, their speech. A number of scholars have pointed out that women in the Dionysus cult were given to frenzied shouting and have suggested that this sort of raving may have carried over into the worship of Corinthian Christian women.[35]
This view cannot be rejected as impossible, but it has several weaknesses. The most obvious is that Paul enjoins silence and does not specify to what extent he might be regulating women’s participation in the gifts. Another obvious objection is that Paul does not avail himself of the opportunity to condemn any associations with pagan cultic behavior their activity might have displayed (contrast 12:2). But other objections may also be raised against reading this passage in light of women’s activity in the Dionysus cult.
It is true that women found cultic liberation[36] in the worship of Dionysus[37] and several other patron deities,[38] and that upper-class Roman men found such activities offensive.[39] It is not true that most of these cults were in actual practice limited to—or even predominantly composed of—women.[40] In the cult of Isis, a special protectress of women,[41] less than half the participants at Rome and Athens were women, and considerably smaller percentages obtained elsewhere.[42] Nor would ecstatic raving have characterized only women.[43] In the cult of Dionysus, which was no longer as prominent as it had been in an earlier period,[44] frenzied women called Maenads featured prominently;[45] but in the cult of the Asian mother-goddess Cybele, the main ecstatics were her castrated male priests called Galli.[46]
This is not to say that men did not think women were less emotionally stable than men; they usually did.[47] Nor is it to suggest that outsiders might not have been suspicious of frenzied women.[48] It is instead to question whether the cultural context of early Christianity really demands that we suppose that its women would have actually been more frenzied in their behavior than its men. Paul is not at this point addressing outside rumors about the Corinthian church; he is addressing the real behavior of women in the congregation. Typical ancient views on women’s frenzy do not tell us how women acted; and texts on how women acted suggest that too many men acted in similar ways for us to apply this background only to female members of the Corinthian church.
In fact, 1 Corinthians 12:2–3 suggests that many of the Corinthians from pagan backgrounds had learned inappropriate forms of worship, forms which had carried over into their excesses in chapter 14. Paul in no way limits this background or its present consequences to the women, but assumes that this has affected many of his readers’ ecstatic activity, whether they were women or men.
Those who believe that Paul here addresses an abuse of spiritual gifts like tongues or prophecy appeal to Paul’s particular word for “speak” at this point, laleō. One writer points out that elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 14 this term usually refers to speaking in tongues.[49] But the meaning of laleō cannot be so limited; it sometimes refers to teaching or to preaching the gospel elsewhere in the same letter (2:6–7, 13; 3:1; 9:8), to prophecy (12:3; 14:3, 29),[50] to revelations (prophecies? interpretations? 14:6), to tongues (12:30; 13:1; 14:2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 18, 21, 23, 27, 28, 39), to anything except tongues (14:19), and to normal speech (13:11). The term “speak” does occur with tongues more frequently than with prophecy in this chapter, but for the simple reason that, in contrast to “prophesying,” Paul had no single verb to express “speaking in tongues” without the word “speak.”
We should note that Paul nowhere uses “speak” to mean “speak in tongues” without making it clear that he means “speak in tongues”—which he does not do in 14:34–35. Nor can the older, classical meaning of the verb “speak” here be used to support the theory that Paul is addressing ecstatic or babbling speech; by this period, it was an ordinary word for speaking and so occurs for ordinary speech throughout the New Testament.[51]
In another effort to grapple with the context, some have related this passage about women to their right to “judge” prophecies in the assembly (14:29), since this would include an authoritative teaching as well as a prophetic function. Thus, though the context does not mention teaching, on this view Paul prohibits the women from doing anything authoritative like teaching.[52]
But “judging” prophecy is probably the spiritual gift earlier called “discernment of spirits” (12:10, cognate term),[53] and nothing in chapter 12 indicates that only men exercised this particular spiritual gift. Judging prophecy is no more authoritative than the prophetic gift itself, which is ranked second only to apostleship in 12:28, immediately above the gift of teaching. Why should women be permitted to prophesy but not to exercise a related spiritual gift to discern whether someone else was speaking by the same Spirit? Were not all those who prophesied to exercise this gift (14:29)?
Further, there is little reason to associate “asking questions” here with challenging prophecies. In Old Testament schools of the prophets, a presiding prophet may have sometimes “supervised” the prophetic activity of the other prophets, guiding them toward charismatic maturity (1 Sam. 19:20).[54] Paul seems to have envisioned a charismatic worship in his own day where all the prophets in a given church exercised the gift of discernment, testing prophecies and keeping young prophets in line (1 Cor. 14:29).[55] The New Testament offers no clear evidence that prophecies were tested with questions, nor any reason why a woman who wanted to challenge prophecies would profit by challenging them for her husband only after they returned home.
Thus it seems unlikely that judging prophecies is in view in this text.
Teaching?
Although Paul may not be addressing women’s abuse of prophecy or tongues, at least the suggestion that he is doing so could derive some support from the context. The same might be said for judging prophecies, unlikely as this proposal is on other grounds. But one view that has no support in the context is that Paul’s requirement that women be silent just means that they are not allowed to teach. Nevertheless, some writers propound this view.
For instance, Knight interprets 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 in light of 1 Timothy 2:11–14 and says that the former passage therefore forbids women to teach men. Although he seems to think that this prohibition of women’s teaching is universal, he believes that the prohibition of women asking questions in the service (1 Cor. 14:35) is directed only to the situation in Corinth.[56] Why he regards as universal a prohibition that is not even explicitly mentioned in the text, as against one that is, is not quite clear.
Since no contextual evidence favors this position, there is little more to say about it. But Paul here actually opposes something more basic than women teaching in public: he opposes them learning in public. Or put more accurately, he opposes them learning too loudly in public. This was, as we argue below, an issue related to ancient culture that no longer relates to women as a group.
ASKING QUESTIONS IN CHURCH
It is true that Paul’s language (“women may not speak in church”) sounds more general than the specific example he goes on to give of women not being allowed to speak. But if Paul had in mind a specific situation that the Corinthians were experiencing, he could have stated it generally without having to explain it to his readers in Corinth. We might have to infer that situation from what he says, but the Corinthian Christians already knew it, so his argument would not suffer from any lack of clarity for them.
We can thus deduce only from clues in the text whether he is addressing a specific situation or all situations in general. On the one hand, Paul could be addressing a specific situation by applying a general principle, which would mean that he is saying: “Your women should stop asking questions, because women should always be silent.” This universal silence cannot be what he means since, as we argued above, Paul did allow women in Corinth to pray and to prophesy. On the other hand, he could be making a general statement applicable only to certain types of conditions, for instance: “Your women should be silent because they are making too much noise.”
We argue here that Paul’s statement is meant to apply only to certain types of conditions. He does, of course, have a general principle in mind, and this principle has to do with church order: people should not disrupt worship services anywhere. But this does not mean that all women should always be silent in all churches; Paul tells these Corinthian women to be silent in church because he does not want them to interrupt the Scripture exposition with irrelevant questions anymore. Like the issue of head coverings, this activity could not have failed to create severe social tensions in the church.
It is doubtful that this particular problem obtained in most other churches in the Mediterranean world. Indeed, if this is the point on which Paul appeals to the custom of the other churches (14:33, contrary to our translation above), he may do so because women were not interrupting other churches’ services.
The only kind of speaking specifically addressed in 14:34–35 is that the wife should ask her husband questions at home, rather than continuing what she is doing. Unless Paul changes the subject from women’s silent submission (v. 34) to their asking questions (v. 35a) and then back again (v. 35b), this must be the issue he is addressing. (That Paul switches back and forth from one subject to another is made unlikely by the fact that he predicates v. 35a on v. 35b, “for it is inappropriate.”) What she is doing, then, presumably, is speaking up, asking questions to learn what was going on during the prophecies or the Scripture exposition in church.[57]
If it is the prophecies that she is interrupting, her purpose is not to judge the prophecies (as some have suggested above), but to “learn” (14:35). This could mean that she wants to inquire of the word of the Lord through the prophets (cf. 14:31). The problem with this suggestion is that it would fail to explain Paul’s alternative: she can get the same information from her husband at home. Will her husband necessarily be as prophetically endowed as the prophets at church, and will she necessarily be unendowed (cf. 11:4–5)?
What is almost certainly in view is that the women are interrupting the Scripture exposition with questions. This would have caused an affront to more conservative men or visitors to the church, and it would have also caused a disturbance to the service due to the nature of the questions. What is the cultural situation in which asking questions during an exposition would most naturally be a problem?
Why Were the Women Questioning?
The women are asking questions to probe what the speaker is saying during the church service. Although questions could be used to teach as well as to learn,[58] the issue here is learning, because this is what these women can get as easily from their husbands at home (14:35). (Nearly all Greek women in Paul’s day were married.) Questions were widely used in learning. They needed to be asked in an orderly way, as a Jewish source (probably second century) indicates:
A sage who enters—they do not ask his opinion immediately, [but wait] until he has settled down. And so too a disciple who came in—he has not got the right to ask a question until he has settled down. [If] he came in and found them engaged in discussion of a law, he should not jump into their discussion until he has settled down and knows what they are talking about.[59]
Perhaps more relevant to the context of the Corinthian church is the way public lectures were conducted by teachers in the broader Greco-Roman world. Plutarch says that it is important to ask lecturers questions only in their field of expertise; to ask them questions irrelevant to their discipline is rude.[60] Worse yet are those who challenge the speaker without yet understanding his point:
But those who instandy interrupt with contradictions, neither hearing nor being heard, but talking while others talk, behave in an unseemly manner; whereas the man who has the habit of listening with restraint and respect, takes in and masters a useful discourse, and more readily sees through and detects a useless or a false one, showing himself thus to be a lover of truth and not a lover of disputation, nor froward and contentious.[61]
This principle is particularly applicable to uneducated questioners who waste everyone’s time with their questions they have not bothered to first research for themselves:
For when they are by themselves they are not willing to give themselves any trouble, but they give trouble to the speaker by repeatedly asking questions about the same things, like unfledged nestlings always agape toward the mouth of another, and desirous of receiving everything ready prepared and predigested.[62]
So also those who nitpick too much, questioning extraneous points not relevant to the argument.[63] It was rude even to whisper to one another during a lecture, so asking questions of one another would also have been considered out of place and disrespectful to the speaker.[64]
Why would the women in the congregation have been more likely to have asked irrelevant questions than the men? Because, in general, they were less likely to be educated than men. Most Jewish women knew less of the law than most Jewish men, and most Greek women were less accustomed to public lectures than were their husbands.[65]
Of course, some Greek and Roman women studied philosophy,[66] but their numbers, in comparison with the men, seem to have been very small.[67] Further, few of the women in the Corinthian congregation would have belonged to the aristocratic class; and among the working classes, husbands might have generally been more likely to hear public philosophical lectures in the agora than their wives. Girls as well as boys were educated during this period,[68] but, among those who could afford it, older students who went on to study philosophy or rhetoric were normally men.
The contrast between men’s and women’s education is more dramatic, where we can examine it, in ancient Judaism. The case should not, of course, be exaggerated. Women must have heard some Torah teaching regularly in the synagogues (Acts 17:4; 18:26),[69] probably often learned some Bible teaching from their parents,[70] and were presumably sometimes expected to join the father in teaching the children, especially when they were young.[71] It was not unnatural for a wife or daughter of a rabbi to be able to cite Scripture accurately and effectively.[72]
But the rabbis did not normally feel that women needed Torah as much as men did. An early second-century rabbi wanted women to learn enough Torah at least to understand the procedure to be followed if they were suspected of adultery;[73] knowing this passage could serve as a good deterrent from giving your husband any reason to suspect you! One of his colleagues, however, taught, “Whoever teaches Torah to his daughter, it is as if he teaches her sexual satisfaction.”[74] A later comment on this second rabbi’s view charges that it is better for the words of Torah to be burned[75] than for them to be given to a woman.[76] This became the prevailing view among the later rabbis, and all our Jewish sources point in the direction that girls, unlike boys, did not receive much Torah training.[77]
Like minors and slaves, women were excluded from some obligations of the law,[78] such as the obligation to wear tefdlin (phylacteries)[79] or to dwell in sukkoth (“booths” or “tents”) during the Feast of Tabernacles.[80] They were exempt from study of the Torah,[81] perhaps, as Wegner suggests, because the rabbis feared that too much education would liberate their women.[82]
Although occasionally a woman mastered the Scriptures (e.g., Beruriah, wife of R. Meir),[83] women who sought to expound Torah as authorities on it were usually not received by their male colleagues. The sages ruled that women were not to be appointed as officials,[84] and we never read of rabbis ordaining women disciples to be rabbis. We know of one rabbi who followed a different practice: Jesus had women among his disciples (Luke 10:39; cf. 8:1–3; Mark 15:41) and chose them as witnesses of his resurrection (Matt. 28:1–10; Luke 24:1–11; John 20:10–18). But we may suspect that most first-century Jewish men in Palestine agreed with what became the rabbinic consensus: as one first-century Jewish writer, Josephus, puts it, even the testimony of a woman is unacceptable, “because of the levity and temerity of their sex.”[85]
We do not have to assume that Jewish women were equally repressed in all parts of the Mediterranean world, but Philo and Josephus, both Jewish authors writing in Greek, do not substantially improve our picture of the educational status of Jewish women.[86] Perhaps in traditional hellenistic areas like Egypt women would have been less educated, whereas more well-to-do Jewish women in places like Sardis would have been more educated. But our point is that we have good reason to believe that women were usually considerably less trained in the Scriptures than their husbands, and hence more prone to err or to ask irrelevant questions.
What then do Paul’s directives mean in such a context? His instruction that they stop asking such questions would solve the immediate problem. But if a woman (or someone else) was less educated and could not ask proper questions, was she then to refrain from asking questions altogether? Assuming that the husbands generally had a better knowledge of what was going on because their background was normally better, Paul expected them to help their wives.
When Paul suggests that husbands should teach their wives at home, his point is not to belittle women’s ability to learn. To the contrary, Paul is advocating the most progressive view of his day: despite the possibility that she is less educated than himself, the husband should recognize his wife’s intellectual capability and therefore make himself responsible for her education, so they can discuss intellectual issues together. We find this perspective in Plutarch. In writing to Pollianus, he suggests that Pollianus learn philosophy well: “And for your wife you must collect from every source what is useful, as do the bees, and carrying it within your own self impart it to her, and then discuss it with her, and make the best of these doctrines her favourite and familiar themes.”[87] Knowing philosophy, he contended, would make a woman virtuous.[88]
Of course, Plutarch’s view is not entirely complimentary toward women; he believes that of themselves they produce base passions and folly, and need a man’s input to straighten them out.[89] Here the comparison between Paul and Plutarch ends, since there is no indication that Paul regards women as more inherently incomplete than men are—indeed, earlier passages in his letter would suggest that he certainly believes otherwise (1 Cor. 7:32–35; 11:11). But Paul would surely agree with Plutarch that a woman can and should learn, and that her husband should take an active interest in her development as a mature person. Paul proposes teaching one’s wife at home as a long range solution to the lack of biblical education that characterized the inappropriate questioning.
What Kind of Silence?
As noted above, a prohibition of literally all speech by women here would keep us from being able to take the “all” of other verses in the context literally (e.g., 14:31), and would contradict 11:4–5. More reasonably, as we have argued above, Paul’s words merely limit speech in public settings; Paul is opposing only the irrelevant questions some women have been asking during the teaching part of the church service.
Yet Paul’s injunction to even a qualified silence for women might have appealed to his culture; a quiet demeanor was considered a necessary characteristic of a submissive wife in many ancient circles.[90] But if Paul recommends a quiet demeanor for women at Corinth, would he recommend it for all cultures? And does a quiet demeanor signify the same attitude in all cultures? Many men today would rather know what their wives are really thinking than be forced to speculate about it. Is quietness equivalent to submission if her husband prefers her to be more vocal in expressing her views?
The women’s silence (14:34) does not mean that they could not be prophetically inspired in their speech (cf. 14:28). The point is rather that preserving church order (14:40) means preserving the common good by not scandalizing the culture. It was “shameful” or “disgraceful” for a woman to interrupt the service with her questions (14:35) the same way that it was “shameful” or “disgraceful” for a woman to have her head uncovered or hair cropped short (11:6): it offended the cultural sensitivities of those whom the church wanted to reach with the gospel.[91]
Silence, like asking questions, could be compatible with the attitude of a learner, if the learner was not yet in a place to ask questions. Silence was sometimes used as a moral discipline or a form of submissive demeanor for a student.[92] We will examine this issue in slightly more detail when we address 1 Timothy 2:11–12 in the following chapter.
“As Even the Law Says”
Much discussion has focused on Paul’s appeal to the law to substantiate his claim that wives should be submissive to their husbands and so be silent in church. Although very few people use Paul’s biblical argument from creation in 1 Corinthians 11 to argue that all women should cover their heads today, many view the allusion to the law in 14:34 as transculturally binding.
Before we turn to the question of whether Paul would apply this allusion to all cultures, we should ask what text or texts he has in mind when he says “the law.” Some writers feel that he is using rabbinic law, rather than biblical law, since no Old Testament passage says quite what Paul says here.[93] This interpretation might work if Paul is citing someone else’s saying and then refuting it,[94] but we have discounted that idea above. Since Paul nowhere else refers to rabbinic law as “the law,” and since it is unlikely that his readers would have assumed that he meant something different than what he usually meant by the phrase, this suggestion is improbable.[95]
The ambiguity of this possible reference to the law has been cited by those who feel that this text is an interpolation added by a later writer. Fee points out that Paul nowhere else appeals to the law absolutely, and that when Paul refers to the law, he always cites the text; therefore, this passage is not from Paul.[96]
But Paul sometimes does refer to the whole law as teaching something in a general way.[97] The term “law,” or the combination “Law and Prophets,” could be used rather loosely to refer to the Old Testament writings as a whole (e.g., 14:21, a quote from Isaiah).[98] In this case, Paul might refer to the general subordination of women in the Old Testament period, which is probably how Josephus (another first-century Jewish writer) uses the term when he says that “the law” enjoins the wife’s submission.[99] Earlier Paul said that he became “under the law” to those who were “under the law,” to win everyone, to relate to everyone, and to avoid causing anyone to stumble (1 Cor. 9:20). It is not unreasonable to suppose that Paul’s motives are the same here: even though he does not require believers to keep all the stipulations of the law, he expects them to respect standard customs that could derive support from the law.
If a specific text is in view, it is more likely that Paul is arguing again from the creation order (Gen. 1) than that he is arguing from the results of the Fall (Gen. 3:16), which he would not regard as the ideal of God’s kingdom.[100] In this case, we would need to regard his argument the same way we understand the creation order argument for head coverings (as in our preceding chapter).
But whether Paul means the law in general, or the creation order in particular, he is probably calling upon the law to support the wife’s submission rather than her silence. As we shall note in chapter 5 (on Eph. 5), the Christian ideal does not remove the common ancient ideal of the wife’s submissiveness; it merely adds the requirement that the husband join her in it. In this case, the wives are to submit themselves by following the propriety required of them to maintain church order.
This Is How It Is Done
Paul’s final appeal (1 Cor. 14:36–38) is similar to his closing appeal in 11:16: This is just how it is done. To those who think the Spirit inspires them to challenge this injunction on church order, Paul points out that there are also people endowed with the prophetic gift on the other side of the question, including Paul himself. Indeed, Paul, the apostolic founder of their church, is certainly well endowed with the Spirit of prophecy, and his advice should thus be heeded (14:36–37; cf. 7:40).[101] The one who did not listen to Paul’s injunctions would be in trouble not merely with Paul but with God (14:38).[102]
But as clearly as Paul’s wisdom was God’s wisdom for the situation in Corinth, applying it to situations for which it was not intended would be a misapplication of God’s wisdom. Those who thought that they were spiritual enough to decide the case against Paul had to reckon with his spirituality. But the fact that Paul addresses his argument in this particular letter to the specific situation in Corinth, and that his injunction to silence cannot contextually mean more than that the women should not ask ill-conceived questions during public lectures, mean that the inspired principle he articulates calls us to order in worship, not to the silence of women. It also has certain other obvious applications—for instance, seminary students who did not do their homework should not ask silly questions in class—but it certainly does not apply today to women on the basis of their gender.
CONCLUSION
Paul’s point is that those who do not know the Bible very well should not set the pace for learning in the Christian congregation; they should instead receive private attention to catch them up to the basics of Christian instruction that the rest of the congregation already knows. In Corinth, the issue had come to a head with uneducated women interrupting the Scripture exposition with questions. Paul suggested a short-range and a long-range solution to the problem in his instructions on how to bring order back to the Corinthians’ church services. The short-range solution was that the women were to stop interrupting the service; the long-range solution was that they were to learn the knowledge they had been lacking.[103]