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Wednesday Weird Bible Verse - 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 - women be silent
"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."
1 Corinthians 14:34-35
* image from The Brick Testament
I remember reading 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 for the first time and did not know what to think about this. It seems to be clearly stating that females should not talk in church. If they have questions, then wait till they get home to ask their husbands. It even says it is "disgraceful" if a female talks in a church meeting.
This was a rather confusing and disturbing verse to read when I was reading my Bible through for the first time right after I graduated from college. I knew enough to know that in my limited experiences in churches up to that point, females certainly did talk in churches. You didn't see as many teaching or preaching, but they didn't just sit there silently like this Bible passage says to do. So I kind of pushed it aside and didn't think about it too much until several years later when I realized I had to look at why this weird sounding verse is in there. How do you make sense of what sounds like an incredibly bizarre and chauvinistic practice?
The simple answer is that in order to understand this verse, it is a matter of cultural context and looking at the direct application to the specific church in Corinth that Paul, the author of this letter was writing to at that time. So what seems to be an incredibly bizarre sounding verse, when you study it more deeply and not just read it out of context, it might not be as totally weird as it seems.
There are lots of debates in the church about the roles that men and women have in leadership in the church. I will get to some of those "weird" sounding verses in future posts. But for this specific verse, it is about women being silent and not speaking in church meetings and only allowed to ask questions when they are at home with their husbands (which would then puts single women in a fix if they aren't married then they allegedly can never ask questions). I have found it interesting that you don't hear this verse being questioned too often. I was once talking to a female teacher in a church and raised up how she views this verse and she didn't know. Which was a little disheartening as no matter ones viewpoint is on the roles of men and women in a church, when there are rather weird sounding Bible verses so blatantly prominent in a major book of the Bible, I surely hope we would study it to find out what it means.
But looking into this weird sounding verse in isolation it certainly sounds incredibly super-chauvinistic and bizarre. But as you look at it in the context of the whole, then some explanations start to arise about it.
For one, Paul cannot mean he actually is commanding all females to be silent in church meetings. Because just a few chapters earlier in this same exact letter in chapter 11 verse 5, he is says the opposite and is encouraging females to prophecy and pray which would mean to be speaking outloud - (and there are some other weird sounding verses in this section of the letter about hair cuts and hats which will be future posts as well). There are gifts of the Spirit given to both men and women listed which involve speaking in the same letter in 1 Corinthians chapter 12. You also see in the New Testament that females of course are instructed that they will be speaking in verses such as Acts 2:16-18. There is in all likelihood a female apostle named Junia who of course would be teaching and speaking (my friend Scot McKnight has a great ebook on this you can get here). So although this verse reading it on its own sounds bizarre and weird, when you look at in in context it cannot mean that it is to be taken literally for all women in all churches.
So what does it mean then? Why is it in the Bible?
Most scholars believe it is referring to a specific group of women in that specific church who were being disruptive in the meetings. So Paul was asking this specific group of women to stop intentionally disrupting the worship times in this specific church. It was a local and specific situation regarding specific women, not a universal one. It very well could have been disruptive men if they were doing the same thing that Paul would have corrected if they were disrupting the church meetings in this way. But in this case it was a group of women.
Although we don't know for sure, there are some theories about this specific group of women and how to understand this passage from the Bible. I can't even begin to get into them in such a short blog post here, but there are very thorough and detailed biblical studies on this passage which go into great detail on interpreting this passage. In a short summary New Testament scholar Scot McKnight writes "The best answer is because these women (*these specific few in this specific church) were not yet educated theologically or biblically as well as the men (That's another discussion). When these women heard what was being said, they had questions. Paul thinks those sorts of questions should be asked elsewhere, probably because it interrupted the service. Paul's silencing of women at Corinth is then only a temporary silencing. Once women with questions had been educated, they would have been permitted then to ask questions in gatherings of Christians." (from "The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible" by Scot McKnight on page 193).
Now I don't understand the cultural settings and formalities of church meetings in that time period. In all church meetings I have ever experienced in today's culture (especially the small ones that meet in homes or classes) we are always encouraged to ask questions whether educated or not. So culture does make a lot of difference and it is so important to be studying what was cultural and what were things taught that surpass time and culture and are valid for today. But as I have been redundant saying here, virtually all of New Testament scholarship agrees this weird sounding verse was about a situation happening in a specific church with a specific group of women at a specific time period who were disrupting the church meetings - not something to be practised for all times and all churches.
My point in even going into brief explanation on this, is thatyou can't take a Bible verse out of context or weird things can happen. As I wrote in my original post on why I am doing this, the unfortunate part is that there are so many cheery, nice, happy verses that can also be quoted out of context and their application to life today misunderstood. Not just the weird sounding ones. So it should cause in Christians a desire and passion to look at the Bible more deeply. And with so many of the weird ones, when you do look at things in context and study them in the whole of the Bible, they often aren't as weird as they may look at surface glance and out of context.
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