Ladies, does the Bible tell you to zip it when in church?
I recently received a question from someone at GSUMC that Talbot, our Senior Pastor, forwarded to me. The question was about how we go about interpreting Scripture, particularly when to take things literally and when to interpret them in a non literal manner. The passage mentioned was 1Corinthians 14:34 where Paul basically seems to be telling women that they are not to speak in public church gatherings.
While many Christians take this in a straightforward and universally binding manner, they are misinterpreting Paul’s words here. Below is my answer to the person who sent the question, as I thought it would be a good subject to kick around in the Dojo!
Comments, debate, feedback, etc. always welcomed!
JMS
We talk about this particular passage in detail in Bible for the Rest of Us because it illustrates the importance of the editorial process in Bible translations.
Here is the passage as it reads in the NIV:
As in all the congregations of the saints, 34 women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. 35 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.“
The NIV, along with most other modern English translations, takes the phrase “as in all the congregations of the saints” to be the qualifying phrase for v.34’s “women should remain silent in the churches“. Thus the passage seems to read as if Paul is saying that it is a universal practice (“all the churches of the saints“) that women/wives (same word in Greek) remain silent in the churches. He further qualifies this with the phrase “as the Law says“.
However, there are a couple of problems with such a translation:
2. Paul elsewhere in his letters commends and encourages women who actually do teach and have authority in the church. For example, in Romans 16:3 and 7, Paul commends two women (Priscilla and Junia), both teachers and at least one (Junia) is an apostle–the highest authority in the early church.
3. Nowhere in the Torah (the Law, or first 5 books of the Old Testament) is there found a prohibition against women speaking in assemblies. Thus Paul’s appeal to “as the Law says” cannot be referring to any Biblical passage about women remaining silent–there is no such passage! Study notes in Bibles that translate it in this manner usually end up appealing to some “general notion” of women being under authority in the OT, but are never able to provide a clear instance of this being directly taught in Torah.
So what does all this mean? Well, the key to unlocking this interprative puzzle is to keep in mind the simple fact that in the original Greek manuscripts of the NT, there is no such thing as punctuation, capitalization, or paragraph indentation–all of these are features of English translations which the editors of the translation committees choose to apply. Therefore, we must not assume that the passages in the original text read in the same manner with regard to punctuation and paragraphing that we find in our modern translations.
This makes a huge difference in the case of 1Cor.14:34! To see how, look at how the editors of the TNIV (the revision of the NIV, carried out by the same committee and in order to clarify, update, and in this case, correct certain features of the previous NIV editions) tranlsate this passage:
34 Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 35 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.” (1Co 14:32-35 TNIV, also see the NLT for this same type of reading)
Did you catch the difference?
Noting all of the above mentioned problems with the traditional NIV translation, the TNIV editors corrected this by placing the phrase “as in all the churches of the saints” as the modifyer of the previous phrase “God is not a God of disorder but of peace“. This is what is true universally in all the churches of the saints. The prohibition against women speaking in church is not universally applicable in “all the churches of the saints“, as Paul’s teachings in ch.11 and Rom.16 reveal.
But what about the “as the Law says” passage? Doesn’t that mean that the Bible elsewhere teaches women to remain silent? No, it does not. However, in Corinthian culture, there were such prohibitions. This is why the TNIV editors correctly chose to drop the capitalization of “law” in v.34, as Paul is not referring to OT Law (Torah), but rather to local Corinthian law. Apparently, some of the wives in the Corinthian churches (churches not known for their propriety or order in worship–in keeping with the general unruliness found in Corinthian culture of the day!) were taking their “freedom in Christ” to mean that they no longer were bound to follow cultural norms and were disrupting gatherings as a result–something that strategically undermined the Gospel’s credibility in the cosmopolitan pagan setting Paul was trying to shore up.
New Testament scholar David Prior, makes the following observation in his commentary on 1Corinthians, which is a good summary of what I’m arguing for above:
I hope this helps. This is an issue that has been so misunderstood for so long, and even good Bible translations like the NIV, ESV, NRSV, NET and HCSB have mistranslated it, causing readers who see the contradiction in Paul’s words as they read to have to go to great lengths to make sense of them, often settling for an arbitrary standard of what they feel should be universal and/or literal and what should be situational/symbolic in Scripture. In this case, the TNIV, the NLT and a few other translations get it right, thus sparing the reader much confusion.
Walking together…
James-Michael Smith
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