Unveiling Paul's Women

Making Sense of 1 Corinthians 11:2–16

Lucy Peppiatt

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781498289245
• eBook ISBN: 9781498289238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Whether people realize it or not, the ideas in 1 Corinthians 11: 2-16 have had a huge impact on the role of Christian women in the church through the centuries. These fifteen verses have shaped worship practices, church structures, church leadership, marriages, and even relationships between men and women in general. They have contributed to practices that have consistently placed women in a subordinate role to men, and have been used to justify the idea that a woman should not occupy a leadership or teaching position without being under the authority or "covering" of a man. It is strange, therefore, that academics and pastors alike continue to note how confusing and difficult it continues to be to make sense of these very verses. In this little book, Lucy Peppiatt not only highlights the problems associated with using this text to justify the subordination of women, but offers a clear and plausible re-reading of the text that paints the apostle Paul as a radical, visionary, church planter who championed women in all forms of leadership.

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1 Corinthians 11

Too Many Problems

I wonder what you wrote down. Here are some questions that might have come to mind.

1. What does it mean for a man to be the “head” of the woman if Christ is the “head” of man and God is the “head” of Christ?

2. Why does a man dishonor his head (Christ?) if he prays and prophesies with his head covered?

3. Why does a woman praying and prophesying with her head uncovered dishonor her head (and is her “head” a specific man or man in general?)? Why is this as bad as having your head shaved? What does that symbolize?

4. Does Paul think that a woman who disobeys him should have her head shaved? Does that sound threatening or harmless? Was he just exaggerating? How serious is the disgrace of not covering your head?

5. Paul gives theological reasons for men leaving their heads uncovered and women wearing head coverings. Man is the image and glory of God. Woman is the glory of man. Man does not come from woman. Man was not created for woman. Woman comes from man and is created for him (vv. 7–9). This is the reason given for the need for head coverings, and because of the angels (v. 10). For this reason (these reasons), a woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head (a head covering?). Even though we may not understand the theology behind the ruling here the message is clear and unambiguous. Why do we not wear head coverings today? (Some people still think women should.)

6. Does Paul really believe that what we wear or how we have our hairstyles has theological significance in relation to gender roles and also to God? In other words, do we communicate something of the essence of being a man or a woman by our clothing, and does that also have spiritual significance? This passage answers “yes” to both those questions.

7. Why does Paul say “man” alone is the image and glory of God? If we compare this with Genesis 1:26–27, then we have two problems with this statement. One is that in Genesis 1, it is man and woman together who are the image of God and the other is that the writer of Genesis uses image and likeness, not image and glory. So this is not a direct quote from Genesis.

8. When you get to verse 11, however, it feels like Paul changes his mind. Now he says that “in the Lord” woman is not independent of man, and man is not independent of woman. Having said first that man didn’t come from woman, he now says that he does! So we are interdependent after all, and we all come from each other. So what has happened to the reason for the head coverings? Is that now redundant?

9. Look again at verse 14. Does Paul really think that the “nature of things” teaches us how we should wear our hair and what length it should be? What does he mean by that? Isn’t it God who teaches us how things should be, or does “nature” have a special place in Paul’s thought so that “nature” is a synonym for God? If that’s the case, does this mean that Christian boys and men should never have long hair?

10. Is he saying in the end that a woman’s hair is her glory (v. 15)? Does this mean she can have long hair instead of a head covering?

11. What is the practice that he says they don’t have in any other church? “We have no such custom!” (v. 16) He clearly strongly disapproves of anyone who disagrees with him on this. If that’s the practice of women going bare-headed, then we have to ask again, why don’t we wear head coverings today? Surely, it’s still a disgrace. But strangely, if he does mean that he has no such custom of women going bare-headed in any of his churches, why don’t we hear about it in any of his other letters?

12. Finally, why does it seem like there are contradictions or at least real inconsistencies between verses 2–10 and verses 11–16?

Those questions and problems should all come about just by reading the text without any need for any knowledge of the scholarship. I hope you got some of them if not all of them. Maybe you had even more! What if we look at the scholarship on the passage? Unfortunately, not only does this not solve our problems, this only throws up further confusion.

The Scholars’ Problems

Here are some of the knottier problems that are present in the text once you know what’s going on with the language, and this will give you some idea of how this passage can be read completely differently by different people, even when they know a lot!

Lost in translation

One of the main difficulties for a scholar is how we translate the words and phrases that we find here. Don’t forget that you are reading a translation of the original language—Greek. The Greek used in the Bible is called “Koine Greek” (pronounced koy-nay) and means the “common Greek” from the time when the Bible was written. Just like with English, there are different dialects of Greek, so Bible scholars need to know Koine Greek to understand what words and phrases would have meant to the readers at the time. Sometimes it’s easy to work out what a word meant. Say you have a common word, like “sheep” or “jar” or “wine,” and it always means the same thing wherever it appears both in the Bible and in other texts written at the same time, then it will be easy to translate it when it appears. Suppose, however, that you have a word that appears nowhere else (or hardly anywhere else) outside your passage, then that is going to make the job of translation harder. Scholars have to look carefully at the word in its context, then whether it appears somewhere else in the Bible, then in other texts, and then make their best well-educated guess as to its meaning. They might be spot on, but then again, they might not be 100 percent accurate. Sometimes discoveries of other texts as the centuries go by mean that scholars change their minds or revise older texts.

In our passage, there is uncertainty about how to understand the precise meaning of all the crucial terms and phrases in this passage. These terms include: “head,” “uncovered,” “glory,” “authority over her head,” “because of the angels,” “in the place of a shawl,” “such a custom,” and “man” and “woman,” which could equally mean “husband” and “wife.” We’ll look at these in more detail as we go on. This means that scholars debate and disagree over the meaning of all these words. If you check these against the passage, you’ll see that this means the entire meaning of the passage is under discussion. Imagine then what a difference it will make to the translation depending on how you choose to translate any particular word. I will show you some of the choices that we have as we go through the book.

Head Coverings or Hairstyles?

First, and importantly, scholars are divided about whether Paul is talking about “head covering” or “hair length” and “hairstyles.” This is because the Greek expression in verse 4 can either mean “having down on the head” or “having down from the head.” It can be translated either way. If we follow the first translation—on the head—we would take it to mean a head covering. If we follow the second one—from the head—we would take it to mean long hair. The argument for hairstyles rather than head coverings is also supported by the references to hair length in verses 14–15. There is a total lack of agreement as to which is meant precisely in verse 4, but the weight of scholarship, simply in terms of the number of serious Corinthian scholars who opt for one or the other, is with head coverings. In other words, the hairstyles reading is currently a minority view. That in itself doesn’t mean that the minority is wrong, but in this case I think verse 4 is referring to head coverings, even though later verses refer to hair length. I’ll explain why below.

Why Such a Shame?

Some scholars like to say that Paul must have wanted women to wear head coverings (or have their hair a certain way) because of the “culture.” The thinking is that what must have been uppermost in Paul’s mind is that he wanted to win people for Christ, and he wouldn’t have wanted to put a stumbling block in anyone’s way. If all women in your culture wore head coverings because it was shameful to do otherwise, then it wouldn’t be a good idea if the church bucked the trend. If outsiders walked in, they would be shocked to see women bare-headed; it would only alienate them and defeat the task of mission. It’s not a bad idea to be sensitive to those around you if you are trying to convince people about the truth of the gospel. Paul even says earlier in the letter that he became like a Jew to win the Jews, like one under the law to win those under the law, like one outside the law to win those outside the law etc. (1 Cor 9:19–23). But is that what he was doing here? I don’t think so.

First of all, nobody is quite sure which customs from which group Paul might have been referring to when he said that head coverings shame a man, and a bare head shames a woman. The Corinthian church was made up of Jews, Romans, and Greeks. They all had different customs when it came to head coverings and hairstyles and these customs were different again depending on whether they were out on the streets, at home, or in worship. For example, Jewish men would be used to having their heads covered, especially at prayer, and wealthy Roman women would have been used not to having their heads covered. It’s very difficult to declare with confidence what exactly was shameful or honoring in terms of what people wore—and especially what they wore in worship—particularly as there were different rules within different sections of society. So it raises the questions: Which group would Paul have been trying to please? How? And why? His “rules” were not universally applicable.

Others say that Paul was concerned that men looked like real men and women looked like real women. So this is about the difference between the sexes that is reflected in what we wear. Paul was concerned that the men weren’t effeminate and that the women weren’t butch, and that Christians shouldn’t do the equivalent of “cross-dressing.” There are also some scholars who think that the shame was about the men appearing gay and the women appearing to be lesbian. I don’t think there’s much evidence for either of these views. This is just reading something into the text that it...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: 1 Corinthians 11
• Chapter 2: Paul in Conversation
• Chapter 3: Whose Image? Whose Glory?
• Chapter 4: Where and Who Is My Head?
• Chapter 5: Paul and the Bigger Picture
• Conclusion
• Bibliography