Beth Allison Barr and Aimee Byrd overlap in another significant area: putting difficult passages into historical context. Significantly, they both analyze 1 Corinthians 14:33-36, where Paul seems to tell women to be silent in church. They have different (although not necessarily contradictory) explanations for this passage that has caused such harm to women in the church, and both are worth examining.
But first, I want to re-iterate my reasons for doing this. It’s not to persuade anyone who is complementarian; the words of a woman could hardly do that. No, I want to give hope – hope to those who have been harmed by complementarian theology. Hope that there are valid, scholarly, historical, and fully biblical interpretations to this passage that do not include the subordination of women.
Barr’s Historical Analysis
First, of course, it’s helpful to put 1 Corinthians into the overall Greco-Roman context. Beth Allison Barr’s second chapter, “What if Biblical Womanhood Doesn’t Come from Paul?” is one of her best. I found it enlightening and encouraging. She discusses several passages, showing how it’s most likely that “wifely submission was not the point of Paul’s writings.”[1]
Instead, she reminds us of the Roman culture of the time:
“Male guardianship was Roman law. Wives legally had to submit to the authority of their husbands; unmarried women had to submit to the authority of their fathers or nearest male relatives; women could not own property or run businesses in their own right; women could not conduct legal or financial transactions without a man acting on their behalf.”[2]
It was a thoroughly patriarchal world. There was no room for women to have autonomy, let alone a voice. Seen in that context, the Gospel certainly proclaims freedom for women. That was never in question; but how far does our freedom extend in our modern era?
Apparently, a lot farther than I grew up believing.
1 Corinthians 14:33-36
This brings us to the perplexing passage of 1 Corinthians 14:33-36:
33For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. 34Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 35If 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. 36Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only people it has reached?
This does not sound like freedom. In fact, it seems like the opposite of freedom. Paul’s tone is harsh, and – quite frankly – rather demeaning. Coming from a fundamentalist (which means everything is taken literally) background, there is clearly only one meaning.
And yet…many scholars have found different interpretations to this passage.
As I said above, both Byrd and Barr have approached these verses differently. I personally think it’s a combination, with perhaps a little more evidence pointing toward Barr’s explanation. But I’ll let you be the judge…
Byrd’s Theological Analysis
But before we get to interpretation, let’s look at the passage structure a little more closely. Aimee Byrd does an amazing job of putting the passage in the overall context of 1 Corinthians 11-14, which is all about “teaching the Corinthians about proper order in public worship.”[3]
Those chapters are written in a “chiastic literary structure,” which means “the center text highlights the main point, and the surrounding verses mirror one another as the sequence of ideas leading up to the main point are presented again in reverse order.”[4]
The “chiastic” structure is as follows:
- “Men and Women Leading in Worship: Prophets and how they dress (11:2-16)
- Order in Worship: Sacrament – The Lord’s Supper (11:17-34)
- Gifts and the Nature of the Body (12:1-30)
- The Hymn to Love (12:31-14:1) [Center]
- Spiritual Gifts and the Upbuilding of the Body (14:1-25)
- Gifts and the Nature of the Body (12:1-30)
- Order in Worship: Word – Prophets and Speakers in Tongues (14:26-33)
- Order in Worship: Sacrament – The Lord’s Supper (11:17-34)
- Women and Men Worshipping: No Chatting in Church (14:33-40)” [our passage]
As you see, the central theme is love (1 Cor 12:31-14:1). This is where we get the famous “love is patient, love is kind” verses. However, it begins with both men and women praying and prophesizing in church (albeit with some interesting cultural dictates). Thus, we see both men and women actively participating in the service. It isn’t until the corresponding end, where Paul talks about women being silent.[5]
Thus, it is only “within this evaluation-of-the-prophecies context that women are told to be silent.”[6]
So then, we must ask ourselves: if the central theme is love in the church, what is Paul trying to say?
Byrd’s Cultural Analysis
This leads Byrd to her cultural analysis of why there is a restriction on interpreting but not on prophesizing. Rather than seeing it as women usurping authority and being told to be silent, Byrd suggests this alternate reading:
“We must think about the cultural situation even more here—Paul mentions the women wanting to learn, not trying to take over. Women in the home were not often socialized the same as their husbands who were involved in commerce. They were not often equal participants in society and business, and therefore were not exposed to all the diverse languages and speech styles. We also need to consider the setting—as the early Christians gathered in house churches with shared fellowship meals, the women must have been distracted with hospitality, preparation, and tending the children… So Paul called for these women to act honorably, as with the other two times he called for silence when it led to disruption and disorder. And yet he also dealt kindly, encouraging these wives to go to their husbands after the service to get their questions answered or to learn what they might have missed.”[7]
Everyone understands the importance of church decorum. You don’t stand up and preach when the pastor is speaking. Since Aimee Byrd does believe in male-only ordination,[8] she interprets it in a way that allows for that. But she shows how this is an outpouring of love, without resorting to saying women should be silent in church.
Barr’s Cultural Analysis
That’s all well and good. But still…Paul comes off incredibly harsh for the focus being love. To that, Barr has an answer, and it dove-tails perfectly with the chiastic structure.
Barr points out that this passage has echoes of the Roman historian Livy’s speech against women getting involved with government.[9] Barr points out that as “an educated Roman citizen” Paul would not only have been familiar with Livy, “he would have been familiar with contemporary rhetorical practices that corrected faulty understanding by quoting the faulty understanding and then refuting it.”[10] He uses this method in 1 Corinthians 6-7, so it’s not hard to believe he did it again in 1 Corinthians 14.[11]
In this scenario, Paul would be quoting how the Corinthian men were trying to put the Roman world into the Christian world in verses 33-35, and then refuting it in verses 36-40.[12] I’d like to point out that Barr isn’t going out on a limb here; this is something male scholars have discussed, beginning in the 1980s.[13]
Barr admits that,
“while I cannot guarantee this is what Paul was doing, it makes a lot of (historical) sense. First Corinthians includes several non-Pauline quotations already, and the wording of verses 34-35 is remarkably close to Roman sources….If Paul is indeed quoting the Roman worldview to counter it with the Christian worldview, then his meaning is the exact opposite of what evangelical women have been taught.”[14]
Did you catch that? His meaning is very likely “the exact opposite” of what we’ve been taught.
This interpretation holds even more weight when you realize that all punctuation (including quotation marks) are educated guess work from modern interpreters.[15] The ancient Greek (and Hebrew) didn’t have punctuation, which means we have to have clues within the text to show us when Paul is quoting something. And although Livy is by no means obscure, theologians wouldn’t necessarily study him. It’s an easy miss – and yet, it has had huge consequences in our world.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I love how Barr sums it up: “Could it be that, instead of telling women to be silent like the Roman world did, Paul was actually telling men that, in the world of Jesus, women were allowed to speak?”[16]
This lines up with the radical Jesus I know and love. The Jesus who let women become his disciples, called them daughter, and commissioned them to preach the gospel.
But it also dovetails nicely with Byrd’s analysis on the theme of love in 1 Corinthians 11-14. If you truly love and value women, you do not silence them. You empower them to speak. Byrd and Barr’s explanations show clearly that silencing women was never, ever the goal, especially in light of the “Hymn of Love.”
I hope this has given you a glimpse of hope. I hope it shows you there are other interpretations that do not require you to be silent. And the more I study and the more I get to know God, the more convinced I am that He would not wish us to be silent.
So go – find your voice and live in the God-given freedom we have. Freedom that is so much more than many of us could even imagine.
Notes
[1] Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021), 46.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Zondervan, 2020), 196.
[4] Ibid., quote from footnote 25, 212.
[5] Byrd, 197, taken from Kenneth E. Bailey’s Paul through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians, emphasis in the original.
[6] Ibid., 197-198.
[7] Byrd, 199.
[8] Ibid., 122.
[9] Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, 59-60.
[10] Ibid., 60.
[11] Barr, 61.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Barr, 62.
[14] Ibid.
[15] https://www.christianity.com/wiki/bible/how-was-biblical-punctuation-decided.html
[16] Barr, 62.
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