St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons) by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780544617391
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2015-09-21T22:00:00+00:00

This, of course, directly contradicts Paul’s insistence that “in Christ” there should be full gender equality. So glaring is this discrepancy that many scholars believe that this passage was inserted into Paul’s letter at a later date by those who wanted to make Paul conform more closely to Greco-Roman norms. Paul’s letters were copied assiduously after his death and survived in 779 manuscripts dating from the third to the sixteenth century.46 There are variant versions in the earliest manuscripts of this letter, and copyists appear to have sometimes added remarks that reflected their own opinions rather than the apostle’s. One of these is almost certainly the passage quoted above.47 First, it jars with Paul’s care to accord men and women equal rights and duties earlier in this very letter, and it is strange to hear Paul of all people appealing to the authority of “the law.” But there are also textual reasons for its later insertion. In the earliest manuscripts, which date only to the third century, it appears in different places, and in its current position it interrupts—almost in midsentence—Paul’s argument about spiritual gifts, which continues seamlessly immediately afterward.

The second text quoted to prove Paul’s chronic chauvinism is the long, meandering argument for women to cover their heads while praying or prophesying during community meetings.48 It is interesting that here Paul seems to have no problem about women speaking in public. Again, the passage under discussion interrupts his argument. In the preceding chapter, he had described the way the community should behave at regular meals and, in the interests of unity, urged the Corinthians to avoid offending other people’s dietary sensibilities. Then comes this entirely unrelated discussion of women’s headgear, which has no connection with what comes before or afterward, and then immediately the discussion of community meals continues, this time focusing on the Lord’s Supper. Again, Paul’s insistence on male authority in this disputed text is at odds with both his theory and practice of gender equality, and the rhetoric, with its insistence on traditional “practices,” is quite alien to Paul and has more in common with the second-century Deutero-Pauline letters to Titus and Timothy.49

The American scholar Stephen J. Patterson, however, accepts the authenticity of this passage, pointing out that it does not require women to wear an Islamic-style hijab, but is concerned about male and female hairstyles. He suggests that the Corinthians were taking the baptismal cry—“Neither male nor female”—to an extreme. Men were growing their hair, while women were wearing theirs loose, instead of tying it back in a bun or donning the headdress prescribed for respectable women. Consequently all members of the congregation were sporting long, flowing locks, and it was impossible to distinguish males from females. Paul, Patterson argues, agreed with the Corinthians’ theology but argued that blurring the gender distinction was wrong, because it was not what God had ordained at the creation.50 At this time, the women who were traveling with the peripatetic Stoic philosophers cut their hair short and wore men’s clothes to avoid being molested on the road.

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