In her dissertation, titled “Mulier taceat – A Study of 1 Cor 14:34–35”, Aļesja Lavrinoviča argues that the verses about women being told to keep silent in church assemblies, found in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, do not belong to Paul’s original letter addressed to the Christians of Corinth. Lavrinoviča suggests placing the biblical verses about women in square brackets, thereby informing the reader of the text’s later origin. In the near future this proposal will be sent to the German Bible Society, which publishes the editions of the Greek New Testament known as Nestle-Aland.
In her doctoral research, Lavrinoviča examines the text found in the 14th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which forbids women to speak in the congregations:
“As in all the churches of the believers, let the women keep silent in the church, for they are not permitted to speak, but let them remain in the obedience prescribed by the law, as the law also directs. But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” (1 Cor 14:33b-35; 2012 transl.)
This is one of two texts cited by those who deny women’s ordination, and one that was once mentioned by the LELB archbishop in his arguments to the press1 before the LELB Synod decided to ban women’s ordination.
Lavrinoviča examined this text in all the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, as well as in later Greek (and Greek-Latin) editions of the New Testament, and concluded that in the ancient Greek manuscripts and the oldest editions of the New Testament (since the time of Erasmus of Rotterdam) the phrase “as is accepted in all the churches of the saints” was not connected with the silencing of women, but rather stood separately – in the preceding paragraph. Lavrinoviča published her conclusions back in 2017 in the University of Cambridge journal “New Testament Studies.”2
It is important to add that almost all Bibles in modern languages, including the Bible in Latvian, connect the phrase “as is accepted in all the churches of the saints” with the silencing of women in the congregations, thereby creating an ecumenical prohibition that exceeds the context of the Corinthian congregation and applies the prohibition to all women in all congregations at all times.
Taking into account the detachment of the phrase “as is accepted in all the churches of the saints” from verse 34 in the ancient manuscripts, Lavrinoviča analysed this phrase using the tools of Greek syntax. It emerged that, in the commentaries of New Testament theologians, the phrase “as is accepted in all the churches of the saints,” which is to be translated literally as “as in all the churches of the saints,” has seven different explanations or interpretations, which point to the very flexible formulation and the doubtful function and origin of the said phrase. These numerous explanations are possible because the phrase has neither a subject nor a predicate, and therefore borrows them from the surrounding context. But if, in the ancient manuscripts, this phrase was written separately from the women, it is entirely irrational and contrary to Greek syntax to join it to the sentence about women, which in the manuscripts begins with a new paragraph. Moreover, a phrase that begins a sentence with “as” is not characteristic of Paul. The copyists had noticed this problem and, in certain manuscripts, had appended at the end of the phrase “I teach.” Such a solution by the copyists logically completes the subordinate clause after the statement about God in verse 33 – “God is a God of order, as I teach in all the churches of the saints.” The addition “I teach” is found both in John Chrysostom’s commentary on the letter to the Corinthians, in the 6th-century Codex Fuldensis, and also in part of the so-called Western tradition manuscripts – the Codices Augiensis and Boernerianus. Could it be that Paul originally concluded the phrase with “I teach,” which at some stage of copying lost its predicate and was then later attached to the paragraph about the silencing of women? Lavrinoviča published her research results on the syntax associated with the phrase “as is accepted in all the churches of the saints” in the journal “Journal of Biblical Literature” in 2022.3
In the next stage of the research, Lavrinoviča evaluated the so-called Corinthian slogan hypothesis, which appears in the writings of certain theologians, and which holds that the text “let the women keep silent in the church, for they are not permitted to speak…” is the Corinthians’ own idea, which Paul quotes and which, in verse 36, he refutes with the help of two rhetorical questions. Lavrinoviča found no confirmation for this hypothesis in classical Greek usage, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, or in Paul’s letters. In order to gain clarity about the role of both the phrase “as in all the churches of the saints” and the two rhetorical questions in verse 36, Lavrinoviča decided to carry out a semantic analysis of the terms. By applying semantic analysis – that is, an analysis of the use of terms and phrases – it was concluded that the text found in verses 34 and 35, “let the women keep silent in the church, for they are not permitted to speak…”, as well as the phrase in verse 33 “as in all the churches of the saints,” and also the questions in verse 36, belong to a different context; namely, the text that silences women in the congregations is from a different context, because practically all the terms used in it do not coincide with the use of such or similar terms either in the first letter to the Corinthians or in Paul’s other letters.
Moreover, Paul never invokes the law without quoting it! In the pericope on the silencing of women, the law is invoked as an argument supplementing the author’s own authority, abstractly and without references. Among biblical theologians there is a widespread view that the reference to the law in this case is a pointer to verse 16 of the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which God declares that man shall rule over woman. Lavrinoviča examined the commentaries on the Book of Genesis by the first-century Hellenistic Jews Philo of Alexandria and Josephus Flavius, as well as the commentaries of Origen, and concluded convincingly that none of these commentators perceived the stories described in the Book of Genesis as the law. This is also confirmed by the apostle Paul’s indication to the Galatians that the law was given “four hundred and thirty years” after Abraham (Gal 3:17), thus, a considerable time after the narratives described in the Book of Genesis about the creation of the world and humanity’s fall into sin. Consequently, if Paul was trained in the interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, he could not have called the creation stories or the story of the fall into sin (Gen 3:16) the law, because these were events before the law was given. Furthermore, Philo, Josephus and Origen, along with the most ancient Church Fathers, interpreted the stories of creation and the fall into sin allegorically, i.e., in a figurative sense. In this way, the term “law” found in 1 Cor 14:34 cannot be associated with Gen 3:16. Nor can it be translated as the Greek-Roman “law,” because for such a version too Lavrinoviča found no evidence. Women’s rights in Ancient Greece and Rome were far broader than biblical theologians would like to present them. Women owned real estate; women who had several children were considered independent persons who could conduct affairs in their own name; women could work, travel in horse-drawn carriages; the well-known “father’s power” or pater potestas applied to children of both sexes, even those who were married, thereby not discriminating against women alone. Nowadays, research is being conducted in the field of papyri, since contracts, wills and other documents have been discovered in which a woman is one of the contracting parties, thereby refuting the claims that women in the first centuries AD had no rights whatsoever. This means that the author of the text on the silencing of women did not intend to invoke any written Roman law known to us.
In the conclusion of her dissertation, Lavrinoviča concludes that the text which silences women in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was added later from a different context. This text makes use of the so-called ancient and unwritten household regulation (known in German as Haustafeln), but expands it so that it can be applied to the context of the congregation. The household regulation, in unwritten form, subjected the wife to the husband exclusively in the marriage relationship. And it was an unwritten rule. In Paul’s congregations, by contrast, both women and men, both slaves and free, both Jews and Greeks gathered. The early congregations, continuing the movement of Jesus’ followers, brought together both women and men, without regulating relationships of subordination. Believers were considered children of God, whose spiritual origin is more important than their physical origin or social status. The extension of the household regulation to congregational relationships according to gender is unique and is found only in Paul’s first letter to Timothy, in the second chapter, which the majority of theologians recognise as a pseudo-epigraphic letter, that is, one written by a disciple of Paul after the apostle Paul’s death. The second letter to Timothy and the letter to Titus are also pseudo-epigraphic. These three letters together were composed a good while after Paul’s death and are called, in scholarship, the Pastoral Epistles, because, unlike the authentic Pauline understanding of the gifts of ministry, or charisms, these letters speak of appointed offices in the church hierarchy, which points to a later time, when Christianity began to become institutionalised.
Taking into account all of the above, Lavrinoviča, following the 19th-century German theologian Johannes Weiss, who represented the history-of-religions school (in German – Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), within the framework concerning the origin of the collection of Paul’s letters, holds that the text found in the first letter to the Corinthians which silences women was recorded at the time when the gathering, editing and codifying – that is, the compiling – of Paul’s letters took place. This could have happened at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century. Around the same time, the so-called pseudo-epigraphic Pastoral Epistles were also composed, whose author, using Paul’s name, sought to establish relationships of subordination and obedience in the Christian congregations, arguing both from the interpretation of the creation stories and from the unwritten household regulation, and also attempting to establish the mechanisms of early ordination, or appointment to sacred office, in the second-generation Christian congregations. That the text was inserted later is confirmed by the study of the ancient manuscripts (among which are manuscripts in which verses 34 and 35 are located at the very end of chapter 14), by the analysis of Greek syntax, which reveals very great syntactic flexibility around the verses about women – in verses 33 and 36 – and by the semantic analysis, which reveals that verses 33b–36 speak quite detached from the overall context of chapter 14, contain terms that imitate those mentioned in the context but are used in a different sense with different pragmatic nuances, which accordingly point to the origin of this text somewhere else and in different circumstances.
For her doctoral research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, Aļesja Lavrinoviča received the assessment Magna cum Laude (with great honour). Her dissertation will be published in book form by the Mohr Siebeck publishing house.
The LLSTA editorial team
1 “Jānis Vanags: What about the ordination of women to the office of minister?” Published 19.02.2014. Source: https://delfi.lv
2 Aļesja Lavrinoviča, “1 Cor 14.34–5 without ‘in All the Churches of the Saints’: External Evidence,” New Testament Studies 63.3 (2017), 370 – 389.
3 Aļesja Lavrinoviča, “The Syntactic Flexibility of 1 Corinthians 14:33b.” Journal of Biblical Literature 141, no. 1 (2022): 157-175.
