At the beginning of June, in the Cambridge journal New Testament Studies, which is devoted to current developments in New Testament research, the 63rd volume published a study by Aļesja Lavrinoviča, a graduate of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Latvia, which is significant for the debates on the role of women in the church. The title of the study in English is “1Cor 14.34–35 without ‘in All the Churches of the Saints’: External Evidence”(1 Cor 14:34–35 without “as in all the churches of the saints: external evidence”). The study analyses the placement of the phrase “as [is customary] in all the churches of the faithful” in the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts, as well as in the earlier Greek editions of the New Testament, and its results bring to light the bias of the dominant theological view, with which theologians and clergy (predominantly men), in order to forbid women from claiming an equal role in the church, invoke the authority of the biblical text by means of an interpretation that they themselves have created in order to entrench their own personal power in Christian society.
The phrase “as [is customary] in all the churches of the faithful”, which is found in verse 33 of the 14th chapter of Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor), is traditionally linked with the sentence that forbids women to speak in congregational assemblies, thus arguing from custom (this can be referred to both as the tradition invoked by the Catholic Church — i.e. that women have never been ordained, and therefore will never be ordained — and as the ecumenical principle, since the phrase refers to the practice “in all the churches”).
In the 1965 Latvian-language edition of the Bible, for example, the phrase “as is customary in all the churches of the faithful” is integrated into verse 34 as a subordinate clause:
Verse 33: “For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace.”
Verse 34: “Let women keep silent in the congregational assemblies, as is customary in all the churches of the faithful; for they are not permitted to speak, but must be obedient, as the law also prescribes.”
A phrase adapted to a foreign context in this way does not reflect the syntactic structure and paragraph division of the text of the ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts.
The study carried out by Aļesja Lavrinoviča reveals that the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts do not connect the phrase “as [is customary] in all the churches of the faithful” with women. The said phrase, in the manuscripts and the old editions of the New Testament, is found in verse 33 and belongs to the preceding paragraph, thus forming the following sentence — “For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace, as in all the churches of the faithful.” The scribes of the ancient manuscripts used paragraph division, contrary to a previously popular claim by Bible scholars that in the oldest manuscripts the text was written without spaces between words or paragraphs.
Does the placement of this phrase in the sentence matter?
As mentioned above, one of the basic arguments invoked by theologians in forbidding women to occupy an equal role in the church is custom. In the context of this passage of Scripture, the phrase in the second part of verse 33 is interpreted as custom. That is to say, the women in Corinth are urged to keep silent and to be in submission, because in all the other churches they already keep silent. The consequences of such an interpretation of the text cannot be underestimated — the outcome is the exclusion of women from the ministry of the church. The argument from custom, intertwined with theological zeal, has given rise to an interpretation widespread among Bible scholars and pastors that the text of 1 Cor 14:33–35 does not relate only to the women in Corinth who were told to keep silent, but relates to all women in all times. The entrenchment of silence, the prohibition on engaging in preaching offices in the congregations, has come from such a theological interpretation. It is worth explaining that in Greek the phrase means “as in all the churches of the saints”, and not “as is customary in all the churches of the saints”. In this particular case, the reference to custom is additionally read into the Latvian-language text.
The study is made up of three parts — a summary of the scholars who, exegetically (i.e. interpreting the text), attribute the argument from custom to God in the preceding verse, or to women in the following verse. In the second part of the study, the author analyses the text of the manuscripts, focusing on the paragraph division and the spaces that the scribes have left in the text of the manuscripts, indicating the completion or continuation of a thought. In this part, the study reveals that the scribes indicated in the ancient manuscripts that the phrase under study completes the thought of the preceding paragraph. But the text that speaks of the women of Corinth begins after a space or is written in a new paragraph.
The third part of the study is devoted to the analysis of the placement of the phrase in the Greek New Testaments available to us since the 16th century. In the form of a table, the author demonstrates that since the time of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a paragraph division between the argument from custom and the discourse on women was observed in the texts of the New Testament. The tendency gradually began to shift to the opposite in the early and mid-19th century, when, one after another, the editors of the Greek New Testament began to push the phrase “as in all the churches of the saints” downwards, joining it with the paragraph about women. The study identifies the most active proponents of such a tendency, the Bible Society, which postulated itself as a team of objective researchers who, in constructing the text of the Greek New Testament from several hundred manuscripts, select the text of the oldest and best manuscripts. Unfortunately, with regard to such a powerful text, which theologians and pastors use to silence women (1 Cor 14:34–35), the German society, widely known in the world as Nestle-Aland, has not reflected the text of the oldest manuscripts, but has been guided by other (its own) considerations, continuing to write the phrase “as in all the churches of the saints” together with women (including in its latest edition, Nestle-Aland 28).
It must be said that the highly respected Nestle-Aland team has not erred for the first time in matters concerning women. The American manuscript scholar and one of the most famous New Testament theologians in the world, Eldon Jay Epp, having studied the oldest Greek manuscripts as well as the history of early Christianity, came forward with evidence that Andronicus and Junia, mentioned in the 16th chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans — whom the Latvian Bible text calls Paul’s kinsmen, highly honoured among the apostles — were not two men, but the man Andronicus and the woman Junia. Moreover, Eldon J. Epp demonstrates in the form of a table how, in earlier times, the name of the woman Junia (highly honoured among the apostles, and possibly the first woman apostle), so self-evident to all, was altered, grammatically changing Junia’s gender to Junias or Julias. Epp discovered that, beginning with the 13th edition of Nestle-Aland in 1927 and ending with the one published in 1993, the German society, informing no one, wrote the woman Junia with the accents of a masculine name. Thus the majority of Bible translations into foreign languages that used the Nestle-Aland Greek text as their basis wrote in the Bible text about a man, Junias, who was held in high honour among the apostles. With the 27th edition of Nestle-Aland in 1994, Junias just as imperceptibly became the woman Junia once again.
Returning to the context of A. Lavrinoviča’s study, it must be added that since the 19th century there has existed a view in theology that the text of verses 34 and 35, which is found in 1 Cor chapter 14, does not belong to the letter written by Paul, but was inserted into the letter at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century. This assumption is neither liberal nor hypothetical. There is a series of manuscripts in which the text of verses 34 and 35 is found at the end of chapter 14. In the majority of manuscripts (but the quantitative aspect does not play a decisive role in manuscript research, since in the Middle Ages there was an expansion of manuscript copying) the text that imposes a prohibition on women speaking is found after verse 33. In textual criticism, in such contentious questions about the placement of a text in a chapter, an important role is played by the best explanation of the text’s original placement. The logical explanation is that the editor or scribe originally wrote the text discriminating against women as a comment in the margin of the papyrus, from where subsequent scribes inserted the text accordingly, as they understood it — one at the end of the chapter, the other after verse 33. The opposing version would be that Paul wrote these verses into the letter in the middle of chapter 14, but one of the subsequent scribes of the letter, wishing to soften the prohibition directed against women, moved the verses to the end of the chapter. Proponents of such a view unfortunately ignore the fact that the terms used in verses 34 and 35 are not connected with the context of chapter 14 and break the flow of thought. Moreover, a few chapters earlier, in chapter 11, it is described that women may pray to God and prophesy. It is also worth adding that the oldest copies of copies of Paul’s written letters available to us are found in manuscripts of the 3rd century (but it is accepted that Paul himself lived in the first century).
A. Lavrinoviča intends to publish a second part of the study as well, which will be devoted to an analysis of the syntax and grammar of the text in the phrase “as in all the churches of the saints”. In the meantime, the author invites those interested to take a look at the website administered by the Latvian Association of Lutheran Women Theologians www.sieviesuordinacija.lv, where articles, reflections and publications connected with the role of women in the church and society are available.
The LLSTA editorial team
