Aļesja Lavrinoviča publishes an article in a Cambridge journal on the silencing of women in the passage 1 Cor. 14

In early June, in the Cambridge journal New Testament Studies, which is dedicated to current developments in New Testament scholarship, volume 63 published a study by Aļesja Lavrinoviča, a graduate of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Latvia, which is significant for the discussions 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”(1Cor 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 believers” in the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts, as well as in the earlier Greek editions of the New Testament, and its results illuminate the bias of the dominant theological view, by which theologians and clergy (mostly men), in order to forbid women from laying claim to an equal role in the church, invoke the authority of the biblical text with the help of an interpretation that they themselves have created to consolidate their own personal power in Christian society.

The phrase “as [is customary] in all the churches of the believers”, which is found in verse 33 of chapter 14 of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (1Cor), is traditionally connected with the sentence that forbids women from speaking in church assemblies, thereby 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 never will be ordained, and as an ecumenical principle, since the phrase refers to the practice “in all the churches”). 

In the 1965 edition of the Bible in Latvian, the phrase “as is customary in all the churches of the believers”, for example, 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 the women keep silent in the church assemblies, as is customary in all the churches of the believers; for they are not permitted to speak, but must be submissive, as the law also prescribes.”

A phrase adapted in this way to an alien context 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 believers” with women. In the manuscripts and the old editions of the New Testament, the said phrase is located 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 believers.” The copyists of the ancient manuscripts used paragraph division, contrary to the previously popular claim among 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 fundamental arguments invoked by theologians in forbidding women from holding an equal role in the church is custom. In the context of this scriptural passage, the phrase in the second part of verse 33 is interpreted as custom. That is, the women in Corinth are called to keep silent and be submissive, 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 church ministry. The argument from custom, intertwined with theological zeal, has produced among Bible theologians and pastors a widespread interpretation that the text of 1Cor 14:33–35 does not refer only to the women in Corinth who were told to keep silent, but applies to all women in all times. The reinforcement to keep silent, the prohibition against engaging in preaching offices in the churches, 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”, 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 text.

The study consists of three parts – a summary of scholars who exegetically (i.e. by interpreting the text) apply the argument from custom either 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 copyists left in the text of the manuscripts to indicate the completeness or continuation of a thought. In this part, the study reveals that the copyists indicated in the ancient manuscripts that the phrase under study completes the thought of the preceding paragraph. But the text that speaks of the Corinthian women begins after a space or is written in a new paragraph.

The third part of the study is devoted to analysing 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 times of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the paragraph division between the argument from custom and the discourse about women was observed in the texts of the New Testament. The tendency began to gradually reverse 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 to the paragraph about women. The study highlights the most active adherents of such a tendency, the Bible Society, which has postulated itself as a team of objective scholars who, in composing the text of the Greek New Testament from several hundred manuscripts, select the oldest and best manuscript text. Unfortunately, with respect to such a powerful text, which theologians and pastors use to silence women (1Cor 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 (their 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 sinned 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 chapter 16 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, whom the Latvian biblical text calls Paul’s kinsmen who are highly esteemed among the apostles, were not in fact 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 esteemed among the apostles, and possibly the first woman apostle), so self-evident to everyone, was altered by 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, without informing anyone, wrote the woman Junia with the accents of a male name. Thus the majority  of Bible translations into foreign languages, which used the Nestle-Aland Greek text as their basis, wrote in the biblical 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 again. 

Returning to the context of A. Lavrinoviča’s study, it must be added that since the 19th century there has existed in theology the view that the text of verses 34 and 35, found in 1Cor 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 located at the end of chapter 14. In the majority of manuscripts (but the quantitative aspect does not play a decisive role in manuscript research, because in the Middle Ages there was an expansion of manuscript copying) the text that imposes on women the prohibition against speaking is located 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 original placement of the text. The logical explanation is that the editor or copyist originally entered the text discriminating against women as a comment in the margin of the papyrus, from where the subsequent copyists inserted the text accordingly, according to their own understanding – one at the end of the chapter, the other – after verse 33. The opposite version would be that Paul entered these verses in the letter in the middle of chapter 14, but one of the subsequent copyists of the letter, wishing to soften the prohibition directed against women, moved the verses to the end of the chapter. The adherents 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 interrupt 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 the letters written by Paul 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 also intends to publish a second part of the study, which will be devoted to analysing 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 Association of Latvian Lutheran Women Theologians, www.sieviesuordinacija.lv, on which articles, reflections, and publications related to the role of women in the church and society are available.