Jessi and I stared at the verses. We had both read those words in isolation many times before. We had wrestled with them and responded to them already, but they felt different this time. They seemed so out of place, so malicious, so unlike the Paul we’ve spent the past three months with:

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If 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. (1 Corinthians 14:35-36)

Verses like these have been used to silence and discredit gifted women for centuries, and we’re pretty sure these verses were what prompted a friend of ours to jeer, “Paul is an asshole,” at an early Crowlers & Corinthians session. Still, knowing we would have to teach on these words, Jessi and I did our best to sit with them, pray over them, and research the crap out of them. You see, these words present three problems which have led us to doubt whether Paul himself even wrote them:

First, as a writer, Paul doesn’t meander. When he is in the midst of a point, he sticks to the subject at hand and only brings up a new topic when it’s time to move on. In this passage, Paul randomly shifts away from the subject of speaking in tongues to deliver a jab against women, and then he moves back to the topic of tongues just as quickly. This rapid shift doesn’t fit Paul’s writing style. The footnotes to the New International Version even acknowledge modern translators are not sure where these verses fit in the chapter, and some translations place these verses at the end of the chapter instead (though even this alternate placement disrupts the flow of Paul’s logic).

Second, Paul has already spoken in favor of women speaking in church way back in chapter 11. “But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered…” (v. 5) Sure, Paul still speaks of husbands as the heads of wives, but he never silences the women in the church; he calls on them to continue prophesying and praying but to do so reverently. Why would Paul encourage women to pray and prophesy in one chapter only to silence them three chapters later?

Lastly, think of the larger context of Paul’s ministry. Without patrons like Lydia and partners like Phoebe, Dorcas, and countless others, Paul would have been helpless. Strong, faithful, and financially stable women helped the early church grow and spread, and Paul thanks them regularly in the introductions and conclusions of his letters. While Paul does not attempt to dismantle the social structures oppressing women (probably because he expects the return of Christ to accomplish this any day now), he does seek to empower women within the church to be deacons, apostles, and leaders of worship. Paul also worked with many widows, and he encouraged singleness for Christians, so why on earth would Paul assume women in the church all have husbands to be submissive to? This assumption doesn’t fit Paul’s experience or his teaching.

So yeah, 1 Corinthians 14:35-36 clashes with Paul’s usual style of writing, contradicts his earlier statements in the same letter, and doesn’t fit with Paul’s overall attitudes toward women and marriage as evidenced elsewhere in his ministry and writing. At my most charitable, I might say Paul is addressing a specific group of women within one church, but I think the more likely answer is the simpler one: Paul didn’t write these words. More likely, somewhere in the life of this letter, a scribe inserted these words as a margin note which, over centuries of translation and transcription, was absorbed into the text proper. Perhaps, like us, this scribe was trying to make sense of Paul’s teachings on women but, shaped by a different context, he arrived at a drastically different interpretation than ours. And now, as with many other out-of-nowhere bible verses, we’re now second-guessing these words’ placement in the letter.

Still, these words don’t diminish the value of 1 Corinthians; rather, they show us a complex history of internal debate about the role of women in the church. These verses remind us even the words of scripture change over time as they pass through the hands of translator after translator, and we should be careful as we read. As stated in a previous post, we should regard the bible as an old, wise friend and treat its words reverently but also cautiously; we must never forget the differences between these words’ original audience and their audience today.

Of course, while these verses make for a fascinating study in biblical history, they don’t make for sound doctrine. Paul celebrated women in leadership, and so should we. So, when you hear verses like 1 Corinthians 14:35-36 used to silence and exclude women, be bold and say what we’re all really thinking:
I don’t think Paul wrote that.