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Originally posted by Garasu:
Originally posted by Footwasher:

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I'm saying that the Church makes a statement with women's ministry when they wear a veil while testifying.

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I'm sure it does. Whether that's the statement you think it's making is another matter...

OK. Let's see if I've understood you: You're arguing that men represent Christ and women represent the church. Christ always puts himself at risk, but the church always has to be protected. As a sign of being protected, women wear veils and as a sign of being vulnerable men don't.

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Methinks paul was married.

How else do you explain the "thorn in the flesh" comment?

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Groan. A dusty joke, smelling of mothballs.

Anyway, in at least one passage where Paul recommends that single people remain single, I believe he states that he is single, too.

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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano

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Originally posted by A.Pilgrim:

When one has worked out the most probable solutions to these and followed the argument up to v.9, one logically expects the instruction: ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have her head covered’. But we don’t get that, we get the apparent non sequitur, a googly out of left field: ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have authority on the head [the possessive ‘her’ is implied in the text, not explicit] because of the angels’. Why on earth does Paul bring in the reference to authority here? What is he talking about, and what on earth is the relevance of the angels? (I’ll come back to the angelic reference later.)

I suppose that it is the attempt of translators to make the text of v.10 fit the expected instruction for the woman to wear a head covering that leads them to insert the words ‘a sign of’ before ‘authority’. The proposition that this refers to a third party’s authority, rather than the authority of the person directly referenced does have some slender support. In another book covering this passage**, there is a quotation from the writings of Diodorus of Sicily between 60 and 30BC, in which Diodorus describes a statue of the mother of King Osymandias as follows:
‘There is also another statue of his mother standing alone, a monolith twenty cubits high, and it has three kingdoms on its head, signifying that she was both daughter and wife and mother of a king’. (There is another translation supplied which gives ‘...three diadems on its head...’ where the translators here have rendered basileia (literally ‘kingdoms’) as ‘diadems’ a word which conveys the meaning: a sign of a kingdom, thereby inserting the meaning ‘sign of’ in the same way that is done by the insertion of the words ‘sign of’ in 1Cor.11:10.)

So in this extract from Diodorus we have the description of a woman with ‘kingdoms’ on her head, where the kingdoms are those of other men to whom she is related. So it’s not unprecedented for Paul’s usage in 1Cor.11:10 to follow the same pattern. But it is slender evidence. (And before any shipmate posts to criticise this as clutching at straws, similarly obscure classical references are used by those arguing for the opposite theological position.)

But maybe we don’t have to go down this ‘sign of’ route at all. Is there an understanding of v10 in which the ‘authority’ can be ascribed to the woman/wife, while fitting in with the meaning expected as a logical continuation of the argument in vv3-9, viz. ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have her head covered’, but without going to the extreme that Atkins does in proposing that because the wife’s head is her husband (as explained in v.3) not only is she the one who has authority, but it ought to be exercised over her husband. (Thereby blatantly contradicting Paul’s instructions in other epistles.)

Before we try to develop such an understanding of v.10, we must bear in mind that it must also lead logically into v.11. No matter how obscure Paul’s arguments appear to us now, I always have in the back of my mind the conviction that he wasn’t stupid, and whatever he wrote must have made very good sense to him when he wrote it. Looking at v.11 it starts with ‘Nevertheless ...’ plēn, which Fee explains (p.147 note 17), quoting from BDAG, is a “marker of something that is contrastingly added for consideration”. That is, a restriction or limitation on what is instructed in v.10. We must lead coherently into: ‘Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man...’

I think there is a possible understanding which fits all these requirements. My first observation is that ‘authority’ is only one of a number of possible translations of exousia – there are other shades of meaning within its semantic range. One of these is ‘control’ or ‘jurisdiction’.*** So, if we are expecting ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have her head covered’, Paul slightly wrong-foots this expectation by writing: ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have control/jurisdiction over her head [in terms of what she wears on it as a covering/veiling] – i.e. her head covering ought to be under her own control. Having thus granted her head covering as being under the woman’s/wife’s own jurisdiction, the ‘nevertheless’ follows very logically as a limitation on that jurisdiction – it is not to be exercised independently of the man/her husband, but interdependently with him.

I am under no illusion in thinking that this suggestion immediately clarifies the meaning of the whole passage. It certainly doesn’t. But it has the benefit of leading coherently into v.11, which the traditional ‘sign of’ understanding doesn’t. If Paul has to write ‘Nevertheless ... woman is not independent of man..’ it must be presumably because what he wrote in v.10 might lead the Corinthians to mistakenly think that Paul is implying that woman is independent of man. What would lead the Corinthians to think that? The granting by Paul of some form of authority/control/jurisdiction to the woman. So he then has to cut short the possibility of erroneous belief that this form of authority/control/jurisdiction implies that the woman/wife is independent of the man/husband.

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Originally posted by A.Pilgrim:

Oh, but there’s also the bit about ‘...because of the angels’. I have the impression that Paul presents this throw-away rationale for his instruction in v10 as something that would be entirely obvious to the readers of his letter. I imagine them sitting there going: ‘ah yes, of course, the angels, that clinches it!’ while we, divorced from the presuppositional context by 2000 years, just go: ‘Duhhh???’

I’m reminded of the top-class exegesis of 1Pet.3:18-22 by R.T.France**** in which he quotes another author: “More recent studies in Jewish apocryphal writings and in early Jewish-Christian literature reveal a whole world of ideas which was powerfully at work, all the more so because simply taken for granted, in the writers of the New Testament. The exegete ... must try to immerse himself as deeply as possible in the mental atmosphere of the biblical writer, his presuppositions, his categories of thought, his literary conventions” and then continues: “In fact, if you are not prepared to dirty your hands in the muddy waters of apocalyptic and rabbinic speculations, much of the New Testament must necessarily remain obscure. To try to understand 1 Peter 3:19-20 without a copy of the Book of Enoch at your elbow is to condemn yourself to failure”. I suspect that the same is true of the reference to ‘the angels’ at the end of 1Cor.11:10.

I have not succeeded in the act of immersion recommended in the quotation above, and my knowledge of the Book of Enoch is non-existent. But I would be very interested indeed to know whether my proposed understanding of 1Cor.11.10 fits with whatever instruction Paul was intending to support with his reference to ‘the angels’. I wouldn’t mind if it turned out completely wrong, but it would be rather exciting if it gave another chink of light on the obscurity of this passage.

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Thanks for the appreciative feedback – I’m glad to know the effort of composition was worth it.

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Originally posted by footwasher:
In other words, women are allowed to preach because they have the imputation of authority from men? The man's authority is imputed to the woman, indicated by the head covering? .

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Originally posted by A.Pilgrim:
Thanks for the appreciative feedback – I’m glad to know the effort of composition was worth it.

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Originally posted by footwasher:
In other words, women are allowed to preach because they have the imputation of authority from men? The man's authority is imputed to the woman, indicated by the head covering? .

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No, that isn’t what I intended to mean at all. I was suggesting that Paul is talking about ‘control’ not ‘authority’, and that perhaps v.10 could be read as : That is why the woman/wife ought to have control/jurisdiction over her head [in terms of what she wears on it as a covering/veiling] – i.e. her head covering ought to be under her own control. There is nothing about that control being imputed to her by the man, and I haven’t addressed the issue of what significance there might be in the head covering – that’s another knotty problem.

The thing is, if we remove the ‘[sign of] authority’ concept from the text, there is no implication that the head covering has anything at all to do with the woman having authority to pray and prophesy, or showing that such authority has been imputed to her, or showing that she isn’t usurping the (supposed) authority that her husband might have over her – none of this can be found in the passage at all. And I’m happy with that, because TTBOMK there is nothing in the NT that supports the idea that in the gathered congregation of the church anyone has to be granted authorisation from anyone else to pray or prophesy. People could just get on and do it, provided that everything was done decently and in order. (Any specific textual evidence on this, either for or against would be welcome.)

And Paul isn’t talking about preaching (either as proclaiming kērussō or teaching didaskō) but about praying proseuchomai and prophesying prophēteuō. Hart made the same mistake near the top of p.1 of this thread. I had thought about pointing this out in my previous post, but it was long enough already.
Angus
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Originally posted by A.Pilgrim:
Footwasher – I agree that the lead-in from vv8-9 is not entirely satisfactory. As I said initially, we’re expecting ‘That is why the woman/wife ought to have her head covered’, but then I described my suggestion as Paul slightly wrong-footing this expectation, as a way of admitting its lack of obvious continuity.

I had been wondering if the content of vv8-9 was a bit of a digression from the main theme of the argument, (or rather, the presenting of further evidence to support a point already made) so I was very pleased to see in the RSV that vv8-9 are placed in parentheses, indicating that the translators of that version thought so, too.

So then, we’re looking for a lead-in from vv6-7 instead. v.6 in the ESV reads: ‘For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head’. There’s one word in that translation that I’m not happy with - the ‘since’ in ‘But since it is disgraceful...’ Other translations have ‘But if it is disgraceful...’ which I suggest is a more faithful representation of the Greek.

It therefore appears that Paul is offering a wife two options – cover her head or cut her hair short. If cutting off her hair or shaving her head is shameful, then she should cover her head. We can then follow this with v.10 according to my suggested reading, now slightly amended: ‘That is why a woman ought to have control over her head [in terms of whether she wears a covering or whether she cuts her hair short] – in other words, the wife has the discretion to decide for herself between the two options Paul has discussed in v.6.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that the RSV throws a spanner in the works of my so-far-constructed argument by also putting vv11-12 as a parenthetical digression as it does for vv8-9. It is therefore much less necessary for v10 to lead coherently into v.11. The RSV leads the reader to see two sequences of logic in the verses, that is: vv3-6 (and possibly v.7), v.10, vv13-15 interspersed with a digression retrospectively adding more evidence in vv(possibly 7),8-9 and vv11-12. (Sorry that I don’t have the time to write out the full quotations in this order – I realise it would be clearer, and I’ll just have to ask shipmates to follow the sequences of verses themselves.)

I have on other occasions in Paul’s writing noticed his (IMO infuriating) habit of conducting two lines of argument simultaneously, interrupting one to switch to the other, and vice-versa, with no clue as to when he makes the switch. And that is what could be happening here.

Sometimes I feel that studying this passage is like doing a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing, you can’t work out what the pieces that you’ve got are showing individually, and you have to propose what the patterns are on the missing pieces in order to construct a picture. Then someone comes along and tells you that half the pieces that you’ve got are the wrong way up, and you need to pull it all apart and turn them upside down, and propose a different lot of patterns on the missing pieces so that you get an entirely different picture. Then someone else comes along, tells you that the previous person was wrong, the half that they said were the wrong way up were actually right, the half they thought were right were actually upside down, half the patterns on the missing pieces that you initially proposed were correct, but the rest should be an entirely different pattern from what anyone else had yet suggested, and then when you’ve pulled it all apart and put it back together, you’ll have a different picture yet again. Naturally, the box that the pieces came in doesn’t have a picture on it!!

It's at times like this that I wish I were more competent at semantic structure analysis, as I have seen how powerful it is for understanding other complex passages.

I’m approaching a busy weekend in RL, so I regret that I will probably not be able to engage in this discussion here for a while. I’m also starting to try to get my head round the Book of Enoch. Extra-canonical 1stC Jewish apocalyptic literature?
Angus

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