"Women should be silent" probably shouldn't be in the Bible

1 Corinthians 14: 34 -35 NASB

34 The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. 35 If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

It appears there is good reason to doubt this passage should even be in the Bible. To discuss why this is, we must also discuss larger questions of how we would even begin to know what Paul, Peter or John or whoever else even wrote. Furthermore, it's reasonable to touch on the question of how we can know the Bible is the word of God or simply the word of man.

Let's do the big questions first. Let's ask the question about God's word first. Is the Bible God's word? Furthermore, even if it wasn't the word of God, can we still trust it as a reliable human book? If the authors are humans only, that doesn't mean they are simply lying all the time. Of course this raises the even larger question of whether it's possible to know anything at all with any certainty. But let's assume for the moment that philosophy can show knowledge and even warranted knowledge is possible. It is possible to know things. Furthermore, it's possible to demonstrate logically and certainly that God, a being of maximal greatness must exist. Since I have done so much work on this in other places, not to mention the existing mountain of invaluable books on the subject, let's move on for now. Whatever objections you have, they have probably been answered a million times so just take the time to listen.

To establish the reliability of the Bible as the word of God, we have to ask a theological question. We have to reason carefully about God. Is the Bible the word of God? First of all, we all know that a person can simply fake a claim to have a message from God. We all know that it's possible to lie about such things. But if a person claims such a thing, would God leave himself without a witness? In other words, wouldn't God also give us a way to know the truth about something which claims to be God's word? I think it stands to reason that God, a being of maximal goodness, would give us a way to know.

The first way we could know is when we think logically. Logically, you shouldn't believe anything until at least some sort of good evidence is established for it. For example, let's say that I tell you that you must eat a candy bar at exactly 4:32 PM tomorrow. If you do not do this, then the moon will crash into the earth tomorrow night and kill everyone. The cause of this event is of course magic that is so far undiscovered by modern science. You have no way to disprove me. That means I am right doesn't it? You can't prove me wrong! So tell me. In all honesty, are you even remotely worried?

Let's say that later today someone else tells you not to believe me. She claims that my understanding of the unknown magic is all wrong. She says the moon will crash into the earth if and only if you eat a candy bar at 4:32 PM tomorrow. You also cannot prove her wrong. So follow the logic closely here. If you believe something merely because you cannot prove it wrong, then you would believe both me and the lady that contradicts me. But logically, we cannot both be correct. Therefore, the principle of believing things simply because you cannot disprove them must be wrong.

In logic this is called the burden of proof. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. There is no reason for me to believe in your thing until you provide evidence for your thing. If we can safely say that God's greatness means God is reasonable, then God wants us to use reason. Therefore, we shouldn't worry ourselves with people who make various claims of God given messages when they provide zero evidence.

But what if good evidence is given? Would that prove the Bible is really God's word? At best it proves that it is likely to be the case. In other words, we can say that a message that claims to be from God is probably from God if there is good evidence to show that it is. But does mere probability also mean we can really be certain it is from God? To deal with that, we can ask the larger theological question. Let's imagine that God gave us mountains of evidence that greatly supported the claim that Mohammad is a prophet of God. Let's say there was no evidence for Christianity. But let's also say that Christianity is true even though God made sure all the evidence was against it. When we died and faced God, can God really be upset with us for believing Islam? Wasn't that the most reasonable conclusion? Think of it this way. If God didn't send Mohammad as a prophet, wouldn't God also give us a way of knowing this? Or think of it this way. Would God really try to fool us? Would God have a good time tricking us? A case can be made that God would want us to work hard to learn and understand. God might intentionally make things hard to understand. But that's not the same thing as completely misleading us. And this is what it boils down to. Would God lie to us? It's clear that a being of maximal greatness would do only maximally good things. Lying is not that.

This leads to all sorts of conclusions regarding the Bible. First of all, the Bible contains lots of ancient prophecies. The events predicted other later events of history with incredible accuracy. This would indicate the prediction comes from being whose knowledge transcends time itself. One could argue that the prophecies are really written after the events they predicted. That question boils down to the historical evidence that supports a date for the prophecy which comes before the events. So if a case can be made to show the prediction very probably predates the events predicted, then it's the word of God. God wouldn't mislead us. But God might make us work for knowledge of the truth, and we might go down the wrong track. Nonetheless God would not leave Himself without a witness and would not intentionally mislead us. Therefore a well evidenced and researched argument for Biblical prophecy should be considered as establishing it as God's word.

Furthermore, I have done a lot of work to argue that evidence makes it very likely that Jesus rose from the dead. Others have argued that Jesus very clearly claimed to be God. Thus if Jesus did raise from the dead, this would serve to confirm Jesus' teaching about Himself. God would not intentionally mislead us. Again, God may make the search for truth difficult as well as something that rewards effort. We may get the wrong idea sometimes. But ultimately, it doesn't stand to reason that God would leave Himself without a witness on such matters. Therefore, if we can really give well a argued and evidenced case that the New Testament is a good record of Jesus' life, then it must be the word of God. Furthermore, Jesus often affirms that the Old Testament is God's word. The apostles do this also, and they would be the source for the record of Jesus' life anyway.

Thus we come to the question of whether 1 Corinthians 14, the part where Paul tells women to be silent in the churches, is something that belongs in the Bible. More importantly, what is the evidence that makes it likely to have been written by Paul? To answer that question, let's just look at the bigger question. How do we know anything was written by Paul or any other supposed Biblical author?

The Bible that you find in the book store comes from older copies called manuscripts. These are copies of books that are so old that they were made back when everything had to be written by hand. This is any book that's over 500 years old. We have about 5700 copies of the New Testament that are written in Greek. The Greek is actually the original, but there are about 10,000 Latin translations of the Greek. Then there are lots of translations into other languages. These manuscripts have to be divided into completes and fragments. A fragment is when it may be a scrap of paper or a page with parts missing. Then there are others where we have the entire book. The oldest complete copies of the entire Bible date to about 700 AD. But we have completes for most of the works of Paul as wells as the Gospels that date to about 300AD.

The way these texts are dated is something called paleography. Essentially, handwriting styles change over time and this can be used to get a date. Also, the text itself is made from paper or animal skin which can be dated via radioactive decay. By using two independent dating methods, we can see that both methods independently arrive at the same date. Thus, we can be confident in our dates for when manuscripts were written. The actual original copy of the book of course must be older than the date for the manuscript we have.

Sometimes people will tell you that the texts have been changed over the years and we have no idea what Paul wrote. That's inaccurate. We have complete copies of most his works that date to the 300's. He would have written the original around 250 years earlier. Furthermore, we have lots of older incomplete fragments. We keep finding them. Think of it this way. If Paul's writings were changed, then the old fragments are like arrows shot at a board. The board is filled with the changes. But as we keep finding fragments, they are like arrows shot at the board. So do they ever hit on any changes?

We actually find tons of changes. We even find tons of changes in the later complete manuscripts too. We find lots of differences in the manuscripts that span the centuries. There are more changes between the manuscripts than there are letters in the New Testament. But here's the thing. They are almost all unimportant mistakes. A few of them are important mistakes. A few of them are important intentional changes. None of them affect the core teachings of Christianity. This is why scholars on all sides confidently give the textual purity of the text over the centuries about a 99% reliability rating.

Here's an example of a mistake. You are a scribe living in ancient times. You are copying a book by hand. You do this all day everyday for a job. You read one sentence. Then you write it on the new copy you are making. Then you go back to the original, but you skip a bit by accident. This is one of the most common mistakes we find. The interesting thing is that these mistakes can be shown to exist, because people are making multiple copies in multiple places. So if someone makes a goof somewhere, only the people who copied his goof will have it in their version. The other copyists in other places may make mistakes too, but they will make totally different ones. Since we have so many copies, we can check them against each other.

Sometimes the scribe went back and realized he had made a mistake and left out a bit. So he wrote the missing bit in the margin so the next guy would add it in. But often scribes wrote interesting thoughts and notes in the margin that they didn't intend to be added into the Bible text. And there were times when later scribes accidentally added this in. There are even a few cases where mistakes like this were made and they became popular and made it into more and more copies over time.

For example, the story of the woman caught in adultery from John appears in none of the manuscripts before the 900's. Then it shows up. Slowly it shows up in more and more of the copies. If you have a copy of the Bible it almost certainly has a footnote telling you this passage probably isn't in the original. And please don't add this footnote into the text of your Bible!

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that 1 Corinthians 14: 34 -35 is one of these mistakes. It sounds very much like a note a scribe added on the side but didn't intend to be added into the text. The oldest complete copy of 1 Corinthians dates to the 300's and has a special mark for just these two verses. This special mark was a way the scribes indicated that they were copying from more than one text and that the originals were not the same. In addition to this, some of the other manuscripts, but not all, place this passage in a different location at the very end of the chapter. Of all the mistakes we know scribes made when it comes to Paul's letters, they never moved verses around. They tended to spell words wrong, accidentally leave things out, or accidentally put footnotes in as part of the Bible. There are even a few examples where it looks like the scribes intentionally changed something. But even in those cases, nobody just moves verses around like this.

On top of that, the oldest complete copy of 1 Corinthians, called the Vaticanus, doesn't have the special mark at the end of the chapter. This indicates that the other copy this scribe worked with didn't place the verses in another place. It most likely indicates that the other copy just didn't have the verses at all. It looks like an earlier scribe was reading this text about orderly church services and added his own note about women being silent. Later this was accidentally added into the copying, but not all of the copies. This mistake would have to had happened early since the Vaticanus dates to 250 years after Paul. Being so early can also explain how it could have made it into so many other copies.

Beyond all of this, the text is a bit strange. In chapter 11, Paul gives rules for how women are to speak in church. So why then did Paul later tell women to be silent? One can only conclude that he didn't mean women must be silent in a technically literal sense, but in some other sense of perhaps interrogating people. Another very simple explanation is that Paul never wrote that part, which does have evidence to support it.

On top of all of this, this passage makes perfect sense with the verses in question removed.Here is how the text reads with the passage in question removed.

And let two or three prophets speak, and let the others pass judgment.
But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, let the first keep silent.
For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted;
and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets;
for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.
Was it from you that the word of God first went forth? Or has it come to you only?
If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which I write to you are the Lord’s commandment.

This makes perfect sense as a logical explanation of Paul's point. Paul is talking about everyone taking turns speaking in church. And so he asks, “Did the word of God come to just you only?” This makes perfect sense. But if it didn't make perfect sense, it would be a good indication that something was missing from the text.

And yet it doesn't make sense when we add the verses about women back in. Paul tells women to be silent and then asks if the word of God came to you only? Earlier he was telling people to let everyone speak and take turns. Then he says the word of God didn't come to just you. But it makes no sense for Paul to tell women to be silent and then to tell them that the word of God didn't come to just them. This would only make sense if the women weren't allowing anyone else to speak. Furthermore, Paul's question here would imply that the women were just some of the people who have the word of God and should take turns with the men. It would be odd for Paul to order women to be silent and then in the next breath affirm that they have the word of God. The only way around this problem is to assume that Paul was just referring back to the part about taking turns which came before the part about women being silent. This problem may be why some of the manuscripts put the verses about women being silent at the end of the chapter. It doesn't seem to belong where it is placed.

Then we come the problem of the law. Here are the verses again.

Let the women keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves, just as the Law also says.
And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

What is the Law that Paul is referring to? Well it is totally unknown. He is famous for proving his points from the Old Testament, which he usually calls the Law. With all of Paul's other references to the Old Testament Law, we know exactly where he got it from. But with this one, we have no idea. There just is nothing at all in the old testament that hints about women being silent. This point alone leads many scholars today to argue that this is an added in mistake. The later scribe that added it would have probably been referring to Roman law. Women could not hold political office in Rome or vote. While women were very prevalent in handling money matters, they were barred from having a political life. Women who were involved in politics did so by influencing people in private rooms. Women did have a lesser, but still significant presence in Roman religion. Although I am unaware of any roman law against women speaking at religious gatherings, it's not remotely implausible.

To understand this, let me list some things the Romans and Greeks thought about women. They believed that Zeus created women to hold mankind back and keep men from rivaling the gods. It was not a bad thing to be a female goddess, but human females were intentionally created to ruin the world. They were made to be stupid. In other words, women were all mentally handicapped. But also their beauty was intended to turn men into animals and hold men back also. Plato said that any man or woman who was sexually attracted to women was a untrustworthy person. Sexual attraction to women was to be suppressed by loveless sex with prostitutes or slaves. Before women existed, men's semen was planted elsewhere and grew up into new people. They didn't think that women's eggs had to merge with men's seed to make babies. They thought that women were just like a ground that men planted seed into. The ground nourished the seed and it grew. Female menstruation was considered a deformed bloody version of male ejaculation, thus proving that women were a deformed race. Children were only the biological descendants of their fathers. In the Roman empire, women were all named after their fathers. Women didn't have names of their own. So if your dad was Julian, you were Julia. If you had a sister, she was Julia also. They had a sort of number system to tell who was who. All children were descendants of their fathers. Legally, there were only two types of women, respectable women and prostitutes. Respectable women were required to wear a long dress, mantle and hair ties called a stola, palla, and vittae. Prostitutes had to wear a toga. If caught in adultery, then you had to wear a toga. In light of laws like this, it begins to make perfect sense that Paul would require Christian women to wear head coverings in church. Otherwise she would be dressed as a prostitute! In the Roman world, the idea of being nice or respectful to a woman with no intention of getting sex from her made no sense at all.

Understanding all of that, listen to these words from Paul. Words like these would have been something like an earthquake.

Galatians 3: 26 For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. 27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.