Bible -- Commentaries; Bible -- Feminist criticism; Women in the Bible
As for the passages now found in the New Testament epistles of Paul,
concerning women's non-equality with men and duty of subjection, there
is no room to doubt that they are bare-faced forgeries, interpolated by
unscrupulous bishops, during the early period in which a combined and
determined effort was made to reduce women to silent submission, not
only in the Church, but also in the home and in the State. A most
laudably intended attempt to excuse Paul for the inexcusable passages
attributed to his authorship has been made by a clergyman, who,
accepting them as genuine Pauline utterances, endeavors to show that
they were meant to apply, only to Greek female converts, natives of
Corinth, and that the command to cover the head and to keep silent in
public was warranted, both because veiling the head and face was a
Grecian custom, and because the women of Corinth were of notoriously
bad character. In support of this theory our modern apologist quotes
the testimony of numerous writers of antiquity who denounced Corinthian
profligacy. But, setting aside the fact that the men of Corinth must
always have been, at least, as bad as the women, and that a sorry case
would be made out for Paul, if it were on the score of morals that he
ordered Greek women to subject themselves to such men, there are yet
two serious impediments in the way of this theory. In the first place,
that wealthy and luxurious Corinth to which the writers quoted refer,
was no longer in existence in Paul's time; 146 B. C. it was conquered
by the Romans, who killed the men, carried the women and children into
slavery, and levelled the dwellings to the ground. For a whole century
the site of the once famous city remained a desolate waste, but about
46 B. C. it was colonized by some Roman immigrants, and a Romanized
city, with Roman customs, it was when Paul knew it. Now, not only did
the Roman women go unveiled, mingling freely in all public places with
men (a fact which Paul, as citizen of a Roman province must have
known), but Paul specially commends the Greek woman, Phebe, whom he
endorses as minister of the Church in the Greek city, Cenchrea (a
seaport within a few miles of Corinth), and in Acts, chapter 17, we are
explicitly told that the Greek converts made by Paul, in Greece, were
"chief women," "honorable women."
This is sufficient refutation of the argument of the clergyman who
strives to clear the character of Paul at the expense of the character
of the women of Corinth.
E. B. D.
EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.
Romans xvi.
I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church
which is at Cenchrea:
2 That ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye
assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you; for she hath
been a succourer of many, and of myself also.
3 Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ Jesus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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