Editorial dilemma: the interpolation of 1 Cor 14:34-35 in the western manuscripts of D, G and 88

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Summer, 2000 by D.W. Odell-Scott

The comments regarding the subordination of women in First Corinthians, Ephesians and Timothy were points which easily drew my fire. My assessments of these notorious declarations ranged from the judgement that the authors of the later non-Pauline epistles, Ephesians and Timothy, had corrupted First Corinthians by seeding the text with tares which any good student of the Bible could identify and remove, to the view that Paul was a simple product of his culture and times (what ever those were) and that his views on gender and the subordination of women were dated, archaic, and worthy of rejection by any critical modern reader.

But something "other" occurred to me that I did not expect and for which I certainly was not prepared. I heard something different in the public reading of the fourteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Maybe it was because the reader spoke softly when he came to the offensive verses before a congregation of faculty and students at Benton Chapel at Vanderbilt University, half of whom were women. Then he hesitated before proceeding to read verse 36 and the remainder of the chapter. These few verses had been quoted far too many times as a weapon in the arsenal against the participation of women as leaders in worship. Thus, the reader may have been seeking for some way to distance himself lest we identify the reader with the text. Between the soft voicing of these offensive verses, the pause and then the return of the reader's full voice at the beginning of verse 36, the brief silence followed by "What! Did the word of God ...," sounded like, suggested to me (and apparently to no one else that morning, not even the reader) that verse 36 was a critique of the material which proceeded it. And so began my close reading of First Corinthians 14:34-36.

Unlike the editors of the western manuscripts D, G and 88, I did not assume that the text would substantiate my own commitments. I had no use for any weapon which could be used to question my wife's ministry. I was prepared to employ a variety of strategies to disarm anyone intent on using the Bible to justify the disfranchisement, subordination, silencing, and disciplining of women in the church, from arguing for the interpolation hypothesis with respect to verses 34 and 35, to the general devaluation of the Pauline epistles on the grounds that they were outdated and representative of a pre-modern culture. However, what I preferred to do and was in the habit of doing, was to simply ignore those verses with which I so strongly disagreed.

But I learned that the interpretation of a rich and complex text like First Corinthians is not a settled matter. The assumption that writers more or less uncritically mirror their historic culture and social circumstances is far too simple and uncritical. How do we know which cultures and social circumstances influenced a writer? What is the force of such influence? Can one's own culture(s) and society become negative influences against which one comes to be a critic?