DAY 248

IT IS BETTER TO DRINK WINE FROM A WINE GLASS, THEN LICK IT OFF A TABLE CLOTH

Psalm 143, 144 & 145 and 1 Corinthians 14:21-40

My title today is taken from N.T. Wright’s commentary on 1 Corinthians. I have been deeply immersed in it and a few others given the text. My wife asked, “Is your blog done?” and I answered, “No, today I have to write about why the Bible says “women should be silent in church.”” She just laughed as if to say, “Good luck with that!” So here goes.

I start with the scholarship. Whenever you study these texts you find yourself asking, “Where are the differences?” There are thousands of New Testament texts. Some Gospels and Letters have some differences—they are not exact Xerox copies.** Remarkably the copies of Paul’s letters do not have differences, except for a few notable places. This is one of them. Some of the copies of the letter to the First Corinthians have this bit about women being silent added to the end of chapter 14, as an appendix added by some later scribe.

Scholars have wrestled with whether or not these are Paul’s words. But let us for a moment accept that they are words in the Bible…what then do we do with them? I want us to do with them what we have been doing now for 247 days…let’s look at the context. This letter is all about a prideful church, with people acting out, and apparently leading to disorderly worship—you might say chaos.

My study of the commentaries has resulted in a range of possibilities; all of them end with this general sentiment: “we must remember that this text is speaking to a particular problem in a specific cultural setting.” True enough. We must also remember that this text is speaking to a church that has really lost its way and the letter is urging order. Now I have been in some churches that are so orderly you might think them “dead.” I have been in others that are so chaotic you cannot really get yourself centered and worship God. It seems as if the Corinthians are in the latter category. And so I end with the quote I started with, “It is better to drink wine from a wine glass, then lick it from a table cloth”—some order is good. I think this comment about women is less about keeping women downtrodden (consider 1 Corinthians 11:2-16) and more about an orderly worship. Chapter 11 was all about head coverings, but in that chapter we read specifically about women prophesying...speaking in church!

**I should note that even though I am pointing this out, the New Testament is by far the best preserved book from the ancient world. Classic texts such as Homer and Cicero are preserved in only a handful of texts all much later than the original; the New Testament is preserved literally in thousands of copies all with years of the original.