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“Prophetesses and 1 Corinthians 11”
Categories: M. W. Bassford, Meditations
At the risk of re-igniting the smoldering debate about the role of women in the church, I did see one issue in the comments on the subject that I wanted to address (and no, I am still not interested in a sprawling online argument about the issue generally! I leave that for local congregations to work out for themselves.). In 1 Corinthians 11:5, Paul writes, “. . . every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head. . .” I am not interested in debating the covering either, but it is evident from this text that there were women in the Corinthian church who had the gift of prophecy, and that when they were prophesying, they were supposed to cover their heads.
In this, many see a contradiction with the rule of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which says that women were to keep silence in the assembly. In fact, back in my religious-studies days, I read authors who argued that 11:5 was proof that 14:34-35 is a later, non-Pauline insertion.
I agree that these texts could contradict each other, but they don’t necessarily do so. 1 Corinthians 14 specifies a setting: the assembly. However, the same is not true in 1 Corinthians 11:1-16. In fact, the language “every woman” is quite broad, and it leads naturally to the assumption that Paul is speaking of what is proper for women in any setting. Whether the whole church was gathered together or not, Corinthian women were supposed to cover their heads when praying or prophesying.
Thus, it’s reasonable to read these passages as telling women in the assembly to remain silent and women with prophetic gifts to cover their heads when prophesying outside of the assembly. As always, we shouldn’t read contradictions into the Scripture unless the apparent contradiction cannot be harmonized.
This interpretation might seem strained to some, but it lines up with the Scriptural evidence. To my knowledge, there are only two places in the entire Bible where we see a prophetess prophesying (I think it’s unclear what Miriam is doing in Exodus 15). The first is in 2 Chronicles 34:22-28, when Huldah the prophetess predicts disaster for the kingdom of Judah after Josiah dies. The second appears in Luke 2:36-38, when Anna the prophetess starts telling anyone who will listen that the Messiah has come.
Neither one of these prophecies occurs in the context of an assembly. In 2 Chronicles 24, Huldah speaks her piece in her own home when Josiah sends some court officials to her. Luke 2 is a little murkier because it at least occurs on the temple grounds (in the Court of the Women, naturally), but it’s hard to imagine that the chief priests would have allowed a woman (of the tribe of Asher, no less!) to address a temple assembly. The best reading of the text is that Anna is going from worshiper to worshiper, telling them the good news.
Clearly, prophesying outside of an assembly was something that God’s prophetesses could do and did. On the other hand, we have no examples of a woman prophesying in an assembly in either the Old or the New Testament. Those with a mind to use 1 Corinthians 11 to overturn 1 Corinthians 14 may object, but the best reading of the text is that the Corinthian prophetesses were out-of-the-assembly prophetesses too. Thus, the passage poses no obstacle to the plain meaning of 14:34-35.
