What Paul Really Said About Women

Reference: John Temple Bristow. What Paul Really Said About Women: An Apostle’s Liberating Views on Equality in Marriage, Leadership, and Love (New York; HarperCollins Publishers, 1988.

Paul is perhaps the most maligned apostle of Jesus Christ. Others call him “arch-male-chauvinist” who believes in the inequality of men and women in marriage relationship, church leadership and matters of love. It is as if demeaning women—using proof texts from Paul that are mistranslated and misinterpreted—is biblical. Yet, the opposite is true. The degradation of women is not Paul’s; it’s Greek philosophy that permeates modern construal, considering women as second class. Socrates in particular disdained women as “the weaker sex”—half-way between being man and animal (4). Hence, the followers of Greek philosophy adhered, women are inferior to men. That is according to the Athenian custom where women are subject to men’s commands, object of men’s physical pleasures without due honor. Added to these is the Stoic norm that treats women as distraction from the pursuit of philosophy and womanly beauty as temptation to men (9).

During Paul’s era, the Greek concept of womanhood was influential among Christians who grew up after Alexander’s greatest campaign for Hellenization of cultures. Is Paul in conformity? Quite the contrary. Paul was also a student of Gamaliel, an exceptional teacher and philosopher who valued womanhood (27). Paul was a radical teacher of equality of sexes, unlike his predecessors and modern interpreters. He is concerned with women in church leadership. As the custom of the Jewish worship was, men and women are separated in congregational worship within the synagogues—men on the main hall, women at the balcony far (and hidden) from the eyes of men. But Paul, in Jesus’ tradition, honored women, talked with them, and valued them equal to men. Hence Paul also recognized the importance of women in church leadership. He baptized women (Acts 16:11-15) and treated them with equality in his ministry (17:34). He respected women leadership in local churches. For example, his dealing with Euodia, Synteche, Prisca or Priscilla (1 Cor 16:19; Rom 16:3-4), Phoebe and other eight women among twenty-six men in leadership (16:1ff), and probably Junias (v.7), are indicators of Paul’s appraisal of women leadership. There is greater certainty that Paul approved “the practice of having women lead in worship alongside with men.” (57)

For Paul, women can deliver inspired messages as a form of prophecy (Acts 2:17-18; Cf. Joel 2:28-32). There were, indeed, women prophetess in the early church (Acts 11:21,13:1;15:32;21:9-10). It is also reasonably an established practice in the church (within a biased Greek culture) that women pray and prophecy in public worship (1 Cor 11:4-5). Paul’s positive outlook on women as “the glory of man”(11:7) is supported by his argument that “woman was created because man needs women”(v.9)(59) and every man cam out from a woman as his mother (60). Paul’s following argument that women should be “silent” should be interpreted like that of Jesus’ voluntary silence (Mk 14:61). Since women were known for having conversation in public gathering—not accustomed to listening to public speakers—Paul, in retrospect to orderliness and decorum urged women to cease from talking to each other. Paul “did not write that women are not to preach, or teach, or declare, or give discourse, or proclaim, or affirm, or aver, or speak for something.”(63). For as there is no male or female in Christ, all of humanity is equal; women are not inferior men. As a matter of fact, Paul affirmed their leadership in church. Any interpretation of male dominance is, certainly, not Pauline.