1 Corinthians 14:34-35
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.
A comment about this passage form HorsesAss
Mark Adams spews:
You know … this was after the break up of the original super group Peter Paul and Mary Paul was really upset with the residuals and there were arguments over who owned the rights and all. Mary really wanted to do that gig at Delphi and do a little speaking in tongues and prophesy and show up the priestess. She could have done it man, but Paul wanted center stage.
Still this passage is used to keep those women folk quiet and down on the farm. Some churches and the Muslims take it to the extreme of separate services for the sexes. Or all the men over here and all the women over there. It’s rather hard to hide the politics on this one though since in temples of the ancient world there were women priestesses and acolytes and they played a strong role in those temples and in some were more important then men. The Hebrews struggled against religions that believed in the feminine and masculine and that both were needed. (Ok those societies were not always perfect about this). Religion and politics and society collide on this one. It’s very much about what men and women get, where, when, but the society we want supplies the why. Paul speaking for god here tries to short circuit this struggle between the sexes. It need not be a struggle, it can be a rather fun tit for tat, but unless one goes for being a monk or nun a completely segregated temple of ones religious choice it’s a struggle we all participate in whether at home, at work, at the market, in church. Ah yes I came, I saw, she conquered. Paul probably wouldn’t agree with that one, even if he saw there could be truth in that. Now the god in Job would see that and get a chuckle out of it. Not Paul’s.
Yet this is no small matter. How do we treat the other half of humanity who are much the same yet so different from us, and so essentially in having a life worth living.