15.Women Should be at Home — Titus 2:3-5
In a letter to Titus, Paul outlines some guidelines for young women that, at first glance, feel quite restrictive and rather gender stereotypical. He tells young women that they should “love their husbands and children… be working at home… and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”

In Paul’s era,[even up to 100 years back] girls received little to no education, and had very little prospects for work outside the home. Again, the social structure was dominated by males. Jews and Greeks would not have questioned this inferior place given to women, but the people of Jesus believed that everyone was made in God’s image. They valued everyone that society ignored. As these revolutionary ideas spread, members of the old guard began to associate Christianity with “loose women,” women who were not following the rules of hearth and home. So Paul, here again, teaches women to be submissive to their husbands. Far from inferring that women should have no opinions, or never disagree with their spouses, Paul’s focus was on how the newfound freedom of Christians was making the faith appear to those not yet initiated. After giving his advice to young wives, Paul says as much, stating that the motivation for their submission is that “the word of God may not be reviled.” Paul will go on to talk about freedom, to both men and women, in similar language. For Paul, freedom wasn’t something to be rubbed in others noses, but rather something to give up if it became a wall keeping your friends and neighbors from coming to know Jesus. Paul would say this about the food we eat, the people we associate with, and the way we interact with authority figures (even the ones who hate us).

16.Women Should Be Silent — 1 Corinthians 14:26-40
In this passage, Paul says “women should be silent in the churches… they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive. And if they want to learn something, they should ask their own husbands at home.”

It is like hearing only one end of a phone conversation. The advice Paul gives to the church in Corinth is hard to completely understand because we don’t know what problems he was addressing. It is generally assumed from the context surrounding these verses that the church’s worship gatherings were quite chaotic. Far removed from our modern church services, which are meticulously planned and generally only allow one person to address the entire church at a time, these ancient gatherings may have been more of an open forum type meeting. Paul’s goal is for the gatherings to help the church grow strong and he reminds the believers that confusion is not from God.

Since Paul elsewhere values women and appoints them as leaders in the early churches (Phoebe is just one example of that—there’s also Chloe, Junia, and many more), it seems highly unlikely that he was meaning to bar every woman from ever speaking in a church assembly.

So what exactly did he mean? We do understand, from history, that women were not allowed to play a direct role in worship at the Jewish synagogue. So Christianity was breaking down the male-female barrier everywhere it went, including in worship, allowing women to not only participate but to even take leading roles. With a seismic shift of that magnitude, it’s easy to believe that some churches would need some guidance as they navigated the way forward.

Paul has been dealing with a group of Christians whose worship gatherings were disorderly, chaotic and damaging. In verses 26-40, he basically sums up his whole argument, the big idea being: we are to love one another with our spiritual gifts, using them to build each other up in following Jesus Christ.

Every Christian has a spiritual gift. And everyone can have something given to them by the Holy Spirit to contribute at a church gathering. The problem is, if everyone wants to contribute at once, it can cause chaos.

Everybody has a potential contribution, but it is to be ordered and filtered with one question: Will this build everyone else up? If so, we should say it. If not, we should keep quiet.

In 1 Corinthians 11:5 where Paul assumes women are prophesying and praying in church, and he doesn’t correct them whatsoever. So why and when should women keep silence? Verses 35 holds the key to understanding what Paul is talking about.

If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

The first clue is the first phrase. Paul isn’t referring to the positive contribution that women are making, he’s referring to their response to what is being contributed. The problem appears to be in the way they were responding to what was being taught. And these were apparently married women, because Paul says that they need to “ask their husbands at home.”

This is probably the biggest clue to what Paul is talking about in this section: “For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” In our present day culture, it can be difficult to understand this. But in shame-honor cultures, shame is a big deal.

This section likely has to do with women who were shamefully interrogating their husbands during the prophecy part of the church service. This would make sense in light of this section coming right after the part about prophecy, in light of the main point of the passage (orderly, edifying worship) and in light of verses 36-38, where Paul continues to talk about prophecy. In his conclusion, he says to “earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues” (v. 39) without mentioning the part about women – so this wasn’t one of his main points, but a sub-point of the part about prophecy. Finally, the overarching theme is found in verse 40: “But all things should be done decently and in order.”

It’s rather impossible to believe that Paul would elevate women to leadership positions in some churches and bar them from speaking in others. This hard advice to the church in Corinth, when viewed through our 2021 goggles, seems terribly misogynistic. But in the eyes of the original culture, the writings of Paul would have a very visible contribution of advancing the rights of women, not restricting them.

Paul, like Jesus, taught that women were not less than men and saw them as equals in the work of spreading the Gospel. The fact that Paul even writes directly to women is astounding given his cultural context, and further supports the fact that he saw women as of unparalleled consequence to the future of Christianity.

To sum up: The creation of woman in the Bible story tells that God made woman from the rib of man. The undertone is that God used rib that was close to the heart of man, ie. opening his heart for the woman as he took the rib out and she was to walk shoulder to shoulder with Adam. And therefore woman has been given a respectable position in the Bible. Even when referring to the first sin, it is mentioned of as the sin of Adam, not the sin of Eve as it is in the Quran. However the Quran and the Hadiths show that woman is inferior to man and is made as a slave to man. Woman has no independent existence and woman has to prostrate before her husband as she would before Allah. And she could not please Allah without pleasing and making her husband happy. From this one would get the impression that Eve in the Quran is created from the heel bone of Adam to trample down his wife. Hadiths mentions that woman was made from a crooked rib, indicating that woman is never good being.

 

Women were prominent presence at the crucifixion and resurrection. In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene is the only woman at the tomb (in Matthew’s there are two, in Mark’s three, and in Luke’s an indeterminate number). They were the first to know of the Resurrection of Jesus. They were sent to tell the news to the brothers. The word ‘apostle’ comes from the Greek apostellein, ‘to send’. Therefore the first apostles of the distinctive Christian proclamation of the Resurrection were women. Indeed, Mary Magdalene is traditionally known as “the apostle to the apostles,” apostola apostolorum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Block letters in the quotations are added, not in the original quotation, to give stress to some particular words.

The hadiths quoted in here are taken from sunnah.com and the Quran quotations unless mentioned are from Sahih International.

Alvin Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World. Originally published under the title Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001.

Sex with animals: https://www.islamquest.net/en/archive/fa8061 accessed on 10th July,2021.

Female Circumcision: https://islamqa.info/en/9412 accessed on 10th July, 2021

Sex with Children: https://www.shiachat.com/forum/topic/234992241-disturbing-khomeini-quote/ accessed on 10^th July, 2021.