Silence, Woman!

Friends, if you’ve been using some of these scriptures as sexist bludgeons, I say unto you, go and sin no more.

I saw what you did there. I saw what you did. You brought it, brought it around.

It’s just a full circle sort of thing. I had that one in my back pocket right there.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are going well. It’s, it’s ladies night here on Data Over Dogma because we are going to explore two Bible stories involving women, which is always an interesting moment. Neither of them have a name, which is common in Bible stories, I suppose. Yeah, but. Yeah, but we’re going to be doing some interesting… We’re looking at them in an interesting way. This is going to be textual healing. All right, that’s, that’s, that’s what we’re calling the segment, so maybe we should just dive on in.

All right, let’s do it. What are we looking at first?

So the first thing we’re going to look at is from John and it… We’re… If you go by what several internet sources that I looked at say it starts in John, chapter 7, verse 53, which is the very last verse right. In the chapter of John 7 . And it’s the weirdest place to switch chapters I’ve ever thought I’ve ever encountered in my life because it starts with. Then each of them went home, comma, and then we go on to chapter eight. So it’s really just the beginning of John, chapter eight. Yeah, but that’s just the weirdest break I’ve ever seen and might be indicative of what we’re going to be talking about. Yeah, I don’t know.

This is the, the famous story of the woman taken in adultery, caught in adultery, the Pericope Adulterae, as some people who cannot pronounce Latin very well, such as myself, like to call it. This is the famous story where Jesus’s opponents bring this woman and throw her on the ground before him, and then he doodles in the dirt of the temple floor. So it’s been, it’s been brought up before on our show, but this time we’re actually going to talk in a little more detail about what’s going on. And let me see if I can find the… How many verses are in here. So it looks like we’ve got 12 verses. Should we just go ahead and read through it first, just to kind of set the table or.

I mean, I don’t know that we need to get all… We need to do the whole thing. Basically, we got Jesus. He’s in the temple, right? All the people came to him and sat down and he began to teach them.

So when… When people argue that when the text says all, it means all. So this means every last person on earth came to Jesus, literally?

If you’re a Bible literalist, then yes, all of the humans on earth came and sat at his feet in the temple, in Jerusalem.

Let me just make sure that’s in the Greek. Yep.

Okay. Good, good, good, good, good. So everybody on earth came, the scribes and the Pharisees. Why did the scribes… Why were they involved? Anyway, a bunch of dudes brought a woman who had been caught literally in the act of adultery. In flagrante delicto, as they say.

That’s… Disgusting.

And anyway, they apparently grabbed her out of the act, dragged her to Jesus and demanded that the law of Moses says that they’re supposed to stone such a woman, right? And apparently trying to catch him out on something, they say. What do you say? It literally says verse six. Says they said this to test him so that they might have some char. Some charge to bring against him.

Right?

What does that mean? What, like, so they’re just. They’re. They’re trying to catch him in a theological faux pas so that he. So that they can charge him with a crime or what kind of.

They’re trying to catch him in between a rock and a hard place, force him to answer one of two ways. Either say, yes, she needs to be stoned. Stone her, or no, she doesn’t need to be stoned. And if he says yes, then they can go to the Romans and wag their fingers and say, see, he wanted to execute this woman, but we don’t have authority to execute. That is. That is unilaterally the. The prerogative of Rome. And so they could get Jesus in trouble with Rome if he says, no, don’t stone her, then Jesus is in trouble with the local authorities because he’s denying the law of Moses.

Even though he’s in trouble with Moses.

Yeah, even though this obviously was not something that was practiced at the time. But it’s. It’s basically they’re. They’re trying to force him to. To choose one of two options which they imagine either way will be helpful for them. And. And this is something that this is a frequent rhetorical ploy for the author of John that they’re trying to. They’re trying to trick Jesus into either incriminating himself in regards to the Romans or in regards to the law of Moses.

Yeah. Okay, so this is where Jesus, as you put it, doodles in the ground. We do not get to know what he wrote on the gr. In the dirt with his finger.

So I have a theory about this, though.

Oh, wow.

And this. There. There are people like, oh, they wrote the names of all the people who were standing around, or he wrote their sins, and they all were individually convicted. But there is another part of the Bible, and I think I brought it up on the. On the show before, where we have suspected adultery, where we have the temple, where we have writing, where we have the dirt of the temple floor.

Oh, I know exactly what this is. This is Numbers.

This is Numbers 5 , the Sotah, the ordeal of bitter waters, where the. If the man suspects his wife of adultery, he can bring her to the priest, and the priest writes out a curse and scrapes the ink of the curse off into a pot full of water and then takes dirt from the temple floor and chucks that in the pot as well. And then she has to. She has a line that she says, and then she’s to drink the bitter water. And then if she’s innocent, the text says she will conceive. And if she is guilty, basically she is deformed, so that she is rendered basically infertile. Probably would kill her if. If this thing, what it says actually happens as a womb will distend or something like that, and her and her genitals will drop and.

And we won’t get back into our. Our argument about whether that means that she had an abortion or not.

Right, right, right. But so what we have here, I would argue, is kind of the themes here are being brought together where Jesus is basically being represented as the one who has this authority. Because in. In the Sotah, it is God who declares guilt or innocence. Right. Because they don’t have evidence. And so that’s what an ordeal is. That’s throw the witch in the river. If she drowns, she wasn’t a witch. If she lives, we execute her. Either way, things don’t. Do not go well for the woman accused of being a witch. But it’s a way of. Of saying God’s gonna decide. Right. How it goes. And so Jesus writing in the dirt of the temple floor is kind of evoking, in my opinion, this. The idea of writing of adultery of guilt, of innocence, of being before Adonai, before the Lord in the temple. And so I. I don’t think he was writing anything at all. One. It’s not historical.

This is. This is a literary creation, so.

How dare you.

There is. I’ve. I’m on record saying this for multiple years now. So, you know, there is no. There is nothing real behind this literary creation. So there was nothing to be written. But I. I think the literary point is to have the writing to make people think of, ah, the writing of the curse that gets scraped into the water and mixed in with the dirt from the temple floor. So that’s my opinion. I don’t know that others. I don’t know if other scholars have made that argument before. In fact, I might need to write a paper about that or something. If no one has made that argument before.

Hear, hear. But because we don’t know, we don’t have any more information about this than just what’s on the page. My theory is just as valid as yours, which is that he was just stalling for time while he tried to.

Figure out what he was going to say.

He’s just like. Well, he’s looking like he was doing something portentous while he. While he figured out. I.

Sorry, I was just thinking of the scene in Big Lebowski where he’s in the guy’s home and he takes a phone call and he’s doodling something on it. He’s writing something on the pad.

Jackie Treehorn.

Yeah. And uses the. Tries to make a little squeeze of what was.

Yeah. Lebowski jumps up and takes a pencil and does a pencil rubbing of the next page to figure out what he was writing. And he just. It was a dirty doodle anyway, so. Yes. So Jesus has been dirty. Dirty doodling on the ground. Literally dirty. It was literal dirt. And then verse seven, when they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, let anyone among you. See, this is where the KJV has an advantage because it’s such a better wording than this. But I’m just gonna do the NRSV. Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.

Yeah.

So this is the very famous line which is better rendered, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Much more poetic, Much nicer, less clunky, but. And. And very famous, too. Right, right. And they all sort of disperse with a harumph one by one, says they.

Being convicted by their own conscience. Well, that’s what KJV says they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. Oh, it doesn’t say anything about convicted. Oh, that must be. I bet that’s part of the Textus Receptus. That is not in the critical text. That’s verse.

And we’re gonna get to what’s in what’s, what’s in what text soon anyway.

Yes.

You know, then Jesus says, hey, that, you know, the, the woman. He’s left there alone with the woman. And she, he says, has anyone, has no one condemned you? Meaning didn’t. Did anyone throw a rock at you? And she says, no. And, and he says, neither do I condemn you. Go your way. And again doing bad wording. And from now on, do not sin again or go and sin no more. Which is a much better wording. And RSV sometimes you can use the better wording if you want to, even if it, or the nicer sounding wording.

Yeah, that is a, that is pretty clunky wording.

Yeah. So anyway, that’s the story. I think most, most people have heard that one. Most people like.

Oh yeah, pretty. That’s one of the most famous stories from the Bible.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But in your NRSVUE, what comes after the quotation mark?

Two brackets.

Two closing brackets.

Closing brackets.

Brackets which open up way back at John 7:53 .

Correct.

Yeah. And there’s, there’s a note there that probably says something along the lines of most ancient authorities lack or omit or something like that. Verse 7:53 all the way through 8:11.

And I don’t know why they needed to double bracket it. Were they really, were they worried that a single bracket just was insufficient to contain all of this stuff?

I, I guess so. I, I, maybe it doesn’t stand out if it’s a bracket. They might use brackets for like, interjections and things like that and other, other parts of the text.

You’re right. Yes. There is a footnote that says the most ancient authorities lack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so talk, talk about that.

Yeah. What we’re after here, when we say most ancient authorities, we mean every single authority before the 4th century CE. Now that’s wow. And then, and then many that come after the 4th century CE. But additionally, once it does start showing up in manuscripts, it’s not in this spot in John. One of the early manuscripts that has it, actually has the story in Luke, and then the other ones that have it in John have it in different spots in the Gospel before it ultimately kind of settles in the location where we find it. Now, and there’s a book called, by Bruce Metzger called Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament from 1971. And I highly recommend this book for anybody who has an interest in textual criticism of the New Testament. It basically goes through. And where there are significant manuscript variants, you’ll find anywhere from a sentence to a few paragraphs explaining what’s going on there. And so they’re, they’re actually two pages and then a few extra lines of two other pages discussing this variant.

And it starts off, the evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming. And then lists 1, 2, 3, 4, like 20 manuscripts that do not have this.

And, and we’re not talking about. I mean, this is New Testament, which means that it seems to me that these manuscripts are likely, these older manuscripts are likely definitive, meaning they, they come from much closer to the time that, that this was. Yeah. That this text was produced.

Yeah. Now there is older doesn’t necessarily mean more original because you can have things fall out, you can have things added in almost anywhere along the way. But when this happens, there are two reasons it can happen. It can be intentional or it can be unintentional. And when it’s unintentional, we usually can tell. We usually have evidence that this has happened. For instance, there are cases where the scribe is reading, they move over to their other text where they write, and then they come back to the manuscript. And usually when you end, you make note of either the word that just ended or the word that starts that you haven’t copied. And you come and you look for that either end of word or beginning of the word to see where you’re going to come back to. And if you have words in close connection to each other that either end the same way or begin the same way, sometimes the scribal eye will go to the wrong word, and you can either repeat words or you can skip words.

Homoioteleuton is where the word ends in the same way, and homoioarkton is where the next word begins the same way. And that can account for haplography, which is where you, where words are omitted, or dittography, which is where words are repeated. You, you really have nothing like that that could possibly account for how this could be omitted. And so there’s no real way to account for how this could be. This could have been left out of all of these very early manuscripts.

Right.

And so from a text critical point of view, we’re about as sure as we can be that this is something that somebody added later to a manuscript that did not originally have it.

This is one of those funny moments where the, where this is a beloved moment in the scripture. You know what I mean?

Powerful story.

I love this story in the scripture. So like I, it’s hard to let go of this. But so, you know, it’s so funny that like someone has. We now see someone adding something that’s really cool. Like what, I don’t know what their motivation was for adding it. I, I’m guessing we don’t even have any guesses as to the who added it or what the motivation was or any of that sort of thing.

No, we don’t. There’s, there aren’t any clues as to who could have been responsible for this. I, I think just the somebody at some point came up with a story, though. There are probably numerous stories similar to this in the sense of little one off short stories about Jesus that were in circulation orally and probably even in text around the first, second, third centuries that, you know, we never found out about and will never find out about. And this is probably just one of those stories that happened to work its way into one of the gospel texts and because of how powerful it is thought to be or that it is, it has just stuck around. And you know, even the NRSVue, which we know this is not, was not written by the author of John is still leaving it in there. I mean, they have the double brackets, but you can’t cut this out without.

You know, breaking some hearts.

Yeah, a lot of people would be upset about that. However, there are. There. Not everything is about. This story is all rainbows and butterflies. There’s a wonderful book called The Good Book by Jill Hicks-Keaton, which we need to have her on the show. I talked about, I talked to her about being on the show and her book, The Good Book is about how particularly white evangelicals try to save the Bible, to save themselves. In other words, they try to make everything about the Bible sound good. And she goes in and tries to show that there are lots of ways that a lot of these stories actually are not as good as we would like them to be. And there is a lengthy discussion about this pericope because it is, it is still pretty misogynist the way the story is told.

Yeah, that’s true. For instance, there’s no man brought in for taking.

Yeah, the, the man is, you know, he’s fine. Nothing wrong with, with what he’s doing now. There’s an argument to make that technically it might there might not be anything wrong if I don’t think the story says. But if he were the married one, then there wouldn’t really be an issue here. No, it would have to be her who was. Who was married, in which case, yeah, it would be a problem. But, yeah, the. The law says that he should be stoned as well, so. Right. They’re. They’re focusing only on her.

And maybe he was just fast. They could only get her. They. They. They caught them in the act.

Fleet of foot, you mean?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. And he got away.

Yeah. Yeah, he managed. I mean, could have been in. In all the ways. He could have been quick in. In every way, but yes, I was.

Gonna say because it was in the act.

There’s a. Yes, there’s a naked guy running around Jerusalem that they don’t talk about in this story.

But yeah, but if. If we assume that either the author had more details in mind or that the way the story was circulated, there were more details that accreted to it. You know, she’s not exonerated. Like, Jesus is. Is not saying, hey, you’re fine. He says, hey, you know, I’m basically. This is about me. This is about tricking me into, you know, criminalizing myself to one group or another. You’re a pawn in a story about me. Your life hangs in the balance as a pawn in a story about me. And. And there are other ways that. That Jill talks about how it’s still a story deeply rooted in misogyny and patriarchy.

Yes.

And in. In a culture that treats the lives and the agency of women as superfluous, as expendable, as supplements and, you know, window dressing to a world that is by, for, and about men. So. Yeah, it is. While it is a powerful story about forgiveness, it is still ultimately a deeply sexist one.

Save some of the. The condemnation of misogyny. For the second story, we’re gonna show.

Okay.

You know, I. I did want to go back to the idea that the NRSV decide. Did decide to leave this in. And the reason that I want to talk about that is because we’ve talked about other verses that they have chosen to exclude.

Yeah.

For. On these grounds. On the grounds that this was very likely not original to the text, and therefore we’re going to exclude them, and we have evidence. And I remember you talking about, you know, the. The seeing the thing in the margins. So we had. So we had a reason to know that it was a scribe interpolating something into the text.

Yeah.

Is. Is. Is that the reason why those are excluded and we don’t have that much, that degree of evidence and why that’s why they’re leaving this in. Or do you think they’re leaving it in just because it’s beloved?

I think they’re leaving it in probably for two reasons. One is how long it is. It’s not a single verse. It’s. I think it was 12 verses. And so the, that’s a huge chunk. But yes, the other reason would be how beloved it is because you’ve got you, the, the lines you draw between what you leave in and take out can, can get pretty thin. And if you have the option of saying we can always mark it off as something, then, you know, that’s, that’s an easier decision to make. That makes the decision a lot easier because you’re giving up a lot to totally omit this story. And there’s a degree to which Bible translations are also trying to represent the tradition in addition to just the text itself. Like the, the NRSV is the property of a, like, colloquium of churches. And so even when they were doing all the updates that just got published last year with the updated edition, everything had to be signed off on by the representatives from this colloquium of churches.

And so there are still Bible believers behind this who are, who are pulling strings. And so I’m sure that’s a part of it as well. And we talked about the ending of Mark, how that is also almost certainly a late addition. But, you know, you’re not going to find many Bible translations willing to just say, hey, we’re just going to omit all of this because it is something that has been influential within Christianity and the Bible for literally 2,000 years. So. Right.

I do think that the, I mean, in terms of omission versus versus leaving it in, it seems obvious to me and you can, you can sort of back me up or check me on this. It seems obvious to me that throughout the Bible, especially going back to the Hebrew Bible, there was, there was clearly a, a tradition of leaving in, of bringing in stories that they felt were worthy. And you know, even if, like, even if it wasn’t true or like, you know, if it was a, an uplifting or a good story or it illustrated something, there’s a tradition of leaving that in or put, or putting that in. And it. So it feels like to some extent, even if this wasn’t original to the author of John, it’s in keeping with the idea, with the ideas of, of, you know, good things belong in Scripture.

Yeah, and this is. And this is that or something.

Yeah, I, I think there’s, I, you know, I’ve said it before. I get asked all the time, what’s the best translation? And my answer is usually somewhere along the lines of whatever translation does the job for you, does whatever you’re engaging the Bible to do. And, and yeah, a part of the purpose of, of Scriptures is to inspire and, you know, things like the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Completely fictional. Fictional. That’s not a word. Fictional. I think I couldn’t decide between fiction and fictional and just went with neither. One of the most powerful stories in all of the New Testament. And so this is as well. And so it serves a purpose and which I think, yeah, gives a lot of people reason to hold on to it.

Okay, that’s great. I think that that is a wonderful discussion and I think we should turn from a beloved story to a problematic story.

Problematic. Okay.

And we’ll, and, and we’ll get. So this is, we’re going to need some real textual healing on this thing. When I get that, oh, I can’t sing songs. Okay, so we’re going to, we’re jumping to First Corinthians, chapter 14. Now you’ve made. I, I call. I, I messaged you about this because you made a couple, you made some posts about this because there’s a new paper that just came out discussing this in depth.

Yes. So we’re looking at 1 Corinthians 14 , and there are a couple passages in here that are infamous or, or famous or infamous. Not just famous, it’s infamous, depending on. On your outlook that have to do with. With women speaking in church. So I’ll just read the two as they appear in the New Revised Standard Version. So this is 1 Corinthians 14 , verses 34 and 35. They read, Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate. As the law also says, if there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Now, this is problematic for a number of reasons. To begin, we just got done a few chapters earlier with Paul explaining that, hey, when women are prophesying in church, they just need to have their hair covered.

And so it seems odd for the same author a few chapters later to just be like, by the way, women. Nope, can’t say.

Yeah, not only are they not allowed to prophesy, they can’t talk. Yeah, that seems like a big reversal to have within the space of a few verses.

Yeah. And this is an odd thing to appear here because we’ve just got done talking about prophecy. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If someone sitting receives a revelation, let the first person be silent, for you can all prophesy one by one so that all may learn and all be encouraged. And so this is. We’re kind of going back to the discussion in 1 Corinthians 11 . And the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. And then suddenly, by the way, women have to shut up. And then it goes back to. Or did the word of God originate with you? Are or are you the only ones it has reached? So it seems like it’s out of place. Like it’s. There’s this sudden interjection. Wait, I forgot, I hate women. Let me make that clear. And then. And then it returns to what they were talking about before.

Because you’re right, that’s the section that’s talking about, like, you know, if anyone speaks. And it’s just sort of talking about keeping. You know, the section in the NRSV is. Has a section heading called Orderly Worship. And it’s just sort of how to keep things from getting a little out of hand when two, you know, let two or three prophets speak. But it starts out, what should be done then, My brothers and sisters, when you come together.

NRSV. Yeah, in their NRSVUE, it. It says that. However, in the Greek, it’s. It’s adelphoi, which is masculine plural, vocative. Now, in the Greek, if you were addressing a company of mixed gender, you would default to the plural masculine plural, which is common in a number of languages.

So it’s not English in some cases, like, yeah, you can say mankind and mean all of humankind. There’s there. There is a tradition of that that we’ve largely eschewed. But, I mean, it’s there in our history.

It’s there. Yes. And so, yeah, it’s. It’s not clear if this is speaking just about brethren or the brethren and the sisters.

All right?

But we have. We have translations that do that. The New English Translation does the same. Brothers and sisters. The NRSV UE does the same. But we just got done talking about women speaking in tongues and everything like that. And verse 14 or verse 27 says, if anyone speaks in a tongue, let there only be two or at most three. And each in turn and let one interpret. So provided nothing has changed between, I think, chapter 11 and chapter 14, this should be including the women. Yeah. Um, and then it’s like, yeah, let’s just make sure everybody is, you know, they’re, they have a, their own seat and they’re dressed the right way.

And then, and also. Ladies, shut up.

Yeah, and then, and then make sure everybody’s got a drink and we want to make sure that it’s, that it’s cool enough. And the veil. However, there’s also, there are manuscripts where this, this interjection, these two verses don’t appear right here. They appear down after verse 40 at the very end of the chapter. So we have what, what I like to call textual instability.

Okay.

Which means it’s not clear where exactly this was intended to go, which is frequently a sign that it is a late addition. Not every time, but the trend is in that direction. Just like we talked about with the woman taken in adultery, initially, it’s popping up in different places within John and even in different gospels. And so here as well, it’s in different parts. And there’s, and you know, we talked about scribes going back and skipping words or repeating words or things like that because they’re, they, they have what’s called eye skips. Parablepsis is the, is the two dollar word for that. And that’s where you go back to the wrong spot.

Right.

And sometimes words can be transposed for that reason. None of the words around this text can explain why it would be in one place versus the other. In other words, there’s no good explanation for why a scribe would accidentally have moved it to the other place. And if it were just accidentally moved by a scribe, it would be the largest chunk of text ever known to have been transposed in a biblical manuscript. Yeah. Because when we, when we look at the woman taken in adultery, that’s because they’re, they’re trying to find a place to stick it. Once they’ve stuck it somewhere, it, it stays there. But there’s no way that or there’s not a, a good case to make for a scribe accidentally moving it from one place to the other, which is supportive of the conclusion that it was a late addition.

Now, the reason I made these posts because this paper that just came out by a scholar named Richard Fellows, and it’s entitled the interpolation of 1 Corinthians 14:34 through 35 and the reversal of the Name Order of Prisca and Aquila at 1 Corinthians 16:19 . And this is an open access paper, so maybe we can include a link to the paper in the show notes so that anyone who wants to go read this paper for themselves can have quick access to it.

Wouldn’t it be great if I remembered to do that? I hope I do.

Well, hopefully you’ll get some emails. And Fellows here is not just making a stronger case that this is an interpolation. People have been arguing for a long time that this is an interpolation. In fact, I’ve made videos where I’ve suggested that it’s probably the consensus view. I don’t have any robust data to indicate that. It’s just that when I’ve seen scholarly discussions of this. Seems to me that the majority of scholars agree that this is an interpolation, or at least does not originate with Paul. But in addition to these verses, he argues that verse 37 has been changed as well. Verse 37, right now says anyone who claims to be a prophet or spiritual must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. However, there are manuscripts, a number of manuscripts that just say that what I am writing to you is of the Lord.

Yeah. NRSVue has a footnote on the word command and it says other ancient authorities lack a command. So what I am writing to you is of the Lord. Interesting.

And this would, a command of the Lord would be uncharacteristic of Pauline writing. And so Fellows makes the case that this is also a late addition, probably by whoever added these two verses as a way to say women are not allowed to speak. Not only that, this is a command of the Lord, basically escalating the authority with which they say that women are not allowed to speak. So it’s not just, it’s not just, ooh, you know, kind of touchy feely of the Lord, but no, this is a command of the Lord. Right. So, and then we’ve got this interesting case of 1 Corinthians 16:19 where Paul makes a reference to Prisca, which is a woman’s name, and Aquila, which is a man’s name. And these two people are mentioned a few other times elsewhere in the New Testament, but in every other occurrence, it is Prisca who is mentioned first and Aquila was mentioned afterwards.

Here in 1 Corinthians 16:19 , Aquila is mentioned first and Prisca is mentioned afterwards. So this verse has the man mentioned first. Everywhere else it’s the woman who’s mentioned first. And there is a, a lot of people understand Prisca to have been mentioned first because she was an authority within the within the church system, more so than Aquila. And so the alteration here, the switching of the two is again, probably by the same person who put these two verses in there, intended to be a way to undermine the ecclesiastical authority of women. In the passage to demote Prisca.

Yeah. To. To being under her man.

Yeah.

Wait, when are we thinking of Prisca and Aquila as as a couple? Or are they just two different people who are mentioned in the same breath with each other?

I’m pretty sure they’re they’re considered a couple. Let me just see if I have any. Yes. Prisca and her husband.

Okay.

So, yeah, it’s a way to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. The. The man’s in charge here. And so again, probably by the same person. And this would resonate. This rhetoric that we find particularly in 1 Corinthians 14 , would resonate with rhetoric we find in places like 1 Timothy 2 , which is even more explicit. In fact, let me take a look at 1 Timothy 2:11 . Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She is to keep silent. And why is that? For Adam was formed first, then Eve. Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. So the snake tricked Eve. Therefore Eve doesn’t get any authority.

Right.

And neither do any women. Scholars are in widespread agreement that this passage in First Timothy, along with the rest of First Timothy and Second Timothy and Titus weren’t written by Paul, but were probably written decades after his death. And make these texts agree a little better about how we’re in charge and women cannot be, even when it comes to mentioning Aquila before Prisca. Which is funny because Prisca— Prisca is mentioned first in the Epistles of Timothy.

Right. I just think, you know, is. There may be people listening to this who don’t appreciate, you know, they. They can appreciate the. The. That it’s interesting that, you know, something was added in. But the. The. This. The importance of these verses has echoed through the ages to very… To, right, like… Like one year ago, less. Almost exactly a year ago, the. The Southern Baptist Convention kicked out a whole bunch of congregations because they were allowing women to be pastors based largely on this verse. These verses.

Yeah.

Like, this is something that is still happening today. This is something that is still highly. Like there was a, the, the, one of those churches was the Saddleback Church, which is a huge church. I believe it’s, it’s in, it’s in Los Angeles or something. But it’s. But yeah, they, they. A very big, a mega church kicked out of association with the Southern Baptists because of these verses, because of an interpretation of these verses. So it’s pretty relevant to learn that these were likely not part of Paul’s idea.

Yeah, and, and this is such a big problem for a lot of folks today, and particularly Christian nationalists, because it’s such an important part of their worldview and their structure of power. These passages that are either pseudepigraphic, entire books that were deceptively written in someone else’s name long after their death, or are interpolated into passages that, that don’t agree with that worldview. But yeah, this is, this is something that. The embeddedness of the patriarchy in so much Christianity today is just so, so deep. Like, women weren’t even allowed to have their own credit cards in our country until the 70s, right? Like the man was in charge of.

The house and, and the finances and.

All, and the finance and everything. And, and now we have a bunch of, of people in state and local and even in national government who are trying to return to this, who are trying to criminalize no-fault divorce.

Right.

Who are trying to argue for, I forget what they call it, household voting or something like that, where every household gets a single vote and the head of the household is the one who decides that. Here in Utah, within the last 10 years, I think it was, I think it might have been 2016, there was a precinct chair up in Davis County for the GOP who went on to social media and declared that most of our social ills started once women got out of the kitchen and started voting. And there were, I think the head of the state GOP, like, denounced it, but there were plenty of people coming to this person’s defense and saying, no, this is right. And there are Christian nationalists all over social media right now trying to leverage 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 , as well as First Timothy and other passages in the Pastoral Epistles to try to insist that it’s God’s very will that women be subordinate to men.

Oh, who was it? This just happened, like yesterday an NFL team’s kicker gave like a commencement speech or something like that.

I saw that.

You saw that? Yeah. Didn’t that make your skin crawl?

Yeah, I was shocked about it. I mean, I don’t know why I was shocked other than, like, you know, this. I don’t. And I don’t know what school it was at. I didn’t catch what school it was. I didn’t catch. So if it was a Christian school, if it was a particular, like, specifically a conservative Christian school, it would make more sense.

Yeah.

It wasn’t booed off the stage that I could see. So I. So, you know, it definitely wasn’t, you know, Mount Holyoke or whatever, but I don’t know why I chose that one.

So it was at Benedictine College.

Okay.

Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas. And.

But yeah, he went into a whole thing about how.

Chiefs kicker.

Yeah, he went into a whole thing about how his wife. He was very proud of all of the women who got their degrees, but he hopes that they can find their true vocation, which is to be a wife and a mother and that. That his wife wasn’t happy until she found hers and all this. He went into a whole bunch of stuff.

Yeah. He says, I’m on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation as a wife and a mother. I am beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: Homemaker.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a homemaker. And, you know, that’s. That’s fine if you can make that work for you. And. And it’s what you enjoy and you excel whether you’re a man or a woman, like, like, great, go have fun. That’s fine. But, like, that’s.

In this economy. If you can do that, more power.

To you, good luck. Get. Get yourself a. A professional kicker. Yeah, but. But yeah, the idea that this is a biblical take.

Yeah. Which is.

Which is what he’s basing this on.

Yeah.

Is. Is. I mean, let’s not be. Let’s not be disingenuous here. That book has plenty of misogyny and plenty of patriarchy and all that sort of thing.

Yeah.

But they’re leaning so heavily on these verses that we’ve been talking about. And if these verses can be pretty confidently demonstrated to be. Not from Paul, at very least not from that source, you know, we can’t be too. You know, I just half an hour ago, I was saying that, you know, how we might as well leave in stuff even though we know that it wasn’t originally there. So I can’t be, I can’t be too hypocritical about that. This was clearly, you know, the expression of a prominent belief of the time, because it’s an expression of a prominent belief of this time. So we can’t, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, we got to be real about that. But if you’re leaning that heavily, if you’re making major decisions for entire denominations of Christianity and it might influence legislation.

Yeah.

Like if it has controlled women’s access to power and resources and liberty, as it, as it absolutely unquestionably has for thousands of years, it’s important to get it right.

I think it’s safe to call that out as being sort of an unacceptable use of a spurious part of the book.

And I think this reveals something disingenuous about a lot of people’s approach to the Bible. It’s unacceptable not because God deems it unacceptable, but because their worldview is so deeply embedded in their understanding of themselves that it is just not acceptable to change it. Even if the message is, hey, guess what, you can still consider everything else God’s Word. You should be happy that we have discovered that, hey, it turns out this isn’t actually part of God’s Word. Depending on how you understand that, you can get rid of these passages now and you can live in a freer, more equal society. And it’s like, no, I prefer the less equal society. There’s no reason you can’t say, okay, guess what? That’s superfluous. We don’t need it anymore. We’re going to renegotiate our understanding of society based on what we have a better idea of as the actual genuine Bible.

But I think because of inspiration, because of inerrancy, because of univocality, the house of cards of that worldview has to be held up. And none of it can. No one card can be taken away.

Right.

Which, which shows that the concern is not for understanding what’s true. The concern is for preserving the house of cards above all else.

Yeah. Well, and especially when the preservation of the house of cards, you know, especially when you’re one of the ones living comfortably in that house of cards and becoming rich because of that house of cards. Yeah, it.

You are.

There are, there are people, men who are deeply devoted to maintaining this, you know, this misogynist patriarchal worldview.

Yeah.

And so, so yeah, they, they, they lean on those verses as their support structure for that.

And I, and I think it’s, it’s easy to say, you know, everybody on, on our end of, of this particular spectrum benefits in one way or another from it. Maybe not directly. There are plenty of people who are getting the short end of the economic stick these days who are still agents of this worldview because the minority that more directly and more openly is, is exploiting this, is able to convince them that their own identity is, is so entangled in the success of, of the minority that they, they go to bat for them. They carry water for them. And this, you know, this kind of thing happens in all different kinds of ways. A lot of historians will talk about the, the Revolutionary War, how there were ways that the powerful folks convinced poor whites to go to, to war for the wealthy by ginning up the enemy on the other side and convincing poor whites that their interests were met or they were best served by carrying water for the interests of the wealthy.

And I think there are a lot of different ways that people cognitively get convinced that their self-identity, their self-esteem and everything is just entangled with the interests of the powerful. What’s the saying that, that a lot of poor folks just walk around imagining themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Yeah, that was, that was a Steinbeck quote. Yeah. There are no poor people in America, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Yeah.

And, and I think folks like Trump kind of are, are the poster child for this because I think a lot of them see themselves in his kind of aw, shucks, I’m such a kind of approach to things. But he’s a billionaire, so you know that that’s how things are supposed to work. And so I’m just temporarily embarrassed. And, and in similar ways, the man is supposed to be the breadwinner and you know, the, the pro athlete and, and the head of the household and all that the way it’s supposed to be. And, and so you’ve got to vilify the women who are like, I’m gonna get a degree, I’m gonna go start a career. I’m gonna be happy, I’m gonna have a cat. And you know, maybe I’m gonna patronize SheVibe or whatever, but I don’t.

They’ve got you, man. They got you. They, man, they do a little bit of art and suddenly you’re, you’re doing free ads for them. I love it.

Somebody, as somebody commented on my post, it’s genius influencer marketing.

And it’s fine, man.

Guilty as charged.

I’m all about it. Well, friends, if you’ve been using some of these scriptures as sexist bludgeons, I say unto you, go and sin no more.

See, I saw what you did there. I see you brought it, brought it.

Around on just a full circle sort of thing. I had that one in my back pocket right there.

Well crafted.

Thank you, sir.

And this is not to exonerate Paul either, because Paul was deeply problematic in other ways.

But Paul’s a jerk in other places. That’s fine.

And, and deeply sexist in a lot of ways. But at least in this instance, it probably wasn’t Paul who said these things. It was probably someone coming through later making all kinds of changes because, I don’t know, he was caught in the friend zone or something like that for too long and decided he was going to take it out on whoever was, whoever was letting churches meet in her.

Home. Oh my gosh, ancient incels. I don’t like it. I don’t.

As somebody somebody said earlier, being caught in a friend zone is only a bad thing if you don’t see women as. As valuable friends.

Right? Yeah, exactly. I, I’m delighted to be in many friend zones anyway. Well, if you would like early access and ad free access to every one of our episodes as well as access to the patrons only after party you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma to become one of our patrons for as as little as $5 a month will get you the the early and ad free show. $10 a month will get you the the bonus content. More money than that per month will get you a warm good feeling in your heart. You can give as much as you want is what I’m trying to get at. Thanks so much to all of you for tuning in. If you you would like to reach us, contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.