points, valuing each others’ gifts, wisdom, and desires, honoring
one another in public and in private, and always seeking to bring
benefit, not harm, to one another.Objection 3: “The husband is the head of the wife” does not indicate author-
ity for the husband, because “head” means “source” or something else, but not
“person in authority.”
In 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul says, “Now I want you to realize that
the head [Greek kephal∑] of every man is Christ, the head of a woman
is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” And Ephesians 5:23
reads, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of
the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.” It is important to real-
ize the decisive significance of these verses, and particularly of
Ephesians 5:23, for the current controversy. If the word “head” means
“person in authority over,” then there is a unique authority that belongs
to the husband in marriage and which parallels Christ’s authority over
the church. If so, then the egalitarians have lost the debate.^37
So what have egalitarians done to give a different meaning to the
statement, “The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head
of the church”? The most common approach has been to say that the
word translated “head” (Greek kephal∑) does not mean “person in
authority over” but has some other meaning, especially “source.”
Thus, the husband is the source of the wife (an allusion to the creation
of Eve from Adam’s side in Genesis 2), as Christ is the source of the
church. The problem of this interpretation is that it does not fit the
evidence.
In 1985, I looked up 2,336 examples of the word “head” (kephal∑)
in ancient Greek literature, using texts from Homer in the eighth cen-
tury B.C. up to some church fathers in the fourth century A.D. I found
that in those texts kephal∑was applied to many people in authority
(when it was used in a metaphorical sense to say that person A was the
head of person or persons B), but it was never applied to a person
without governing authority.^38 In these texts, I found examples such
as the following:
- The king of Egypt is called “head” of the nation.
- The general of an army is called “head” of the army.
56 BUILDINGSTRONGFAMILIES