19

DISRUPTIVE WOMEN

IN CORINTH?

Some evangelical feminists claim that Paul told the

women in Corinth to “keep silent”

because they were disrupting the church services

Several egalitarians claim that the reason Paul wrote that “the women

should keep silent in the churches” (1 Cor. 14:34) was that women were
being disorderly and disrupting the church services at Corinth. Perhaps
they were rudely shouting questions to their husbands (or to other men)
seated across the room, or perhaps (according to a variant of this posi-
tion) even giving loud shouts characteristic of near-ecstatic worship.
Advocates of this interpretation say that Paul wanted to stop these dis-
ruptions and restore order to the service.
Craig Keener, professor of New Testament at Palmer Theological
Seminary (formerly Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary) in
Philadelphia, says,

We will turn to what seems to be the most likely interpretation of

1 Corinthians 14:34-35: Paul was addressing relatively uneducated

women who were disrupting the service with irrelevant questions.

The immediate remedy for this situation was for them to stop asking

such questions; the long-term solution was to educate them.^1

(^1) Craig Keener, Paul, Women, and Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of
Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1992), 70.