52 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
reconcile, and yet that is his primary argument against the authenticity
of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.
At this point Fee’s procedure is different from that of all other evan-
gelical interpreters of Scripture. There are many passages in the Bible that
on first reading seem difficult to reconcile with other passages in the Bible
(think, for example, of the teachings of Paul and James on justification by
faith, or the astounding claim that Jesus is God and the Father is also God,
when combined with the teaching that there is only one God). Historically,
interpreters with a high respect for the authority and consistency of
Scripture have not simply decided that one set of verses stands “in obvious
contradiction” to the other set and that therefore the difficult verses should
be thrown out of the Bible. (Think of what would happen if we were to
follow Fee’s procedure in the Gospels, where we find some manuscript evi-
dence of scribal attempts to “fix” the difficulty in almost every parallel pas-
sage that has details that are difficult to harmonize, just as Fee finds some
manuscript evidence of scribal attempts to move 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
to another context.) Rather, interpreters have returned to the difficult texts
with the assumption that they have misunderstood something, and they
have sought for interpretations that are fair to both texts and are not con-
tradictory. (In fact, on pages 703-705 of his book, Fee himself lists—but
then rejects—several ways interpreters have explained 1 Corinthians 14:34-
35 and 1 Corinthians 11:5 so that they are not contradictory.)
Does Fee’s solution to 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 then constitute evi-
dence of a liberal tendency to reject the authority of the Bible? It should
trouble evangelicals that Fee says these verses are not part of the Bible
and therefore “certainly not binding for Christians.” It seems to me that
Fee’s recommendation that we should remove some hard verses from the
Bible rather than seeking to understand them in a way that does not con-
tradict other verses establishes a dangerous precedent. When the verses
that he throws out of the Bible are missing from no manuscript, and also
happen to be the very verses that show Paul’s insistence on male gover-
nance of the church meetings “in all the churches of the saints” (v. 33),
then it seems to me to be another example of a pattern in many egali-
tarian writings, a pattern of using sophisticated scholarly procedures in
order to evade the requirement of submitting to the authority of the
Word of God. Fee’s rejection of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 as not belong-
ing to the Bible seems to me another step on the path toward liberalism.