Would you kindly list verses / writings?
Really? Please give the dates for both.
There are no verses saying the Bible is dictated (except for a few isolated portions like direct quotes and the Ten Commandments that I know of. So, anything to the contrary? God breathed is inspired, not dictated.
It takes some a lot of words to say “Paul’s background assumptions were wrong and his arguments predicated on them are thus questionable.” Paul and other NT authors almost certainly appealed to mythological characters in the OT as fully believing they were real humans. No distinction is ever made between Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses. David et al.
We could say Paul was inspired and offered correct theological truths based on outdated exegesis since his arguments are based on his cultural assumptions and background knowledge. The one-sided situational letters of Paul should not be read as if they are a theological encyclopedia, Some Christian’s believe God accommodated his message and spoke through the worldview and conventions of the time. Paul has nothing to offer us scientifically about how the world was created.
Vinnie
the Yahwist source dates to from either just before or during the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC, and that the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after
Anaximander (c. 610 – c. 546 BC) speculated about the beginnings and origin of animal life, and that humans came from other animals
Thank you, but you said evolutionary theory was on the scene at the time. What’s with that?
600 years after it arose in Greek culture, Paul, an intellectual in that culture, would have been fully aware of it.
One of the difficulties in reading this sentence, and hopefully the wider section within which it sits, is our inability to know where Paul is quoting some at Corinth, and where he is giving his point of view. We know that Paul engaged in serial correspondence with the Corinthians and that we do not have in our possession some of the letters he both received and wrote. Part of the problem is that the oldest manuscripts in the original Greek were hand-written in capital letters with no spaces between the words, let alone punctuation and paragraphing. The graphic below is a portion of an ancient manuscript which starts up around 1 Corinthians 11:3. Such manuscripts do not lend themselves to a “quote … unquote” analysis.
Remember that Paul usually began his missionary campaigns amongst Jews first and then Gentiles, so the early church congregations included Jews, or rather Jewish-Christians, who were quite capable of entering into theological debate with Paul. And Paul probably enjoyed debating with them!
One branch of theological argument derived from Nature. “If God is the Creator, then Nature is a book written by the finger of God”, as one medieval theologian put it. This is an important aspect of Christian theology today and guarantees the place of science in Christian understanding.
However, the books of the Old Testament were probably finalized during and after the Babylonian Exile (6th century B.C.), that is, in Mesopotamia, where ancient Creation myths and Flood epics bear a striking resemblance to the Old Testament versions. The Biblical authors simply adopted the framework and gave the stories a different theological slant. And what else can we expect them to have done? If you were tasked with writing theological insights from Creation, would you include the Big Bang, the coalescence of sub-atomic particles, supernovae (as the source of elements from which life is created), Black Holes and the like? And would you include String Theory and the Multiverse, at the risk of these theories ultimately being proved wrong? The thing is, if you want to reflect on God’s purposes in Creation, you cannot wait until all the science is in, because we would still be waiting. The thing we hang onto is the attempt to read God’s purpose and meaning for our lives from what we know in our own time. Reading the Creation and Flood stories as scientific accounts is rather silly.
But what are we to do when theological insights appear to be based on thoroughly outdated notions of Nature? Let’s tackle the passage at hand. The primary issue is the modesty of women who step up to lead the congregation in prayer and prophecy. This means they become the focus of attention of the whole congregation. In ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern society, a woman who lets her hair down is sending a signal that might cause sexual arousal. When someone enquired of a Spartan why they took their girls into public places unveiled, but their married women veiled, he said, ‘Because the girls have to find husbands, and the married women have to keep those who have them!’ For we modern Westerners, this is hard to understand. But imagine if the situation was one where the women who lead worship in your congregation went braless and in see-through tops! Of course, in some indigenous societies, that would be perfectly acceptable.
Paul begins to debate with some at Corinth about this issue and his opening statement seems somewhat sexist. Part of the problem is that the word translated “head” from the Greek, namely κεφαλὴ, can mean “source” rather than “boss”. We get that meaning in English as well when we speak of the head of the river, the fountainhead, etc. It becomes clear in the text that this is Paul’s meaning as he speaks about men and women being the “source” of each other’s existence in Creation and its ongoing expression in Nature.
It is not clear in this passage when Paul is quoting some at Corinth and when he is putting forward his own case. The photograph of an ancient manuscript above shows why this is so. However, what is clear is Paul’s emphatic statement that “in the Lord”, that is, for those of us in Christ, woman is not set apart from man, nor man set apart from woman, in this role of being the source of one another’s life. This is the nature of life in the New Creation. Then, as if to buttress his argument from the Old Creation, Paul turns to Nature and the process of childbirth, in which a woman becomes the source of man.
As Westerners we may ask ourselves why Paul didn’t just say, “Everybody dress modestly according to the standards of your society”. I think part of the answer is Paul’s principle of becoming a Jew to the Jews and a Gentile to the Gentiles – all things to all people. However, I also think there is something to be gained as men and women reflect on how they become a source of life for each other. Another way of putting this is by saying that, while I stick to astrophysics as an explanation for the processes of the universe, these ancient scriptures, based partially on Mesopotamian myths, still speak to me theologically. It is a bit like the indigenous person who said of their mythology, “I don’t know whether this story actually happened, but I know that it is true.”
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Evolutionary Theory came from Darwin/Wallace
I agree with a lot of this. Paul does give us some insight into the theological milieu of the early church, and he was in contact with the disciples. For these reasons I do understand why Paul’s letters are given more weight than other later works, but he was just a man (and perhaps more than one man). Jesus certainly seemed to indicate that he wanted imperfect humans to spread the word, so it isn’t surprising that those humans got a few things wrong while also faithfully spreading the central message of Christianity.
Darwin/ Wallace were the first to propose a scientific mechanism for evolution (i.e., natural selection). But ideas of organisms changing into other organisms over periods of time (i.e., evolution) were around as far back as the ancient Greeks.
Of course, but saying evolutionary theory with no article usually means your are referring to Darwin’s theor.
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Many good contributions here have indicated why we should not take this passage of Paul’s to tell us what happened in creation. Paul is merely using a common belief to shore up his argument that women who are contributing to worship should cover their heads. It sounds a bit as if he is grabbing at straws to some extent. I’m guessing he had to deal with some conflict on this issue. There was no one way for a woman to dress her head in the Roman world of the 1st century, but devout Jews were very much concerned that women should cover their heads–it was a sign of holiness and respect. I am sure many women of other cultures didn’t want to cover their heads at all, preferring to let their beautiful braids and pearls show. So Paul had to make a decision. Suppose you had a church in rural Africa where the women wore only jewelry above the waist, but some westerners were among your congregation. You would have to make a rule about covering in this case too. Paul is not teaching theology here; he is trying to get everyone on the same page. It is noteworthy (and amusing) that at the end of the passage he essentially says that he doesn’t want to hear any more about it.
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In our own time, ultra-orthodox women keep their heads covered with wigs.
If you say so.
Do you happen to know which ancient Greeks were involved in evolutionary theory?
- Empedocles and Anaxagoras knew how to conduct experiments and the value of doing so in physical investigations, a piece of knowledge that was also subsequently virtually lost for the next two millennia, though Archimedes also knew it.
- Empedocles and Anaxagoras likewise knew that people are descended from marine life. Empedocles even expanded this idea into a crude theory of survival of the fit. Aristotle believed in fixed species.
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Haven’t done a detailed historical dive into this, but one guy who is often mentioned is Anaximander of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the 500s B.C.E. Apparently he hypothesized that humans were descended from fish.
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So Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish was spot-on!
Paul probably took the Genesis story dead literally. But his point can easily be updated by saying that there is a theological/psychological reason why Genesis represents the creation of man and woman the way it does, apart from the literal scientific story. As for Paul’s point, it’s pretty obvious from the surrounding verses. Not popular point, true, but far from obscure.