Here I am critiquing the
underlying 'scholarly' work linked at the
podcast page which provides the evidence they cite:
PAUL'S ARGUMENT FROM NATURE FOR THE VEIL IN 1 CORINTHIANS 11:13-15:A TESTICLE INSTEAD OF A HEAD COVERING
First of all, this is not some impartial scholarly work but from a highly biased feminist perspective.
This is a direct attack on scripture, meant to cast doubt that we can know what it means; that anyone has ever known what it meant. This is simply not true. Such criticism is unique to our time, wherein feminists in rebellion against God have sought to write this passage out of scripture since it is so devastating to their ideology. Anyone who leads with this sort of take on 1 Cor 11 (and many many do) can be safely dismissed out of hand as they are engaging in sophistry. But we shall continue anyway.
As evidence of this viewpoint he offers a quote from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza saying she "expresses the scholarly assessment". And where did this come from? "Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A
Feminist Theological
Reconstruction of Christian Origins." [emphasis added]
I think that speaks for itself! But we shall dig deeper.
The quote from Elisabeth itself is full of lies, my comments [in brackets]:
Yet more evidence why Paul prohibited women from teaching. The author goes on to quote two other people in the same vein about how hard the passage is to understand. Meaningless sophistry.
Only to a society pushing trannys, cross dressing, and unisex attire. But this is a feminist perspective so I guess we should expect that. To non-damaged people familiar with healthy femininity and masculinity the problem with men growing their hair like women is painfully obvious.
It doesn't. They're sowing confusion by mixing up words. This just shows they either haven't a clue what the passage is teaching or (more likely) are being deceptive. Maybe they really are confused and having a hard time understanding. Maybe then they shouldn't pretend to be experts on the matter then.
There is no 'apparent contradiction' because what is going on is two different Greek words are being translated to 1 English word (covering). They know this but ignore it because it suits their argument. The contradiction is artificial. This is the foundation for their whole argument and it is false.
Furthermore Paul never says 'public worship' but rather speaks of prayer and prophesying; things that regularly happen in private. Here the author demonstrates his intellectual carelessness, confusing common latter day Christian practice with what the text teaches.
This is the key to their argument and its an outright lie. "Instead of" is the
minority translation. Most say 'for a' or 'as a'. To claim this is the 'usual translation' is a lie. But it is a necessary lie because they need the hair to be the substitute for a covering for their line of argumentation to result in dismissing the need for a covering. Which is funny because they later argue that hair is a testicle, which is why it needed to be covered. Their arguments are thereby incoherent and self contradictory.
Notice also they hang their argument on one man's interpretation of περιβόλαιον completely divorced from its usage elsewhere in scripture.
Now, we could get lost in the weeds of their arguments on περιβόλαιον. But I haven't the time to go there today so I'm going to cut to the chase. This is just a variation on a common contemporary argument, that the hair is a covering and we needn't use cloth. It was unheard of before feminism and is simply not true. That is contradicted by the passage itself where it earlier commands a cloth covering. It is also contradicted by history. The native speakers did not interpret this passage as meaning women must cover using their hair. Instead, they took it to mean a cloth covering. The only early controversies were over whether or not virgins should cover (see Tertullian around 200 AD, who also commented on the increasingly lax amount of cloth used to cover).
But even these modern commentators don't really believe the hair is the covering, or they'd require women to have long hair (not shorn, and long about the shoulders consistent with περιβόλαιον). But they don't because their purpose is only to provide excuses why women needn't cover.
Their logic that female hair is genetalia and the equivalent to testicles is tortured at best. Based on the arguments provided, I don't think the ancients even believed that. All this argument from mistaken Greek medical understandings is silly because the Christian practice of head covering traces not to the Greeks, but to the Hebrews and was practiced by them (and surrounding cultures) going back thousands of years.
For these other cultures it had to do with straightforward status and propriety, not archane medical theories. The ancient law I linked to earlier demonstrates that for the ancients, a woman by wearing a covering showed she was under the authority of a man. This is exactly what Paul says as well (symbol of authority). Feminists today even think it is a symbol of authority. While they on the one hand deny it has any meaning, they on the other hand assume a woman wearing a covering was forced to do so by her husband (i.e. demonstrating she was under his authority).
Modern feminists understand this intuitively, without any cultural teaching, echoing exactly what Paul said. Let's get real here. It's just a cloth. If the creator of the universe wanted you to pray to him while standing on your head, and you wanted to be heard, you'd stand on your head. God's rules. Feminist's real objection is they don't like differing rules for women. They don't like being under authority. They are in rebellion against God.
And even if Paul was appealing to a Greek understanding of hair drawing out semen when he says "Doesn't nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him". This is a tertiary argument, coming practically at the end in v15. He already abundantly made it clear what the covering was about (authority, headship, glory, etc). That he appealed to a lost cultural viewpoint doesn't mean the other reasons are no longer true.
But you wouldn't know that from this article as it not once anywhere mentions Paul's main arguments. The words 'authority', 'glory', 'hierarchy', and 'headship' are not found even once in the entire paper. It is just one big handwaving exercise from Greek culture with no serious attempt to understand what the passage itself says. This is not a serious scholarly article, not a serious attempt to rightly understand the passage. But rather an attempt to deceive.
And so given this obvious deception as to the content of the text in question (1 Cor 11), I have a hard time believing anything else the author claims about Greek culture which are harder for me to verify. He is not a credible witness.
This isn't a serious take on scripture, but another feminist attempt to write it off as cultural and something we can ignore. As such, I harbor extreme concerns about any teacher basing their opinions of scripture on this. The whole point of construing women's hair as genitalia isn't to explain Paul's reasoning, but the get women to think "that's silly", which it is, so she'll dismiss the headcovering idea from her mind. It also serves to make people embarrassed to talk about the passage. They even say as much...
But that's not historically why they abandoned the covering. They abandoned it because of the ideologies of feminism and equality. Feminism is rebellion against God and His divinely created social order.
This article is from top to bottom a pack of lies and deception. And yet...
What double speak. So 'important' that they don't apply to today. I think it would be more accurate to say 'the only coherent explanation that doesn't contradict feminism'. While some may find this article convincing on its own, divorced from the text it pretends to interpret, within the greater context of what Paul actually writes and the greater history of headcoverings both in scripture and out, it is abjectly silly.
tldr; This theory is yet more feminist bullshit, lies, and hand waiving aspersions. It isn't convincing in the least. Its just more feminist gobligook that makes no serious attempt to study the passage. An honest scholar should be ashamed to cite it except to point and laugh.
