1 Corinthians 11:2-16 Line by Line (2)

INTRODUCTION

In part 1 of this series, here, I outlined three keys to understanding 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, and I looked at verses 2-3 including what Paul meant when he said, “the head of woman is the man.” In Part 2, I continue looking at Paul’s words, line by line, especially 1 Corinthians 11:4-6.

1 CORINTHIANS 11:4 AND MEN’S HEADS
Praying and Prophesying Aloud

“Every man who prays or prophesies ‘with something on his (actual) head’ dishonours his (metaphorical) head (i.e. Christ)” (1 Cor. 11:4).

First, I understand “prays and prophesies” here and in verse 5 as referring broadly to spoken ministry. Prayer is spoken to God while prophecy is spoken on behalf of God. Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul links prayer with speaking in tongues (1 Cor. 14:14ff cf. 1 Cor. 14:2). Perhaps he includes speaking in tongues here also.

I take Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 as referring to spoken ministry done within the Christian community. That is, men and women were speaking aloud in church gatherings, whether large or small. I mention this because some people have difficulty recognising that women were ministering vocally in Corinthian assemblies.[1]

Paul encouraged spoken ministry, especially prophecy, as long as it was done in an edifying manner. He told all the Christians in Corinth, “the one who prophesies builds up the church” (1 Cor. 14:4). And, “For you can all prophesy one by one, so that everyone may learn and everyone may be encouraged” (1 Cor. 14:31, italics added).

In 1 Corinthians 14:26-40, he silences disorderly speech from three groups of people, but Paul begins and ends this passage by encouraging edifying speech without specifying gender.[2]

Head Coverings or Hair Lengths?

The second point I want to make is that the Greek phrase behind the translation “with something on his head” (kata kephalēs echōn) is ambiguous. There are a few Greek terms in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, referring to what was happening with the actual heads of the Corinthian men and women, that are unclear. We cannot be certain if Paul was speaking about head coverings or about hairstyles and hair lengths.

Kata kephalēs also occurs in Esther 6:12 in the Septuagint. This is where Haman returns home after being humiliated. Some suggest the picture here is that Haman’s long hair which may have ordinarily been done up in a Persian hairstyle was hanging loosely.[3] Then again, maybe Haman covered his head with something.[4] Whatever he did with his head, it was a sign of grief or shame.

In some contexts in the ancient world, however, long hair on men was not necessarily a sign of shame. Dio Chrysostom (born c. AD 40), a Greek orator and philosopher and a close contemporary of Paul, spoke about hair lengths in men and admitted that he himself had long hair. His point was that long hair, which was an unusual hairstyle for Roman men, was not a mark of moral superiority.

“For if long hair were accountable for virtue and sobriety, mankind would need no great power nor one difficult of attainment. … However, I fear that fools get no good from their long hair …” (Orations 35. 2-3).

Cynthia Thompson summarises Dio Chrysostom’s point on hair length.

Philosophers, priests, peasants and barbarians are mentioned as exceptions of men’s short hair by Dio Chrysostom who criticizes philosophers for making a connection between their long hair and moral superiority.[5]

Did the praying and prophesying Corinthian men wear long hair as a sign of moral or spiritual superiority?

The church father John Chrysostom, writing in the late 300s, associated long hair with philosophy in his comment on 1 Corinthians 11:4. He wrote that “the men went so far as to wear long hair as having spent their time in philosophy …” (Chrysostom, Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians). Chrysostom believed, however, that the longhaired Corinthian men also covered their heads when they prayed and prophesied, and that Paul disapproved of both long hair and cloth coverings on men.[6]  Another early church father, Epiphanius, believed the problem with the Corinthian men was long hair.[7]

My understanding of 1 Corinthians 11:4 is that Paul was telling the Christians in Corinth,

Every man who prays or prophesies with a socially suspect or provocative hairstyle, possibly long hair hanging down, brings shame and dishonour to the Messiah who is the person who has a place of honour above him.[8]

Let’s hold that thought while we look at the next two verses about women. These are the trickiest verses in the passage.

1 CORINTHIANS 11:5-6 AND WOMEN’S HEADS
Head Coverings or Hair Styles?

“Every woman who prays or prophesies with her (actual) head uncovered dishonours her (metaphorical) head (a man), since it’s one and the same as having her hair shaved off (xyraō).
For if a woman doesn’t cover, she should have her hair cut short (keirō). But if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut short (keirō) or hair shaved off (xyraō), let her head be covered” (1 Cor. 11:5-6, my “literal” translation with some keywords in bold).

Verse 5 contrasts with what Paul had just said about the men. The women, like the men, were also praying and prophesying, but Paul wanted the women’s (actual) heads to be different from the men’s.

I don’t fully understand Paul’s flow of thought here. While it seems clear Paul disapproved of short hair on women, I don’t understand the distinction he is making, if there is one, between a woman having her hair cut and her hair shaved. Perhaps Paul is speaking derisively and saying that a woman with short hair may as well be shaved bald.

And it’s unclear whether the Greek words behind “uncovered” and “cover” refer to hair uncovered-covered by head coverings or they refer to heads uncovered-covered by hair.[9]

Despite the ambiguities, these verses have been understood, even in the earliest surviving commentaries, to mean that a woman who didn’t wear a veil when she was praying or prophesying was causing shame and disgrace. Nevertheless, I propose a different reading based on Paul’s repeated use of phrases about cutting and shaving hair and something we know was happening in the Corinthian church.

Renouncing Sex in Corinth

In 1 Corinthians 7, we learn that some people in the Corinthian church were choosing not to marry, others were breaking up their marriages and leaving their spouses, and still others had sexless marriages, sometimes without their spouse’s agreement. 1 Corinthians 7 makes no sense unless we understand this backstory of sexual renunciation.

Celibacy was huge in the early church, and sometimes when Christian women chose to renounce sex and marriage, they cut their hair short to look more masculine.  Some even wore men’s clothing. More than a few ancient texts mention these things. The Acts of Paul and Thecla is one of them.

I suggest that 1 Corinthians 11:5 and 6 is, at least in part, about women who believed the new age had fully arrived, had renounced sex in order to be “like the angels” (cf. Matt. 22:30), and had cut their hair short.

Short hair on women and long hair on men was not the social norm in mid-first century Corinth, especially as cutting a woman’s hair was sometimes done to punish a woman who had behaved in a shameless, immoral manner.

Respectability in Corinth

For women, having short hair, but also having long unbound hair, made a provocative statement in the Greco-Roman world. However, unlike what has often been asserted, it was not necessarily scandalous for a first-century Roman woman to have her head uncovered in public, as long as she had a respectable hairstyle.

Cynthia Thompson has investigated archaeological finds in Corinth and has concluded that because most of the surviving portraits of women had uncovered heads, “one may infer that bareheadedness in itself was not a sign of a socially disapproved lifestyle. These women certainly wished to be seen as respectable.”[10]

Also taking into account frescoes in Pompeii that had been buried under the ash of Vesuvius in the late first century AD, Cynthia Thompson adds that “for Hellenistic and Roman women a veil was a possible choice but not a requirement.”[11]

So, although the veil, more specifically, a garment called the palla, was a symbol of respectability for citizen women, there was nothing necessarily unbecoming in a woman who didn’t wear a veil in mid-first-century Corinth. What was unbecoming for women was short hair or long unbound hair.[12]

Even though verses 5 and 6 are difficult to decipher fully, I think the last statement in verse 6 may be saying that if a woman does have short hair, then she should cover it with a veil.

1 Corinthians 11:4-6, about men’s and women’s actual heads are unclear, but because this passage was written as a chiasm, we have the corresponding verses in the second half of the passage to help us understand what Paul was trying to say in the first half.

The corresponding verses to 4-6 are verses 14-15, and here the topic is more clearly about hair lengths.

“Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her as a covering” (1 Cor. 11:14-15, italics added).

“Nature” in 1 Corinthians 11:14

Paul’s reference to nature in verse 14 is not a theological argument. It’s also not a biological argument. Paul would have known that men’s hair can grow long if not trimmed. Rather, as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor has pointed out, “nature” in verse 14 “does not refer to natural law in any technical sense but to what Paul’s generation accepted as conventional.”[13]

Paul took the matter of different hair lengths for men and women as instinctively and culturally understood. Different hairstyles on men and women were ordinary and customary in Corinth because men and women, generally speaking, are distinct. In many cultures until relatively recently, men wore different hairstyles than women, and wearing the hairstyle of the other sex could bring dishonour.

In his discussion on “nature” in 1 Corinthians 11:14, Philip Payne notes,

What nature teaches, namely “dishonor” and “glory,” are clearly cultural categories, not categories that could be deduced solely from the natural world. The cultural background is summarized in Plutarch’s Roman Questions 267B, “In Greece … men cut their hair short; women let it grow.”[14]

With verses 13-15 in mind, I propose that verses 4-6 are about hair lengths more so than head coverings, and I’m not alone. Judith Gundry, Richard Hays, Philip Payne, and Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, among others, believe Paul was talking about hairstyles or hair lengths in 1 Corinthians 11.

In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, Craig Blomberg writes,

In verses 14–15 Paul is definitely talking about relative lengths of hair for men and women, so it is somewhat more natural to assume that he has been talking about hairstyles all along.[15]

Paul had a problem with the hairstyles of the ministering men and women in Corinth. We come to why this was a problem in verse 10, but for now, let’s move on to verse 7 where Paul states that “man is the image and glory of God.” ( See Part 3.)

Footnotes

[1] 1 Corinthians is addressed to the Christian community, to the church, in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2), and it addresses issues related to community, congregational life in Corinth. Some say Paul was addressing private speech in 1 Corinthians 11, especially in verse 5 where it mentions women praying and prophesying. I suggest these people have a limited understanding of how churches in the mid-first century operated. Nothing in Paul’s words indicates that the praying and prophesying in Corinth was done privately.

[2] Paul’s list of ministries, in the Greek, do not specify gender. See Rom. 12:6-8, 1 Cor. 12:28; 14:26, Eph. 4:11, and Col. 3:16.

[3] See footnote 46 on page 137 in Andrew Bartlett’s 2019 book Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts.

[4] Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint, Karen Jobes’s translation in NETS, and The Lexham English Septuagint each say that Haman’s head was covered in Esther 6:12.

[5] Cynthia L. Thompson, “Hairstyles, Head-Coverings, and St. Paul: Portraits from Roman Corinth,” The Biblical Archaeologist 51.2 (June 1988): 99–115, 104.

[6] Further in the same homily, Chrysostom explains,

But with regard to the man, it is no longer about covering but about wearing long hair, that he [Paul] so forms his discourse. To be covered he then only forbids, when a man is praying; but the wearing long hair he discourages at all times. … If he have long hair, it is a dishonor unto him. He [Paul] said not, if he be covered but, if he have long hair. Wherefore also he said at the beginning, Every man praying or prophesying, having anything on his head, dishonors his head. He said not, covered, but having anything on his head; signifying that even though he pray with the head bare, yet if he have long hair, he is like to one covered. For the hair, says he, is given for a covering. (Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians).

[7] In verse 7, Paul uses different language and says that a man should not “cover” his head. A. Philip Brown II notes that Epiphanius, “cites 1 Cor. 11:7 in five different contexts in his polemical work Panarion. In each case, he cites the verse as: ‘A man ought not to wear long hair [κομᾶν] because he is the image and glory of God.’” Brown, Chrysostom & Epiphanius: Long Hair Prohibited as Covering in 1 Cor. 11:4, 7 presented at a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on November 16, 2011. (A pdf is here.)

Gordon D. Fee comments on the ambiguity of 1 Corinthians 11:4 and 7.

As with the man’s situation [in 1 Cor. 11:4], one must finally admit that we cannot be certain as to particulars. On the basis of what is said twice of the man (vv. 4 and 7), it seems more likely that some kind of external covering is involved; nonetheless, the linguistic ties with the LXX and the parallels from [dishevelled hair in] pagan ecstasy offer a truly viable alternative in favor of hairstyle.
Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, Revised Edition; Eerdmans, 2014),563.

[8] Alan G. Padgett writes about the phrase in 1 Corinthians 11:4b, “We thus join a growing number of scholars in rendering kata kephalēs echon as ‘having long hair coming down from the head.’”
Padgett, “Paul on Women in the Church: The Contradictions of Coiffure in 1 Corinthians 11.2-16,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 20 (1984): 69–86, 70.

[9] See my notes on Paul’s “uncover” and “cover” language here.
1 Corinthians 11:5-6 makes some sense if we understand that Paul wanted the ministering women to wear a head covering such as a veil or a palla. However, it’s difficult to make sense of every phrase with this interpretation, and it’s difficult to see how this interpretation ties in with 1 Corinthians 11:14-15, the corresponding verses in the chiasm, and Paul’s reference to long hair as a covering.

Here’s my paraphrase with the “cloth head covering” interpretation in mind.

“Every woman who prays and prophecies ‘with her head uncovered [by not wearing a veil]’ (akatakalyptō tē kephalē), dishonours her head [a man]; it’s just as shameful as if she was shaved bald. For, if ‘she doesn’t cover’ [with a cloth covering] (ou katakalyptetai), she may as well cut her hair. But if it is disgraceful for a woman to have short hair or be shaved, ‘she should cover’ [her head with a cloth covering] (katakalyptesthō).

Here is my paraphrase with the “long hair as a covering” interpretation in mind.

Every woman who prays and prophecies and has “short hair, exposing her head” (akatakalyptō tē kephalē) [like a man] dishonours her head [a man]; it’s just as shameful as if she was shaved bald. Now, if ‘she doesn’t have long hair covering her head’ (ou katakalyptetai), she should cut her hair [shorter?]. If it is disgraceful for a woman to have short hair or be shaved, [then] ‘she should cover up’ (katakalyptesthō).

Here is my paraphrase with the “long hair done up as a covering” interpretation in mind.

Every woman who prays and prophecies and has “her long hair undone, exposing her head” (akatakalyptō tē kephalē) dishonours her head [a man]; it’s just as shameful as if she was shaved bald. Now, if ‘she doesn’t have long hair done up covering her head’ (ou katakalyptetai), she may as well cut her hair. But if it is disgraceful for a woman to have short hair or be shaved, ‘she should do up her hair to cover her head’ (katakalyptesthō).

In these three approaches to 1 Corinthians 11:5-6, it’s difficult to work out what Paul meant with his first statement in verse 6. Was he being sarcastic?

[10] Thompson, “Hairstyles, Head-Coverings, and St. Paul,” 112.

[11] Thompson, ibid., 112.

[12] Statues, busts, reliefs, mosaics, frescoes, ceramics and coins survive that depict first-century Roman women. Few of these women wear a veil. Their heads are exposed, and so we can see that many had elaborate hairstyles with intricate braids or curls. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul says nothing at all about veils, but urges women not to wear fancy braided hairstyles (1 Tim. 2:9; cf. 1 Pet. 3:3). If the women in Ephesus were wearing veils, their hair would be covered and the problem of intricately braided hairstyles, as a display and statement of wealth, would not have posed so much of a problem for the Christian community at Ephesus. But Paul’s solution wasn’t veils. His solution was less ostentatious hairstyles.

[13] Murphy-O’Connor, Keys to First Corinthians: Revisiting the Major Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173 footnote 69.

[14] Payne, “Wild Hair and Gender Equality in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16,” Priscilla Papers 20.3 (Summer, 2006): 9-18, 14. (Online: CBE International)

[15] Blomberg, 1 Corinthians (NIVAC; Zondervan), 178.

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Excerpt of the funerary stele of Q. Gesius Petilianus showing him and his wife, AD 117-138. (Coyau / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

An Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, Line by Line:
Respectable Reputations Outside the Church, Mutual Relationships Within the Church

Part 1: Introduction, “Head” and “Firstness” (1 Cor. 11:2-3)
Part 3: Genesis, Glory, and Reputations (1 Cor. 11:7-9)
Part 4: A Woman’s Authority and the Angels (1 Cor. 11:10-16)

Explore More

1 Corinthians 11:2-16, in a Nutshell
Hair Lengths and Hairstyles in the Bible 
Head Coverings and 1 Corinthians 11:2-16
“Uncover-Cover” Words in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16
A Note on Nature and Hairstyles in 1 Cor. 11:14-15 
All my articles on 1 Corinthians 14 are here.
All my articles on 1 Corinthians 7 are here. 
A wife has no authority of her own body? (1 Cor. 7:4)
A Note on Tertullian’s “On the Veiling of Virgins”
Every Female Prophet in the Bible
Philip’s Prophesying Daughters
Theonoe and Myrte: Prophetesses in Corinth
Jezebel of Thyatira: A Female False Prophet