The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, by Beth Allison Barr, Brazos Press, 2021.

In chapter 2, Dr Barr asks: ‘What if biblical womanhood doesn’t come from Paul?’

She begins by noting that many have taken Paul’s teaching to be heavily patriarchal.  Complementarians look to 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2 to support their case.  But this, suggests Barr, is to misread the apostle.

If, writes Barr, instead of focussing narrowly on texts such as those just mentioned, and take more account of the broader sweep of Paul’s teaching, then a different picture emerges.

Barr refers to a favourite medieval sermon, by John Mirk.  In his marriage sermon, it is noticeable that he emphasises the mutual love of the man and the woman (drawing on Gen 1-3, Matt 22 and Jn 2).  But he never quotes from Paul, and therefore does not mention the issues that so dominate modern discussions between egalitarians and complementarians.  And, adds Barr, this sermon by Mirk is by no means an isolated example.

Roman Catholic teaching, writes Barr, has never formally endorsed subordination within marriage.  Rather,

‘because husbands sinned, they often proved poor leaders for their wives—blurring for medieval preachers the “bottom line” of male authority. As one early fifteenth-century text argued, a wife should not blindly follow her husband, because—just as Mirk’s marriage sermon stated—she owed allegiance first to Jesus as her “principal husband.” For medieval women, Jesus as head could trump husbandly authority; sometimes women could even take the lead.’

I don’t think that there is much here from which a complementarian would demur.

I agree that there are times when women do what men ought to have done.  In the account of the woman anointing Jesus with oil (Matthew 26:6–13; Mark 14:3–9; Luke 7:37–50), we can go some way with Peter Abelard, who Barr quotes as writing that

‘woman and not man is linked with Christ’s headship,’ she ‘indeed institutes him as “Christ.”‘

Indeed, this is one of a number of reversals of conventional male and female roles that we see in the New Testament.

So it is with the household codes.  We can joyfully agree that they subvert prevailing mores about the roles of husbands and wives.  They do so by addressing wives (and slaves and children) directly, as moral agents, and by urging husbands to ‘love their wives’.  But it the obstinate fact is that, in these same codes, it is wives who are instructed to ‘submit’ to their husbands, and not vice-versa.  Barr knows this, of course, but turns a blind eye to it.  Instead, she extrapolates from what the household codes do say to what they don’t say:

‘The Christian household codes address all the people in the house church—men, women, children, and slaves. Everyone is included in the conversation. Theologian Lucy Peppiatt writes that this is “key” to the Christian subversion of Roman patriarchy. Because the Christian household codes are directed to all members of the Roman household, instead of presuming the guardianship of the male head, they “contain within them the overturning of accepted positions accorded to men, women, slaves, and children, and the expectations placed upon them.” Instead of endowing authority to a man who speaks and acts for those within his household, the Christian household codes offer each member of the shared community—knit together by their faith in Christ—the right to hear and act for themselves. This is radically different from the Roman patriarchal structure. The Christian structure of the house church resists the patriarchal world of the Roman Empire.’

We are being asked to believe, then, that Paul has overturned not only the accepted relationship between husbands and wives, but also between parents and children.  If egalitarians are correct, then it follows that if the roles of husbands and wives are interchangeable with respect to servant leadership, then so are the roles of parents and children.  This is palpably absurd.

No issue is to be taken with Barr’s contention that the ground of submission for wives in Paul’s teaching is radically different that in Roman culture:

Paul emphasizes that wives should be subject as fitting in the Lord (not because they are inferior) and that husbands should love their wives and not treat them harshly. “Instead of grounding the instruction to the wife in her husband’s authority, power, leadership or status in a hierarchy,” McKnight writes, “the grounding is radically otherwise: it is grounded in the Lord’s way of life.” Jesus, not the Roman paterfamilias, is in charge of the Christian household.

Once again, this alters the relationship between wives and husbands very significantly, but it does not upend it.

In her reading of Ephesians 5, Barr notes that ‘many scholars’ think that Paul’s discussion is governed by his instruction in verse 21 – ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ’.  This would mean that not only are wives to submit to husbands, but husbands are to submit to wives.  Barr complains that the ESV severs v 21 from what follows, weakening this implication.

But,

It is no argument to say that ‘many scholars’ adopt a certain interpretation, without considering at least some of their main reasons for doing so.

The different pairings in this passage are not interchangeable: just as husbands are never told to submit to their wives, so masters are never told to submit to their slaves, or parents to their children.

Barr fails to observe why v21 might just as well be attached to what precedes it as to what follow it: that verse contains the fifth and last of a series of participles, all elaborating the instruction to ‘be filled with the Spirit’ (v18).

According to Barr, Paul, Ephesians 5 honours the female body in a way that no pagan society in his time did.  Although I would want to do more exegetical work on this, and I no problem in principle with accepting this conclusion.  It is clear that Paul honoured women in all sorts of ways.  But this is not to say that he turned the relationship between wives and husband upside down, or that he smoothed out all distinctions between the sexes.  (I can hear egalitarians objecting to that last statement, for they are likely to vigorously affirm distinctions between men and women, and between husbands and wives.  But I would like to hear from them what they think those distinctions are, apart from the very obviously distinction regarding child-bearing).

I am happy to affirm, with Barr, that on a number of occasions Paul uses female imagery to describe his relationship with the churches he has served.  I too scratch my head at John Piper’s suggestion that Christianity has ‘a masculine feel’ (whatever happened to the biblical description of the church as ‘the bride of Christ’?

Moving on: Barr would have us believe that the early Christians were perceived in the Roman world as ‘gender deviants’, because of the prominence they gave to women.

‘Osiek and MacDonald remind us that Pliny the Younger, after discussing the torture of two Christian women whom he called deacons, described Christianity as a “depraved and excessive superstition.” As they write, “In drawing attention to some kind of female leadership in the group—to the exclusion of references to male leaders—Pliny was implying that the ideals of masculinity were being compromised. Women were in control.”’

I have no problem in supposing that the Romans despised Christians partly because of the way that follows of Christ honoured women, slaves and children.  But if we look at what Pliny actually writes (to the Emperor Trajan, concerning his investigations of Christians)…

‘They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food誼ut food of an ordinary and innocent kind. Even this practice, however, they had abandoned after the publication of my edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations. I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves, who were styled deaconesses: but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition.’

…then it appears to me that Osiek and MacDonald are seeking to squeeze from the text more that it can actually yield.

It is highly misleading for Barr to accuse Piper and Grudem of seeking to reinstate a Roman view of sexual distinctions.  They, and the other contributors to the book edited by them, are well aware that, in many ways, the Christian doctrine of men and women is radically different from that of ancient Roman culture.  But this does not mean that the distinctives that Paul puts in place (husbands as servant leaders in the church and in the home) are thereby of no consequence.

Did Paul tell women to be silent (1 Cor 14:33-36)?  Barr (following Lucy Peppiatt) inclines to the view that the passage in question is an extended quotation from the letter that the Corinthians had sent to Paul; it does not represent Paul’s own view at all.  According to this interpretation, Paul in v34f rebukes the (male) believers who have put forward this point of view.

The suggestion is that Paul is once again quoting something the Corinthians have said or written, and then responded by writing, ‘What!’  This would, of course have the effect of reversing the meaning of the passage.  Instead of Paul prohibiting women from speaking, he would be challenging a prohibition that the Corinthians had themselves laid down.  The Corinthians were aping Roman customs; Paul was flatly contradicting them.

Barr seems to realise that this is a minority view (she cites D. W. Odell-Scott, Charles Talbert and Lucy Peppiatt as supporting it).  It is certainly convenient for her cause.  But there is little evidence to support the idea that Paul is at this point quoting the Corinthians.  There are many other interpretations – many of which are as at least as plausible as this one – available; the interpretation offered by Barr does not add much weight to her overall argument.

Beth Allison Barr them moves on to consider Romans 16 – a passage which celebrates the work of a significant number of godly women.  Phoebe is a deacon (but there is limited evidence of a formal ‘office’ of deacons in New Testament times; and even less evidence that the role had a significant leadership aspect).  Prisca (Priscilla) is named before her husband (but there could be several reasons for this, including the possibility that she was simply better known than him).

And then there is Junia.  I think that Barr engages in one of her most regrettable polemical flourishes when she complains that

‘most people who attend complementarian churches don’t realize that the ESV translation of Junia as “well known to the apostles” instead of “prominent among the apostles” was a deliberate move to keep women out of leadership (Romans 16:7).’

This is very misleading.  For one thing, it imputes unworthy motives to the ESV translators (question their translation if you will, but they were motivated by a deliberate attempt to be faithful to the biblical text).  For another thing, Barr leaves her readers with the impression that the translation “well known to the apostles” is unquestionably wrong, and that “prominent among the apostles” is unquesitonably correct.  The simple truth is that the meaning of the underlying phrase is contested.  Insofar as I am able to judge, “prominent among the apostles” is very probably correct; but it still leaves the question (unaddressed by Barr): what, in this context, is meant by ‘apostle’?  See here for an extended discussion.

Given the weaknesses in Barr’s argument, it is impossible to accept her conclusion:

‘I [know] the truth about Paul’s women. I [know] the reality that women who are praised in the Bible—like Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia—challenge the confines of modern biblical womanhood. As a historian, I [know] that women were kept out of leadership roles in my own congregation because Roman patriarchy had seeped back into the early church. Instead of ditching pagan Rome and embracing Jesus, we had done the opposite—ditching the freedom of Christ and embracing the oppression of the ancient world.’