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By Craig S. Keener
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Jul 31 |
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When I was doing my PhD in New Testament and Christian origins at Duke University (1987-1991), I helped with the InterVarsity campus ministry there. But while my own Christian origins interests, as a former atheist, were especially historical, the primary objections I heard against Christianity on campus were that it was “racist, sexist, and imperialist.” On many campuses, these objections have only grown more strident in subsequent decades.
This might be one reason that, reversing a long-standing trend, church disaffiliation among young women is now happening faster than among men. Since 2020, church attendance has declined some 13 percent among Gen X women (Gen X was the dominant generation of college students when I ministered). More dramatically, Gen Z women in the United States are abandoning organized religion faster than men. Ryan Burge concludes that, “Among 18- to 25-year-olds, 49 percent of women are nones, compared to just 46 percent of men.”[1]
Ancient Views and Ancient Craig
In the late 1990s, an African American pastor friend and I cowrote a couple of works challenging the charge that the Bible was racist (with Glenn Usry, Black Man’s Religion and Defending Black Faith). More widely circulated was my 1992 response to the charge that the Bible was sexist (Paul, Women & Wives).[2] Although that book “outed” me as an egalitarian, the information I presented about ancient customs can be useful wherever on the current complementarian-egalitarian spectrum you lie. (I keep my friends on both sides of the aisle.)[3]
Most male thinkers considered women intellectually inferior (though many made exceptions for educated elite women); nearly all believed that nature had ordained them to be socially inferior, for husbands to be bosses and for men to run most public affairs. By first-century standards, even fairly strict complementarians today would be viewed as supportive of women. So if you can overlook my “egalitarian bias,” please take whatever apologetic value you can from this brief response to the common dismissal of the New Testament (NT) as sexist.
Typical feminist critiques of the NT do not usually focus on Jesus himself. After all, Jesus allowing women to follow him around Galilee (Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3) violated usual custom and provided an opportunity for criticism, but he allowed it anyway.[4] Likewise, he was one of the only ancient rabbis to explicitly welcome a woman to sit at his feet to learn from him (Luke 10:39-42), a posture that Luke attributes elsewhere only to a rabbi’s disciple (Acts 22:3).
Marriage Roles in New Testament Letters
Most non-Christian feminist criticisms surround Paul and other authors of NT letters. Yet most of these critics read Paul as if he were writing directly to the large numbers of twenty-first century Christians in North America rather than to first-century Christians, who constituted less than one-tenth of one percent of the Roman empire. We should keep in mind the cultural strikes Christians had against them: most obviously (and nonnegotiably), they followed Jesus, who was crucified for high treason as a king of the Jews. Besides this, a major fear Romans harbored about many religious groups from the eastern Mediterranean world was that they subverted proper family order. Scandals in Rome that involved Judaism and, most recently, the cult of Isis, reinforced these prejudices against foreign cults.
Like most evangelical scholars, I attribute Ephesians to Paul. Paul authored the letter from Roman captivity (Eph 3:1; 4:1; 6:20), where he had a firsthand view of what bothered Romans. In fact, just as Paul’s instructions to obey civic authorities are addressed especially to Christians in the empire’s capital (Rom 13:1-7), the longest NT instructions for household arrangements (Eph 5:21—6:9; Col 3:18—4:1; 1 Pet 2:18—3:7) all were likely written from Rome (1 Pet 5:13) or Roman custody (Col 4:10).
Although translations often separate Eph 5:21 (“submit to one another”) from 5:22 (“submit to your husbands”), the verses are grammatically inseparable. Most translations of verse 22 read something like, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Unfortunately, in Greek, the word “submit” does not appear in this verse. Now wives, before you get any ideas: the word is implied, but that is because it is borrowed from the preceding verse: “submitting yourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ” (v. 21). But that means that wifely submission reflects the wider Christian ethic of all Christians serving one another (Mark 9:35; 10:44; Gal 5:13); Paul invites all believers, regardless of their gender, to submit to one another’s needs (Eph 5:21).
What that looks like may vary from one culture to another and one role to another (and from one theological understanding to another), but it is undergirded by our Lord’s own example (Mark 10:45; John 13:14). If Paul calls all of us to serve each other, he can hardly be accused of being sexist. (Though most in antiquity would have thought the ethic of serving and laying down lives for one another pretty radical—like he got that idea from a crucified Messiah or something.)
Many thinkers in the ancient world provided lists of familial roles (scholars call these “household codes”), but Eph 5:21—6:9 is the only one we know of that actually frames those codes with this emphasis on mutual submission. “Submitting yourselves to one another” (5:21) introduces the list of instructions to spouses (5:22-33), children and fathers (6:1-4),[5] and slaves and slaveholders (6:5-9). (Ancient codes treated household slaves as members of the household.) At the end of this code, after inviting slaves to submit (but as to Christ; 6:5-8), Paul invites masters to (literally) “do the same things to them” (6:9). Slaves and masters should both submit? What would have happened to slavery had everyone taken Paul’s instructions literally?
While Paul underlines submission especially for the wife (5:22), he may demand even more from the husband. While he specifies only the wife’s submission, he specifies only the husband’s love (5:25), yet he does expect all believers to love each other (5:2) just as he expects us all to submit to one another (5:21). What does this look like for the husband? How should the husband love his wife? He should love her like his own body, since the husband and wife are one flesh (5:28-31). He should love her as Christ loved the church and gave his life for her (5:25), which implies loving her even more than himself. Again, this goes way beyond Paul’s contemporaries, embracing a Christocentric, cruciform model derived from Jesus’s own example.
Before 1 Peter introduces the subjects of slaves and wives of unconverted husbands (1 Pet 2:18—3:7), he urges honoring the king (2:13, 17). This injunction does not require us to reinstitute the monarchy; we instead submit to the authority structures in our respective societies. Peter’s phrase “every human institution” (2:13) recognizes that some of these rules are merely human. Nevertheless, we submit to them “for the Lord’s sake” (2:13). We also honor not only the king, but “all people” (2:17), just as we seek to serve all (as noted above) and prefer fellow believers’ honor to our own (Rom 12:10).
“For the Lord’s sake” (1 Pet 2:13) includes his honor in a hostile society: we might suffer for the sake of righteousness (2:20; 3:14, 17; 4:16, 19), to silence the slanders of those who accuse us (2:12; 4:4). Wives could try to win their unsaved husbands to Christ by fulfilling their expected role of humble, modest respect (3:1-4), similar to Peter’s instructions to slaves (2:18-25). (Peter addresses abuse only regarding slaves, since wives had more options in such cases.)
NT letters are concerned with a situation in the Roman world that could be addressed partly through a lifestyle apologetic. Violating social norms needlessly could bring reproach against the gospel (1 Tim 5:14-15); thus slaves should honor slaveholders not as an endorsement of slavery but so society would not dishonor Christians’ God (1 Tim 6:1; Tit 2:9). Wives should “be submissive to their husbands so God’s word will not be reproached” (Tit 2:5). Today, too, our lives can be a winsome apologetic, although for a culture that defines virtues and social norms very differently from the first century.
Keep Women Silent?
I turn now just briefly to two passages that have perhaps raised the fiercest feminist objections (1 Cor 14:34-35; 1 Tim 2:11-15). (Many scholars dismiss the authenticity of both passages, but that is not my approach and taken in their context they need not be viewed as anti-women.)
Both of these enjoin on women silence in church (1 Cor 14:34-35; 1 Tim 2:11). Almost no churches today press them to mean all that they could mean literally; although 1 Cor 14:34 says, “the women must keep silent in the churches,” most churches at least allow women to join in congregational singing. Generally these churches are not just allowing them to lip sync. Moreover, Paul’s original audience in Corinth would also have known that he did not intend all kinds of silence, because by the time they get to what we call chapter 14 they had already heard chapter 11.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul allows women to pray and prophesy in church so long as their heads are covered (11:4-5). (Exceedingly concise digression for cultural background: most married women in the eastern Mediterranean world covered their hair as a sign of sexual modesty.)[6] My own view is that the kind of noise Paul was prohibiting involved their interrupting Bible teaching with questions, since interrupting lectures with questions was common in antiquity and since Paul says to ask their questions at home (14:35). The particular target of silence is much debated, but at least most of us can agree that the prohibition is not absolute (given 11:4-5 and presumably singing).
The most controversial passage is 1 Tim 2:11-15. Entire books debate this passage, and I will not resolve that discussion in a few paragraphs. But I will offer some observations that may help at least some of my readers with the issue at hand. First, like 1 Cor 14:34-35, this passage appears in a context of learning. Second, all new learners in antiquity were expected to do so quietly. So asking women to learn quietly may have more to do with them being new learners than with them having only xx chromosomes. Finally, that women were new learners would certainly not appear repressive toward women in the first century. Despite exceptions, the vast majority of women were less educated than the men of their own social class (though even most men were not very literate). Jewish boys grew up reciting the Torah, and with extremely rare exceptions Jewish girls did not (though they could attend synagogue). Even among the few philosophic schools that admitted women, women rarely became teachers; perhaps only half a dozen famous women teachers of men flourished in the half millennium before and after Paul. This is why some of us treat the issue as cultural (the first-century Mediterranean world) rather than genetic (the lack of a y chromosome).
Be that as it may, we should note that 1 Tim 2:12 is the only passage in the Bible that specifically prohibits women teaching men, if that is what it does (debates about the meaning of the wording there seem endless, and can’t be re-started here). And this possible prohibition appears in the one set of letters where we specifically know that women were particular targets of false teaching (2 Tim 3:6) and apparently vulnerable to spreading it (cf. 1 Tim 5:13, given one of the Greek terms there). Of the two biblical arguments used to support the case, one (sequence in creation, 2:13) elsewhere is used to support women wearing head coverings (1 Cor 11:8), and the other (Eve’s deception, 1 Tim 2:14) elsewhere applies to an entire church and not just women (2 Cor 11:3). These factors contribute to the debate as to whether Paul applies these verses to a local or universal situation, although he usually cites Scripture universally.
Wherever one comes down on that, Paul does not condemn all ministry by women, because elsewhere he specifically commends women friends for their ministries. This happens especially in Rome (Rom 16:1-7) and Philippi (Phil 4:2), two of the locations in the empire where women had more public freedoms than in many of the cities in the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire.
By the standards of antiquity, Paul thus ranks with the Roman Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus as one of the more women-friendly voices of the first century. So again, wherever you are on the contested spectrum from complementarian to egalitarian, Paul was not sexist and he actually advanced women’s position in the church beyond where it was in most of his society. If society exerted any pressure on how he worded things, it was from the opposite direction as today. In his own culture, the apostle that some today view as sexist actually affirmed women in multiple ways.
Notes
[1] See Ryan P. Burge, “With Gen Z, Women Are No Longer More Religious than Men,” Christianity Today (July 26, 2022), at https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/07/young-women-not-more-religious-than-men-gender-gap-gen-z/ (accessed July 23, 2025).
[2] Much of the documentation for my claims about ancient practice appears there; even more appears in Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (4 vols.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012-15), 1:597-638.
[3] By “egalitarian,” I mean one who believes that God gifts and empowers both genders equally—though we are also obviously different and biologically complementary. Complementarians today accept the equality in Christ of both genders but restrict some ministry roles exclusively for men. There is actually a range of shades between these positions and a much wider range of views outside them. This article is not staking a position on the complementarian-egalitarian debate, though my own views are a matter of public record.
[4] Compare e.g., Tal Ilan, “The Attraction of Aristocratic Women to Pharisaism during the Second Temple Period,” HTR 88 (1, 1995): 1–33.
[5] “Fathers,” rather than parents, because ancient household codes addressed fathers specifically. Scripture in general of course expects both parents to instruct their children (Deut 21:18; Prov 1:8; 6:20).
[6] For women’s head coverings, see e.g., Craig S. Keener, “Head Coverings,” pp. 442-46 in Dictionary of New Testament Background (ed. Craig A. Evans and Stanley E. Porter; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000); now esp. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2003).
— Craig S. Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and author of 37 books, including Christobiography: Memories, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019).
