1 Corinthians 11 Footnotes

11:1 Was Paul being arrogant when he called for others to imitate him? Not at all. Living in a preliterary age, he was adopting a deliberate teaching strategy—calling on new converts to imitate the patterns of behavior modeled for them. Working to support oneself was one such pattern, and relinquishing liberties for the sake of others was another. In fact, 1Th 2:14 speaks of persecuted Thessalonian believers being imitators of suffering Judean churches—just as they had imitated both Paul and Christ in how they received the gospel (1Th 1:6).

11:3 Does calling God the Father the “head” of Christ suggest the Son’s subordination to the Father and deny the doctrine of the Trinity? Indeed not. Rather, Paul was echoing Jesus’s own words that though the Son is equal in substance with the Father (and the Spirit), the Son is (eternally) submissive to the Father’s will (see Jn 5:17-24).

Jesus’s apostles taught that a husband is the family’s “head” and that wives are to acknowledge this (Eph 5:22-33; 1Pt 3:1-7). For their part, Christian men are to love their wives sacrificially as Christ loved the church. Earlier, in the context of sexual purity and conjugal obligations, Paul pointed out that wives have authority over their husbands’ bodies and that spouses should not deprive one another sexually (1Co 7:3-5).

11:5 Paul admonished women prophets for speaking in church without their marriage veils (or neatly arranged hair). Paul also taught that masculinity and femininity should be clearly visible in the self-presentation of men and women, and he used cultural norms of his time in explaining this to his readers. In public worship, women’s voices were heard in both praying and prophesying, although the nature of the latter is somewhat uncertain (see 14:34).