Rhetorical Questions
Ruud has posted on the topic of Paul's Hair on my bookshelf blog. Of course, we have no idea how long Paul's hair was when he had it cut. However, I thought that there might be a significant difference if he was taking a vow. Maybe he would shave his hair and then not have it cut again until he had fulfilled certain conditions. How long would that be, a month, a year? There is no indication.
However, a more grammatical issue is involved. Michael has recently brought up the possibility that certain expressions could be ironic, (verse 10) and that the intended meaning is the opposite of the plain text reading. Once again, how would we know for sure.
What about rhetorical questions? Is there no clear way in Greek to tell if something should be a rhetorical question? I don't have the answer. There seems to be some disagreement here. Could 1 Cor. 11: 4 - 5 read,
Update: These verses are taken from a translation proposed by Norman E. Anderson.
However, a more grammatical issue is involved. Michael has recently brought up the possibility that certain expressions could be ironic, (verse 10) and that the intended meaning is the opposite of the plain text reading. Once again, how would we know for sure.
What about rhetorical questions? Is there no clear way in Greek to tell if something should be a rhetorical question? I don't have the answer. There seems to be some disagreement here. Could 1 Cor. 11: 4 - 5 read,
- Does each man [or husband] praying or prophesying having a draped head dishonor his head? Yet does each wife [or woman] praying or prophesying with the head uncovered [or against the uncovered head] dishonor her head? Is she [or he] surely one and the same with [or as] she who has been shorn?
Update: These verses are taken from a translation proposed by Norman E. Anderson.
posted by Suzanne McCarthy at 4:13 PM
15 Comments:
I can't answer this directly, but I had the impression that this would be a common feature of certain types of Greek compostion. Sure enough, there is short description of the classical use of the Rhetorical Question in Herber Weir Smyth's "Greek Grammar" (1920; revised 1956), Section 2640 (pages 596-7). It concludes that "The rhetorical question is much more favoured in Greek than in English." Unfortunately, the discussion seems limited to examples from Attic (Plato and orators), with no mention of the New Testament, let alone whether the same grammatical forms are used there to mark that the statement if being made in the form of a question.
The 1920 edition, as "A Greek Grammar for Colleges," which at this point is identical to the revised edition I have at hand, is available as a pdf at:
http://www.textkit.com/learn/ID/142/author_id/63/
(The passage in question begins on digital page 611.)
Michael,
I apologize if it came out sounding contrary. I didn't have in mind anything so explicit. I don't really know if there is any one possible 'plain reading' of this chapter. At this point, I feel as if I am back in the hunting and gathering stage. I would like to read more about rhetorical questions.
So I present this post to explore, once again, the tools that are available for learning more about rhetorical questions and irony.
Rather than promoting any particular interpretation, my interest is in establishing some of the instruments and guidelines that we can use.
I think we can all particpate in this. The question is, what signals are there that tell us if it is a rhetorical question? There is a traditional understanding, which I believe you support, but it is not without difficulties. One way or another the rhetorical question should be addressed.
I see a serious problem here. It is clear that 1 Corinthians is full of rhetorical questions, probably full of quotations from the Corinthians' letters to Paul, and very likely has some irony in it. But where? If everything in the letter is taken as Paul's direct and literal statements, the letter becomes self-contradictory in various ways. Therefore various people, on both sides of the gender etc debate, have found ways to get round what appears to be the plain sentence by sentence meaning of the text by declaring that certain passages are, or might well be, rhetorical questions, or quotations from the Corinthians' letter, or irony.
The problem is that by making different selections of passages to empty of normative authority in this way, they come up with radically different interpretations of the letter as a whole. In fact by this method they can make the letter say almost anything. And there must be at least a suspicion that some, on both sides, have decided in advance what they think the letter should mean and have selected which passages to empty of authority so as to fit their preconceived ideas.
So, are there any controls by which we can determine which passages are rhetorical questions, or quotations, or ironical, and so which overall interpretation is correct?
The rule on irony is:
"If the speaker can't possibly mean what he is clearly saying he is being ironic." I'm being ironic. Get it?
Ian,
Thanks for that text. I downloaded it but as you say, it doesn't give much more info on Rhetorical questions.
However, in reading Romans, and 1 Corinthians through it seems that the rheotrical questions are always marked by a following answer like Not at all. So I am going to review the ISV translation of this passage which makes no use of rhetorical questions or irony. The effect is that the secod half of the passage appears to contradict the first half. I believe that we should consider this first.
Michael,
what I am working towards is a completely literal interpretion first. Once this is established, it seems like a secondary step to then introduce the issue of irony and rhetoric. This would not be the first scripture in the Bible that appears to be contradictory, so I would want to go very slowly on assuming unmarked irony and rhetoric.
So in anwering my own question I am going to propose that neither verse 4 - 5 are rhetorical nor are verses 14 - 15. They are a true and intended contrast.
However, this doesn't mean disrespect for alternative proposals since this is a very difficult passage. There is a very long tradition of one particular interpretation which you uphold. But my desire here is not to uphold tradition but to read the text in its most grammatically direct sense first, even if it is the more difficult reading.
Michael wrote: "the interpretation should fit in the context of the larger discourse-unit. An individual sentence should not interpreted in such a way that the passage becomes incoherent or self-contradictory." And later: "our interpretations should be plausible within the historical context."
Fair enough, Michael. But Welty, if I understand him correctly, has put forward an alternative interpretation which is coherent and not self-contradictory, according to which the passage is NOT "urging the Corinthians to adhere to a headcovering rule". I forget the details, but I think that to do this he has to take other parts of the passage as not completely literal e.g. as rhetorical questions or irony. But then you do the same with different parts of the passage. So what makes his interpretation impossible and yours certainly true?
Perhaps you would point to the rule that "our interpretations should be plausible within the historical context." Yes, but that does not mean that they should agree with the general custom of the time, because there would have been no need to teach the original audience to do what they would automatically do from general custom. But the real problem is, how much do we actually know about the historical context? You claim that "a female headcovering rule ... generally corresponds to a Jewish custom which we know was prevalent at the time." But I had understood the opposite, that the Jewish rule was that men covered their heads while praying but women did not have to. At the very least the evidence on this seems to be confused.
You make the point that "the new interpretations (such as Welty's) are suspiciously convenient to twentieth-century Western preferences in dress." Perhaps. But the support you quote, from early Christian literature, is also suspiciously convenient to the general dress preferences of its time, and so should not be taken as a good guide to accurate exegesis of the passage. In every century there is a temptation to make Paul say what is least demanding in the cultural context. But that does not imply that that is what he said.
Exactly when covering the head became a distinguishing religious obligation for Jewish men is apparently a difficult problem; the last time I checked, the consensus was that it was probably medieval.
In the Biblical text, it is mentioned in connection with contrition (2 Sam. 15:30) or shame (Jer. 14.3-4), and as a sign of (anticipated) mourning (Esther 6:12) which may indicate that it was somehow unusual enough to have symbolic associations. (In the former instance it is associated with bare feet, which might be read as indicating that it required differentiation from ordinary practice -- an historical survey of Jewish exegesis of the passage might turn up something relevant.)
There is consistent evidence that in Rabbinic times a respectable married woman normally kept her head covered in public (e.g., a man is brought into court charged with removing it). But the extent to which this was regarded as a religious obligation rather than the prevailing social norm, shared with the Gentiles, is apparently is also debatable. The traditional and obligatory nature of the practice is often assumed by those familiar with Eastern European Jewish customs, in which a woman cut her hair short at marriage, and thereafter wore a wig in public. But Cecil Roth pointed out that, during the Renaissance, Italian rabbis denounced Jewish women who, not being satisfied with the adornment provided by God, and following the practice of the Gentiles, wore wigs in public. Which suggests an entirely different set of assumptions at work in a different environnment.
I don't know a lot about Tertullian, but I had tended to see him as representing an older, more conservative and austere cultural tradition resisting the imported modern fashions. A bit like you, Michael, in some ways. But were the customs he was supporting genuinely Christian, or were they simply those of an older culture? I could ask the same about you.
How do you square Paul's insistence (according to you) on Jewish head covering customs in Gentile churches with his insistence, recorded especially in Acts and Galatians, that Gentile Christians had been set free from bondage to Jewish laws and customs and were not to be bound by them? Or for that matter with the explicit apostolic instructions of Acts 15:19,20,28,29? There is no mention in these verses of head covering according to Jewish custom as a requirement for being a Christian.
I posted a few images from Women in the Classical World on my other blog. The veil is worn by Augustus, a freedwoman and a public priestess.
It's actually pretty hard to find a common theme.
I think Peter makes a good point that veiling is not mentioned in Acts 15. So either it was a custom that most Greek and Roman women had already, or it wasn't, and no one in Acts thought to mention it. Or it isn't all that relevent. There are only so many choices.
And why would women be asked to accept further limitations to freedom, when men are offered considerable latitude?
I am still interested in the rhetorical problem.
Michael, I don't accept that Paul's insistence on Christian freedom from the Law of Moses, and from Jewish practices taught as if they were part of the Law, was only a matter of expediency, and so should be limited to "the Jewish laws that effectively prevented any successful mission to the Gentiles". i.e. those matters in which it is expedient. For Paul it was a matter of deep and basic Christian principle, and so it should be for us.
But if Paul's principle was "complete freedom from the Jewish laws that effectively prevented any successful mission to the Gentiles", then in the context of the modern world that principle should surely be put into practice as including freedom from any laws about head covering, for to require women to cover their heads in the 21st century, at least in any Western culture, "effectively prevent[s] any successful mission to the Gentiles", or for that matter to modern westernised Jews.
So, choose for yourself, were Paul's teachings on these matters points of principle or issues of expediency? You can't have your cake and eat it on this one.
Meanwhile perhaps a better example of what I had in mind is given in Colossians 2:8-23, where Paul clearly teaches Christian freedom from Jewish as well as pagan religious customs. He would be highly inconsistent to insist to the Corinthians on Jewish head covering customs. That is one reason why I am convinced that your interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11 is wrong. It is of course well known that the early church quickly fell away from Paul's high standards in this matter into the fringes of legalism and gnosticism. That would explain why early church authors interpreted 1 Corinthians 11 in a way which is utterly foreign to Paul's general teaching on Christian liberty.
But Paul agreed with the Corinthians that "all things are lawful"! (1 Corinthians 6:12, 10:23). That is the basic principle which he shared with them. However, he insisted that not all things are helpful or expedient, and that Christian behaviour should be not to make full use of one's freedom but to do what is expedient for God's work. Thus Christian freedom could be limited not by rules, but only by expediency. Now it was expedient in the cultural conditions of his time to avoid eating meat known to be sacrificed to idols in the home of an unbeliever, even though it was OK to do so in one's own home (10:24-30). Similarly it may have been expedient in the cultural conditions to have suitable hairstyles and headgear (11:4-15 on your interpretation, note how closely this follows 10:23). But on this argument this was something culturally conditioned, and so something which can and should be abandoned in this age in which such rules are not expedient but actually damaging to the witness of the church.
Maybe in some sense I am the Marcion to your Tertullian! - the radical to your conservative. But you misunderstand me if you think that I am rejecting the Old Testament and all things Jewish as Marcion did. Far from it! We have a wonderful heritage from the Jews. It is just that their customs are not binding on Christians - even though for expediency, to avoid excessive offence, the apostles did require Gentile believers to "abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality." Nevertheless, there is clear historical evidence of some retrogression in the church in the second century, and of some failure to understand the teaching of Paul and the other apostles. I don't think this is the place to go into this in any detail.
Michael, I am prepared to accept that such things as abstaining from food sacrificed to idols may have been considered, and may actually be, spiritually beneficial to the person doing so, and not just a matter of avoiding offending or confusing outsiders. My point was not to focus only on others. The issue is not just of maintaining witness to outsiders but also of building up the church. So I wanted to to point out that these are not arbitrary rules but matters of real benefit to someone. Even avoiding fornication is not an arbitrary rule but one given for the benefit of both parties. I accept that there is a fine line here between what is beneficial and what must be taken as obligatory for all Christians. But I don't see that there are any arbitrary rules which are considered obligatory for all regardless of expediency, certainly not even when they go against expdiency.
So, would you want to argue that there is real spiritual benefit to a woman to cover her hair during worship and/or to have long hair? Is Paul trying to teach that? I suppose that could be what the bit about the angels is about. But it seems to me that on your interpretation Paul is teaching an arbitrary rule, one which may have been beneficial for some in his own culture, but if applied in the modern setting helps neither to build up the church nor in its witness to outsiders. I can accept that Paul might teach such rules as culture-bound and so with limited applicability. But it would go against his basic theology to insist on them as applying to all churches for ever.
Well, Michael, while I can agree with you in considering Grudem's and Wallace's applications of this passage as inadequate, I would not go as far as calling them spiritually dangerous. But if we can't be sure what the passage means, and teaching a bad interpretation is spiritually dangerous, the safest course is not to teach this passage at all! Unfortunately we Bible translators don't have that luxury as we would not be allowed to leave the passage out completely. So we have to come to decisions e.g. on what is to be translated as a question. But we can leave matters of application to others.
I just noticed that Euangelion has a good post about Rhetoric in Paul. Something to look into.
Michael, I am not that surprised about disagreements over Paul, because I have studied New Testament to MA level and have worked on translation of Paul's letters. So I am aware that there are many interpretive issues. I am also aware that whatever translation technique is used a translator usually has to make a choice of preferred interpretation - at least if the translation is to be at all clear, and not simply left full of transliterated Greek or Latin words which have zero meaning to readers who are not theologically trained. In fact even these transliterations are controversial. Therefore no translation will be uncontroversial. Do you remember the controversy about the RSV and "expiation"? ESV has proved extremely controversial, and so has TNIV for reasons which are nothing to do with "dynamic equivalence". Bible translation of any style will never be uncontroversial. Does that mean we should abandon it?
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