The Apostle Paul never told women to be silent in church and the Bible passage that indicates he did was a later addition by scribes, scholars have said – though others have rebutted their claims.
It remains one of the most controversial clauses in the New Testament and has fuelled centuries of misogyny as well as supporting the belief women should not be ordained.
But the infamous instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 that ‘women should remain silent in the churches’ was added later and was not written by the original author St Paul, according to analysis of ancient manuscripts by academics at the University of Cambridge.
The presence of a tiny dash, known by scholars as ‘distigme-obelos’ which indicates a section of text added later and not present in the earliest versions, could unravel centuries of theological debate.
Analysis of the Codex Vaticanus – one of the earliest and most reliable copies of the New Testament, dating back to the fourth century – has revealed such a marking next to the insistence that ‘it is disgraceful for a women to speak in church’.
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