Lydia

“Jennifer, since you said that the bible does not say that man is the head of his wife(woman/household), then please explain what does 1 Corinthians 11:3 means when it tells us that the head of man is Christ, the head of woman is man and the head of Christ is God.”

The key is understanding what was meant by Kephale in the 1st Century. It did not mean authority. Believe it or not you can find references to “Kephale” meaning that the “head” was the “source for life for the “Body”” God was the “source” for Christ and the man was the original source for woman. But read on as Paul goes on to say that then man was born of women. He is making a point of interdependance.

The same “source” for life is communicatd in 1 Tim. Christ is the source for life of the Body of Christ. Husbands were the source of life for the wife in the 1st Century since women were generally considered chattel.

They also believed that the “heart” was the center of thinking and decision making. You can see this in many of Paul’s writings when he refers to the heart.

You see this belief in the head being the source as in food, smell, breathing, etc in writings from ARistotle and Hippocrates. The “head/kephale” nourished the “body”.

About a hundred years after Paul, Galen, a physician proved that the “head” was the center of thinking and movement for the Body. Before that, it was thought it was the heart. He did this by opening up the heads of animals and proving the brain is what caused the body to move certain parts.

Head/Body is a unity metaphor in scripture. And it has been completely changed in it’s original meaning for 2000 years. Had the Holy Spirit wanted to communicate “authority over” then He would have inspired clear Greek words such as exousia or arche.