Don Johnson

As I meditate on this more, I find that using 2 principles have helped me.

1. Start from the more clear and let the more clear help me understand the less clear. 1 Cor 11 is in the form of a chiasm, with the center at 1 Cor 11:10, this is the crucial part of the teaching to get correct and unfortunately, many translations add words to try to make sense of what they (mis)understand to be Paul’s argument. However, in the Greek 1 Cor 11:10 is very clear, a woman can decide what to do with her “head thing” (whatever it is), but a man is not to do the “head thing,” at least in the 1st century culture at Corinth. But if you stray from these 2 conclusions, you make a hash of the teaching and all too many interpreters do just that.

2. Per Acts 21, Paul was a Torah-observant Jew and agreed to pay for 4 Nazirite vows. There is simply NO WAY Paul was going to say long hair was wrong on a man or a woman (as this could easily happen if the Nazirite vow was long enough) if you think Paul is saying long hair is wrong, it is time to restart the analysis and you are missing something. Unfortunately, short hair on men is considered natural in our culture, but actually long hair is natural on both genders, unless it is cut. So it is easy for many people to just read the text as if it was written to people in our 21st century Western culture and totally miss what is going on, it is so (apparently) “plain” to them, what is the problem? We are just “twisting” the “clear and plain meaning” if you bring up how the text would be read in the 1st century! But actually we are just “untwisting” it.