Philip B. Payne

I am delighted make available my new book in German translated by Hans Ronsdorf, a new article in Chinese, and a new article in The Christian Post:

Philip B. Payne, Die Gleichstellung von Mann und Frau aus biblicsher Sicht (Augsburg, Germany: Ronsdorf, 2023). See its cover.

Philip B. Payne, “The Bible Teaches the Equal Standing of Man and Woman,” Gospel and Modern China 20 (2023.06) 32–46.
腓力·佩恩（Philip B. Payne）圣经教导男女平等 福音与当代中国†第20†期 (2023.06) 32–46.

Philip B. Payne, “The subordinationist heresy? Christ is eternally subordinate to Father God” The Christian Post (July 24, 2023)

On Monday July 31, I had a cochlear implant in my right ear. Dr. Wilkerson says my surgery went well, and so far I have no pain or ringing in either ear.

Immediately after surgery, before I was conscious of anything in my surroundings, I clearly remember being in a contest in which I had to get five points in order to come back to reality. The four points I had gotten were all overridden by my opponent, so I had nothing. At that moment the Spirit of the Lord intervened and gave me a point in a position that freed up my other four points. I instantly became 100% aware of all my surroundings and saw the face of a nurse leaning over me with Rachael on her name tag. She asked, “How are you?” I replied, “The Spirit of the Lord enabled me.” Nancy and Brendan were there and both heard me say this three times. Their smiling faces were wonderfully beautiful to me.

Thank you for your ongoing prayers for recovery. I am scheduled on August 17 to have the cochlear implant turned on. Please pray that my mind will adjust well to this new way of hearing and that I will with practice be able to understand speech far better than I can now.

I’m delighted that Amazon.com lists The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood as its #1 Best Seller in both Christian Leadership and in Religious Leadership:

I’m also delighted to announce the publication of my new newest book, Die Gleichstellung von Mann und Frau aus biblischer Sicht (Augsburg, Germany: Ronsdorf, 2023) and that The Christian Post has recently published ten of my articles:

Can women be pastors: What I discovered during 50 years of research

Does 1 Timothy 2:12-15 prohibit women having authority over men?

Does 1 Corinthians say women have to cover their heads?

Does the Bible teach male headship?

What Ephesians 5 really means about husband-wife submission.

Mutual submission in 1 Peter 31:7—husband submit to wife.

Is the order of creation male authority Bible argument valid?

Bible translations distort God’s Word on the issue of gender.

The church fathers repudiate gender hierarchies in the Bible.

Is the slippery slope argument against ordaining women valid?

It was wonderful to celebrate Mother’s Day with my mother, who turns 99 in October. I was able to sit by her and my three brothers at the opening session of the Twin Lakes Church Bible Conference in Aptos, California. Two people said how pleased they were that I was able to sit by my wife! When Mom heard about it she laughed out loud! She attended my session and understood it and our frequent theological discussions that week.

Response was enthusiastic to my three seminars on Women in Church Leadership. It looked like all sixty books they ordered were grabbed. Following a special session the following Tuesday with PowerPoint slides and Q&A for the whole staff and interns, René Schlaepfer, their lead pastor, promised to buy a copy of The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood for each of them.

I also had wonderful Q&A sessions that next week with the pastors of Santa Cruz Bible Church and Vintage Faith Church and memorable hikes along the Pacific coast and in the redwoods with my brothers John and Peter. John and I also jogged 2.4 miles every other day around the Henry Cowell Big Trees loop trail. 

On May 17, 2023 The Christian Post Published “Mutual submission in 1 Peter 3:1-7: Husband submit to wife? Here Peter also not only commands wives to submit themselves to their own husbands, but also commands husbands to submit themselves to their own wives and to honor their wives as joint heirs of the gracious gift of life.” You can download it here. 

I’ll be presenting 3 seminars at the Twin Lakes Bible Conference in Aptos, California May 13 on WHAT DOES THE BIBLE TEACH ABOUT WOMEN IN MINISTRY? The seminars will give biblical answers to seven objections to women in leadership in the church and in the home with time for Q&A after each objection.
This is the LINK to download the talk. This is the LINK to download the PowerPoint.

The Christian Post has recently published five articles they requested I submit:
3/31/2023 Can women be pastors? What I discovered during 50 years of research. https://www.christianpost.com/voices/can-women-be-pastors-what-i-found-during-50-years-of-research.html
4/19/2023 Does 1 Timothy 2:12-15 prohibit women from teaching or having authority over men? https://www.christianpost.com/voices/does-1-timothy-212-15-prohibit-women-having-authority-over-men.html
4/27/2023 Does I Corinthians say women have to cover their heads? https://www.christianpost.com/voices/does-i-corinthians-say-women-have-to-cover-their-heads.html
5/2/2023 Does the Bible teach male headship? https://www.christianpost.com/voices/does-the-bible-teach-male-headship.html
5/7/2023 What Ephesians 5 really teaches about husband-wife submission? https://www.christianpost.com/voices/what-ephesians-5-really-means-about-husband-wife-submission.html

Preston Sprinkle invited one female and one male scholar to present a biblical defense of the complementarian (Sydney Park and Gerry Breshears) and egalitarian (Cynthia Long Westfall and me) views at the Theology in the Raw Symposium on Women in Leadership in Boise, Idaho March 23.

Click HERE to see my 20-minute talk that distills my last 50 years of research that changed my mind regarding four key objections to women in leadership and HERE to download my PowerPoint to your downloads folder.

I argue that Paul usually uses “head” to convey “source,” not male headship, that 1 Timothy 2:12 addresses a crisis of false teaching in Ephesus—where some women had followed after Satan—by prohibiting women from seizing authority to teach a man, that Paul encourages all believers to aspire to the office of overseer in 1 Timothy 3:1, and that external and internal evidence shows that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 was not in Paul’s original letter.

Just today I received copies of my new Zondervan book: The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood:

How God’s Word Consistently Affirms Gender Equality, 223 pages. Click HERE to see it.

It is written for non-specialists to make complex ideas as simple and clear as possible. It includes extensively updated material on 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, including photographs of all 16 two-dot plus bar (distigme-obelos) symbols in the oldest Bible in Greek, Codex Vaticanus B.

Beth Allison Barr writes: “Payne makes it clear that ‘biblical womanhood’ has never been biblical. His careful analysis provides unshakeable ground that we can believe both in the Bible and in the full freedom of women to serve however God has called them.”

Click HERE to see other endorsements. 

https://www.amazon.com/Bible-vs-Biblical-Womanhood-Consistently-ebook/dp/B0B5CVBJ4R states that it is the “#1 New Release in Gender & Sexuality in Religious Studies” and sells it for $17.99 paperback, $12.99 Kindle. 

Richard Fellows and Jan Krans in NTS 65 (2019) 246-251 and 252-257 deny that distigme-obelos symbols exist in Codex Vaticanus B. This study critiques those articles. It identifies key insights and weaknesses in both articles. It shows that all eight subsequently discovered distigme-obelos symbols with all five characteristic features identified in my NTS 63 (2017) 604-624 article mark with a gap the precise point where the original text was interrupted. In each case, the spurious added text consists of at least four consecutive words. Since additions of four or more consecutive words occur on average only once every 83.5 lines of Vaticanus text their coincidence with all sixteen distigme-obelos symbols must not be random.

Sam Williams, a student from the Philippines, asks Phil Payne if Deut 22:28-29 teaches that a rapist must marry his victim. Click here for their dialogue.

Sam Williams, a student in the Philippines, dialogues with Phil Payne about her deep concerns about 1 Cor 11:3 interpretations that teach the subordinationist heresy. Click here to read the dialogue.

Clicking on Bibliography will give you the 6/6/2020 updated version.

Priscilla Papers 33, No. 2 (Spring 2019) 24-30 has just published my article, “Is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 a Marginal Comment or a Quotation? A Response to Kirk MacGregor.” It demonstrates that Kirk MacGregor’s claim that 1 Cor 14:33b-38 is a “Quotation-Refutation Device” is false. It argues, instead, that 1 Cor 14:34-35 was originally written in the margin as a reader comment and was inserted into the text, as copyists normally did with text in the margin, either after verse 33 or after verse 40. It provides evidence that 14:34-35 was a marginal gloss from the oldest Bible in Greek, Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest Latin manuscripts, Codex Fuldensis, transcriptional probability, and internal evidence. It identifies all sixteen instances where Vaticanus’s original scribe left a gap in the text at the exact point at least four words were added. Four-or-more-word additions survive in multiple manuscripts on all seventeen distigme-obelos-marked lines. The two-dot distigme marks the location of a textual variant. The obelos identifies what kind of variant it is, a multi-word addition that was not in the original text.

I am delighted that Angela Rolston has made available an Italian translation of the entire text, including footnotes, of my article summarizing the argument of Man and Woman, One in Christ, “The Bible Teaches the Equal Standing of Man and Woman” published in Priscilla Papers 29,  number 1 (Winter 2015) 3-10. https://www.pbpayne.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/La-Bibbia-insegna-uguaglianza-di-uomo-e-donna.pdf

This is Phil’s chapter “What-about Headship? From Hierarchy to Equality” in Mutual by Design: A better Model for Christian Marriage (ed. Elizabeth Beyer; Minneapolis: CBE International, 2017). Read the complete post…

It was a great joy to give several lectures to about 170 highly receptive African leaders celebrating the inauguration of The Africa Centre for Biblical Equity at St. Paul’s University, Kenya. My lectures were on: Read the complete post…

The home page of New Testament Studies at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies states:

“Most read  Article:   Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34-5

  Philip B. Payne

  New Testament Studies, Volume 63, Issue 4″

The NTS web site also lists this article as already having reached a media ranking of 19. There is only one issue in New Testament Studies in the past ten years for which the sum of the media rankings of all the articles in that issue (up to 10 articles) combined is higher than the media ranking of this one article.

I am grateful to Richard Fellows for pointing out to me that there is a ninth instance of the distigme-obelos symbol in Codex Vaticanus at Mark 6:11 (1285B) besides the eight identified in my New Testament Studies article. It both extends into the margin farther and is longer than any of the twenty undisputed paragraphoi adjacent to a distigme. Its following line of text also has a gap in it at the exact location of a fifteen-word block of later-added text. Like all five other distigme-obelos symbols in the Gospels of Vaticanus, the added text is not in the Vaticanus body text. Read the complete post…

My latest article in New Testament Studies has been extensively discussed in mainline and academic media following a major article about it in The Telegraph Sept. 17 by Olivia Rudgard, Social and Religious Affairs Correspondent, “Bible passage used to stop women become ordained ‘added later’, academic claims” (see link below).
Read the complete post…

I am delighted to make available with twelve color photographs: “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34-5” New Testament Studies 63.4 (2017) 604-625. Paul Canart, probably the world’s leading expert on Codex Vaticanus, emailed to me how pleased he is with the article and its argument that scribe B faithfully copied a primitive manuscript of the Gospels. Larry Hurtado, renowned New Testament textual scholar, already has a positive review of it at https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/paul-and-1-corinthians-1434-35/, and the British mainstream newspaper Telegraph already has published a positive review of its importance at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/22/bible-passage-used-stop-women-become-ordained-added-later-academic/ Read the complete post…