Philip B. Payne

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…

I am delighted to make available a summary of Six Groundbreaking Discoveries detailed in “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34-5” New Testament Studies 63.4 (2017) 604-625. This summary also contains links to 25 publications by me that are posted on the Christians for Biblical Equality web site, www.cbeinternational.org. This summary and the full NTS article with twelve color photographs are also available for free download at www.pbpayne.com: Publications: Articles.

I am delighted that New Testament Studies 63 (2017) 604-625 is publishing my study, “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34-5″ with twelve colour photographs, downloadable free in September 2017 from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/open-access. Downloads are free since Christians for Biblical Equality paid to make it an Open Access article permitting unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Attached is a supplement to that article giving the chi-square standard probability test data confirming that the eight bars with characteristic features in Vaticanus are not simply paragraph marks, but obeloi marking blocks of added text. Six groundbreaking discoveries in this study are summarized at cbe.today/Vaticanus.

The following link shows you Phil Payne’s PowerPoint for his talk, “Why do Women and Gender Studies Matter for a Christian University?” It shows that the Bible does not teach twelve allegedly biblical reasons against the equality of man and woman. Payne Whitworth Women https://www.pbpayne.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Whitworth-talk.ppt

Whitworth University in Spokane, WA, has invited me to give two public talks with discussion, a coffee time with honors students, and three meals with faculty members, including a faculty dinner with a discussion on “The Meaning of Biblical Equality.” The first public talk is on Monday, March 20 from 8:00 to 9:30 PM in the HUB Chambers (upstairs) to Overflow on, “Is God a Feminist? The Bible’s Affirmations of the Equal Standing and Privileges of Women and Men.” The second public talk is Tuesday, March 21 from 7:00 – 8:00 PM in the Weyerhaeuser Hall 1st floor Robinson Teaching Theatre on, “Why do Women and Gender Studies Matter at a Christian University.” If you are in the area, come early to get a good seat! This link shows you my talk, Why do Women and Gender Studies Matter? https://www.pbpayne.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Why-do-Women-and-Gender-Studies-Matter.pdf 

I am delighted to make available a complete Chinese translation, including end notes, of my article summarizing the central argument of Man and Woman, One in Christ: “The Bible Teaches the Equal Standing of Man and Woman” Priscilla Papers 29 number 1 (Winter 2015) 3-10. I am profoundly grateful to Jiang Qingxin (江庆心), Beijing (北京), Renmin (People’s) University of China (中国人民大学), who translated it. Mable Yin writes, “the translation is superb. I dare not touch it. I am clearly in awe of it. It is excellent. I am just THRILLED this translation exists.” 

The 50+ ordained women who attended the Assemblies of God Conference yesterday were wonderfully responsive and full of outstanding questions. Vicki Judd, who led the conference emailed me, “It was a joy and an honor to have you teach today. The feedback from our ladies has been phenomenal. Thank you so much for sharing your joy and passion with us today.”