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A¿esja Lavrinovi¿a undertakes a detailed critical examination of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, a passage that has played a decisive role in debates on women's participation in early Christian worship. Drawing on textual criticism, redaction criticism, and linguistic analysis, she explores the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions of the verses in close dialogue with manuscript traditions, with particular attention to early Greek and Latin witnesses. This investigation is framed against centuries of exegetical engagement, from patristic interpretation to modern scholarly debate.
The author's analysis demonstrates that verses 34-35 form a discrete textual unit with tenuous syntactic links to the surrounding context. Pronoun usage, verbal forms, and central terms such as ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿, ¿¿¿¿¿¿, and ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ exhibit striking incongruities, reinforcing the hypothesis of interpolation. Furthermore, she highlights the function of verses 33b and 36 as an editorial frame that universalizes the prohibition of women's speech in order to emphasize ecclesiastical unity. This insight supports the conclusion that the passage is not authentically Pauline but the product of later editorial activity.
Challenging rhetorical approaches that assume textual coherence, the author proposes instead that textual incoherence be read as evidence for interpolation. The findings shed new light on questions of Pauline authorship, the role of women in early Christian assemblies, and the processes by which doctrinal norms were established.