Paul tells women to be silent in church and not have authority over men (1 Corinthians 14:34-35, 1 Timothy 2:11-12), which shows the New Testament endorses the subordination of women rather than their equal dignity.

Why people find it persuasive

These aren't obscure verses — they've shaped centuries of church practice excluding women from teaching and leadership, and on their face they read as flat, general prohibitions rooted in claims about creation order, not merely local customs.

Important distinctions

• • Universal, timeless prohibition vs. instruction addressed to specific disruptive situations in specific churches.
• • Silence/submission language vs. Paul's own practice of commending women leaders, prophets, and co-workers elsewhere.
• • Complementarian vs. egalitarian readings within orthodox, Bible-affirming Christianity.
• • Creation-order argument as grounding hierarchy vs. as grounding differentiated, not ranked, roles.

Christian response

• • The same letter (1 Corinthians 11:5) explicitly assumes women pray and prophesy — publicly speaking, Spirit-empowered ministry — in the gathered assembly just three chapters before 14:34's 'silence,' which makes an absolute, universal silencing reading internally contradictory; most scholars conclude 14:34-35 addresses a specific disruptive pattern (likely uneducated women, newly admitted to worship in a culture where women rarely received religious instruction, calling out questions during teaching, or a targeted response to disorderly speech/false teaching in Corinth's chaotic worship context described throughout chapter 14), not a blanket ban on women's speech.
• • Paul commends and works alongside numerous women in ministry leadership throughout his letters without apparent tension: Phoebe is called a deacon and patron (Romans 16:1-2), Junia is called 'outstanding among the apostles' (Romans 16:7), Priscilla is named (often first, ahead of her husband Aquila) as a teacher who corrected Apollos's theology (Acts 18:26), and Euodia and Syntyche are called his 'fellow workers' in gospel ministry (Philippians 4:2-3) — a pattern hard to square with a Paul who believed women must be categorically silent or barred from teaching men.
• • 1 Timothy 2 is addressed to a specific, named situation in Ephesus, a city dominated by the cult of Artemis with prominent female religious authority, where false teaching was being spread partly through untrained women in the young church (1 Timothy 5:13, 2 Timothy 3:6-7 describe exactly this problem) — many scholars (including egalitarian ones like Craig Keener and Philip Payne) argue Paul's instruction is a timebound corrective tied to a lack of theological training and a specific false-teaching crisis, not a universal ontological claim about women's capacities.
• • Even among scholars who read these texts as establishing some differentiated role for men and women in church leadership (the complementarian position, represented by serious exegetes like Wayne Grudem and Denny Burk), the standard interpretation is not that women are inferior or must be silent in general, but that a specific teaching-authority office within the gathered church is reserved for qualified male elders, alongside full affirmation of women's giftedness, spiritual equality (Galatians 3:28), and wide-ranging ministry — a considerably narrower and more textured claim than 'the Bible silences women.'
• • This remains one of the most seriously, respectfully contested exegetical questions among faithful, historically orthodox, egalitarian and complementarian Christians alike, both camps affirming women's full equality in worth and salvation while disagreeing on the scope of specific leadership roles — which suggests the text is genuinely difficult to adjudicate with certainty rather than a straightforward, unambiguous subordination of women as persons.

Christian counterresponse

The creation-order appeal need not imply inferiority or general silencing — Paul elsewhere grounds differentiated (not ranked) roles in creation order without denying full spiritual equality (1 Corinthians 11:11-12 explicitly balances the creation-order comment with 'in the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man of woman'), so the argument's force depends on contested background assumptions about what 'created first' is meant to establish, and reasonable, textually serious readers land on different sides; this is a case for interpretive humility rather than a decisive disproof of the text's overall message about women's dignity, which is unambiguous in other passages.