Updated 1/31/18

1 Corinthians Chapter 11

A pdf of the interlinear text with Strongs Numbers and morphology code arranged by clauses is given here: 1 Cor 11 Clausal Interlinear Codes R1

Verbs:  Imperative

At the end of the text is a highlighted summary of the morphology codes.  Of particular importance, always, are the verbs in the imperative (command) form.  These are highlighted in the above text of 1 Cor 11 by the shown red boxes.  There are 13 such verbs in this single chapter, a very large frequency of occurrence indicating the importance of necessary behavior for a God-honoring gathering of His elect.

Verbs:  Infinitives

Also highlighted in the above 1 Cor 11 text in green boxes are verbs in the infinitive condition.  Infinitives are a special form of verbs known as the “being” or “to be” verbs.  These are verbs that point to some present and always condition or situation, to something inherent about one’s being.  Infinitives relate closely to the idea of ontology, the study of deep being questions such as “Who am I, really?”  (“Am” in all its forms is the important “being” verb in English, when expressed as an infinitive it is “to be”).  We often pass by such ideas, and word forms, without wrestling with them as to their significance and implications.  But they can be hugely important.  Think for example about the common writing known as a resume (or CV).  What is such a document, really?  It’s an attempt in a few pages to define who some person is (another form of a being word) both in general terms and with respect to some potential particular work career opportunity.  The resume is something much more than a person’s educational or work history:  it is used (or should be, another bering word) about what that person themselves thinks they are (another being word) and can be in some particular set of work responsibilities and, in turn, what the reviewer so determines in reading the resume.

Two of the world’s great pieces of literature center around the great being question:  Hamlet (generally thought to be the greatest English play) and Don Quixote (a candidate for the best novel of all time, and my personal favorite).  What makes these two stories powerful and enduring is that they deal with the central question of who, really, is the central character after which the works are named.  Hamlet struggles mightily to figure it out for himself, a story that ends tragically, while Don Quixote is forever a mystery as who he really was, and his story too ends in death, though a more poignant one, and one that preserves the mystery of him.  These stories have been significant for centuries because they are about the central question that we must ask of ourselves:  “Who am I, really?”

A more recent highly-regarded story is Les Miserables.  The central character has a birth name of Jean Valjean.  One of the core issues that threads through the story is who is Jean Valjean, really.  As a young man he is found to be a thief, having stolen bread during a severe economic crisis in the country; but thief is not the total story of his character as his theft was to provide bread for his sister’s children, so he is a provider judged harshly, even unfairly, by the iron law of the time.  During his many year prison sentence, he is a prisoner, specifically identified as 24601..  Then he is released under severe conditions as a parolee, forever barred from fully participation in society because of his long ago crime, forever remaining, in effect, as 24601.  He then steals again, now some silver, as what he sees as a necessary and just act of survival, but now motivated more out of hatred, as societal rebel.  With the silver and by disguising his identity he becomes over time an upstanding man, a leader in his community, kind and fair to many people with whom he identifies in their struggles.  But he is seen by a Police Inspector named Javert, who represents the unrelenting arm of the law, as a parole-violator who must be again a prisoner, returned to confinement from society as only a number,  24601.  We in the audience are driven by the unfolding of the story to see Jean Valjean as the man he became, the upstanding man, as the man he always truly was, and the legal determinations of him though strictly true were always materially, fundamentally false, something Javert could never see or accept, because he could only see the black and white unchangeability of the determination of “law.”  It is a great story about being.  In the closing scenes of the musical instantiation of the story Valjean sings the riveting lines “Who am I?” that serves to instill him to an act of great personal courage.

More on Being

Being is the central issue of the story of God’s creation, including God Himself, and even our own story.  Within the narrow confines of our issue here, consider the momentous encounter between the God and Moses at the burning bush event as recorded in the book of Exodus.  Here’s that passage (Exodus 3:12-14, NKJV):

¹³ Then Moses said to God, “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?”

¹⁴ And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

What is God saying to Moses in this difficult to grasp self-description?  The world has books by the ton attempting to answer that question.  At its essence, God is expressing to Moses His eternality, as first and only Cause, His non-contingency (non-dependance on anyone or anything), His ultimate Authority as the Author and Creator of all that has any being, as all such being is contingent upon Him, including both Moses himself and the falsely perceived Pharaoh of Egypt with whom Moses will have dramatic encounter.  The fundamental issue is that at the most fundamental of all considerations God’s Being is absolutely and entirely unique with respect to any being within the confines of His creation.

Yet in the creation story in Genesis Ch 1-2 we see that God created man in His “image,” which includes certain derived aspects of God’s own Being.  Among such aspects are that God has given to mankind a being which is (upon its creation) eternal, but eternal subsequent to its creation.  That is, man’s being is that he will live forever.  Because the Scriptures makes clear that such eternal existence (being) will be forever in the presence of God’s love or forever the object of God’s wrath, such being of ours should be a source of great terror to each of us, but for the Grace of God.

What, then, about us?  What is our intrinsic being in this great story, God’s story of creation (and “story” here means simply the revelation of reality through the telling of events and meaning)?  Here are a couple of important markers.  When a man, later a prophet, named Isaiah has a direct encounter with God, Isaiah rightly recognizes himself (Isaiah 6:5, NKJV):

So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of uncleanlips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.”

Note the twice occurring “I am” in this verse.

Out of the many many other examples, let us consider Peter upon his encounter at the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry.  Peter is working as a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus causes a clear miracle in the catching of fish in Peter’s nets.  When Peter recognizes what has happened, here is his proper self-determination (Luke 5:8 NKJV):

then Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

The great ‘aha’s’ of the Bible is the recognitions of truly the “I AM” (Being) of Jesus Christ and the I am (being) of me.  If you get either one of those being claims wrong, you are into the deepest and most eternally damning of error.

The New Testament Being Word

In English we have the root word “am” and all its paradigm (I am, you are, he/she is, …) to express being.  In the Koine Greek of the New Testament the parallel word is eimi, in all its multiple forms.  In the pdf study chapter given above, eimi occurs first at 1 Cor 11:3:

³ But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

The particular form of eimi (translated by is) in the above verse is in the third person singular, so in the Greek it is esti, corresponding to Strong’s G2076.  The root word (for the form of first person singular), eimi, is Strongs G1510.  Together, forms of the being word eimi occur more than 2,500 times in the New Testament.

Here are the occurrences of the being word (all in the form of esti) in our present chapter, 1 Cor 11 (NKJV):

5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with herhead uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is ^G2076even all one as if she were shaven.

 

7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is ^G2076 the glory of the man.

 

8 For the man is ^G2076 not of the woman; but the woman of the man.

 

13 Judge in yourselves: is it ^G2076 comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered?

 

14 Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is ^G2076 a shame unto him?

 

15 But if a woman have long hair, it is ^G2076 a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.

 

20 When ye come together therefore into one place, thisis ^G2076 not to eat the Lord’s supper.

 

24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is ^G2076 my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

Nouns:  Woman and Man

The most frequent words in this chapter are “woman” (as in female) and “man” (male).  The former occurs 16 times and the latter 14 times in just these 33 verses.  This is dramatic and surprising because this chapter contains some of the important commands regarding the New Testament church regarding the practice of communion (also known as The Lord’s Table or Supper).  As noted in the pdf, there is no particular word in Greek for husband or wife.  Rather the same word here in Ch 11 translated “woman” and “man” could legitimately be translated “wife” and “husband.”

But the emphasis of the chapter, at least in terms of word usage of 30 total times is about the role and behavior of women and men in the body of believers.  Don’t miss wrestling with these verses especially because of how offensive they are to the sensibilities of the culture of our time and place.

Think of this:  does it make sense to focus with a microscope and authority on every word in the last half of this chapter–dealing with The Lord’s Supper–and blow by the first half of the chapter either in neglect or outright defiance?  If the first half of the chapter cannot be deemed to be meaningful “to us” (in our time and place), though it indeed is, then on what basis should we then care about the last half of the chapter?

Welcome, to the challenge of God’s Word:  for every one of us there are the tough spots, and we have to choose.  Do we humbly accept?  Deny?  Or, defy?  As Augustine said long ago about The Gospel in general, if we believe what we like and don’t believe what we don’t like, it’s not the Bible we believe but ourselves.  And, of course, we tend to like to believe ourselves; it affirms us, makes us wise, authoritative, and always in the right.  But this natural human tendency is again and again confronted with the text of the Bible that appears or actually does say something widely different than what we or our peers or time and place claim to be inviolately to be true and right.  Guess what:  this dilemma began millennia ago in a place called Eden as recorded in Genesis 3:  the reality and validity of one single prohibitive command of God’s creation for man was confronted by a deceiving snake.  Our parents chose the snake because it simply looked to be a better deal, and so it has been man’s (and woman’s) natural inclination, and the inclination and firm conviction of every culture of people ever since, down to this place and hour.

The Headcovering Issue

This text’s reference to Christ and God, and to woman and man, uses multiple references to the head and its covering.  The historical understanding of the teaching of this passage includes the practice of women (1) having long, or generally longer, hair, and (2) wearing a covering on their hair during the occassions of the gathering of the church.  In the United States today this practice has almost entirely ended.  A web search on the term “headcovering movement” will provide examples of people and groups advocating a return to the practice of either longer hair or using a hair covering (or both) based upon the text of 1 Cor 11.  At issue here is the question of whether the matter of headcovering is a “scruple” (a persuaded leaning but not obligation to do a ‘good thing’) or a Biblical “principle” (a God-ordained ordinary practice) or an “ordinance” (much like the commanded observation of the Lord’s Supper, as discussed later in 1 Cor 11).

Some resources for the study of this issue are provided here.

The Lord’s Supper:  General Resources

This passage in 1 Cor. 11 is the most-important one as to the practice of the NT church regarding The Lord’s Supper.  Accordingly, there is a separate page providing many study resources on The Lord’s Supper including its institution by The Lord in the Gospels, and is available here.

The Lord’s Supper:   The Adjective  Unworthily

This chapter contains the clearest teaching in all the New Testament Epistles about the observance of The Lord’s Supper.   This teaching includes a solemn warning as to mis-practicing such memorial.

So much has been written on this subject that entire libraries could be constructed containing only such books and texts.  For our purposes here we will focus on one word used in the description of how The Lord’s Supper should be observed and that word is unworthily.

The word occurs twice in Ch 11, in verses 27 and 29.  One important point often missed is that the word is in the form of an adverb not an adjective.  (Because we tend to read quickly and casually it is easy for us to miss this distinction, but we do this here particularly to our peril).  Let’s review:  an adjective describes a noun, an adverb describes an action.  (The prefix “ad” comes from the Latin which means “toward;” so an adverb is pointing toward a verb, and an adjective toward a noun).  If the form of the word here in Ch 11 regarding participation in The Lord’s Supper was an adjective then the warning would be that no person, such as you and me, who is (a being word) unworthy should participate in the memorial.  But the word in the text is not an adjective but an adverb meaning that it is not talking about the being of any participant or would be participant in The Lord’s Supper but the behavior in participating.  This is something totally different.

And the behavior or rather misbehavior issue in Corinth regarding The Lord’s Supper is symptomatic of the mess going on from the very beginning of the Epistle where we learn of these folks elevating and following various persons, rather than the Lord, and continues with all manner of moral / sexual deviance, and continues into this very chapter having to do with questions of authority and the interrelationship of women and men.  The Apostle Paul here gives serious warning, inspired by The Holy Spirit as to the consequences of such chaotic mis-behavior with respect to the honoring of the great work of the Lord Jesus Christ, so central to anything about us as new creations in Christ and right before God (subjects we will get to in 2 Cor 5).

Crackers and Juice?

Is the Lord’s Supper to be memorialized by crackers / wafers with grape juice?  This too has been an issue of great controversy.  The simplest, most straight-forward expression of the Lord’s Supper seems to be a memorial occurring during a regular, perhaps even weekly, evening meal of the local body of Christ, during which both bread and wine (or grape juice) would be natural elements.  At some point in such dinner, as would have taken place in the Upper Room at which time the Lord instituted the memorial, an elder of the gathered group would then lead the dinner guests to memorialize the eating and drinking to the words of Jesus and the significance of the work of Jesus Christ in providing their substitute redemption at the cost of his body and blood.  This does not appear to be the regular practice of most Christian communities today, primarily for reasons of convenience and simplicity (it’s a lot easier and quicker to file up to the front, grab a cracker and a tiny plastic vial of Welches, walk back to one’s seat, hoist it down, and call it mission accomplished).

1 Cor 12 study resources are here: