I have a great deal of respect for N.T. Wright and works like the Christian Origins series and Surprised by Hope are masterpieces that have positively impacted my life. However, when it comes to his arguments in favour of women’s ordination, his historical claims are so wrong that for them to have come from a man of his calibre he is surely being either wilfully ignorant or outright deceptive.

For instance, he often claims that since St Phoebe was likely the letter-carrier of Romans (Rom 16:1-2), then she must have also been the one to have read it out loud to the Roman Church, which he then uses to undermine the plain reading of 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 and 1 Timothy 2:12. The problem with this claim is that Wright never provides any evidence for it, and it is in fact demonstrably false, no matter how many egalitarian scholars continue to parrot it.

Dr Peter Head is one of the world’s leading scholars on ancient letter carriers and has studied well over a thousand ancient Roman and Jewish letters. He says in one of his articles, published by a peer-reviewed academic journal, that after carefully studying these letters “we did not find any evidence that any particular letter-carrier was also expected to read the letter aloud to the recipient, and we found some evidence which would tell against such an expectation.”[1]

Even the internal evidence of the NT itself shows that letter-carriers did not read out the letter.[2] Acts 15:30-31 shows that while Judas and Silas delivered a letter to Antioch, it was the Antiochians who read it aloud. Revelation 1:3 assumes that the recipient of the letter will also be the one reading it aloud. And finally, Ephesians 3:4, Colossians 4:16, and 1 Thessalonians 5:27 all also show that the receivers of the letter are the ones who read it out loud.

Wright also continues to bring up the long-debunked myth that murals painted on ancient Christian churches show women presiding over Communion,[3] which is frankly absurd, as we know full well that the ancient Church unanimously upheld a male-only Priesthood, who alone could preside. Wright also claims that the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus had an all-female Priesthood, in order to twist the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:12, but this fantasy has also been utterly debunked long ago. (You can watch Paul Facey and I refute these claims here: https://youtu.be/R4PnS-Zo304 ).

It is, frankly, somewhat alarming that someone of Wright’s learning and prowess would continue to make such baseless and thoroughly refuted claims about history. It certainly does suggest that on this issue he is trying to warp the evidence in favour of his view, which would mean he is considerably biased in favour of it. I wonder why?

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[1] Peter Head, “Named Letter-Carriers among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri,” JSNT 31.3 (2009): 297.

[2] In what follows I am indebted to the following blog post: https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/phoebe-carrier-of-pauls-letter-to-the-roman-christians/

[3] This ridiculous claim was also made by T.F. Torrance, another able scholar who was blinded by egalitarianism, and was thoroughly debunked here: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=06-01-022-f