Paolo, la violenza, il genere. Note sulla questione del velo a Corinto

Since the seminal studies of G. Theissen and W.A. Meeks, scholarly attention has been increasingly drawn to the problem of the social composition of the Pauline groups, as well as to Paul’s ambiguous attitudes towards women. Even today, however, it is difficult to bridge the gap between the image of Paul as a great “revolutionary” who proclaims perfect equality between men and women in Christ and the idea of Paul as inevitably anchored in the retrieve views of his time on women. In fact, as we shall seek to demonstrate through the analysis of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, both these positions often stem from anachronistic and actualizing readings. Behind the controversial issue of the veil, addressed by Paul in the passage, we can recognize instead a fundamental clash between different conceptions of gender, whose deciphering is made problematic by a twofold cultural distance: the one that opposed Paul to the Corinthians in the 1st century, and the one that still separates his text from its modern interpreters.