Social status

The paterfamilias, where the man is in charge and everybody else just has to do what he says, isn't necessarily how it functioned in the the ancient world, social class had five or six major factors and where you fit in society was not dependent on just one factor.

Today, social status has maybe two or three factors.

Gender, definitely in Christian spaces, less so in the secular spaces, but in Christian spaces, gender is our big, especially in the complementarian world.

In the complementarian world, gender is our big social status marker.

You are either male, so you lead, or you are female, so you follow.

Like, that's pretty much it.

Sometimes we get caught up in, like, wealth and celebrity status.

Yeah.

So Bourdieu called this habitus.

So when behaviours shaped by wealth and social status become the kind of the norm, and then we almost sort of forget, therefore, where they come from.

So at the other end of society, where people were drinking beer, ordinary people were also storing ice and they were using cold cellars and cool rooms.

And this is how we get the beer now known as lager.

However, since the city was heavily influenced by Roman culture, it makes sense to focus on Roman practice during the first century.

In the ancient Roman world, what you wore was based on your age, gender, and social status.

For adults, the basic dress was the tunic, or underdress.

Over the tunic, married Roman women wore the stola, a long dress fixed with straps.

Tertullian was writing a hundred years later in North Africa, The Dora Europas painting is from Mesopotamia and dates to the mid-200s, so this data is far removed from Paul's context, both geographically and chronologically.

Given the nature of our sources and the likelihood that Jews in Corinth had probably already adopted many aspects of Roman culture, scholars tend to focus on Roman fashion and cultural norms when reconstructing the cultural context of this passage.

So what was the significance of women covering their heads? For the Greeks and the Romans, clothing communicated not only social status, but also moral status.

The stola impala symbolized a woman's modesty, with veiling serving as a visual shorthand for sexual virtue, norms of proper women's behavior, and morality.