Kephale (New Testament)

kephalē (Greek: κεφαλή) appears some 75 times in the Greek New Testament. It is of considerable interest today because of differences of biblical interpretation between Christian egalitarians and Complementarians as to the intent of the New Testament concerning roles of authority assigned biblically to husbands and wives. A prime example appears in Ephesians 5:21-24 where all Christians are told:

²¹Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

and the following three verses say:

²²Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head (kephalē) of the wife as Christ is the head (kephalē) of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."^NIV

Complementarians

Complementarians translate "head (kephalē)" in the above verses (and in similar passages in other Pauline epistles) as meaning “authority", “superior rank", “leader", or similar term signifying authority or rulership of a husband over his wife in perpetuity. They extend this theological position to their belief that the New Testament prohibits women from being pastors, elders, or deacons.

Christian egalitarians

Christian egalitarians maintain that nowhere in Liddell, Scott, Jones and McKenzie Greek-English lexicon (LSJ) does kephalē translate as “authority", “superior rank", “leader", “director", or anything similar as a meaning—not even metaphorically.

Christian egalitarians believe kephalē in the Apostle Paul's Epistles more likely means "source" or "origin" since the Genesis 2:24 account of Creation indicates that the man was the "source" of the woman since she was described in Genesis 2:21-22 as having been created from Adam's "side", the Hebrew word tsela (צְלָעֹת).

Christian egalitarians propose two possible treatments of the Apostle Paul's use of kephalē:

(1) Old Testament laws of primogeniture gave superior rights to the first-born male (Adam). Since Old Testament teachings historically had given the husband, being male, a superior position in the marriage, kephalē was being used in the sense of "source" or "origin"; or

(2) Since first-century Christians were legally held to the Greco-Roman law of patria potestas—"the Rule of the Fathers" which gave a father almost unlimited power over his household of wife, children, and slaves, Paul was doing his best to "Christianize" the harsh law to make it more tolerable, at least conceptually, for wives who had no choice but to cope with the law.

Paul's counsel to the husbands in New Testament passages that describe husbands as being kephalē made potentially greater demands on the husbands. Paul told them to "love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. ... husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself".