Was 1 Corinthians 14:33-36 added to the Bible?
After Jesus fasted for 40 days, Satan tempted Him to turn stones into bread. Matthew records His response (emphasis mine):
But he answered, “It is written,
‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
—Matthew 4:4 (ESV)
Jesus expects us to feed on every word of God. Does that include 1 Corinthians 14:33–36? Some, like Gordon Fee[1], say no—arguing it was added later by someone else. They base this on a handful of manuscripts where verses 33–36 appear after 1 Corinthians 14:40.
But this view runs into a problem: these verses are present in every known copy of 1 Corinthians[2]. Antoinette Clark Wire notes that all manuscripts which relocate the verses come from the Latin tradition and likely trace back to the same source[3]. She concludes:
Because the transposition of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 to the end of the chapter occurred in the Latin-related tradition, we can only accept that Paul wrote the chapter in the now familiar order.
We still need to understand how 1 Corinthians 11:5 harmonizes with 1 Corinthians 14:33–36. But dismissing these later verses as not written by Paul is not a viable option.
This too is our bread from God.
Gordon Fee's argument that Paul didn't write verses 33-36. ↩︎
Wire, Antoinette Clark. The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul's Rhetoric. Fortress Press, 1990, pp. 149–153. https://archive.org/details/corinthianwomenp0000wire. ↩︎