You know, I agree here, though not in the way you might suppose, and certainly not to the point you’d draw from it. I refer you to The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament under the article for the veil: κάλυμα kaluma. To summarize what you find there:
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We have evidence for the practice of women wearing veils that are textual and graphic, the latter in the form of statuary, coins, medallions, and frescos.
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These sources are non-Christian, rather Greco-Roman. For this reason, they are especially useful for evaluating a common and mistaken notion about the deployment of headcovering in Corinth in the First Century.
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In non-religious contexts, women are routinely portrayed with and without headcoverings. There are no contexts where covering of women is either mandatory or prohibited.
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In religious contexts (portrayals of female deities, female worshipers of any sort of deity), females (goddesses or worshipers) exhibit the same diversity in practice - sometimes with veils, sometimes with none. No pattern related to context is provable.
Things change dramatically, however, when we move to eastward. There lived a Roman statesman and historian named Dio Cassius (c. 155 – c. 235), many of whose works, including speeches, have survived. One of these speeches, referenced in the TDNT article above, was delivered in Tarsus, Paul’s home town (!). In its introduction, Dio Cassius comments favorably on the Eastern practice of the women being veiled in public, evidently viewing a number of these in the crowd gathered in a public square to whom he addressed himself from a balcony.
Two implications may be drawn from this. First, that what Dio Cassius was commenting on was not an ordinary custom by women in the Greco-Roman West. Second, it validates in summary fashion what the article on the Veil in TDNT also reports - in the Greco-Roman west, there was no pan-cultural practice regarding the veiling of women.
Add to this, Tertullian’s aplogia for the veiling of virgins notes that Jewesses in North Africa were recognizeable because they (like the women Dio Cassius noticed) veiled themselves in public.
How does this bear upon Paul’s 16 verses devoted to this topic in the First Corinthian Epistle?
First, it shows how utterly erroneous the notion that Paul was taking the Corinthian Christian women to task because they were flaunting a common custom. In Corinth there was no common custom regarding the covering of women.
Second, in a culture where there was no common custom regarding the veiling of women, Paul is imposing an Eastern and Jewish cultural custom upon the Christians who inhabited a Greco-Roman culture!
Fast forward 2,000 years, two millennia in which Christians followed the Apostolic teaching of Paul (until the middle of the 20th Century, that is), and ask yourself - what becomes of those rationales bandied about for dismissing Paul’s teaching? If those rationales “work” today, they should have worked just as well in Paul’s day, wouldn’t you think?
I was communicating Alastair Roberts’ view, not my own.