by Sarah Ruden
ALSO BY SARAH RUDEN
TRANSLATIONS
The Aeneid: Vergil
The Homeric Hymns
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Petronius: Satyricon
ORIGINAL POETRY
Other Places
Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Ruden
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
IMAGE and the Image colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.: Excerpts from Homeric Hymns, translated by Sarah Ruden, copyright © 2005 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005); excerpts from Lysistrata by Aristophanes, translated by Sarah Ruden, copyright © 2003 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003); and excerpts from Satyricon by Petronius, translated by Sarah Ruden, copyright © 2000 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Yale University Press: Excerpts from The Aeneid by Vergil, translated by Sarah Ruden, copyright © 2008 by Yale University. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruden, Sarah.
Paul among the people : The Apostle reinterpreted and reimagined in his own time / Sarah Ruden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul—Theology. 2. Paul, the Apostle, Saint. I. Title.
BS2651.R83 2010
225.9’2—dc22 2009020969
eISBN: 978-0-307-37902-3
v3.1_r1
FOR
THE LATE PROFESSOR W. V. CLAUSEN,
MY TEACHER
You, by the window here with me,
Who never spoke to me before,
But called me in
When I went by your office door,
You are a stranger—
Why insist I see
What stands below your window there,
The white tree?
The spring went by like a dull rain
Of “It is gone,” “You cannot have it,”
“We will have to see,”
And then you showed me this,
The glittering tree,
Which stands out in an open place,
For anyone at all to see,
And now I am that anyone,
Since when he looks, he looks for love of me,
And I for love of him,
At the flowering tree.
It is so hard to say, so plain to see.
But you have made it speak, it speaks through me:
The vivid tree.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface: Who Was Paul?
1. PAUL AND ARISTOPHANES—NO, REALLY
2. THE END OF FUN? PAUL AND PLEASURE
3. NO CLOSET, NO MONSTERS?
PAUL AND HOMOSEXUALITY
4. AN APOSTOLIC OINKER?
PAUL AND WOMEN
5. JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS?
PAUL AND THE STATE
6. NOBODY HERE BUT US BONDSMEN:
PAUL AND SLAVERY
7. LOVE JUST IS:
PAUL ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW COMMUNITY
Note on My Use of Sources
Selected Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks abound, for spiritual, scholarly, and practical help: to David and Marjorie Ball, Marcelle Martin, and Ken and Katharine Jacobsen at Pendle Hill Quaker Study Center; to Sheila Murnaghan and the Classics Department at the University of Pennsylvania; to my agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu; to Yale Divinity School—I was a stranger, and you took me in; to Leslie Williams—hungry, and you fed me; and to George and Sadie Stegmann, Caro Attwell, and Tom Conroy—ni me plus oculis vestris amaretis.
PREFACE: WHO WAS PAUL?
Probably around a decade after the birth of Christ, the person who would become the most important exponent of Christianity was born. Paul belonged to a Jewish family in the port city of Tarsus (on the southern coast of what is now Turkey), in the Roman province of Cilicia. He was originally called Saul, the name of a king in the Hebrew Bible, but as a missionary of the new sect he adopted the name of Roman origin by which he is still commonly known, sometimes with the addition of the title “Saint” or “the apostle.”*
Paul was a native or early Greek speaker, and all of his surviving writings are in that language. According to Acts of the Apostles (the New Testament book that recounts events after those in the four gospels), he was fluent in Hebrew as well (Acts 21:40–22:20). How much Latin he knew is uncertain. Acts shows him dealing suavely with Roman officials, but many Romans read and spoke Greek, the business language of the entire Mediterranean.
Tarsus had come under the Greek Seleucid empire more than 250 years before falling to the Romans in the early first century B.C. It was a cosmopolitan city: as almost everywhere, the Greeks and Romans had overridden all previous hegemonies (which in this case were Hittite, Assyrian, and Persian). Tarsus was known for commerce, for the same kind of oratorical and philosophical higher education enjoyed at Athens and Rome, and for its cult of Hercules. It had all of the public works of any established Roman provincial capital, including monumental temples, a stadium, and a sophisticated water supply.
Since Paul was a tent maker, and since trades were usually passed on through families, it is safe to assume that this was the family business. It is a tricky question whether he was a Roman citizen. This would not have been odd for a provincial from a respectable family. But if Paul had been born a citizen, as Acts testifies (22:27–28), why did he only once—and only quite late, after years of submitting to official beatings and ad hoc imprisonment—invoke his privilege of a legal process ending at Rome? Perhaps it was one thing to be a Roman citizen, another to rely on citizenship amid the touchy religious and cultural politics he had to negotiate. Since he does not seem to have traveled with the usual entourage (including slaves) of a man of position, it would have been easy to assume he was not a Roman citizen.
Even more confusing, this cultured and influential man, who never questioned his own prerogatives as a leader, supported himself at times by crafting tents with his own hands. And—of course—what about the strange religion he was aggressively spreading? His legal status must have been only one question in people’s minds as they tried to work out who he was, what he was up to, and how to react to him.
As a young man, Paul went to Jerusalem for Jewish religious purposes, and by his own account he was a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5). This group was concerned with ritual purity, especially in and around the Temple. Marriage was prescribed for such men, but there is no telling whether Paul ever had a wife or children.
While in Jerusalem, he became an agent of the Temple in attacking the recently crucified Jesus’ followers, who were playing a disruptive and precarious role within Judaism. On the road to Damascus with documents authorizing a purge in that city, he heard the voice of Jesus rebuking him, was blinded, and recovered to be baptized and slowly work his way into the new movement (Acts 9ff.; Galatians 1:13–24
).
The full history of his missions is uncertain, though scholars have worked out several more or less plausible timelines. Acts summarizes his career, gives versions of some of his sermons, and takes a particular (and probably anti-Jewish) interest in how often and how badly he got into trouble. But the author of Acts is sometimes only copying a memoir or journal, not even changing the word “we” to “they.” Paul’s letters are more detailed than Acts, but most of the time he either focuses on an individual community’s problems (spiritual or practical) or preaches the new faith. Paul’s accounts of his own activities are never profuse.
It is clear, however, that he made at least three long missionary journeys, going farther to the west over time. He made as many as five trips back to Jerusalem, the center of Christianity at the time. (Not that any followers of Jesus were calling themselves “Christians” yet: the term started as a taunt, perhaps best translated as “the hyped-up fans/ political mob of ‘the Anointed One’ ” [Acts 11:26], and the single time Paul is shown being teased with it, he demurs humorously [Acts 26:28–29].) Meetings there included the Jerusalem Conference, probably in 49 or 50 A.D., where Paul received from the leaders of the new sect the authority to evangelize non-Jews. Later, in Antioch, he nevertheless clashed with Jesus’ disciple Peter, who he claimed was hypocritically opposing the agreed-upon policy of tolerance and inclusion. But Paul was never a favorite at Jerusalem. He was not as credible there as Jesus’ surviving companions and relatives; he may have failed ever to win trust, because of his early persecutions; and his letters suggest that at best he was not easy to get along with.
His final arrest among many came around 57 A.D. in Jerusalem, where he had arrived with charitable donations but found his relations with both Jews and Christians still poor. He appealed to Rome and remained jailed, under guard during transport, or under house arrest until as late as 65 A.D., a date that would allow us to attribute his death to the first great persecution of Christians, by the emperor Nero, who blamed them for the great fire of 64 A.D. There is no good evidence of the journey to Spain he was planning to make after his time in Rome (Romans 15:24–28).
In spite of all this, Paul was the man who did the most to create the Christian church after the brief, otherworldly ministry of Jesus. He established, guided, and advised a number of religious assemblies in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. Though Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and John were the three other most important leaders of the sect, Acts spends relatively little time on any of them (and they did not write the New Testament books attributed to them). Paul appears already in Acts 7, and from chapter 13 to the end, at chapter 28, he is the protagonist.
Acts (along with the gospel of Luke) is ascribed (though not without controversy) to Luke, the “beloved physician” and friend of Paul, but it cannot be favoritism alone that gives Paul such a crucial role. Paul’s churches were the prototype in Europe, where Christianity held fast, becoming and staying dominant.
Paul was also crucial as an author. Uniquely in the Bible, he is like a Greco-Roman or modern expository writer, a definite historical person writing down his own thoughts and experiences under his own name and on his own responsibility. He sent exhortations and instructions to Christian communities, and some of these “letters to” or “epistles to” survive. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are the ones attributed to him with little or no scholarly doubt, and they make up seven out of twenty-seven books in the New Testament. (The seven letters that many, or most, modern scholars say have been falsely attributed to him—2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews—are a further measure of his influence: his was the most authoritative name under which to put early Christian treatises.)
Because Paul died before 66 A.D., the letters are earlier than the earliest canonical gospel, Mark. The work biblical scholars hypothetically reconstruct under the name Q, a collection of sayings of Jesus, may have existed during Paul’s lifetime, as well as other extant books about Jesus (such as the gospel of Thomas) that did not make it into the Bible. If so, Paul most likely did not use them. He makes almost no reference to Jesus’ life apart from the crucifixion episode, and he quotes Jesus directly and by name only in 1 Corinthians 11:24–25, in narrating the Last Supper.
Paul climbed to this lonely and towering position the hard way. There were other wide-ranging missionaries claiming authority from Jesus, with other agenda. Paul won.
The most controversial issue during his time as a missionary was the new sect’s relationship to the Jewish covenant. Were Christianity and Judaism basically the same thing? In that case, then circumcision and the observance of strict dietary laws were essential for belonging, and the new strain of the old religion would draw most of its authority from Jerusalem and the Temple—and have limited appeal. Greeks and Romans considered circumcision a mutilation, and Jews were forbidden even to eat alongside non-Jews. The synagogues of the Diaspora drew many gentile “God-fearers” or “God-worshippers,” but for them to become full Jews would have meant a “maiming” operation and isolation within their own households and cities. Paul had to insist that Judaism was not a gatekeeper to Christianity. But for pious Jews, the idea of the Jew Jesus starting a movement that negated any part of the Law was abominable.
Yet the very existence of the God-fearers and God-worshippers implies an advantage Paul had as a Jew well schooled in his tradition: he understood the lure of monotheism and of a consistently just and merciful God unlike any of the deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon; and he knew the beauty of a deeply orderly community, such as polytheistic ideology had never managed to produce. Paul sensed that the practices of the scorned, harried Jews would not be attracting any gentiles who did not experience their own religion as cynical and their own society as brutal.
Perhaps the greatest irony about his letters is that, in the passages modern readers consider most intolerant, Paul seems, on an examination in context, to be addressing this brutality most humanely. The Greeks and Romans deified materialism in the form of idolatry, and they deified violence and exploitation through their belief that these were the ways the gods operated. Paul fought this ideology and all of its manifestations. Rather than repressing women, slaves, or homosexuals, he made—for his time—progressive rules for the inclusion of all of them in the Christian community, drawing on (but not limited by) traditional Jewish ethics.
At the same time, Paul was from a sophisticated port city, where he had grown up in a commercial family and studied rhetoric and philosophy as any privileged Greek or Roman youth would. He knew the Greeks’ and Romans’ longing, best expressed in a number of mystery cults, for a personally persuasive explanation of the meaning of life. Judaism did not offer this.
Paul had something new to offer everyone: the idea of salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection. According to Paul, God, out of love, had sent his Son to suffer and die in order to pull humans out of their human state and beyond all suffering and death.
His special experience helped make him perhaps the greatest theological genius of all time. On the Damascus road, he was confronted by the full horror of his human limitations. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” the voice asked (Acts 9:4). He conceived that by persecuting human beings, he was persecuting God himself. God did not live in the Temple (the Christian preacher Stephen had claimed that he didn’t—just before Paul assisted at the young man’s stoning [Acts 7:44–50, 8:1]), and his essence was not rules and institutions. He lived within humanity, so that any hurt done to them—like the hurt done to Jesus in human form—was an assault on God.
But an even stranger idea appears to have emerged from Paul’s healing through a follower of Jesus, Ananias (Acts 9:10–19). The answer for human beings, who in their imperfect state were selfish, stupid, and always helplessly hurting one another, was neither a desperate effort to be righteous nor an acceptance that a righteous God would punish them; they must instead learn that God had unlim
ited compassion and would save them. This was a charis, or free gift (“grace” is the rather esoteric-sounding modern translation), a loving power and presence during life and an assurance of eternal life. If this all seems to be explicit in the gospels, it is probably because it was written back into these later documents. The evidence is strong that the full Christian doctrine came not from Jesus’ mouth but from Paul’s pen.
Baptism marked the acceptance of salvation, and a life useful to the community testified to a true conversion. The faith-versus-works debate shown in the letter of James (and of huge importance in the later history of Christianity) may have exercised some Christians, but not Paul. To his mind, faith automatically caused believers to do their best. If a community was conspicuously sinful or troubled, it must renew its faith. There was no vital division between people’s trust in God and their actions, however imperfect either might be; the one could not be sincere and therefore acceptable without the other’s being the same, though trust in God came first, since the divine always preceded the human.
But Paul urged his followers not to worry too much about metaphysics: God would simply meet them in their prayers, not halfway but all the way, with whatever help they truly needed, teaching them to rejoice in their very weakness in relation to the divine.
Paul himself, while never overcoming his faults, drew great strength from his faith. The letter to Philemon, for example, written in prison, about a runaway slave who has become a Christian and thrown himself on Paul’s protection (as if imprisonment had not been enough to deal with), is full of inside jokes and high-as-a-kite invocations of the transcendent. A slave was, in Greek or Roman eyes, absolutely limited as to the consideration anyone (even a god) could show for him. Even if freed, he would always be treated as a social, civic, and spiritual inferior. A runaway had no right to any consideration at all. Deploying Christian ideas against Greco-Roman culture, Paul joyfully mocks the notion that any person placing himself in the hands of God can be limited or degraded in any way that matters. The letter must represent the most fun anyone ever had writing while incarcerated.