Paul Among the People

by Sarah Ruden

  The letter to Philemon may be the most explicit demonstration of how, more than anyone else, Paul created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings. There is no sign that Paul intended all the social change that gradually (and sometimes traumatically) resulted, the development of the rights and freedoms that characterize the West. He laid down the law against only the worst abuses, such as pederasty, male promiscuity, and forced marriage. But broad social change did follow inevitably from the idea he spread: that God’s love was sublime and infinite, yet immediately knowable to everyone. No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are.

  This book is an attempt to get further inside Paul’s world and, through this, to understand him better.

  * The Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name “Saul” means “man with a mincing, queeny walk,” clearly not ideal for a proselytizer among Greek speakers, but there may have been some other reason for the name change.

  CHAPTER 1: PAUL AND ARISTOPHANES—NO, REALLY

  The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.

  But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant “just the ability to project my power and essence.” Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn’t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sorcery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace’s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Empire—certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main readership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it. I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity.

  As I began to read Paul in connection to Greco-Roman writing, I seemed to be actually reading him: understanding his devotion and his constraints, and not simply listening to 1 Corinthians 13 with boredom and irritation, and with smug agreement to excoriations of his “betrayal of Jesus’ message.” I came to see how a man whom a divinity student friend of mine called “grumpy-pants Paul” had spread an uncompromising message of love, and how he had established a community that proved to have, if not a steady power for good, then at least a steady power for renewing its ideals. More and more, I wanted to take his part.

  This feeling grew even stronger when I researched the origins of our bad impressions of Paul. It seemed that many reactions to him across the centuries had been distorted or incomplete in ways that would not have survived a look at his main contemporary and near-contemporary audiences through their own books. For every implausible reading of Paul, there were Greco-Roman works through the lens of which he showed more plausibly. The contrast between distant views of Paul in a variety of modern authors and the very near view that we can re-create came to seem like a way to organize a book.

  Others have written defenses of Paul, but he needs—and deserves—all the help he can get. His faults are obvious enough: his bad temper, his self-righteousness, his anxiety. But we tend not to feel inspired that such a painfully human personality was able to achieve so much in the name of God. And we do not ask the obvious question, which is, what was he doing right in substance that is hidden from us under his manner? He must have been doing a great deal right or he could not have succeeded as he did.

  And understanding his success is vital for letting him help us now. Paul dealt with several social issues that remain painful today. Read in a way that shows the challenges, ideals, and strategies behind his words, he usually offers diverse people something they can agree on. In the case of homosexuality, it is the passion he had for ending exploitative sex, the only physical expression of homoeroticism he likely knew about. Getting closer to Paul as he really was can allow Christians and non-Christians either to find common ground to build on or to part ways more peacefully, because they see that they merely disagree on how to reach the same goals and can no longer call each other’s intentions evil.

  Paul is, of course, not easy to understand. Probably many Greeks and Romans themselves misunderstood him or skimmed the surface of his arguments when he used terms such as “law” (referring to the Jewish religious law in which he himself was trained). But their literature is still a good basis for interpretation: they shared a language with him, Greek, and a cosmopolitan urban culture, that of the Roman Empire, and he considered evangelizing them his special mission.

  What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul’s writings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far—and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the kōmos and the right to have a really good party. The “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Galatians does not forbid “carousing,” the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or “revellings,” as in the King James. A kōmos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parade—which could even end in kidnapping and rape. We have vivid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their elders would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have “orgies,” but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgylike, but not the kōmos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of was both serious and customary.

  I was at first puzzled that nobody had lined up Paul’s letters and Greco-Roman literature in any systematic way before, but I soon realized that scholarly disciplines are not set up for it. In seven years at Harvard as a classics graduate student, I got to know exactly two divinity students, and only as friends, not as scholars. I never met any of the divinity professors, wherever they were, somewhere up in the cloudy regions of the North Yard. Their language courses were separate, and in my curriculum there was not a single piece of Christian literature out of all that belonged to the era I was studying. We behaved as if the New Testament had not been written in Greek, as if Paul had not been a Hellenized Jew and by some accounts a Roman citizen, and as if the Roman Empire at its greatest period of power had not been in the early Christians’ background.

  I was now stunned at how much perspective this took away from Christianity. “Oh, yeah, we’re not supposed to have orgies, no kidding.” Maybe shallowness of perspective is one reason so many people consider the religion passé—not interesting, not inspiring, not useful. To me, even the first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before. And as I went on, I found that—almost creepily—the passages to which the modern world has the most resistance were all telling me the same thing: contemporary readers would likely not have seen Paul’s “authoritarian” policies as anything but ways to connect with one another in conscientious tenderness. />
  In this way, I was dragged away from a quite dear prejudice: that the socially concerned church was an invention of the modern era. (We Quakers have always thought our own sect invented it, but I won’t go into that.) In fact, the compassionate community was there at the beginning, and its founder was Paul of Tarsus. To those asking, “But how do we live, right here, right now?” his answer was always in essence the same: “In a way worthy of God’s infinite love for each of you.”

  This is his story as told not only by himself, but by Aristophanes, Herodas, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, and many others he never met. It is the story of his challenges and his triumphs in their world. And here’s a little of what it tells us for today.

  CHAPTER 2: THE END OF FUN?

  PAUL AND PLEASURE

  What was Paul’s real message about the body and social life? Don’t ask the Puritans.

  When these gained power and sought to wipe out the enjoyments (games, drama, feasting, dancing, fancy hats) that the medieval church had spared, the main New Testament authority they alleged was Paul. Richard Baxter (1615–91) of Kidderminster, in England, cites him over and over in part VII of his Directions to Weak Christians, “Directions Against the Master Sin; Sensuality, Flesh-Pleasing, or Voluptuousness.” By this time, “flesh” meant roughly anything that is often done for its own sake, like eating or conversation, and Baxter condemned what we would today call the most ordinary and natural pleasures:

  Do you think that man is made for no higher matters than a beast? and that you have not a more noble object for your delight than your swine or dog hath, who have the pleasure of meat, and lust, and play, and ease, and fancy, as well as you? Certainly where sensual pleasures are preferred before the higher pleasures of the soul, that man becomes a beast, or worse, subjecting his reason to his brutish part.

  The looming trouble with pleasure of all kinds was that it could come between you and your religion. (“Flesh-pleasing is the grand idolatry of the world, and the flesh the greatest idol that ever was set up against God.”) That is, if you found you liked doing anything more than you liked praying, exhorting, and reading pious books, you were in for it. So pretty much everyone was in for it, or had hope only in suspecting and resisting any natural draw.

  [Flesh-pleasing] is the very rebellion of corrupted nature; the turning of all things upside-down; the taking down God, and heaven, and reason, and destroying the use of all the creatures, and setting up flesh-pleasing instead of all, and making a brute of your god and governor. And do you ask what harm there is in this? So will your child do, when he desireth any play, or pleasure; and the sick, when they desire to please their appetite.

  Many people think Paul is the original authority for this (and for all puritanism; the Puritans only epitomized the ideology), because of what he wrote about the flesh. One of the passages Baxter and other Puritans relied on most is the “fruit of the Spirit” part of Galatians 5. (I count five citations of that passage within “Directions Against the Master Sin,” more than of any other part of the Bible.) At the heart of Paul’s exhortation is a pair of lists: what not to do to indulge the flesh, and what the fruit of the Spirit will be.

  Paul’s letters contain other lists of bad things and good things, but here the strictures have a special force. Galatians is mainly about false teachings and alienating practices, and the criteria for spiritual fruit answer the vital question of how a group of believers can tell whether they are going in the right way—that is, whether the Spirit is really working in them. So it is hardly an academic matter to get a better sense of the specific acts and attitudes Paul condemns and commends. Here, in the original King James translation of Galatians 5, some close derivative of which Baxter would have used, are the bad things:

  19 Nowe the workes of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adulterie, fornication, vncleanness, lasciuiousnesse, 20 Idolatrie, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, 21 Enuyings, murthers, drunkennesse, reuellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I haue also tolde you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherite the kingdome of God.

  I will go straight back over Baxter’s head with my questions. Would people of Paul’s time have read him as preaching against natural desires and ordinary fun? What exactly did these words mean about the way people were expected to live according to this new religion?

  Picture the Galatians hearing this list read for the first time, perhaps in the house of the most well-to-do member of their church, where they usually meet to pray and eat together. They know Paul as a poor speaker and a scrawny, sickly man of the unpopular Jewish race. He may have been kind to them in person, but now they have his bad temper emerging from the papyrus of his long letter to them. He thinks his rivals should go castrate themselves (5:12), and he snarls that he is writing in BIG LETTERS for the Galatian Christians (6:11)—not that he needs to rub in his scorn: he has already called them “foolish” (3.1; a soft-pedaling translation: more precise would be “brainless”). What use might words like those in the list above have been to this church? The correct answer is not “They were another reason to throw the letter away and go back to the shrine of Isis.” If we judge Paul’s prose that harshly, we would have to wonder why any of his letters, not to say his churches, survived.

  Okay, I’ll answer my own question. All of Galatians 5 shows a great concern with the link between religion and getting along with other people, caring for them, allowing communities to thrive. Among those who had grown up as polytheists, there was nothing trite about this program. On the contrary, it set out a new way of thinking that must have been quite exciting, a hope for something beyond exploitation, materialism, and violence—a plan not for competing in purity and the denial of life, but for the sharing of life in full. The words in the list above, even the words we might at first associate with puritanical values, back this up.

  “ADULTERY”* IS THE only way to translate the word moicheia, but here translation just doesn’t communicate; it merely leaves us crouching over two thousand years of mostly inapplicable experience, including puritanism and our reactions against it. For us, the thought of religion banning adultery might bring up images of Hester Prynne standing on the scaffold in public, displaying her scarlet letter A and being harangued by her lover, the minister.

  For Greeks, “adultery” was far different. A moichos (the root word) was a man (married or not) having sex with another man’s wife, and rage and punishment were aimed at him, not her. We don’t know precisely how all of the various Greek and Greek-influenced city-states treated this kind of adultery (though we are certain that it was the only kind that was illegal), but we do know well the system set up in fifth-century B.C. Athens. In Athens, adultery with a married woman, once known, automatically broke up her household, and the main victims were the children, who would now be classed as illegitimate. They could not inherit (a vital privilege, as I will show below) and were no longer citizens. Neither boys nor girls would be allowed to marry citizens, and when the boys grew up they could not take part in the all-important political life of the city along with their peers.

  Since men were supposed to be far more rational and to have far more self-restraint than women, a male adulterer could presumably think through all the possible consequences, yet he chose to risk destroying the future of blameless children in order to have sex with someone in the only category—other men’s wives—that was absolutely out of bounds. An adulterer was in the moral position of a pedophile today.

  The crime was an especially wanton one because no man had to go to another’s wife to have sex. Prostitutes were always at the ready (even for slaves to spend their allowances on), and no stigma went with hiring them, except for stigmas of taste and class that applied to the lower ranks of prostitutes—morals had nothing to do with it. Unmarried freedwomen who were not prostitutes, along with ordinary slave women by the tens of thousands, also offered chances for sanctioned sex. Prostitutes could be very cheap, wh
ile these other women—even when not coerced—were often free, or expected only small gifts or favors.

  There was no romantic sympathy for adulterers, no notion of “tragic lovers,” no excuse that “people do fall in love.” (The story of Paris and Helen is romanticized today, but the ancients repeatedly characterized the two as monsters, who with their selfish lust destroyed great kingdoms of two continents. The tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, as we tell it, would have baffled the Greeks and Romans.) Falling in love was commonly thought to be a shameful misfortune, a kind of insanity, and decent people were not supposed to let such emotions have any influence on the course of their lives.

  So it was more or less open season on adulterers. The orator Lysias, of late-fourth- and early-fifth-century Athens, wrote a speech through which a man defended himself in court against a murder charge. The sole argument was that the victim had been the lover of the accused’s wife, caught in the act, so that his killing was legal:

  “We shoved open the bedroom door, and those of us who came in first saw him lying next to my wife, while those behind us saw him only when he was standing naked on the bed. Now I, gentlemen of the jury, hit him and knocked him down, pulled his hands behind his back and tied them together, and asked him how he had the gall to come into my house. He admitted that what he was doing was a crime, but he groveled and pleaded with me not to kill him but to make a deal for cash. But I told him, ‘It’s not me who’s going to kill you, but the law of this city, which you have violated. You thought your fun was more important, and you chose to commit this outrage against my wife and children rather than obey the laws and behave decently.’ ” In this way, jurymen, the man got what the laws decree for those who do this sort of thing.