Paul Among the People

by Sarah Ruden

  The Roman world was less harsh about adultery. A child born within a marriage was legitimate unless its mother’s husband claimed that it was not—and he was unlikely to advertise himself as a cuckold in this way. But catching a wife in the act still normally meant the end of the marriage, and the treatment of adulterers was hardly less brutal. Here is what the poet Horace had to say about adultery in the late first century B.C.:

  For those who want adulterers to stumble,

  It’s worthwhile hearing all the ways they suffer;

  Their pleasure’s rare, and agony infects it,

  And all around them savage dangers lurk.

  This guy dove straight down from a roof. Another

  Was whipped to death. A third one met a fierce gang

  Of bandits while he fled. One bought survival.

  Stable boys squirted into one. It happened

  That one offender’s balls and randy tail

  Were reaped off. “That’s the law,” said everyone.

  This was adultery for Paul’s Greco-Roman audience, and also for the ethnically diverse audience that had adopted Roman or Hellenic culture. Altogether, nearly everybody in the Roman Empire would be prone to feel that Paul, rather than making a harsh new rule, was only seconding a humane and sensible one they had always had.

  BUT IS THE BAN on fornication, in contrast, such a general one that we could call Paul puritanical—as interested in controlling sexuality as his Puritan interpreters were?

  If with adultery we need to get the right picture, with fornication we don’t even have the right word, and there may not be one in English. “Fornication” in our passage from Galatians is a rendering of porneia, whose steady meaning in polytheistic literature is “prostitution” or “whoring.” To get a sense of what Paul means by porneia, which he applies even in cases where there is no payment for sex,† we have to consider the ethical poverty of the Greek and Latin languages.

  The Greeks and Romans had many terms to show disgust for a woman who had more than one sexual partner; on the other hand, a man who was erotically rapacious would not be called names, as long as he followed just a few rules, the one against adultery being the most important. Paul signaled a vast change in morals by indicating that both an unfaithful man and an unfaithful woman, with no distinction, behaved “like whores.”

  It is unlikely that porneia meant, at least to Paul’s Greco-Roman readers, all consensual extramarital sex, which is our basic modern definition of “fornication.”‡ The Greeks and Romans did not make the same distinctions about sex that we do. We think of two basic kinds: sex within and sex outside of legal marriage. But for the polytheistic ancients, marriage was not as straightforward a matter. Slaves could not be legally married as free people were, but many had long-term unions that got some recognition, and raised their children together. Freedmen on average must have had less formal setups than the freeborn, since many of these setups started in slavery. In Latin the same slang, “tent-mate” and “shacking up” (literally, “tenting together”), could apply.

  For aristocratic Romans, the nobility’s separate legal history, along with large dowries, and ceremonies no one else went through, set their marriages apart. Even the Latin words for marriage, husband, and wife are not completely the same across different levels of privilege: uxor, for example, for “wife,” applies mainly to the upper classes; conjunx, on the other hand, can mean a wife, fiancée, concubine, or even animal’s mate, so of course it applies all over the place.

  What is more, the ordinary type of Roman marriage was legally defined by consent to be married, which made getting a divorce easy for either party: a husband or wife had only to make known the wish not to be married anymore; and divorce, it appears, was common during the empire. A stricter type of marriage was available, but it was unpopular.

  This, then, was the array of committed sexual unions allowed among the Greeks and Romans. In 1 Corinthians 7 (see my discussion of Christian marriage in chapter 4) Paul lays down the law for Christians and gives his rationales—partly because, I think, existing laws and customs were too loose, yet nobody in this world had thought much about them.

  But across a great gulf from all of these arrangements was porneia (from the word meaning “buy”), which meant sex bought by the act and with no further obligation. A pornē, or prostitute, was normally a slave. Some had to parade naked in public places. Greek vase paintings show men beating them, evidently for fun. This was the institution behind Paul’s word, and even when he isn’t writing about sex for hire, he is probably emphasizing brutality. To make the word’s tone clearer, here is the comic pimp Lisper (in Herodas, a Greek writer of the third century B.C.) suing someone for damages to a piece of his property:

  Now for you, Myrtale.

  Come, let these men all see—don’t be embarrassed.

  Think of them as your fathers and your brothers

  That’s here to judge the case. Look, gentlemen,

  At how he shredded her clear up and down.

  The sonofabitch has torn her nearly bare.

  He dragged her, beat her silly.…

  Maybe you want Myrtale. That’s no problem.

  I want my food: we’ll swap the two of them.

  By Zeus, you’ve got an urge there in your innards?

  Just stuff her price in the old Lisper’s hand

  And bruise your goods up any way you want.

  The most outrageous joke here is that the pimp in his stupidity insults the jury by comparing Myrtale to their freeborn, citizen female relatives, a species as high above her as horses above gnats.

  Here is Horace recommending a cautious shopping trip for sex:

  And the thigh’s often softer, the leg straighter

  On a prostitute in the official drapery.

  What’s more, she struts the wares with no disguise,

  And openly displays the things she’s selling.

  She doesn’t flaunt the handsome parts alone,

  And look for ways to cover what’s disgusting.

  When the Who’s Who buy horses, it’s their habit

  To cover, then inspect them: a fine body

  Might rest on weak hooves. Lovely flanks, a short head

  And arching neck might lure a gaping buyer.

  These guys know what they’re doing.

  For the polytheists, the essence of porneia was treating another human being as a thing. If I had been one of Paul’s typical early readers, whatever else I understood from his use of the word, I would have picked up that treating another human being as a thing was no longer okay.

  “UNCLEANLINESS” AND “LASCIVIOUSNESS” really cannot carry a puritanical concern with purity and self-control as spiritual stunts. For one thing, the Greek words were more outward-looking than the Puritan meanings require.

  For the Greeks and Romans as well as the Hebrews, “uncleanliness” was more a public and ritual state than an inward and moral one. You might be unclean, for example, if you entered a holy place without washing, but the chief thing wrong with this was that you angered divinity and marred the place for the whole community. Crime could pollute you, but this would be in a similar way. Your uncleanness was not in any important sense an inward burden—it was a visible, contagious sickness. Paul, of course, rejected ritual technicality in both Hebrew and Greco-Roman practices, and in this passage he must have meant moral uncleanliness, but the sense of practical and shared bad effects was likely still there.

  “Licentiousness” is a widespread better translation than “lasciviousness.” Here the Greek word may have its usual previous meaning, irresponsibility, sexual or otherwise. “Lasciviousness” may also wrongly suggest a mere feeling, instead of certain acts. Augustine and then medieval clerics and then Puritans managed to criminalize sexual desire itself, but that was in a changing or changed world. Any Greek or Roman (or inhabitant of a Greek or Roman city) of Paul’s time who set himself against his own arousal would have gone insane, because no one could escape the sexual stimula
tion in this social and outdoor culture: titillation crooned in pictures on walls and on dinnerware, in prostitutes on the street, in jokes and songs and public religious observances. (For example, the Roman spring Floralia celebration included live sex shows, and the Greeks carried through the streets the phalluses they worshipped.) There is no evidence that Paul beat his head against this culture by going further than to preach that overwhelming lust could be channeled in marriage (1 Corinthians 7:1–9). He does not suggest that either God or man can defeat the urge itself. Irresponsible follow-through has to be the idea here in Galatians.

  As well as not jibing with the environment, any stress on sexual repression does not jibe with what we know of Paul himself. He was celibate and recommends it, a choice and a doctrine I will explore in chapter 4. But we simply can’t squeeze out of his writings or other biographical data the inference that he had anything against sex or sexual desire per se, as opposed to the distractions and worries that marriage brought and the evil manifest in exploitative or promiscuous sex.

  He had a personal torment, a “thorn in the flesh,” that may or may not have been the sexual desire his calling prevented him from indulging. If so, his take on the feeling (2 Corinthians 12) was remarkably enlightened: that God meant it to keep him humble and, with comforting words, declined to remove it; Paul clearly thought it was a matter to be worked out between himself and God, which was good news, because God was as strong and loving as Paul was weak and put upon. In fact, every human vulnerability was purposeful and joyful in the end; he classed the thorn with other sufferings in his mission.

  Let me wind up this section by dramatizing the misreading of Paul’s attitude toward sex in a more graphic way than any Puritan writings allow. Karen Armstrong narrates that, as a novice nun during the early 1960s, she could not adjust to the convent, in which, for example, she needed permission to ask someone to pass her the sewing scissors during “recreation.” Her supervisor at one point gave her a whip with which to try beating herself into submission. She obeyed, and reported back with glum honesty that the experience had merely been arousing. She was sent away with angry instructions to beat herself harder.

  Would the Paul we know through his writings, and whom we can know even better against the background of Greco-Roman culture, conceivably have treated anyone this way?

  “IDOLATRY,” OF COURSE, means worshipping an object. As in the case of adultery, accurate translation can still leave the modern reader with no idea of Paul’s focus, as opposed to what later interpreters have done with him. Baxter rants about the “flesh” as an “idol,” passionately worshipped to the exclusion of God; “flesh-pleasing” is “idolatry” in that it consumes devotion.

  The Hebrews and Paul had the opposite problem with idolatry. It was somewhat like “fornication”/porneia, crude and shallow and transactional, but worse, because one party was self-evidently not sentient (or in the case of an animal, sentient but not intelligent), while the act was supposed to be religious, so that the transaction was fictional while alleged to be transcendent. People can worship only a living, thinking God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

  The Greeks and Romans may have been ripe for this. The educated among them, to whom the notion of objects’ having divinity was a fairy tale, could at times barely hide their boredom and irritation with rituals (which were required for social and political conformity) to honor these objects. Epicureanism, with more followers than any other philosophy but Stoicism, argued that the gods, though they existed, had no presence or interest in objects that stood for them.

  But the animistic tradition had crammed everyday life with superstitious observances: people had to propitiate doorways, stumps, and mildew, along with a lot of manufactured images; every Greek or Roman household had at least one shrine with figurines. Freeborn children wore related items as amulets for protection from evil spirits.

  Outside of mythological works, polytheistic authors and their characters, faced with all of this trumpery, tend to show either dutiful reverence for tradition or skepticism—and sometimes the two in a firm, bizarre embrace. For example, Servius (late fourth century A.D.), a famous commentator on Vergil’s Roman epic, the Aeneid (late first century B.C.), records the story of a consul needing the sacred poultry to grant him an omen before he can go to war; when they hang back from eating the grain strewn for them, he grabs them, throws them into a river, and snorts, “Let them drink, then!” Readers must have enjoyed the punch line and admired the no-nonsense consul, but the tale is in the historical legend genre, which must support the ancestral piety that is part of patriotism, so the official cannot get away with this attitude: his expedition is a disaster.

  A MODERN READER might connect the word “witchcraft” to female herbalists persecuted by a paranoid church, to the Salem hysteria, or to New Age witchcraft, or Wicca. Actual sadistic cults would probably not jump into the mind.

  But Paul was writing when the view of witchcraft was unequivocally grim. “Witchcraft” in Greek was pharmakeia, from the root that gives us “pharmacy,” though medicinal drugs were not characteristic of witchcraft: pharmakeia can also be translated as “the art of poisoning.”

  Our evidence for the evil force of the word is particularly good. First, it is certain that the polytheistic cults concerned had cursing and bewitching and animal abuse among their practices; archaeologists have even found some of the instruments. (That much archaeology I know; I myself have seen a “magic wheel,” for bewitching.) Moreover, the ancients knew a lot about poisons. If witches weren’t the main practitioners of the science, as they were said to be, who was? It was forbidden to doctors, at least according to the Hippocratic Oath.

  Someone like myself, who has lived in the new South Africa, can even affirm that violent witchcraft exists today. There, a credible press and court system confirm the reality of “muti murders”: sangomas, or witch doctors, kill people, especially children, for their genitalia and other body parts, which are believed to be love and money charms. Horace wrote about two witches in such an enterprise. We have no proof that their particular sort of crime actually happened, but the point is that witchcraft had a very evil reputation, which Paul and his readers would have been aware of, but which the descriptions of in Acts (8:9, 13:8–11) do not explain to the modern world:

  Now Veia had no conscience that could stop her.

  Groaning with the effort,

  She hollowed out the earth with an iron mattock,

  So they could bury the boy

  With just his face exposed, the way a swimmer’s

  Chin floats above the water:

  There he would die while staring at a meal changed

  Two or three times each long day.

  And once his eyeballs, fastened on the food

  He couldn’t touch, had rotted,

  They’d cut out his marrow and his dried-up liver

  For a love potion.

  Love spells could have the same tone as curses, and the same motives of hatred and revenge could be behind them, given the very dim view the ancients took of infatuation. Here is the Greek poet Theocritus (third century B.C.), with the dramatic monologue of a young woman who has been carelessly seduced and cruelly abandoned and is now trying to do as much damage as possible in return:

  Grim goddess [Hecate], welcome! Come to the end with me,

  And make my drugs more powerful than Circe’s,

  Yellow-haired Perimede’s, or Medea’s.

  Drag the man to my house now, magic wheel!

  First, barley flour melts in flames. Come, Thestylis,

  Sprinkle it on—you fool, where has your mind gone?

  So I’m a joke, even to dirt like you?

  Sprinkle it and repeat: “The bones of Delphis!”

  Daphnis has wounded me. I burn this laurel

  Against him. As it catches, as it snaps,

  And the ash itself is gone a second later,

  So I want Delphis’s body burned to nothing.

 
Drag the man to my house now, magic wheel …!

  Arcadia has a weed that makes the colts

  And speedy mares run frantic through the mountains.

  Let me see Delphis just as frantic, coming

  From the bright wrestling school into my house.

  Drag the man to my house now, magic wheel!

  IN THE NEXT SEGMENT of the list in Galatians 5, we are coming home to Paul, to his most passionate concerns.

  Both Acts and Galatians contain accounts of Paul’s conversion, and he makes several other references to it. For the rest of his life, he campaigned for others to let Jesus bring them the same kind of salvation. But what kind was it actually? Salvation from what sort of sin most of all?

  He traveled to Jerusalem as a young man to study at the Temple. Quickly, he took the part of the established clergy and other officials against a new sect outrageously asserting the divinity of a vagabond, crucified criminal. He was an eager servant of the persecution, perhaps from ambition as well as the rage we read of. It was no trivial task to go as a certified agent of the high priest to purge the followers of Jesus from the Damascus synagogues.

  For many of us, the center of a new moral or religious life is the image of some evil act we have done and cannot undo. In many cases, it is a cruel act. The realization that we have caused helpless suffering is a special shock, and creates an especially vivid memory.

  For me, the memory is of the dog of my childhood cringing and whimpering as I beat him as hard as I could in the face with his leash. I think that for Saul the memory was of standing over a pile of outer robes, guarding them from petty thieves. The robes belonged to men who were heaving stones at Stephen (a Greek name), who had been preaching in the name of Jesus and claiming that Jews were “uncircumcised in their hearts.”

  There is no detailed scene of stoning in any ancient literature I know of, but sadly the practice continues in the modern world, allowing us to reconstruct the scene. It would have taken Stephen some time to die; a stone small enough to throw from a few yards away usually cannot cause much damage. There is little bleeding, mainly bruising. The victim screams, tries to get away. After a while, he shrinks down and covers his head with his arms. Impatience, pity, or self-disgust may cause someone to come up closer, raise a larger stone with both hands, and slam it straight down onto the victim—but that may mean looking into his face as he hears the approach and lifts his head. The crowd might not stop when he loses consciousness; he could still be alive.