by Sarah Ruden
Saul, as he was called then, saw something like this. As he went about afterward, inflicting his culture and education, his self-righteousness, his arguing, his politicking, and his networking on more Christians, he had in the back of his mind what such things had done to the body of Stephen, yet how, when the young man went down, it was to kneel and cry out words of forgiveness. It was all in the back of Saul’s mind as he set off for Damascus, but if he wanted to make any peace with it, anger and ego still did not let him.
The new life he believed Jesus gave him was beyond a miracle. A miracle would have enabled him, by some unimaginable means and at some unearthly cost, to undo what had happened to Stephen. But he conceived that God, unasked, had already undone it, that through the suffering and sacrifice of God, Stephen was not dead. And this was done not only for Stephen, God’s innocent, martyred servant, but also for him, Saul, God’s persecutor. In Jesus, Saul met endless good and could contrast it with the evil in himself, which must have seemed quite feeble. He could hope that the good in himself would grow and the evil would wither.
He never overcame his touchiness, his fussiness, or his arrogance. It seems likely to me that the thorn in his flesh was anger rather than lust. But he kept his worst faults in bounds, sometimes with charming irony, and the knowledge of how destructive they could be was of great use to him in his work. It does not surprise me that he tended to see so much evil in controversy, rivalry, and violence, and so much good in connection and reconciliation. Nor does it surprise me that he set out to save the world Stephen got his name from, the European Roman Empire.
And did he ever have his work cut out for him there. I believe that the everyday uproar of these parts of the world was also a powerful draw: he went where he was needed most.
I am struggling to be polite about the way the Puritans, especially, looked past this, or else read the condemnation of strife as a condemnation of anybody who disagreed with them and thereby earned squelching. Increase Mather’s aptly named “An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing” is a moving example of their attitude. In general, puritanism is linked with violence, as most recently evinced by extremist Muslim groups. People at war with their own bodies have little respect for others’.
But what is Paul saying? As elsewhere in his letters, here he uses together a number of words for bitter feeling and fighting. At the end of the list of fighting words, he places the word “envyings” next to “murders” (both of these are exact translations), almost as if they were on the same moral level. In part, this is wordplay: there is only one Greek letter of difference between the two rhyming words phthonoi and phonoi. But the linking of the two words also summarizes what was most horrible in Greco-Roman life, even in the relative peace and order of the Roman Empire. Things did often go from strong emotion straight to violence.
Five centuries before Paul, the tragedian Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, had declared life worthless because of the violence that was inseparable from it.
Best of all is not to be born. But if you’re born,
By far the best thing is to take a walk
Back to where you came from as soon as you can,
Since when youth with its silliness passes,
What blows, what sufferings, what agony will be missing?
There will be envy, sedition, feuding, battles,
And murders.
Sophocles used close together three of the same words Paul does in his list: “envy,” “sedition,” and “murder.”
Why was the violence so bad? The Greeks and Romans were, at their best, fighters (see chapter 5). The contrast with the peasant cultures of the Middle East, where menial work shaped the lives of ordinary free people, is pretty striking. Southeastern Europe was about aggression.
Hatred and revenge were not marginal or shameful for the ancient Greeks and Romans, but matters of routine and pride. A person who simply forgave an injury was held to be feeble and a coward. How could he protect his family and friends?
Not all people were comfortable with this brutal equation. Again and again, the fifth-century Greek tragedians show catastrophe coming out of it. In Euripides, the love goddess Aphrodite is insulted that the prince Hippolytus (in the play named for him) remains a virgin and does not worship her. She makes Phaedra, the boy’s stepmother, fall in love with him to the point of insanity, but since Phaedra is a chaste woman with children she wishes to protect (see the discussion of adultery on this page–this page), her panic when her passion becomes known will lead to both her death and his. The goddess shrugs off her use of the unoffending young woman:
And here she’s groaning, driven from her senses
By passion’s goads—the poor thing’s perishing
In silence. Not one servant knows her sickness.
But this love I’ve inspired must not fail.
I will reveal it all to Theseus.
The father will kill the young man who’s at war
With me, kill him with curses that Poseidon,
The ruler of the sea, has granted him:
Three times, whatever he prays for, he will get.
Phaedra will keep her honor, but will die.
And I won’t give more weight to her disaster
Than to the chance to punish enemies
So that I have things just the way I want them.
When the gods themselves appeared self-centered and merciless, human beings had far fewer compunctions. The barbarism this helped create shows best in Greek and Roman historical writings. Democracy advanced quite far in Greece, and in Rome a republican government was followed by the Roman Empire, a welfare state with authoritarianism that varied over time, but with the outward structures of the Republic intact. Even in the provinces, the public took part in government. But the rule of law was always weak, and no notion of peaceful protest, loyal opposition, or constructive criticism tempered participation. When there was political rivalry, someone always ended up getting plundered, exiled, or killed, so that a movement like Epicureanism, which was interested in peace of mind, plain living, and loving friendship, advocated staying out of public life altogether.
Paul may actually have read the historian Thucydides’ famous late-fifth-century B.C. account of what happened when Greek habits of thought and emotion slammed up against public crises, in this case the conflicts between Athens and Sparta and between democracy and aristocratic government in city after city during the Peloponnesian War:
Fathers killed their own sons, and men were dragged out of the temples [where they had taken refuge] and killed beside them, and some were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.…
In this way uprisings began to convulse the cities, and people heard the accounts of what had happened before and went to bizarre and imaginative lengths to surpass it in creative aggression and outrageous revenge.…
The cause of all of these things was the desire for political power, which came from greed and ambition and the resulting passion of those who have become involved in brutal rivalry.…
So every form of wickedness won out in Greece because of these revolutions, and straightforwardness, which is the main ingredient in a good character, was laughed out of existence, while mutual hatred and mistrust became the rule. No promise was binding enough, no oath terrifying enough.
The Roman historian Sallust, in his Conspiracy of Catiline, gives a lurid account of a young aristocrat’s attempt to take over the Roman state in the mid–first century B.C. Catiline began with an electoral campaign, and it may have had only the usual amount of bribery and street gang persuasion in it. But a consul, Cicero, accused him of much more, and some fiery speechifying and a single, possibly forged document led to five senators’ being hauled off and executed without trial. Cicero had driven Catiline out of Rome by this time, and the crisis ended in the slaughter of Catiline and his followers by a Roman army. How much of the violence was necessary? Cicero, suspiciously, turned suppressing the conspiracy into the most renowned episode of
his career, and wrote an awful, much-mocked epic poem about it. He was later exiled for his unconstitutional acts, by people who were committing far worse ones, and was finally assassinated by the goons of Mark Antony, a far fiercer political thug than himself. My point is that, though there were rules, and recognized rights, and due process, they fell apart all the time because of unchecked, selfish rivalries.
What did lowly people, people struggling for food, get up to in their disregarded, unrecorded affairs, when the leaders, the role models, behaved like this in spite of full publicity and constant documentation? The mind boggles.
Anyway, it is no wonder that Paul in effect decreed that Christians should build for themselves communities that were completely different, based on the qualities listed as the fruit of the Spirit, such as peace and long-suffering.
In the words referring to strife, the King James translation is far off the mark. For one thing, the committee worked from a version of the Greek text that favors plurals. The things they saw listed are plainly acts, not states of mind or emotions. The Galatians must stop clawing at one another, not merely stop feeling disagreeable.
The Greek word rendered as “hatred” should be “hostilities” or “feuds.” The word behind “variance” meant not assorted types of dissension and dispute (which is what “variance” meant to the post-Elizabethans), but merciless competition, often military or political. The word could not refer to opinion alone or to any expression of opinion that was not pretty vicious. “Emulations”: not productive contests and imitations but selfish rivalries. “Wrath”: explosive shows of fury. “Strife” and “sedition” are roughly correct but not strong enough. Americans might think kindly of civil unrest or even rebellion, but in Greek literature, “strife” is likely to get people killed for a less than idealistic cause, and “sedition,” a compound word, is a cynical “uprising” that “splits” the state—this is certainly no American Revolution.
The translation “heresies” here is strange. Hairesis (literally “taking”) can mean “choice” or “sect.” Paul opposed certain sectarian movements of his time, but at least in the Greco-Roman world, hairesis could not mean departure from the edicts that a monolithic religious authority makes about personal belief, a departure that the authority feels entitled to punish. There was no such concept, and nothing to which such a concept could be applied.
It’s impossible for me to imagine that Paul had plans, or hopes, or even secret fantasies of forcibly repressing people. In his own words I can read only that he tried to persuade them not to start swinging at one another on any excuse.
“DRUNKENNESS” IS a very straightforward word to translate. Drunk is drunk. And Paul would probably have agreed with the Puritans in disapproving of drinking to the point of falling over and throwing up. But the placement of the word right next to kōmoi (“revellings”) gives it a much different focus from that of the Puritan panic over self-denial and self-control. Paul’s mention of drunkenness is about social behavior and the health of the community.
First, drinking in Greco-Roman culture needs some explaining. Wine was the ordinary beverage at meals, not water. Normally, the wine was diluted in fixed proportions, to lessen or put off drunkenness. The Greeks were probably less moderate than the Romans, as a common type of Greek evening party, the symposium (“drinking together”), never had respectable women as guests or hostesses—usually no women at all except the flute girls, who were available for sex, so that a party could easily become an orgy. Plato’s dialogue the Symposium (set in the late fifth century B.C.), in which the drinkers send the flute girl away and drink so little that they can have a long philosophical discussion, is very probably not typical. (In fact, the company opts for moderation because they are hungover from the day before, and moderation means only that everyone will drink “as much as he wants” and not have to drink on command—the normal practice.) A fair amount of drunkenness would have helped with the more-ordinary symposium activities.
Among these was the kōmos, a word that, in the plural, is translated here in Galatians as “revellings.” kōmos originally meant a village festival, then it could mean carousing in general, but by Paul’s time the main image was of what went on after the carousing. This kōmos was a group of men marching down the street at night, drunk, wearing garlands, carrying torches, and making loud music. The flute girls might go along as accompanists. In vase paintings, the mythical version of the scene features satyrs—part-man, part-goat creatures wholly outside civilization, with giant penises and a reputation for wild lust—and their accompanists are nymphs, their main sexual partners. Stories of human kōmoi are consistent with this. Here in Theocritus, a young man is visiting a young woman to convey a come-on blended with a threat:
“I would have come—I swear it by sweet Love—
At nightfall with a couple of my friends,
And Dionysus’s apples in my tunic,
And on my head white poplar—which is sacred
To Hercules—all wound up with purple ribbons.…
If you had let me in, you would have liked it.
(Good-looking, fast—that’s me among the boys.)
I’d have kissed your pretty mouth and slept in peace.
But if you’d shoved me out and barred the door,
Torches and axes would have come against you.”
The following account from Plutarch (late first, early second century A.D.) is probably only a legend (the events would have taken place in the 730s B.C.), but it does show respectable people’s attitude toward the kōmos:
[Archias] could not win over the boy [Actaeon, with whom he was infatuated], so he decided to kidnap him. He gathered together many friends and servants and went on a kōmos against the home of Melissus [Actaeon’s father] and tried to extract the youth. But the father and his people fought back, and the neighbors as well ran out and engaged the attackers in a tug-of-war, so that Actaeon was pulled apart and killed. Archias’s party then made themselves scarce.
Paul was writing not about parties in general, but instead about a specific tradition that was not terribly good for men, women, or the neighborhood.
MOST PEOPLE READ “not inheriting the kingdom of God” as purely negative, and the Puritans and others have used it as a combative threat. Put your foot wrong, and out you go. But this is based on the modern idea of inheritance as a far broader yet also far less important privilege than it was in the ancient world. Most of Paul’s audience would not have been inheritors, but they would have yearned to be.
Among us, most people (though they expect to inherit something from their parents) accept having to make their own way in the world. An inheritance big enough to live on is a rare thing, but this seldom matters, as independent livelihoods are quite plentiful. It was very different for the ancients: inheritance was the defining fact for secure, respectable people. This group lived in leisure off their parents’ slave-run land and businesses both before and after their parents’ death, and even professions (other than that of orator, which paid more in political influence than in money) were only for those able unfortunates who needed them.
It is no wonder that “inheriting” and “the kingdom of God” go together in scripture. For slaves, freedmen, laborers, soldiers, wanderers, colonists, hucksters, prostitutes (a very large profession), artists, entrepreneurs on a shoestring, and all of the others struggling through the hard facts of the Roman Empire, “inheriting” was a fantasy of salvation.
The fantasy produced a popular comic motif, that of the legacy hunter, or person who flatters and bribes the wealthy in the hope of being written into their wills. Real legacy hunters would have been rare, as substantial people nearly all married and had children who got the bulk of their estates, and the childless tended to keep their money within their families and circles of close, trusted friends anyway. The attentions of outsiders would normally have only annoyed the well-to-do. But the yearning for inheritance was so strong that quite a lot of black comedy resulted. This is the n
ovelist Petronius, writing around 60 A.D.—he was a contemporary of Paul’s and was also put to death (actually, he was forced to commit suicide) in Rome under Nero.
In our vagabond state, we had no idea where we were, but we learned from a passing farmer that this was Croton, a very ancient city and at one time the most powerful in Italy. We studiously inquired who lived on that noble spot now, and what their main business pursuit was now that many wars had worn through their stores of wealth.
“O strangers,” the farmer said, “if you are merchants, find a different project and seek some other means of livelihood. If, however, you are sophisticated people and can lie your heads off on every occasion, you are headed straight toward profit. In this city the study of liberal arts finds no glory, oratory has no place, and probity and conscience win no praise and bring no gain. All the people you will see belong to one of two classes: they are either legacy hunters or the targets of legacy hunters. No one in this city brings up children, because anyone who has heirs ready in the family never gets an invitation to dinner. He is excluded from public entertainments and barred from society altogether. Like some skulking criminal, he hides at home. But the men who have never married and have no near relatives hold the highest offices. They alone are considered martial, brave, and clean-living.