Paul Among the People

by Sarah Ruden

  “You are approaching,” he concluded, “a town with a plague. There is nothing there but corpses and the crows that feed on them.”

  I can’t resist telling what this speech sets in motion. The footloose friends decide to masquerade as a shipwrecked plutocrat and the remains of his retinue, so that the townspeople will pamper them in hopes of legacies. It works spectacularly—one woman even hands over her two children as sexual playthings. But the “rich man” dies. Fortunately, he leaves a will that seems certain to prevent the expectant “heirs” from finding out that there is no money and taking out their rage on his surviving companions: no one, the will states, may inherit without helping to eat the corpse in public. Unfortunately, the heirs are willing to do it. I’d give a lot to know how the author got his protagonists out of that one, but the fragmentary novel breaks off here.

  For real people, the inheritance fantasy probably wasn’t founded only on greed. It was likely also a fantasy of belonging fully, which was impossible unless you had a household—the basic thing inherited, and a very arduous thing to put together on your own. The Roman poet Martial (late first, early second century B.C.), in a poem to a friend of the same name, places inheritance first among blessings; moreover, the family stronghold in the last line here is the main thing you would inherit.

  Martial, my darling friend, the following

  Are things that make a life more fortunate:

  Property from a will, not won by labor,

  A fertile farm, and an established household.

  Christianity offered anyone, no matter how poor and powerless, an alternative inheritance—another kind of home, a new way to belong. In this light, Paul’s message is strongly positive: not “Obey these strictures, against human nature, or we’ll kick you out of the community you were born into,” but instead, “We offer you an equal share of a community, such as most of you could only dream of before. You forfeit it only if you are disorderly, through these destructive acts that are not even attractive in comparison to the life you could be leading.”

  No wonder Christianity grew like mad.

  A PAUL FED UP with Greco-Roman culture is not at all hard to posit. Many Greeks and Romans were fed up too. What they lacked was a grasp of how things could be better. But Paul had one, though he almost needed to reinvent Greek to express it. After the un-fruit of the Spirit comes the contrasting list:

  22 But the fruit of the spirit is loue, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentlenesse, goodnesse, faith, 23 Meeknesse, temperance: against such there is no law.

  As many Bible readers will already know, this “love” is agapē (a word not often used before the New Testament). It is selfless love, as opposed to the common Classical Greek words philia, which meant the exclusive love of one’s own circle, and erōs, which meant erotic love. “Joy,” as in the joy of prayer and spiritual fellowship in themselves, was not at all a common polytheistic idea. “Peace,” here arguably a peaceful attitude, peaceful behavior, or social harmony, had used to mean very little but the absence of war. I can deal with almost all the rest of these words even more briefly: “long-suffering,” “gentleness,” “goodness,” “meekness,” and “temperance” are not exactly stars in Greco-Roman literature, when they appear at all.

  But “faith”—wow. For the Greeks it was a powerful word, pistis; and for the Romans, fides, with the same Indo-European root and the same basic meanings, was one of the five or ten most powerful in their language. Pistis/fides always had to do with trustworthiness or trust, but its applications among polytheists were almost opposite to those in the New Testament. Polytheistic pistis/fides was good backup: a guarantee or other binding commitment, often based on scary oaths (the swearer might invoke, for his own destruction in case he lied, the combined power of the earth, heaven, and the underworld); the past experience of a businessman’s good faith or good credit; the long-term reliability of friends, family, associates, or fellow-citizens; or a proof or very persuasive argument. Pistis/fides could also be the feeling of trust evoked by any of these things. I could quote from any number of speeches of Cicero to show the word used in make-or-break and even life-or-death situations. Moralistic Roman writers of all kinds were infatuated with it: prisca fides, or “old-fashioned reliability,” summoned up the fantasy of a time when everyone kept his word or was tied to four horses who were then whipped to run in divergent directions.

  Trust or Trustworthiness, like everything else important, was a deity; but then, so was Terror. Before Christianity, neither the Greeks nor the Romans seem ever to have used the concept in what we would call a spiritual sense—that would have broken it and re-formed it forever for them, which is in fact what Christianity did. Pistis/fides for the polytheistic ancients came from watching their backs. Our “faith” comes from the agapē version of love, from putting away intent self-protection and relying on God’s providence.

  WHAT ABOUT THE IMPACT of the entire passage in Galatians 5? I think it was ringing, jolting, but welcome. This is particularly because of the text before and after the lists of do’s and don’t’s.

  13 For brethren, ye haue beene called vnto liberty; onely use not libertie for an occasion to the flesh, but by loue serue one another. 14 For all the Law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt loue thy neighbour as thy selfe. 15 But if yee bite and deuoure one another, take heed ye be not consumed one of another. 16 This I say then, Walke in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. 17 For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that yee cannot doe the things that yee would. 18 But if yee be led of the spirit, yee are not vnder the Law.…

  24 And they that are Christs, haue crucified the flesh with the affections and lustes. 25 If we liue in the Spirit, let vs also walke in the Spirit. 26 Let vs not be desirous of vain glory, prouoking one another, enuying one another.

  I’ve taught literature for too long, so I can’t help myself. I’m going to make a list of the most obvious contrasts or opposing forces:

  True liberty self-indulgence

  Love, service flesh

  Love, law tearing one another to pieces

  Spirit flesh

  Spirit compulsion or burden of the law

  Christ flesh, “affections,” and “lusts” (= passions and self-indulgence)

  Spirit egotism, resentment

  In this pattern, parallel to the lists of do’s and don’t’s, people can either pull one another apart or pull together. What is more, Paul connects the peace of the community with the metaphysical Spirit in a way that the English does not show. Pneuma (from which we have “pneumatic”) means both Spirit and physical breath. What is most essential for life is most free, most natural, and most shared. In the Hebrew Bible, the Spirit (rúach) of God comes to the entire nation, bringing his kingdom.

  Flesh, or sarx, on the other hand, either is just an object or it is animal life with its unthinking drives. Animals tear at one another, eat one another. Since the polytheists tended to distinguish the sarx sharply from the mind, it was also a good word for a dead body. A large coffin was a sarcophagus, or “flesh eater.”

  Paul’s point is not that the body or nature is bad and the mind or spirit good. It is about two ways of using the body, the one for a life that is worth living forever, the other for a life that is as good as death in the short time before it vanishes. The passage is not an angry homily but a shout to people standing hesitant on a thirtieth-story ledge. Community is life. The failure of community is death. Paul is writing that he cannot let his followers die.

  But what best expresses this urgency is the image of crucifixion. This is what Christ did to save humankind from death. And the metaphor of “crucifying” antisocial passions makes that sacrifice seem to spill over from the metaphysical realm to the natural one: believers get not only eternal life but a life of the Spirit in community that begins right now. Christ stopped at nothing in showing his love for humankind. On his example, people m
ust stop at nothing in showing love for one another. They must eliminate, at any cost, the selfishness that divides them.

  Most people have, at least in the back of their minds, the idea that crucifixion was abominable. But sheer wear dulls that impression. Some historical facts may sharpen it.

  Like all torture, crucifixion in the Greco-Roman world was for those without rights. In the historical era, constitutions forbade torturing citizens. But anybody could hurt a slave: his owner, on any whim and usually with no limits; a stranger, who would at most owe the owner compensation for physical damage to the slave, as if for scratching a piece of goods; or professional interrogators, who tortured unoffending slaves routinely in connection to crimes committed in their households, just because slaves were ubiquitous and likely to know something. Provincials of the Roman Empire, like Jesus, could also be vulnerable.

  Crucifixion was the nadir of torture. It was never careless or whimsical, but was always a punishment, and a punishment for a crime that threatened the system, such as property crime in the case of the two thieves crucified with Jesus, and such as the slave revolt led by Spartacus, which ended in the crucifixion of thousands. This was the punishment for those who, like Jesus, stepped far out of line.

  For maximum humiliation, and maximum edification of others, crucifixion was public. Crosses with their victims on them might stand beside roadsides or on hills. The crucified were totally naked, without loincloths. Anyone could point and comment, and Greeks and Romans, with their intense interest in the phallus, no doubt did. Was it too large (a not unknown complaint)? Not dainty and shapely (as they preferred)? Was it—grotesque!—circumcised?

  The families and friends could do nothing but watch, hour after hour. The victims died when they could no longer pull their shoulders back to keep their esophagus open and breathe. They were practically never reprieved. They might get a numbing drug or something to drink, or the leg breaking (a chop that might go straight through the shinbones) to prevent them from bracing themselves upward from the foot stand and surviving longer. This was probably seldom an act of mercy, as opposed to a convenience; in Jesus’ case, the purpose of sending soldiers to break his legs (although it turned out he was dead already) was to allow his burial before the Jewish Sabbath (John 19:31–33). “Forsaken” is the right word for the crucified.

  An arrangement was made to allow Jesus burial, but this was not universal. A rotting crucified body is a prop in Petronius’s black-comic farce about the widow of Ephesus. She goes down with her husband’s corpse into his tomb, in showy devotion, and is starving herself to death while bewailing him. Meanwhile, nearby, a guard is assigned to keep a criminal’s relatives from taking down his dead body from its cross and burying it—burial was essential for the soul’s rest, the Greeks and Romans thought. Drawn to the light and noise in the tomb, the guard seduces the widow and through repeated visits neglects his duty until the relatives steal away the crucified body. This means the guard faces execution himself, but his clever new girlfriend, in the ultimate example of female depravity, donates her dead husband to hang in the criminal’s place and (according to polytheistic theology) to have his grisly afterlife. “Go to hell!” is an apt rendering of the Roman curse “Get crucified!” It is about unspeakable suffering, and it is about suffering that can reach into eternity.

  Paul evokes all this in the single fearsome word “crucifixion”: this is how much God loves humankind. This is the sort of suffering he gave himself to for their sake. When they give themselves to him, what effort and what sacrifice is not worth expressing love toward others?

  My image of Paul is never going to be the same now that I have read the passage in Greek and followed some of its words home. How did I ever accept the fairy tale of the apostle walking into communities of happy pagans, at peace with nature and their bodies, and shutting down the Maypole dances—to the dancers’ mysterious glee? Instead, he sacrificed his home, his health, his peace of mind, and eventually his life for the sake of the Greeks and Romans—whom, since they are long dead, it should not be politically incorrect to call kindergartners with knives. He must have helplessly, sufferingly loved them.

  * I am going to modernize the spellings throughout and make them consistent.

  † For example, he uses porneia in 1 Corinthians 5:1 for a son having sex with his father’s wife.

  ‡ In fact, modern Bible translators tend to reject “fornication” in favor of—alas, still weak—terms like “immorality.”

  CHAPTER 3: NO CLOSET, NO MONSTERS? PAUL AND HOMOSEXUALITY

  Paul’s longest passage on homosexuality, Romans 1:24–27, is the single most fiercely debated of his writings. The passage is obviously important, placed as it is almost at the beginning of what many scholars consider Paul’s last and climactic letter, and forming as it does the heart of his most savage indictment of polytheism. And here Paul pronounces on the most divisive issue in Christianity today.

  24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

  26 For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

  There are so many ways to abuse the Bible. The most obvious is to interpret a biblical statement in isolation from others; they are definitely not all equal in rank, as the Bible itself keeps saying. When I was at the University of Kansas, the Westboro “Baptist Church” used to picket the student union, and tiny children carried signs declaring that GOD HATES FAGS. The “minister” cited the above Pauline verses as part of his authority to disrupt the funerals of AIDS victims—ignoring, of course, the vital command to love one another set down in Jewish scripture, expanded by Jesus, and stressed again and again by Paul.

  But to distort the Bible’s historical context is, though a much less flamboyant violation of the Bible’s purposes, in the long run a more damaging one. Think how many mutually alienated and suspicious people the Westboro rants bring together in spirit every time they make the news. Here, in contrast, is John Boswell on the Romans passage, trying to explain away the seeming condemnation of acts that were “characteristic” and “natural” in Greco-Roman society—and therefore “not morally reprehensible” to Paul. I cannot see in Boswell’s words any contribution to peace and clarity among Christians (let alone others), but rather to further conflict, from politically correct disingenuousness on one side and angry bafflement on the other.

  … the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. The whole point of Romans I, in fact, is to stigmatize persons who have rejected their calling, gotten off the true path they were once on. It would completely undermine the thrust of the argument if the persons in question were not “naturally” inclined to the opposite sex in the same way they were “naturally” inclined to monotheism.…

  … It is not clear that Paul distinguished in his thoughts or writings between gay persons (in the sense of permanent sexual preference) and heterosexuals who simply engaged in periodic homosexual behavior. It is in fact unlikely that many Jews of his day recognized such a distinction, but it is quite apparent that—whether or not he was aware of their existence—Paul did not discuss gay persons but only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons.

  I’m trying as hard as I can to picture Paul standing outside the assembly, like a bouncer outside a nightclub, scanning with his gaydar (keen or otherwise) for the mere metrosexuals. I’m failing.

  Wouldn’t the Greco-Roman literature of homosexuality provide more insight and better terms for dialogue than Boswell does? This literature is the closest r
epresentation available of what people saw around them in polytheistic imperial cities like Rome, and what they thought of it.

  But a first pair of eyes to look through is, of course, Paul’s. For more than three hundred years before he was born, first the Greeks and then the Romans had ruled his home city of Tarsus and made it as similar to the cities of southern Europe as they could. But however much of the Greco-Roman worldview Paul might have adopted, what he heard at home and in the synagogue would not have led him to tolerate homosexuality. Jewish teaching was clear: homosexual acts were an abomination.

  But another teaching mandated circumcision for all males in God’s covenant. Paul put this aside; Judaism would not always hand down what Christianity would practice. Perhaps, in the matter of homosexuality, what he saw as a boy influenced him more than his tradition did. Among the female prostitutes on the streets, or in the windows or doorways of brothels, were males, on average a lot younger. At any slave auction he found himself watching, there might be attractive boys his own age (blond Scythians, red-haired Germans?) knocked down to local pimps at high prices, to the sound of jokes about how much they would have to endure during their brief careers in order to be worth it. A pious Jewish family, as Paul’s probably was, would not have condoned sexual abuse of any of its slaves, but he would know from his non-Jewish friends that household slaves normally were less respected as outlets for bodily functions than were the household toilets, and that a sanctioned role of slave boys was anal sex with free adults.

  Flagrant pedophiles might have pestered him and his friends on the way to and from school, offered friendship, offered tutoring, offered athletic training, offered money or gifts. But adults he trusted would have told him that even any flirting could ruin his reputation, and at worst get him officially classed as a male prostitute, with the loss of all of his civic rights. After his conversion, as he preached what Jesus meant for human society, he wasn’t going to let anyone believe that it included any of this.