Paul Among the People

by Sarah Ruden

  4. Paul, though physically helpless, is full of joy and confidence.

  5. Paul is ecstatic to have begotten a runaway slave.

  6. It is a sacrifice for Paul to send Onesimus back: he selfishly wants the services of this runaway slave for himself; conversely, he gives away his beloved newborn son.

  7. Paul has wanted Onesimus to remain with him in place of Philemon, as if a runaway slave could be as much use to him, and in the same capacities, as the slave’s master.

  8. Onesimus’s flight must result not in punishment but in promotion to brotherhood with his master.

  9. Onesimus (“Profitable”) was perhaps unprofitable when treated as a slave and certainly unprofitable as a runaway, but will be profitable when treated as a beloved brother.

  10. Onesimus will be profitable not only to his master but even to Paul.

  11. Onesimus, a runaway slave, must be treated as having the same value as Paul himself.

  12. Paul promises emphatically to pay any monetary damages, but Philemon will (the reader senses) not take him up on this.

  13. Philemon will acknowledge and act on all of this of his own free will, not needing any direct command or explanation from Paul for this rather devastating-looking set of policies.

  14. Paul is confident that Philemon will do even more than he asks, but what is he asking? For Philemon to make Onesimus his brother in practical terms is impossible; even if Philemon took the dizzying step of making him an heir, he could not share with him his own privileges as a freeborn person (assuming he is one)—laws forbid it. But even as a figure of speech or an ideal, what does “brother” mean? It is as if Paul were writing, “I’m thinking of a big, big number. Guess what it is!”

  Paul may also be parodying letters of recommendation.‡ Such letters of Cicero have a similar fulsomeness, and a similar confident self-mockery as does the letter to Philemon. A common come-on is along the lines of “I’m ridiculously excited about this person, but of course you’ll indulge me because of the valuable relationship between ourselves.” Cicero, like Paul, takes the whole responsibility and promises wonderful benefits. But Cicero’s letters of recommendation either ask for specific things or are about people who will ably figure out on their own what to do with a new connection. And Cicero always stresses the personal merits of the subject:

  But if because of his shyness he hasn’t put himself in your way, or if you’re not yet well enough acquainted with him, or if there’s any reason that he needs a greater endorsement, I hereby recommend him to such a great degree that I couldn’t praise anyone else more eagerly or for better reasons. And I’ll do what people do who write these letters conscientiously and with no ulterior motives. I’ll promise you, or rather I’ll pledge in the fullest and most binding terms to you, that Manius Curtius is such a good person, and such a humane one, that if you get to know him, you’ll think him worth it, and worth such a fancy recommendation.

  Imagine, in this tradition, a prisoner writing on behalf of a runaway slave and perhaps a thief, who may have no personal merits whatsoever or may just now be starting to show some, and who could not normally find hope in anything but pleas for mercy on his behalf from a man of material power and influence with whom he has taken shelter. “Comic inversion” just doesn’t cover what is going on in this letter. In worldly terms, it is like a janitor throwing a party for his dog and inviting a federal judge.

  The solution, the punch line of the joke that is the letter to Philemon, the climax of this farce, is God. God alone has the power to make a runaway slave a son and brother, and in fact to make any mess work out for the good—not that anyone knows how, but it doesn’t matter. Philemon has only to surrender to the grace, peace, love, and faith the letter urges, and the miracle will happen. Paul seems to insist that it is happening even as he prays for it, and he is goofy with joy: Philemon cannot say no to him, because God cannot say no.

  This unusual experience of prayer drives Paul to new heights (a strange but, I think, appropriate term) of self-deprecation. More here than anywhere else, he makes fun of his own weaknesses. He is often in his letters the nagging father, using metaphors of birth and rearing infants, boasting of his sacrifices, losing his temper, prodding, repeating, condescending—doing so many things to suggest that the outcome depends on him, not God.

  At first glance, he appears to do the same sort of thing here. He twists Philemon’s arm by stressing his own pathetic situation and Philemon’s spiritual debt to him, and by citing devoted followers (some of whom may be Philemon’s friends). But he leaves Philemon without a to-do list, and with only (only?) an assurance of profound love and purpose. He turns his sermonizing into a bomb, presses down the detonator, and walks away, leaving glittering fragments of absurdity in place of the conviction that people solve problems.

  This could be called a cop-out, a pie in the sky. But in the most practical terms, he was justified: the early Christian church, without staging any actual campaign against slavery, in the course of the centuries weakened it until it all but disappeared from Europe. Slavery was doomed simply because it jarred with Christian feeling—the same basic circumstance that doomed it in the modern West. But Paul is not calculating anything of the kind. He is simply turning in Onesimus—and Philemon, and himself, and the whole community—to God.

  So it’s no wonder that there’s been such resistance to dealing with this letter on its own terms, instead of substituting some congenial mundane opinion or interest for the dizzying submission to God that it shows.

  Picture me standing in a South African shack settlement, or what used to be one. Somebody knocked over a kerosene lamp, and there is sand and ash and melted plastic where the shacks used to be. I’ve come out with a Council of Churches donation of clothes and food. A local minister speaks to the crowd for a few minutes in Xhosa, and adds a prayer.

  But now a chubby man in a beautiful suit has stepped up to the microphone. He has on a frilly green and yellow badge like a prom corsage. He is the representative of the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress. He speaks in Xhosa for twenty minutes. He gestures toward the emergency shelters, the army tents that my tax dollars paid for, and then at his own chest.

  There isn’t any worship or other gathering you can keep these people away from. If they’ve done nothing at all, they still demand a cut of the publicity. I’m going to get the Council of Churches to pass a resolution to at least keep the sons of bitches out of pulpits.

  Today, back in the States, I can’t tell whose rightness and righteousness was uglier, theirs of the victory over apartheid, or mine of white charity in triumphal procession. But I read Philemon and see that there is only one way to win.

  * Note that a parable of a master or “ruler” merely forgiving a servant or dependent a debt directly follows that command (Matthew 18:21–35).

  † He has taken refuge at the altar in an attempt to avoid punishment.

  ‡ He plays explicitly on the idea of “Letters of recommendation” in 2 Corinthians 3:1.

  CHAPTER 7: LOVE JUST IS: PAUL ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW COMMUNITY

  When I read 1 Corinthians 13 for the first time in the original Greek, I understood better why I had always felt shut out and bored during the reading of the passage at a wedding. I had misunderstood. Love is not some special dispensation, some perfect, abiding state of harmony for the lucky, as if those who can perform up to Paul’s stated standard will get the same performance granted to them forever, and as if those who can’t will lose their place in the community, will not have friends or lovers or spouses or children or a God. Love is something that is there already, something that draws the mind and heart back to itself.

  I first got a hint of this when I looked at the comparatively obscure runup to the famous passage. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul has been writing of the church as one body with many parts. Jews and Greeks, slaves and the free all partake of this unity. These people have many different talents and need one another the way an eye needs a han
d. They are all incomplete, and they must all cooperate for that very reason.

  “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts for healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?” (12:29–30). The lecture is showing typical irritability.

  But then Paul seems to catch himself and turn back (12:31–13:1), as if he realizes that he is acting out incompleteness, an incompleteness of a more basic kind. He might as well be writing, “Do all have patience? Are all gentle with people who are trying to find their way? Do all admit that they don’t know everything? I have failed in the most fundamental things.”

  31 But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

  13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

  Let me first back up and make sure that Paul’s topic is explicit. As I noted in chapter 2, in Greek there was erōs for sexual desire and being “in love”; philia for the affection of family and friends; and agapē, a marginal word adapted to carry the central message of Christianity. Agap? is selfless love that people can feel even for enemies or strangers. It is utterly impractical and makes no sense, but it is real. It comes from God. Agap? is 1 Corinthians 13 love.

  Though he had a word to use that at least couldn’t be mistaken for lust, Paul still doesn’t seem to be confident of getting his point across to his readers in Corinth. And no wonder: he is writing about an utterly new idea. Among the polytheists, giving always fit into some rationale: open-handed hospitality, which made trade and travel mutually safer; self-sacrifice in war, which helped create military machines; the love of children or parents that bound households together; and male friendships that were the basis of politics and business. Practice love for its own sake? Huh?

  Paul, in starting to explain agapē, is facing the goal of his life and his mission, and he is facing it from a highly personal angle. He has shifted from the third person to the first. If he was showing no humility before, he is showing it now. He, the leader, the apostle, the preacher, is worthless in all of his achievements if he does not have love. His words here take apart not the polytheistic culture but, blessing by blessing, his own church under his own guidance.

  Does anyone else hear a hint of real exasperation with himself as he starts out, as if he is taking himself down an extra peg with the expression “of mortals and of angels”? It sounds to me a little like someone saying, “I might speak as well as a person could speak; I might speak as well as the queen of England.”

  English-speaking Christians, unless they’ve been brought up with updated translations, come to the first sentence with a handicap, the image of “tongues.” Before I saw the Greek, it never really registered with me that these were not body parts but languages: the same word serves for both, but “language” is the logical translation here.

  Paul is referring to glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues.” This was a unique, charter practice of Christians, a token of the birth of the church at Pentecost. The gift of tongues signaled that the new faith was for everyone, cosmopolitan or not, and that God would speak to them and through them in their own languages.

  But look at how Paul characterizes speaking in tongues without “love”—without true self-sacrifice. In his metaphor for empty sound, one of the verbs is the proper one for metal ringing, but the other is usually about a human voice, in a war or victory shout or mourning—or, especially, a shriek during the wild rituals of Bacchus, the wine god, rituals brought to Greece from the East within legendary memory and to Rome within the time of recorded history.

  The nouns are literally “brass” (or “bronze”) and “cymbal”; the rhetorical figure is a hendiadys, or “one through two”: it is a brass or bronze cymbal we are reading about. This image was used for bombast or self-advertisement: the on-the-make provincial writer Apion (whose life overlapped with Paul’s) was styled “the world’s cymbal.” But at this period, this object had its strongest link with ecstatic celebration in mystery cults, particularly that of Cybele and other Asian mother goddesses whose identity and ritual, in popular opinion when not in reality, were interchangeable.

  Of all the cults Paul could have alluded to, those of Bacchus and Cybele were the most noxious in the popular mind. Their original foreignness made them suspect in the first place, and people associated them with orgies and crimes. Here is Livy’s account of the cult of Bacchus in Rome before it was severely restricted. (See also this page about this episode.)

  When wine, smutty talk, night, and the mingling of the sexes had snuffed out any notion of restraint, then perversions of every kind began to go forward, as everybody found ready that sort of pleasure to which he or she was individually and naturally inclined. And the abandonment wasn’t limited to sex between freeborn men and women; no, this warehouse of crime sent out perjury, counterfeiting, and entire false prosecutions, as well as poisonings and assassinations so discreet and professional that in certain cases the families could not even find the bodies for burial. Conspiracy produced some of the crimes, but most were simply violent; because of the shrieking and the noise of drums and cymbals, no one outside heard the cries of those being manhandled or killed.

  Cybele’s cult evoked the ancient horror of passive homosexuality and effeminacy (see chapter 3). Some of her followers were men who had castrated themselves in the transports of dancing rites. Lucretius uses Cybele’s worship as a warning example of religious overexcitement. Vergil in the Aeneid shows the Italians of a millennium before taunting the settlers from Troy with their “effeminate” Asian culture and sneering at the Great Mother and her rites. Juvenal ranked this cult among the exploitative ones in Rome, a couple of generations after Paul’s death. A naïve woman is a natural victim:

  Here comes the troupe

  Of raving Bellona, the gods’ mother. The junior pervert

  Must worship the giant eunuch like an icon,

  Who grabbed a shard and cut his tender balls off

  Long ago. The loud crew, the lowly players

  Of drums fall back before his droopy headdress

  From Phrygia. He blares a threat: September’s south wind

  Will bring disease should she not cleanse herself

  With a hundred eggs, and second-hand red robes—

  For him.

  A couple of generations later, Apuleius depicted the cult as the worst kind of scam, one that played on simple people’s superstition and compassion.

  As soon as they came to the outside gate, they flew forward with frantic-sounding, discordant howls. They put their heads down and for a long time whipped their necks around slickly and whirled their loose long hair. At intervals they attacked their own flesh with their teeth, and at last each took the double-edged sword he carried and cut up his own arms. Amidst all of this, one of them went more lavishly wild and, panting rapidly from deep in his lungs as if overflowing with divine inspiration, he mimicked a visitation of madness—exactly as if the immanence of the gods didn’t make men better but instead broke them down or filled them with disease.

  But look what kind of reward divine providence rendered him. With a fictional shrieking show of channeling a holy message, he launched an accusation against himself, saying that he had committed some sin against the sanctity of cultic observance; and he demanded just punishment for his crime from his own hand. He grabbed the whip that’s the special accessory of these faggots—a fringe of long, twisted, unshaven sheepskin ribbons strung with numerous ovine joint-bones—and wouldn’t stop thrashing himself with its multiknotted blows.

  These performances are for shaking down audiences, but the group stops at nothing, not even at the passive gang rape of an innoc
ent young man. And when the narrator, a man turned into a donkey, first falls into their hands, the slave they have been passively abusing gives soulful thanks that he will get a break now, as his masters will of course turn their sexual attentions to this animal.

  And the authors of these grim scenes were polytheists, used to cruel gods who brought disaster or death at whim, and used to coughing up to greedy priests for any hope of divine help. Cybele and Bacchus obviously had cults quite out of the ordinary. There has to be a special noxious flavor to Paul’s allusions to them. Christians who depend on noisy shows, in no matter how Christian a category, are no better than polytheists at their most abandoned and cynical.

  Next, Paul cites “prophetic powers” (literally “prophecy”). For the polytheists, prophecy was the interpretation of the gods’ will, especially through commercial oracles. For the Christians, prophecy was the public voicing of inspired and inspirational things about the new faith. Contempt for polytheist practice is probably present here in Paul—since this is a shared word—but the Christian “gift” he criticizes when it lacks love is otherwise a commendable one, not ever merely puzzling to others, as speaking in tongues can be. Paul praises prophecy over speaking in tongues from the start of 1 Corinthians 14. In harshly qualifying prophecy’s value here, he is moving closer to the heart of the problem: nothing people do is worthwhile unless they love one another.

  “Mysteries” were not a vague category of unknowable things for the Greeks and Romans, but a definite set of secret rites—“mysterious” because even the initiates had to shut their eyes at certain stages: the root word is “to shut one’s eyes.” Mysteries for Christians were divine truth revealed (if only in part) by grace. A similar idea comes across in Paul’s mention of “knowledge,” which in Greek and Roman literature could be about actually knowing ultimate truths through supreme human skill. In early Christianity the word “knowledge” carried the notion that any grasp of such truths was a divine favor, a loving support of trust-filled, admitted human weakness.