by Sarah Ruden
To sum up so far, glossolalia, through the image of the shriek and the gong, as well as prophecy, mysteries, and knowledge, just by shared terms, evokes uncomfortable comparisons to polytheist practice. The idea must be “You are like them if you don’t have love.”
Now, as if to pound in that selfish behavior is a challenge Christians have to own up to within their own unique community, Paul shifts away from words that have anything to do with polytheistic religion or philosophy. Pistis, the next word—“faith” (which I discussed on this page–this page)—had a very special religious meaning for Christians, and “removing mountains” has the obvious reference to Jesus’ promise (Matthew 21:21; Mark 11:23). We have now moved wholly into Christian territory. In the phrase “give away all my possessions,” the Greek verb is not actually “give away” but “feed by hand.” The reference is to charity in Jewish and Christian practice. The polytheists had beggars among them, but I don’t read anywhere of a religious duty to care for such people unless they were attached to a particular cult (which, as in the case of the Great Mother, might just be a shakedown of the superstitious), and giving away everything to them would have been considered merely insane.
A textual problem arises in verse 3, but I think that modern editors have solved it. Handing over the body “to be burned” is what the King James and closely related translations have, but nobody was burning martyrs at this point, as far as we know. “So that I may boast,” from the Greek verb that is attested in some manuscripts, makes a lot more sense.
Giving up possessions and life—there had been people contributing all of their property to Christian fellowships, and there had been martyrs already, such as Stephen—would seem to be pretty acceptable expressions of love, unless these things are done just to show off, in the same spirit as staging a noisy ceremony, shooting off one’s mouth, or pulling off miracles as if they were magic tricks. “Boast” ties the phrase straight to Paul: he is always boasting; he even makes fun of himself boasting (as in 2 Corinthians 11).
Imagine how this catalog put readers on the spot. If they thought that their Christian activities—however enthusiastic or seemingly successful—would save them, they were wrong, in an embarrassingly polytheistic way. Jesus had spoken similarly about agapē (as the gospel writers render his Aramaic word): non-Jews manage to love their friends; there is nothing special about you unless you surrender to a much more significant love (Matthew 5:43–47).
But I feel less moved by that than I do by the thought of the apostle’s forgetting love altogether and then suddenly, at just the right moment, remembering it in its importance beyond anything. How could this happen, unless God could keep love, guard it for a person until he and everyone else is ready? This would seem to be an absurd degree of grace—unless Paul carries here again his frequent point that there are no limits.
WHAT IS agapē, then? Paul begins to answer this, with several sharp shifts in focus.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
Paul has been speaking in the first person, but now moves to the third. Love is something outside himself, but really more like a someone, since it does so many things and has so many human characteristics. Before, we were reading of religion, but most of the way through this present list, we find nothing that can apply directly to a relationship with God, only to relationships with other human beings—unless we can somehow imagine that God needs kindness or patience. Only at the end do more-religious words come back: rejoicing in the truth, believing, hoping. But the repeated “all things” (or “everything”) in verse 7 suggests that the goal is still to deal with the everyday world in an exemplary way. These humble virtues are what absolutely never come to an end. They outlast any worship, wisdom, or inspiration.
The break in style in the Greek at the beginning of this section is startling. I made a long search for parallels to this new style, and I ended up feeling like a pedantic moron for missing the whole point: these words are not supposed to be like anything else.
It’s more or less a necessity of our language that the standard translations here contain a lot of adjectives. But the Greek is extreme in not containing a single one. Instead we have a mass of verbs, things love does and doesn’t do. This is the ultimate authority for the saying “Love is a verb.”
Since the wording is so simple, I can translate this piece fairly literally without creating nonsense. I am also going to take out spaces between the words, punctuation, and the distinction between capital and small letters—none of these would have appeared in the original ancient manuscript. Below is an English version of what Paul’s readers saw on the page. To get a sense of what it sounded like when read aloud (a very common practice everywhere, but doubtless more common in the Christian churches, where many members were illiterate), read three times as fast as you would normally, in the typical manner of a Mediterranean language. This will produce something closer to the original machine gun of verbs:
T H E L O V E E N D U R E S L O N G A C T S K I N D L Y T H E L O V E N O T A C T S J E A L O U S L Y N O T A C T S B R U T A L L Y N O T B O A S T S N O T G E T S F U L L O F I T S E L F N O T D I S G R A C E S I T S E L F N O T S E E K S W H A T I S I T S O W N N O T G E T S I R R I T A T E D N O T R E C K O N S U P T H E E V I L N O T R E J O I C E S I N T H E I N J U S T I C E B U T R E J O I C E S T O G E T H E R I N T H E T R U T H E N D U R E S E V E R Y T H I N G B E L I E V E S E V E R Y T H I N G H O P E S E V E R Y T H I N G E N D U R E S E V E R Y T H I N G T H E L O V E N E V E R F A L L S
So manically verb-centered is the passage that Paul takes two adjectives and creates a one-word verb from each (neither verb being attested previously in Greek); and he creates yet another verb, in Greek a one-word metaphor:
1. “[is] kind” (verb: “kinds”)
2. “[is] boastful” (verb: “boastfuls”)
3. “[is] arrogant” (verb: “inflates-like-a-bellows”)
If we take the meaning from the form, we could say that he is preaching, “You know the right ways to feel? Turn those feelings into acts and perform those acts, ceaselessly. You know the wrong ways to feel? Don’t, ever, perform the acts that spring from them.”
Love is not just something to return to. It is something to remember to do. And are Paul’s followers ever in for a challenge here. To love everyone selflessly is a lot harder than to sober up, stop fighting, and behave decently, or to bring justice to the weak, or to accommodate a spouse, or to deeply respect authority, or even to be open to whatever status in life God’s purpose and providence may grant. How could anyone manage to follow 1 Corinthians 13 and not go insane?
It might be possible if love is not an ethereal, abstract standard, an impossible assignment written in lightning on a rock, but a living God. Suppose the love people need to carry out loves them and helps them, sometimes through the other people it loves, and sometimes merely as itself. Suppose it reaches out, calls, never gives up on failure. Suppose that, though human beings fail most of the time, love never does.
IF THE LOVE that attends humans comes from a perfect sacrifice of a perfect being, anything they can give has to be petty and confused in comparison.
9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
&n
bsp; What could be less coherent and satisfying than Paul’s earthly life? He disappeared for long periods after his conversion, three years in Arabia and a number of years back home in Tarsus. He may have worked in his family business, argued with his parents, married and argued with his wife. He then helped with the new movement in Antioch, and later in a long series of other cities. He pitched and vomited on boats. He was shipwrecked three times, and once floated a whole day and night on wreckage. Time after time, he lay awake hungry and cold in long grass by the road, perhaps listening terrified as bandits passed.
Sometimes after he preached, they whipped him until his back was a single wound, and in town after town they beat him with rods, but he wouldn’t shut up. He had an uncanny gift, not only for inspiring and convincing, but also for causing riots. And with a pen that must have eaten through the papyrus like acid, he cursed his rival missionaries and made fun of his converts. He even quarreled with the gentle, widely respected Barnabas, who had sponsored him and looked after him, making a missionary out of him in spite of everything that told the others he was trouble.
He sat and stitched together pieces of leather tents with an awl to support himself and earn boat fare; there were easier ways for an educated man to make money, but they required cooperation, and in that sense he was probably unemployable. He found some sympathetic people and started small congregations, but he seems to have been congenitally unable to share authority. He even fell out with Peter and spread the word that he was a hypocrite. Paul was just not a nice guy. He even had his half-Jewish assistant Timothy circumcised as an adult. Rescued a final time from a mob, he parlayed Roman protective custody into a trip to Rome. In the midst of everything, he wrote 1 Corinthians 13.
It would all have been nothing but a long and useless farce if not for its faith and its passion. His stumbling, incomplete self yearned toward completeness. He sums this up in the insistent image of himself as a child.
I spent a long time trying to understand my feelings about this image. I had found it uncomfortably moving even when I was a child, but for some reason its strangeness and power only increased as I grew. It was the only part of the passage I liked, but it was … I didn’t know. I believe now that from the time I was used to anything in the Bible, I wasn’t used to people in it talking about themselves as children, the way people tirelessly do in modern literature.
Childhood certainly plays a special role in Christianity. Christ was a baby at first, and children in their innocence and weakness are supposed to have a special bond with and special protection from Christ. But of small children’s own points of view we have practically nothing in the Bible. We hear the words of Jesus at the age of twelve, but they are superadult words inspired out of another world, putting his anxious parents in their place (Luke 2:49).
My years as a student of the classics must have confirmed my impression that in those days, children more or less weren’t there—an impression that fits with what we know of most traditional cultures: until they are initiated (usually at puberty), the young are sort of half human, with no firm stake in the community.
I made a list of Greek and Roman literary treatments of actual personality in childhood, and a pretty short list it was. On it was the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (unknown date, but probably fifth century B.C. or later—or else earlier but badly corrupted by later writers), in which a god rustles cattle, hoodwinks a divine tribunal, makes three major inventions, and receives authority over a cult, all within a few hours after he is born. The same kind of comical precocity is found in stories about the love god Eros (in the Greek world) or Cupid (in the Roman one). The pounding irony is that this toddler has power over the strongest, proudest adults and even over other gods. In Apollonius Rhodius’s epic the Argonautica (third century B.C.), his divine mother Aphrodite discovers the boy busy at the equivalent of card counting, taking another young god for everything he has. In Apuleius, Cupid French-kisses his mother (Venus, in this Roman tale) before leaving with his bow and arrows on an assignment.
All right, those are gods, so I couldn’t expect realistic depictions. But human childhood as seen through ancient books isn’t believable either. Even in writing tenderly of his own two-year-old’s death, Plutarch specifies among her merits only implausible precocity in kindness and generosity: his daughter (according to him) offered to share her wet nurse’s milk with her toys and with other children (“as if inviting them to dinner”). The poet Callimachus, in his prologue to the Aetia (Causes), shows his early self as another superhuman child, taking a tablet onto his knees not to learn to write but to pour forth epic poetry. He is mistaken only about the genre: his true calling, as a god instantly informs him, is to pen incredibly learned, precious, short poems. Various leaders manifested their greatness or their depravity in early childhood, according to late biographies, but that’s a lot of hoo-ha.
It is probably safe to state that ancient Greek and Roman authors never write realistically of themselves as children. One fictional character speaking honestly of himself as a child (as well as playing indulgently with a child, as I show on this page–this page) is the drunken, gauche freedman Trimalchio in Petronius. He reveals that he used to be a slave catamite and voices a child’s pathetic justification: “It’s not wrong if the master makes you do it.” Since that kind of vulnerability, if not that kind of abuse, just went along with immaturity for the Greeks and Romans, it is natural that they shrank from exposing their immaturity, even through memory.
Realizing all of this confirmed why Paul’s “When I was a child …” is odd. He even refers to himself as a nēpios. He cannot mean this in the Classical Greek sense—that kind of nēpios was a baby who could not speak yet, and the little Paul can speak, think, and reason to some extent. But he is still a young child, with a realistically limited outlook. The words must have come across to contemporaries as a shattering way for Paul to illustrate the incompleteness, the unconsciousness of all mortals. Because only the great gulf, in the eyes of the ancients, between a child and an adult can show the difference between people on their own and people unified with God, Paul makes a sacrifice of his dignity and his status as a man (here anēr, “man’s man”) and leader and creates an image of himself as a groping, hapless small percentage of a man. Now that’s love.
The NRSV has it that we now see only “in a mirror, dimly”; literally, this is “through/by means of a mirror, in a riddle.” The correction from the old translation “glass” (old-fashioned English for “mirror”), which is confusing to the modern ear, is good: I used to picture a dirty pane of window glass myself. Ancient mirrors were made not of glass but of bronze, which does not reflect terribly well; people don’t, on their own, in their immaturity, see even themselves clearly. But if they practice love, they will someday look into a mirror and see not only themselves but God. They will have the answer to the riddle and understand.
I picture Paul settling into a house in Rome, the last place he will live. He is arranging his room, putting his tent-making tools and a few spare clothes into a chest. He has some papyrus rolls of Jewish scripture, which he places in the slots of the bookcase. He is exhausted and starving, and his back is giving him trouble; he’ll never be rid of the effects of so many beatings. He is starting to feel sorry for himself. He sighs, kneels down, and thanks God for arriving safely, and for all he can do here. This reminds him: why aren’t the local Jewish leaders here already to talk to him?
I think nowadays that reading the epistles is better for me than reading the gospels. What can I understand about the way Jesus felt? But I feel how Paul must have felt.
The Stoics pictured two parallel lines, each starting from its own finite point and moving infinitely in the same direction, say left. But one line starts to the left of the other, so the one “infinity” is shorter. It’s a paradox: true, demonstrable, yet incomprehensible. My sin feels infinite, but the love of God is infinite both within me and outside me, going in every imaginable direction, like the light of the sun compared to t
he beam of a laser pointer with which I play with the cat. I sit on the edge of the bed and grouse and daydream, but eventually I get up and go where I am called.
NOTE ON MY USE OF SOURCES
This is a new kind of book, I know. I worked in some new ways that I need to give an account of. My colleagues both in classics and in New Testament studies may ask, “What does she think she’s doing?” Other readers may ask, “Is this what biblical scholarship at universities is like? Can she do this?” The answer to both groups is that, to make ancient voices better heard, I had to think more as a reader and a writer than as a traditional researcher.
This is why I brought in personal experiences and imaginative impressions in dealing with the texts. But I would never claim the right to be touchy-feely about these vital historical documents. On the contrary, I feel justified in writing reflectively about them only because I have lived with them for thirty years: learned their languages, studied their contexts, and made myself comfortable with their styles. When you know writers that well, you can have a sort of conversation with them, and if you go on and on about yourself or interrupt or contradict them, they will tell you, in your heart and conscience, that you are full of it.
My inquiries are directed almost entirely at the Greeks and Romans, with very limited treatment of the Jewish tradition in itself. But I did not look at the Greeks and Romans as entirely separate from the Jews and risk being lured into the tired and rather unfruitful debate over who had the greater influence on Paul. I didn’t want or need to go there. Greco-Roman culture tended to assimilate conquered peoples with the force of a John Deere harvester, and at this period many Jews of the Diaspora lived and thought like Greeks and Romans most of the time (though Palestinian Jews offered the most troublesome resistance to Roman rule). Many Jews could not read Hebrew or Aramaic but had access to their own scriptures only in the Greek version, the Septuagint. When Paul used metaphors for sacred athletic games, which were alien to traditional Jewish culture, he was writing of something known everywhere in the empire through its main languages and literature—even as Pacific islanders today know about skiing through American media.