by Sarah Ruden
But things were quite complicated. Some Greeks and Romans were attached to Diaspora Jewish congregations from pre-Christian times, forming a special class of “God-fearers” or “God-worshippers”; these would have embraced quite a lot in the Jewish worldview. And Paul’s Greek, drawing on the Septuagint as it often does, would have brought up many Jewish ideas and images in the minds of both God-fearers and Jews. The majority in the following generations of Christian converts, however, the great waves of the evangelized, started out thoroughly polytheistic. Polytheistic literature is an unequivocally good template for what the letters meant to them.
Anyway, to try to show on whose behalf or under whose influence Paul wrote in each instance is excessively challenging. It is also a project Paul himself would not have liked. I preferred to look at him from a point of view, the Greco-Roman one, that was the dominant one at the time, shared by vast populations to varying degrees and known today through exhaustively researched literature. But I want to stress that I am not disrespectful of Paul’s Jewish context, which was vital—Paul was a proud Jew and cherished the origin of Christianity in Judaism. That context simply isn’t my topic in this book.
In case I seem to be playing fast and loose with chronology by citing material written hundreds of years before the New Testament, I hope to justify myself in three ways. One is that Greco-Roman culture, clear into the imperial period and until Christianity itself began to change it fundamentally, was quite static compared with our culture. Parties in the evening, for example, were roughly the same for centuries. The second justification is the scarcity of some material. For instance, we haven’t got an ancient Greek forensic speech on caught-in-the-act adultery newer than from the late fifth or early fourth century B.C.—or any other Greek document of any period that tells us nearly as much about such adultery as the old one does. I cite what I think is most informative. The third justification is that some of these texts were classics already, read and recited and included in school curricula down the generations; if they were not in tune with lasting values (even when some customs and institutions had fallen away), their intense popularity would be hard to explain.
Readers will quickly notice that a number of the works I cite are bawdy and comic. I arrived at the study of the New Testament with the same interest in daily life that had brought me first to the Roman novelist Petronius and then to the Greek comedian Aristophanes. I want to know what was really on people’s minds and in their lunch boxes. As far as Greco-Roman literature goes, scholars have tended to cite Plato, Seneca, and other philosophers in connection with Paul, alleging that he got certain ideas from them. If that were true, it would still leave a lot unsaid about what Paul faced and what his mission sought to change. He himself rejected intellectualizing (most explicitly at 1 Corinthians 1:18–27; “wisdom” is the common Bible translation, but the evidence is huge that ordinary people used the Greek word to mean “self-promoting, fact-twisting blather”) and addressed himself to the practical problems of his churches, and to revealed religious truths far beyond human understanding. My expertise—the literature of food, clothes, sex, family squabbles, petty commerce, local politics, and staying out of the rain—is a better background to him, I believe, though I do cite from the entire range of Greco-Roman literature (including philosophy).
Expert readers might object that most of the literature I cite is quite sophisticated, even when it is obscene and treats lowlife. That is true; the Greeks and Romans handed down toilet humor and spoofs of their slaves in ornate literary forms. Much of Paul’s audience would not have known this literature at first hand, though much of it claimed to be about them. So how relevant is it? In using it, as in using books from a very wide span of time, I can again call on justifications of necessity and common sense. Elite works are almost all we have of Greece’s and Rome’s literature, and they were dominant to a degree our elite works are not. These societies were steeply hierarchical, and in them the canon (the Roman one laid out by the master teacher Quintilian combined Greek and Latin literature) showed values that the lower classes both were strictly subject to and fervently dreamed of wielding—that is, until Christianity began to change minds. Any child formally schooled would learn at least some poetry (all of it written for adults, and uncensored), oratory (much of it full of dirt and slander), and history (violent): these were in fact the basic curriculum, for the powerful reason that they more or less diagrammed the society. They weren’t a precise overlay of the experience of Paul’s followers, but we have nothing better—not by far.
I have used mainly the obvious tools, such as Greek and Latin dictionaries and biblical and classical commentaries, besides the original texts.
For a Greek text of the New Testament, I had no hesitation in choosing the Nestlē-Aland edition. Its authority is unrivaled, and its format is accessible to a scholar like myself, who has been trained but never professionally active in “textual criticism”; this is the art and science of reconstructing the likely authentic text of a work of ancient literature after that work has been transmitted through a long series of cumulatively corrupt handwritten copies. The state of the Greek text explains some of the main confusions about Paul, so that I needed to go into certain text-critical questions. But I have kept these forays as brief and straightforward as possible, nearly always relying on the consensus represented in Nestlē-Aland rather than indulging in speculation of my own.
I have made quite limited use of “secondary literature” such as scholarly monographs and journal articles, except as examples of how badly Paul can be misunderstood. Two observations confirmed that this was a good choice. First, it was clear that in biblical studies, as in classics, really valuable information and insights would soon enough find their way into that special and privileged class of secondary literature, the reference books that I mentioned above: I didn’t have to—in essence—compile my own versions of them.
Secondly, where broad interpretation is concerned, I found no great difference between the persuasiveness of typical modern academic writing on the Bible and of older writing on the Bible that was openly political or theological, making no claim to objective research or evaluation. Yet to yield to my impulses and spend a lot of time on criticism of secondary sources in either class would have been to take my eyes off Paul, to place my own opinions at the center of this book. I wanted above all to avoid that, and to offer an account of the apostle that will be more useful than anything I could write on my own behalf, as a competing scholar and nothing else.
The translation of the Bible I quote is the New Revised Standard Version, except in chapter 2, with its passage from the King James.
It took me a long time to decide on this; I considered doing some of my own translation, because I sometimes disagreed with everything else available for a word or sentence. I thought of using only the King James Bible, because of its familiarity and influence. I wondered about making a broad selection of translations. But in the end I felt that the NRSV was the best because of the vast, up-to-date scholarship behind it and at the same time its retention of a lot of traditional wording. With generous notes and appendices balancing out this wording, as in the New Oxford Annotated Bible (the edition that I referred to the most), I could best see the tradition in development, the Bibles of my childhood moving at a stately pace into the future.
The NRSV is updated but doesn’t have more political correctness than the Greek can support. For example, the old generalizing “man,” which the NRSV eschews, is now linguistically insensitive, not just vulnerable to charges of sexism: the original Greek word is grammatically masculine but means only “person” or “human being.” (In fact, the word can be grammatically feminine and mean “prostitute” in the sense of “that person whom I am too polite to specify as a prostitute.”) There is a separate word for persons whose male anatomy and masculine character are important.
But in chapter 2, which responds to a Puritan minister’s use of Paul, I felt I could quote only the King James, the Bible
the minister knew, particularly because its tone (and even the version of the original Greek text it was based on) supported a certain kind of interpretation. The NRSV would not show as clearly where Richard Baxter was coming from. Where I don’t agree with translations in the NRSV or the King James or other Bibles, I have of course said so.
The translations of Greco-Roman texts are all my own. They are as close to the originals as I could bring them, though some may seem strikingly slangy or ironic, unlike other translations of classical literature. I made it a point to try to catch the original tones and registers, as far as English idiom allows. (I had to let most of the formal structures go, however: the original meters, prose rhythms, and so on are simply too alien and too complicated. I have rendered the more brutal erotic poetry as plain prose, unless I had a verse translation already on hand in one of my published books.) I have made words or phrases stand out only after my research convinced me that they stood out for the original readers or audiences.
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