Paul Among the People

In Paul Among the People, Sarah Ruden explores the writings of the evangelist Paul in the context of his time and culture, to recover his original message of freedom and love while overturning the common—and fundamental—misconception that Paul represented a puritanical, hysterically homophobic, misogynist, or reactionary vision.
              
By setting famous and controversial words of Paul against ancient Greek and Roman literature, Ruden reveals a radical message of human freedom and dignity at the heart of Paul’s preaching. Her training in the Classics allows her to capture the stark contrast between Paul’s Christianity and the violence, exploitation, and dehumanization permeating the Roman Empire in his era. In contrast to later distortions, the vision of Christian life Ruden finds in Paul is centered on equality before God and the need for people to love one another.
 
A remarkable work of scholarship, synthesis, and understanding, Paul Among the People recaptures the moral urgency and revolutionary spirit that made Christianity such a shock to the ancient world and laid the foundation of the culture in which we live today.

Praise for Sarah Ruden:

Paul Among the People
“Ruden offers a wholly fresh reinterpretation of Paul’s most controversial writings.” –Washington Post
 
“Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book.” –Booklist
 
“The most exciting book of historical analysis I’ve read in ages – indeed the most exciting book period … What makes reading Ruden such a pleasure, aside from the quality of her thinking and her prose, is her willingness to question settled truths, and to do it with such a lightness of spirit.” –Rod Dreher, Beliefnet

“Wonderfully unexpected.” –Christianity Today

 
The Aeneid
“The best translation yet, certainly the best of our time.” –Ursula K. Le Guin
 
“The first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself.” –Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books
 
“An Aeneid more intimate in tone and soberer in measure than we are used to—a gift for which many will be grateful.” –J. M. Coetzee
 
“An intimate rendering of great emotional force and purity . . . The immediacy, beauty, and timelessness of the original Latin masterpiece lifts off these pages with gemlike originality.” –Choice 
 
Lysistrata
“A perfect Lysistrata for the new millennium: rich apparatus and a sparkling, metrical, accurate translation of this inexhaustible treasure of a play.” –Rachel Hadas, Rutgers University 
 
Satyricon
“Ruden has caught, better than any translator known to me, both the conversational patterns of Petronian dialogue and the camera-sharp specificity and color of the Satyricon’s descriptive pages . . . A quite extraordinary achievement.” –Peter Green, Los Angeles Book Review
 
“Relying on her excellent knowledge of Latin, her lively feel for contemporary slang and rhythm, and her infectious love of the work, Ruden gives us the full Satyricon . . . Her book, breathing knowledge and affection, is a delight.” –Donald Lyons, The New Criterion

Sarah Ruden was educated at the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. She has translated four books of classical literature, among them The Aeneid and is the author of Other Places a book of poetry. She is a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University and lives with her husband in Middleton, Conn.

Chapter 1: Paul and Aristophanes— No, Really
 
The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.
 
But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant “just the ability to project my power and essence.” Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn’t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sor­cery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace’s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Empire—certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main read­ership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it. I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity.
 
As I began to read Paul in connection to Greco-Roman writing, I seemed to be actually reading him: understanding his devotion and his constraints, and not simply listening to 1 Corinthians 13 with boredom and irritation, and with smug agreement to excoriations of his “betrayal of Jesus’ message.” I came to see how a man whom a divinity student friend of mine called “grumpy-pants Paul” had spread an uncompromising message of love, and how he had estab­lished a community that proved to have, if not a steady power for good, then at least a steady power for renewing its ideals. More and more, I wanted to take his part.
 
This feeling grew even stronger when I researched the ori­gins of our bad impressions of Paul. It seemed that many reactions to him across the centuries had been distorted or incomplete in ways that would not have survived a look at his main contemporary and near-contemporary audiences through their own books. For every implausible reading of Paul, there were Greco-Roman works through the lens of which he showed more plausibly. The contrast between dis­tant views of Paul in a variety of modern authors and the very near view that we can re-create came to seem like a way to organize a book.
 
Others have written defenses of Paul, but he needs—and deserves—all the help he can get. His faults are obvious enough: his bad temper, his self-righteousness, his anxiety. But we tend not to feel inspired that such a painfully human personality was able to achieve so much in the name of God. And we do not ask the obvious question, which is, what was he doing right in substance that is hidden from us under his manner? He must have been doing a great deal right or he could not have succeeded as he did.
 
And understanding his success is vital for letting him help us now. Paul dealt with several social issues that remain painful today. Read in a way that shows the challenges, ideals, and strategies behind his words, he usually offers diverse people something they can agree on. In the case of homosexuality, it is the passion he had for ending exploita­tive sex, the only physical expression of homoeroticism he likely knew about. Getting closer to Paul as he really was can allow Christians and non-Christians either to find common ground to build on or to part ways more peacefully, because they see that they merely disagree on how to reach the same goals and can no longer call each other’s intentions evil.
 
Paul is, of course, not easy to understand. Probably many Greeks and Romans themselves misunderstood him or skimmed the surface of his arguments when he used terms such as “law” (referring to the Jewish religious law in which he himself was trained). But their literature is still a good basis for interpretation: they shared a language with him, Greek, and a cosmopolitan urban culture, that of the Roman Empire, and he considered evangelizing them his special mission.
 
What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul’s writ­ings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far—and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the komos and the right to have a really good party. The “fruit of the Spirit” pas­sage in Galatians does not forbid “carousing,” the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or “revellings,” as in the King James. A kōmos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parade—which could even end in kidnapping and rape. We have vivid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their eld­ers would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have “orgies,” but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgylike, but not the kōmos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of is both serious and customary.
 
I was at first puzzled that nobody had lined up Paul’s let­ters and Greco-Roman literature in any systematic way before, but I soon realized that scholarly disciplines are not set up for it. In seven years at Harvard as a classics graduate student, I got to know exactly two divinity students, and only as friends, not as scholars. I never met any of the divinity professors, wherever they were, somewhere up in the cloudy regions of the North Yard. Their language courses were separate, and in my curriculum there was not a single piece of Christian literature out of all that belonged to the era I was studying. We behaved as if the New Testament had not been written in Greek, as if Paul had not been a Hellenized Jew and by some accounts a Roman citizen, and as if the Roman Empire at its greatest period of power had not been in the early Christians’ background.
 
I was now stunned at how much perspective this took away from Christianity. “Oh, yeah, we’re not supposed to have orgies, no kidding.” Maybe shallowness of perspective is one reason so many people consider the religion passé—not interesting, not inspiring, not useful. To me, even the first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheis­tic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so com­pelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before. And as I went on, I found that—almost creepily—the pas­sages to which the modern world has the most resistance were all telling me the same thing: contemporary readers would likely not have seen Paul’s “authoritarian” policies as anything but ways to connect with one another in conscien­tious tenderness.
 
In this way, I was dragged away from a quite dear preju­dice: that the socially concerned church was an invention of the modern era. (We Quakers have always thought our own sect invented it, but I won’t go into that.) In fact, the compassionate community was there at the beginning, and its founder was Paul of Tarsus. To those asking, “But how do we live, right here, right now?” his answer was always in essence the same: “In a way worthy of God’s infinite love for each of you.”
 
This is his story as told not only by himself, but by Aristophanes, Herodas, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, and many others he never met. It is the story of his challenges and his triumphs in their world. And here’s a little of what it tells us for today.

Chapter 2: The End of Fun? Paul and Pleasure
 
What was Paul’s real message about the body and social life? Don’t ask the Puritans. When these gained power and sought to wipe out the enjoyments (games, drama, feasting, dancing, fancy hats) that the medieval church had spared, the main New Testament authority they alleged was Paul. Richard Baxter (1615–91) of Kidderminster, in England, cites him over and over in part VII of his Directions to Weak Christians, “Directions Against the Master Sin; Sensuality, Flesh-Pleasing, or Voluptuousness.” By this time, “flesh” meant roughly anything that is often done for its own sake, like eat­ing or conversation, and Baxter condemned what we would today call the most ordinary and natural pleasures:
 
Do you think that man is made for no higher matters than a beast? and that you have not a more noble object for your delight than your swine or dog hath, who have the pleasure of meat, and lust, and play, and ease, and fancy, as well as you? Certainly where sensual pleasures are preferred before the higher pleasures of the soul, that man becomes a beast, or worse, subjecting his rea­son to his brutish part.
 
The looming trouble with pleasure of all kinds was that it could come between you and your religion. (“Flesh-pleasing is the grand idolatry of the world, and the flesh the greatest idol that ever was set up against God.”) That is, if you found you liked doing anything more than you liked praying, exhorting, and reading pious books, you were in for it. So pretty much everyone was in for it, or had hope only in sus­pecting and resisting any natural draw.

[Flesh-pleasing] is the very rebellion of corrupted nature; the turning of all things upside-down; the taking down God, and heaven, and reason, and destroy­ing the use of all the creatures, and setting up flesh-pleasing instead of all, and making a brute of your god and governor. And do you ask what harm there is in this? So will your child do, when he desireth any play, or pleasure; and the sick, when they desire to please their appetite.
 
Many people think Paul is the original authority for this (and for all puritanism; the Puritans only epitomized the ide­ology), because of what he wrote about the flesh. One of the passages Baxter and other Puritans relied on most is the “fruit of the Spirit” part of Galatians 5. (I count five citations of that passage within “Directions Against the Master Sin,” more than of any other part of the Bible.) At the heart of Paul’s exhortation is a pair of lists: what not to do to indulge the flesh, and what the fruit of the Spirit will be.
 
Paul’s letters contain other lists of bad things and good things, but here the strictures have a special force. Galatians is mainly about false teachings and alienating practices, and the criteria for spiritual fruit answer the vital question of how a group of believers can tell whether they are going in the right way—that is, whether the Spirit is really working in them. So it is hardly an academic matter to get a better sense of the spe­cific acts and attitudes Paul condemns and commends. Here, in the original King James translation of Galatians 5, some close derivative of which Baxter would have used, are the bad things:
 
19 Nowe the workes of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adulterie, fornication, vncleanness, lasciuiousnesse, 20 Idolatrie, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emula­tions, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, 21 Enuyings, murthers, drunkennesse, reuellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I haue also tolde you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherite the kingdome of God.
 
I will go straight back over Baxter’s head with my ques­tions. Would people of Paul’s time have read him as preach­ing against natural desires and ordinary fun? What exactly did these words mean about the way people were expected to live according to this new religion?
 
Picture the Galatians hearing this list read for the first time, perhaps in the house of the most well-to-do member of their church, where they usually meet to pray and eat together. They know Paul as a poor speaker and a scrawny, sickly man of the unpopular Jewish race. He may have been kind to them in person, but now they have his bad temper emerging from the papyrus of his long letter to them. He thinks his rivals should go castrate themselves (5:12), and he snarls that he is writing in big letters for the Galatian Christians (6:11)—not that he needs to rub in his scorn: he has already called them “foolish” (a soft-pedaling translation: more precise would be “brainless”). What use might words like those in the list above have been to this church? The cor­rect answer is not “They were another reason to throw the letter away and go back to the shrine of Isis.” If we judge Paul’s prose that harshly, we would have to wonder why any of his letters, not to say his churches, survived.
 
Okay, I’ll answer my own question. All of Galatians 5 shows a great concern with the link between religion and getting along with other people, caring for them, allowing communities to thrive. Among those who had grown up as polytheists, there was nothing trite about this program. On the contrary, it set out a new way of thinking that must have been quite exciting, a hope for something beyond exploita­tion, materialism, and violence—a plan not for competing in purity and the denial of life, but for the sharing of life in full. The words in the list above, even the words we might at first associate with puritanical values, back this up.
 
“ADULTERY” IS THE only way to translate the word moicheia, but here translation just doesn’t communicate; it merely leaves us crouching over two thousand years of mostly inapplicable experience, including puritanism and our reac­tions against it. For us, the thought of religion banning adultery might bring up images of Hester Prynne standing on the scaffold in public, displaying her scarlet letter A and being harangued by her lover, the minister.
 
For Greeks, “adultery” was far different. A moichos (the root word) was a man (married or not) having sex with another man’s wife, and rage and punishment were aimed at him, not her. We don’t know precisely how all of the various Greek and Greek-influenced city-states treated this kind of adultery (though we are certain that it was the only kind that was illegal), but we do know well the system set up in fifth-century b.c. Athens. In Athens, adultery with a married woman, once known, automatically broke up her household, and the main victims were the children, who would now be classed as illegitimate. They could not inherit (a vital privilege, as I will show below) and were no longer citizens. Neither boys nor girls would be allowed to marry citizens, and when the boys grew up they could not take part in the all-important political life of the city along with their peers.
 
Since men were supposed to be far more rational and to have far more self-restraint than women, a male adulterer could presumably think through all the possible conse­quences, yet he chose to risk destroying the future of blame­less children in order to have sex with someone in the only category—other men’s wives—that was absolutely out of bounds. An adulterer was in the moral position of a pedophile today.
 
The crime was an especially wanton one because no man had to go to another’s wife to have sex. Prostitutes were always at the ready (even for slaves to spend their allowances on), and no stigma went with hiring them, except for stig­mas of taste and class that applied to the lower ranks of pros­titutes—morals had nothing to do with it. Unmarried freed­women who were not prostitutes, along with ordinary slave women by the tens of thousands, also offered chances for sanctioned sex. Prostitutes could be very cheap, while these other women—even when not coerced—were often free, or expected only small gifts or favors.
 
There was no romantic sympathy for adulterers, no notion of “tragic lovers,” no excuse that “people do fall in love.” (The story of Paris and Helen is romanticized today, but the ancients repeatedly characterized the two as monsters, who with their selfish lust destroyed great kingdoms of two con­tinents. The tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, as we tell it, would have baffled the Greeks and Romans.) Falling in love was commonly thought to be a shameful misfortune, a kind of insanity, and decent people were not supposed to let such emotions have any influence on the course of their lives.
 
So it was more or less open season on adulterers. The ora­tor Lysias, of late-fourth- and early-fifth-century Athens, wrote a speech through which a man defended himself in court against a murder charge. The sole argument was that the victim had been the lover of the accused’s wife, caught in the act, so that his killing was legal:
 
“We shoved open the bedroom door, and those of us who came in first saw him lying next to my wife, while those behind us saw him only when he was standing naked on the bed. Now I, gentlemen of the jury, hit him and knocked him down, pulled his hands behind his back and tied them together, and asked him how he had the gall to come into my house. He admitted that what he was doing was a crime, but he groveled and pleaded with me not to kill him but to make a deal for cash. But I told him, ‘It’s not me who’s going to kill you, but the law of this city, which you have violated. You thought your fun was more important, and you chose to commit this outrage against my wife and chil­dren rather than obey the laws and behave decently.’” In this way, jurymen, the man got what the laws decree for those who do this sort of thing.
 
The Roman world was less harsh about adultery. A child born within a marriage was legitimate unless its mother’s husband claimed that it was not—and he was unlikely to advertise himself as a cuckold in this way. But catching a wife in the act still normally meant the end of the marriage, and the treatment of adulterers was hardly less brutal. Here is what the poet Horace had to say about adultery in the late first century b.c.:
 
For those who want adulterers to stumble, It’s worthwhile hearing all the ways they suffer; Their pleasure’s rare, and agony infects it, And all around them savage dangers lurk. This guy dove straight down from a roof. Another Was whipped to death. A third one met a fierce gang Of bandits while he fled. One bought survival. Stable boys squirted into one. It happened That one offender’s balls and randy tail Were reaped off. “That’s the law,” said everyone.
 
This was adultery for Paul’s Greco-Roman audience, and also for the ethnically diverse audience that had adopted Roman or Hellenic culture. Altogether, nearly everybody in the Roman Empire would be prone to feel that Paul, rather than making a harsh new rule, was only seconding a humane and sensible one they had always had.
 
BUT IS THE BAN on fornication, in contrast, such a general one that we could call Paul puritanical—as interested in controlling sexuality as his Puritan interpreters were?
 
If with adultery we need to get the right picture, with for­nication we don’t even have the right word, and there may not be one in English. “Fornication” in our passage from Galatians is a rendering of porneia, whose steady meaning in polytheistic literature is “prostitution” or “whoring.” To get a sense of what Paul means by porneia, which he applies even in cases where there is no payment for sex, we have to con­sider the ethical poverty of the Greek and Roman languages.
 
The Greeks and Romans had many terms to show disgust for a woman who had more than one sexual partner; on the other hand, a man who was erotically rapacious would not be called names, as long as he followed just a few rules, the one against adultery being the most important. Paul signaled a vast change in morals by indicating that both an unfaithful man and an unfaithful woman, with no distinction, behaved “like whores.”
 
It is unlikely that porneia meant, at least to Paul’s Greco-Roman readers, all consensual extramarital sex, which is our basic modern definition of “fornication.” The Greeks and Romans did not make the same distinctions about sex that we do. We think of two basic kinds: sex within and sex outside of legal marriage. But for the polytheistic ancients, mar­riage was not as straightforward a matter. Slaves could not be legally married as free people were, but many had long-term unions that got some recognition, and raised their children together. Freedmen on average must have had less formal set­ups than the freeborn, since many of these setups started in slavery. In Latin the same slang, “tent-mate” and “shacking up” (literally, “tenting together”), could apply.
 
For aristocratic Romans, the nobility’s separate legal history, along with large dowries and ceremonies no one else went through, set their marriages apart. Even the Latin words for marriage, husband, and wife are not completely the same across different levels of privilege: uxor, for example, for “wife,” applies mainly to the upper classes; conjunx, on the other hand, can mean a wife, fiancée, concubine, or even ani­mal’s mate, so of course it applies all over the place. 
 
What is more, the ordinary type of Roman marriage was legally defined by consent to be married, which made get­ting a divorce easy for either party: a husband or wife had only to make known the wish not to be married anymore; and divorce, it appears, was common during the empire. A stricter type of marriage was available, but it was unpopular.
 
This, then, was the array of committed sexual unions allowed among the Greeks and Romans. In 1 Corinthians 7 (see my discussion of Christian marriage in chapter 4) Paul lays down the law for Christians and gives his rationales— partly because, I think, existing laws and customs were too loose, yet nobody in this world had thought much about them.
 
But across a great gulf from all of these arrangements was porneia (from the word meaning “buy”), which meant sex bought by the act and with no further obligation. A porn¯e, or prostitute, was normally a slave. Some had to parade naked in public places. Greek vase paintings show men beating them, evidently for fun. This was the institution behind Paul’s word, and even when he isn’t writing about sex for hire, he is probably emphasizing brutality. To make the word’s tone clearer, here is the comic pimp Lisper (in Herodas, a Greek writer of the third century b.c.) suing someone for damages to a piece of his property:
 
Now for you, Myrtale. Come, let these men all see—don’t be embarrassed. Think of them as your fathers and your brothers That’s here to judge the case. Look, gentlemen, At how he shredded her clear up and down. The sonofabitch has torn her nearly bare. He dragged her, beat her silly. . . . Maybe you want Myrtale. That’s no problem. I want my food: we’ll swap the two of them. By Zeus, you’ve got an urge there in your innards? Just stuff her price in the old Lisper’s hand And bruise your goods up any way you want.
 
The most outrageous joke here is that the pimp in his stupidity insults the jury by comparing Myrtale to their freeborn, citizen female relatives, a species as high above her as horses above gnats.
 
Here is Horace recommending a cautious shopping trip for sex:
 
And the thigh’s often softer, the leg straighter On a prostitute in the official drapery. What’s more, she struts the wares with no disguise,
 
And openly displays the things she’s selling. She doesn’t flaunt the handsome parts alone, And look for ways to cover what’s disgusting. When the Who’s Who buy horses, it’s their habit To cover, then inspect them: a fine body Might rest on weak hooves. Lovely flanks, a short head And arching neck might lure a gaping buyer. These guys know what they’re doing.
 
For the polytheists, the essence of porneia was treating another human being as a thing. If I had been one of Paul’s typical early readers, whatever else I understood from his use of the word, I would have picked up that treating another human being as a thing was no longer okay.
 
“UNCLEANLINESS” AND “LASCIVIOUSNESS” really cannot carry a puritanical concern with purity and self-control as spiritual stunts. For one thing, the Greek words were more outward-looking than the Puritan meanings require.
 
For the Greeks and Romans as well as the Hebrews, “uncleanliness” was more a public and ritual state than an inward and moral one. You might be unclean, for example, if you entered a holy place without washing, but the chief thing wrong with this was that you angered divinity and marred the place for the whole community. Crime could pol­lute you, but this would be in a similar way. Your unclean­ness was not in any important sense an inward burden—it was a visible, contagious sickness. Paul, of course, rejected ritual technicality in both Hebrew and Greco-Roman prac­tices, and in this passage he must have meant moral unclean­liness, but the sense of practical and shared bad effects was likely still there.
 
“Licentiousness” is a widespread, better translation than “lasciviousness.” Here the Greek word may have its usual previous meaning, irresponsibility, sexual or otherwise. “Lasciviousness” may also wrongly suggest a mere feeling, instead of certain acts. Augustine and then medieval clerics and then Puritans managed to criminalize sexual desire itself, but that was in a changing or changed world. Any Greek or Roman (or inhabitant of a Greek or Roman city) of Paul’s time who set himself against his own arousal would have gone insane, because no one could escape the sexual stimula­tion in this social and outdoor culture: it crooned in pictures on walls and on dinnerware, in prostitutes on the street, in jokes and songs and public religious observances. (For exam­ple, the Roman spring Floralia celebration included live sex shows, and the Greeks carried through the streets the phal­luses they worshipped.) There is no evidence that Paul beat his head against this culture by going further than to preach that overwhelming lust could be channeled in marriage (1 Corinthians 7:1–8). He does not suggest that either God or man can defeat the