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| Pantheon, Feb. 16, $25 |
FOR THOSE OF us who grew up going to church, it was almost impossible to like Paul, regardless of whether we liked Jesus. Sarah Ruden, who has a doctorate in classics from Harvard and has translated such works as The Aeneid, was originally among these ranks. Yet in her new work, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, she argues that much of that dislike for the angry and arrogant — and highly effective — missionary of the early Christian movement is a matter of misunderstanding. Using her knowledge of early Greco-Roman literature and society, Ruden depicts what Paul's message would have sounded like to its original audience. In doing so, she takes a man preachers and parents have long used to support restrictive rules and judgmentalism, and transforms him into an advocate for love, equality and human freedom.
The chapters break down into all the major controversial social issues found in Paul's writings and today's society: sex and marriage, homosexuality, women's rights, the role of the State, slavery and love. Using a wide range of Greek and Latin works, Ruden attempts to show the situation of these issues in Paul's context, sometimes quoting so liberally that it breaks her train of thought and makes the arguments hard to follow — even while providing livid examples of the topic at hand.
Homosexuality emerges as the most enlightening subject in the book. Paul's writings on the subject have been the source of much bigotry over the years, but Ruden turns this around by showing the actual historical context of these writings, revealing Paul's ultimate concern here to be one of human dignity. She claims that in the Greco-Roman world, gay couples did not exist, even in thought. When Paul condemns males lying with males, he is probably talking about the all-too-common occurrence of grown men raping little boys and each other. The poetry she quotes to illustrate the frequent role this disturbing situation played in that society is graphic and horrifying. According to this reading, Paul was forbidding exploitative sex, not mutual love.
Her insights on slavery are also quite helpful, but her perspective in the chapter on the State is often obscured. It's hard to see where she is coming from there, so the arguments often seem weak. This occasionally happens elsewhere, though the linguistic and cultural studies throughout the book are usually sound and noteworthy for understanding this controversial man.
Ruden works hard to make Paul Among the People as accessible as possible, but the technical nature of the subject will obviously limit the scope of readership. While this is an important work for scholars, most interested readers will probably be fine skimming through it.
(eric.pettersson@citypaper.net)
I cannot see how Paul was forbidding exploitative sex between men. In Romans 1:27 he talks about men being inflamed with lust for one another. This implies mutual consent, not exploitation. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 he criticizes "soft men" (malakoi) and "men who have sex with men" (arsenokoitai). Again there is no direct reference to exploitation.
Contrary to the final line of the review, this book is not an important work for scholars. It takes no consideration of the now standard view that the book of Acts may not responsibly be used as historical data for Paul's life; it ignores previous scholarship that has compared Paul's letters to Greek and Roman literature; it makes controversial and unsubstantiated claims with no sensitivity to historical responsibility. The book was a waste of my money and, worse, my time.
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