WE NEED more colloquial translations and considerations of the classics. Dr. Sarah Ruden shows the way in Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. She calls it a “new kind of book”—a multidisciplinary study.
Since Shaw first attacked him, St. Paul has been considered a vicious muddier of Jesus’ message of love by sophisticated Christians. By coincidence, Ruden’s book comes out in competition with a new St. Paul study from Pope Benedict. Benedict is “a profound spiritual leader in his own right” notes the pontiff’s publicist, in case we were wondering.
Ruden’s book is a defense, and not from a fundamentalist view. Her discovery of St. Paul’s elevated side was, she writes, the last benefit she expected to get from her classical education. As an academic and a poet, Ruden had previously studied Virgil and Petronious, largely because most female classics students gravitated toward Ovid. Her experience shows; her prose is salty and martial.
Yet Ruden is a Quaker, a member of a fairly pure set of Christians. Foreswearing violence is tough. As one ages, the desire for sin wanes, except for the desire to beat your enemies into a pulp. Ruden notes that Paul saw past rage: “If I had been one of Paul’s typical readers … I would have picked up that treating another human being as a thing was no longer OK.”
Such is the colloquial way that Ruden writes. She also translates a line of Horace’s Second Satire as “these guys know what they’re doing.” (“This they do judiciously” is another translation.) Ruden, who claims that the ancients were “kindergarteners with knives,” uses some seriously informal prose.
The limits of a pejorative point of view are obvious, though. What Ruden has against the Greeks and the Romans is inarguable: they victimized the weak, and she can cite her considerable readings to prove it. Unfortunately, our fantasies of the nonstop toga party turn out to have been more like evenings in San Quentin, with similar harshly delineated roles of pitcher and catcher. And if Roman society labeled you as Mike Piazza instead of Randy Johnson, only God—Paul’s God—could help you. Pedophilia was a joking matter. The joke was on the punked, and the shame outlived you.
In coming out against homosexuality, Ruden argues, Paul was condemning what he knew, namely the exploitative kind—slave raping, underling sodomizing. Adultery ruined women socially and took away their property. Caught in the act, an adulterous man could be dealt with summarily. How summarily? Amy Richlin’s excellent The Garden of Priapus, cited by Ruden, reminds us that Roman houses carried signage something like the novelty ones joke shops used to sell: “Trespassers will be violated.” So, in Paul’s objection to homosexuality and adultery, Ruden sees an objection to objectification itself.
We can see what the Romans and Greeks laughed at, but writers—however ancient—telling us that something is unthinkable is usually a good sign that somebody thinks it. I thought of Hemingway’s objection to male homosexuality: it just had to be beastly because of the physical way it’s carried out, QED.
While Ruden makes a fine argument that Paul helped create the ideas of fraternity and equality, obviously there’s no liberty there, unless you think of liberty meaning liberation from base desires. I’m too pagan to appreciate that idea. Ruden spares some condemnation for Rev. Wildmon and his gang, but I wish she had acknowledged that there was a part of Paul that was revolutionary then but is reactionary now. She almost does, but the point is nearly parenthetical; she blames churchmen, not the texts that inspired them. The end results of religious authoritarianism are seen everywhere today, particularly in Pope Benedict’s scandal-ridden papacy.
Yet anyone defending Paul has 1 Corinthians as a gift. Ruden presents that book’s most shining passage just as the Greeks would have seen it: a series of verbs in a box of text, without spaces or punctuation, like a word puzzle. This forceful summing up of faith, hope and charity, and the importance of possessing it in the heart instead of the tongue, almost outweighs the wrongs done by good Christians over the centuries.
PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE: THE APOSTLE REINTERPRETED AND REIMAGINED IN HIS OWN TIME by Sarah Ruden; Pantheon; 240 pages; $25 hardback
