Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time

by Sarah Ruden

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.