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

by Sarah Ruden

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).