St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.

The Spirit would be crucial to this early movement; it was not a separate divine being, of course, but a term used by Jews to denote the presence and power of God in human life.

The great masters often depicted Paul preaching to large crowds in beautiful colonnades and grand lecture halls, but we should probably picture him expounding the gospel in his workshop. Tent making was quiet work, and it would have been quite possible for Paul to discuss his ideas about Jesus and the Kingdom with fellow workers and customers.

Luke tells us that Antioch was the place where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.”37 It is possible that during the riots that broke out after Caligula’s death, the imperial officials in Antioch began to call those Jews who venerated the Messiah crucified by Pilate Christianoi, in order to distinguish them from the Herodianoi, the Jews who believed that Herod Agrippa, the new pro-Roman Jewish king in Judea, would restore the fortunes of Israel.

As in all congregations of God’s people, women should keep silent at the meeting. They have no permission to talk, but should keep their place as the law directs. If there is something they want to know, they can ask their husbands at home. It is a shocking thing for a woman to talk at the meeting.45

This, of course, directly contradicts Paul’s insistence that “in Christ” there should be full gender equality. So glaring is this discrepancy that many scholars believe that this passage was inserted into Paul’s letter at a later date by those who wanted to make Paul conform more closely to Greco-Roman norms.

The second text quoted to prove Paul’s chronic chauvinism is the long, meandering argument for women to cover their heads while praying or prophesying during community meetings.48

It is interesting that here Paul seems to have no problem about women speaking in public. Again, the passage under discussion interrupts his argument. In the preceding chapter, he had described the way the community should behave at regular meals and, in the interests of unity, urged the Corinthians to avoid offending other people’s dietary sensibilities.

Wives, be subject to your husbands as though to the Lord; for the man is the head of the woman, just as Christ is the head of the church. Christ is, indeed, the savior of that body; but just as the church is subject to Christ, so must women be subject to their husbands in everything.