July 21, 2020

This is an astonishing book that changed my views of Saint Paul. We all think we know who Saint Paul is. He was touched by God on the road to Damascus, changing him into the great missionary, founding Christian churches all over the Roman world. We think we know how Saint Paul thinks, based on the books he wrote in the Bible.

But do we really?

It’s hard enough to understand an era of history that is still barely within living memory (say, the 1930s in the United States during the long, slow, grinding run-up to World War II when no one and I mean no one in 1935 had any idea of what they’d be doing and seeing seven years later) and is reasonably well-documented in the language we speak today.

How much harder is it to understand the world two thousand years ago, with an enormous language barrier and cultural and behavioral barriers that are even larger. The Greeks and Romans at 1 A.D. did not think like us. They didn’t act like us. Their entire social structure was wildly different from ours and not just because it was a world built almost entirely on human and animal muscle.

This was the world of Saint Paul.

Why then, do we think that Saint Paul should have thought like a modern person and fault him when he doesn’t? Judging people of the past by the standards of today is chronocentrism and it gets in the way of understanding better what actually happened as opposed to what we think should have happened if only those unenlightened savages knew better, like we do today.

So meet Sarah Ruden, a classical scholar and a Quaker, who decided she needed to understand Saint Paul better. Fortunately, as a classics scholar, experienced in ancient Greek and classical Latin, she could go to the source materials. Even more interesting, she chose to examine the written records we do have of the world that Saint Paul actually lived in. That is, Ms. Ruden translated all kinds of writing, from Juvenal to Ovid to Petronius (and a host of others) to help us understand a very different world. Then, she uses her translations to explain how Saint Paul was influenced in his writings by the world he lived in.

As an example, why does Saint Paul tell women to cover their hair in church? Because at the time, there were two classes of women: upper-class ladies with wealth and family backing and everyone else. Everyone else means poor women, slaves, and whores. Those categories are not mutually exclusive either. If you were poor and female, you got zero respect of any kind and if some wealthy man wanted you, well, you complied. One of the ways to distinguish upper-class women was they were veiled in public. Poor women didn’t cover their hair.

Covering your hair in church meant that poor prostitutes got treated with respect, almost as though they had the status of upper-class women.

Why did Saint Paul tell women to remain silent in church? The scandal here was not women remaining silent. It was that women were in church in the first place! Again, a very different world, one in which women – unless they were slaves or whores or desperately poor – didn’t normally go out in public to socialize or work. They stayed home. Behind walls and closed doors. Certain public functions were acceptable but not very many. The Romans were more accepting of women in public than the Greeks were, but not by much.

Thus, Saint Paul allows women in a public church at a time when this was shocking. He asks that they remain silent basically as a sop to contemporary mores and get their questions answered afterwards. But he expects them to be there and he expects them to have questions that should be answered. Groundbreaking.

Another fascinating aspect of Ms. Ruden’s book is how nasty so much of the classical writings were. Those Romans didn’t censor themselves. I’m reminded of Catullus #16 which is so viciously obscene that it is still almost never translated into English. I didn’t know that little ditty even existed until a few years ago, when I was looking into Catullus’ poems for another project. In Paul Among the People, Ms. Ruden provides her own translations and she keeps close to the invective-laden spirit of the original writing. She thoughtfully provides an extensive bibliography so you can brush up your Latin and Greek and check for yourself.

Paul Among the People also answered one of those questions I’ve had for years. As we head deeper into a post-Christian world, it becomes harder and harder to understand why Christianity swept the world, moving from an obscure Jewish sect in 32 A.D. to becoming the official religion of Rome as per Constantine in 313 A.D. This took less than three hundred years and during an era when most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born. The world at that time had many, many religious sects and movements to choose from.

Why Christianity? Because it offered hope, for the very first time, to huge numbers of people at the very bottom of the social ladder, people who were used to being treated as worth less than dirt. Christianity valued those people, many of them for the first time ever. Christianity and the gospel worked. Prayers were answered by the living Christ as they still are today.

If you are interested in the early church, in Saint Paul, Christianity, or in the classical world, I can’t recommend Paul Among the People enough. It is very readable, lively, and fascinating. Expect to be alternately entertained, horrified, and challenged.

If you’d like to learn more about Sarah Ruden you can visit her website.

If you’d like to read Catullus #16, here’s the original text (get out your unabridged Latin dictionary from graduate school) along with a translation if you didn’t attend graduate school for classical studies.

(Banner art from a Bible app for kids, “From Enemy to Friend”)