A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and disability in the letters of Paul, by Isaac Soon

Author: Isaac Soon. Review by Simon Webb

When he wrote his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul felt compelled to tell his correspondents about what he called the ‘thorn’ in his ‘flesh’, a mysterious ailment that has long puzzled readers. Isaac Soon’s book is the first to be devoted to this enigmatic complaint, and to other issues that may have made the man from Tarsus a disabled apostle.

As Soon reminds us, ‘from early Christianity to twentieth-century scholarship, interpreters have tendered a multiplicity of hypotheses regarding Paul’s thorn’. He implies that this approach may now be old hat. Modern thinking on disability goes beyond the impairment itself to examine how cultures turn impairments into disabilities. Looking closely at the cultures that may have classed Paul as disabled, Soon offers insights into ancient attitudes to physical and psychological difference, and ideas around normality and perfection. 

Early on, Soon offers his own answer to the thorny thorn question. Paul, he asserts, believed that he was sharing his body with an angel of Satan. The author tracks down various ancient and medieval cases where such a possession was regarded as a useful gift.

Soon also traces where the apostle may have found inspiration and support for such an idea, and looks at the ramifications of the idea in Paul’s writings. Modern Bible readers might think that Paul’s self-diagnosis was merely his way of explaining a condition such as epilepsy, but Soon bids us think like the ancients, and understand that the apostle and his contemporaries would have thought of his demon-possession as an impairment in itself.

The other issues that Soon examines are Paul’s circumcision, and the possibility that he was of short stature (‘Paul’ means ‘small’ or ‘humble’). Few today would think of circumcision as an impairment, but Soon reveals that many Greeks and Romans idolised a long foreskin. Paul’s complex attitude to circumcision surely reflects his mixed cultural identity – he was a Jew, and also a Roman, who wrote and spoke in Greek.

The tradition that Paul was of short stature can be found in various sources, some of which the author of A Disabled Apostle takes seriously. Soon finds that though both short and excessively tall people might expect to be mocked, opinions about them were not as destructive or divisive as ancient ideas about circumcision.

Soon’s book is important – too important to have been published with so many obvious errors of English. It reveals that a lot of scholarly work has already been done about disability in the ancient world, especially in the Bible. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ wrote LP Hartley at the start of his 1953 novel The Go-Between. A Disabled Apostle reminds us that, though the impairments were the same, they did disability differently in the ancient world.

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