Paul Among the People: The apostle reinterpreted and reimagined in his own time, by Sarah Ruden

Author: Sarah Ruden. Review by Simon Webb.

This book is an attempt to look again at the accusations of homophobia, excessive puritanism and general grumpiness that are routinely levelled against the apostle Paul. Sarah Ruden is a Quaker scholar, and her approach is to set Paul in the context of his time. This is not an attempt to find excuses for Paul, as we might forgive a homophobic uncle on the basis that when he was growing up ‘it was a different time’. Ruden’s profound grasp of Greek and Latin in particular forces her to conclude that Paul’s reputation as the ultimate spoilsport is based on a series of misunderstandings.

Where generations of Bible readers have assumed that Paul was writing against homosexuality in general, a closer look at the Greek he uses suggests that he was not criticising anything like modern gay relationships, which can be just as equal and loving (or unequal and poisonous) as straight relationships. That kind of homosexuality was just ‘not a thing’ in the Roman empire – as Ruden points out, the word ‘homosexual’ was not even coined until 1869. The homosexual activity Paul would have known about did not involve reciprocal love or even mutual lust: it had to do with abuse of unwilling slaves, even enslaved children, by callous men. By the same token, heterosexual ‘sleeping around’ tended to mean the heartless (and sometimes violent) sexual exploitation of prostitutes and enslaved women and girls.

Paul’s objection to what the King James Bible translates as ‘revellings’ (e.g. Galatians 5:21) is actually his horror of what the Greeks called the kōmos, a drink-fuelled, riotous procession that could end in brawling and rape. Ruden quotes a chilling passage from Theocritus, where a young man promises to pass a girl’s house as part of a kōmos, and slip inside and have sex with her. If she bars the door, the kōmoi will just chop it down with their axes.

The Paul of Paul Among the People is not, therefore, a repressed puritan, railing against any kind of fun. In his letters, he is trying to direct the first Christians away from cruelty, oppression and violence. Ruden reminds us how horribly violent the Roman empire could be; where we have elections and political debates, they had murderous coups and mass executions. In an insightful passage, the author suggests that Paul’s war against unbridled mayhem was motivated by lingering guilt over his role in the murder of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. 

Sarah Ruden’s book is not as up-front about her Quakerism as her more recent translation of the Gospels. But the author’s determination to dig out the truth and to see the man from Tarsus from all sides is very Quakerly. She is no Polyanna though: what she brings to the table is compassion. She writes: ‘He never overcame his touchiness, his fussiness, or his arrogance… but he kept his worst faults in bounds, sometimes with charming irony, and the knowledge of how destructive they could be was of great use to him in his work’.

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