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Paul Among The People: The Apostle Reinterpreted And Reimagined In His Own Time (2010)

by Sarah Ruden(Favorite Author)

3.86 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0375425012 (ISBN13: 9780375425011)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Pantheon

review 1: First of all, let me say that I generally think Ruden's book serves a good purpose, namely, setting up a contrast of Paul's more (for modern people) controversial writings against those of prominent Greco-Roman writers of his day. If you find his various statements about women, slavery, and the like, beyond the pale, this is a good book for you. It does as good a job as possible of putting them in a more positive light, in an accessible way that a modern reader can understand. This is the great value of the book.Having said that, I really wanted to like this book a great deal more than I did, for several reasons. One is personal: Ruden is a Quaker, and her view of Paul and the various "traditional" interpretations of Paul she seeks to refute are very Protestant in nat... moreure (I am a Catholic). She seems to read the entire Christian tradition after Paul's death in a very negative fashion, though she never explicitly says so. Paul brought us freedom from wretched Greco-Roman culture (or certain aspects of it) and then the Church became an authoritarian nightmare until the modern period again. And that is directly related to the way she sees Paul: he is meaningful to her insofar as he is consistent with her modern, essentially liberal beliefs. This seems to be the main message of the book: I used to think Paul was a troglodyte, now I know he really agrees with the way I feel! (186)This sort of emphasis is not a big surprise, given the very personal nature of the book, but it is unfortunate, because in her zeal to exculpate Paul she often winds up unnecessarily blurring important distinctions. For example, while she is right to emphasize the brutality of Greco-Roman society toward slaves, women, etc., she repeats several times the charge that for Romans slaves and others were "not really human." This is not true; they were seen as incredibly inferior types of humans, but human nonetheless. (See Timothy Reiss' book for a good explanation of this, Mirages of the Selfe.) What made Paul's writings so different is that they presume, in the eyes of God anyway, a level of equality among all human beings, that the ancients could not countenance. And of course, to a modern, this is a great gulf: being human and being equal are synonymous for us, in a way that was not true for the ancients. But neither really was it true for Paul, I expect, at least not in the way she has it. Paul is plenty authoritarian when he wants to be, invoking his authority as an apostle. I thus found a level of exaggeration in her description which I felt was more than the evidence she cites (very ably handled, for the most part) could bear.I don't want to make this review any longer than it is, but I do want to say that I do not think Ruden is much of an historian, and by that I mean I don't think she makes much of an historical argument here. Rather, I see her as making a cultural argument as to the superiority of modern culture, which she rightly sees as having its roots in Christian beliefs. Unfortunately, she leaves a great deal to be desired in terms of the historical underpinnings of this broader point, with which I agree with (mostly).
review 2: Interesting take on the Apostle Paul. The author is not a religious scholar, but rather a Christian w/ the conventional sense of Paul being a bigot. But she IS a classical scholar, and when she compares what contemporaries of Paul said about women, sexuality, having fun - she realizes that he really caused huge changes in his immediate culture that still impact us today. Her translations of literature comtemporary to Paul are mind-bogggling - what some people thought and believed. Worth reading. less

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