Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden (Pantheon Books, 2010), 214 pp.
“What Marriage Is For” by The Editors, National Review, September 20, 2010.
A published translator of Vergil, Homer, Aristophanes and Petronius – and now of Paul – Ruden was interviewed recently in Christianity Today and its sister publication, Books & Culture. Having recoiled at an arrogant, ill-informed put-down of Paul’s opposition to a brutality of his day (sorcery), she sought to know more of what he wrote in the original Greek and historical context. She grants that in her many years of graduate study in the Greek and Latin classics at Harvard, “we behaved as if the New Testament had not been written in Greek … and as if the Roman Empire at its greatest period of power had not been in the early Christians’ background.” At last, she found even her “first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before.”
This socially concerned Quaker from a liberal Protestant upbringing was “dragged away” from the “dear prejudice” that the “socially concerned church was an invention of the modern era. … In fact, the compassionate community was there at the beginning, and its founder was Paul of Tarsus.” Contrary to popular notions today, “more than anyone else, Paul created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings. … No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are,” she says.
Ruden examines Paul on pleasure, homosexuality, women, the state, slavery and love, “the foundation of the new community” – giving a chapter to each of these topics – and explaining, with fascinating historical illustrations, what Paul and his contemporaries would have known of these matters, as over against what we tend to misread into them. She notes how very crucial the ancient cultural context is and how damaging it is “to distort the Bible’s historical context”, especially in today’s debates on homosexuality.
She’s clear: In Paul’s day, “There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all.” To the contrary, “society pressured a man into sexual brutality toward other males. To keep it unmistakable that he had no sympathy with passive homosexuals, he would tout his attacks on vulnerable young males.” She notes that, “homosexual rape [was] divinely sanctioned” with the “idol of sexual aggression [being] Priapus, the scarecrow with a huge phallus.” She cites a Roman poet’s describing being “cut to pieces” as “the ordinary term for ‘to be the passive partner’.” She assumes that, as a boy, Paul saw, “at any slave auction … boys his own age … knocked down to local pimps at high prices, to the sound of jokes about how much they would have to endure during their brief careers.” So, she observes, what’s behind Paul’s allusion to same-sex acts “is the passion he had for ending exploitative sex, the only physical expression of homoeroticism he likely knew about.” In the B&C interview, “Paul in Context”, she repeats: Paul “could have had no idea of anything in homosexuality that was not exploitative and cruel. I think this is the source of his emotion when writing about homosexual practice in his time.” Ruden asks rhetorically: “What greater contrast could there be to the tradition of using a weaker body for selfish pleasure or a power trip [than Christ’s having given] his body to save mankind”? So, since “no one could have imagined homosexuality’s being different than it was; it would have to go.”
Nowadays, we should know not to confuse a loving same-sex peer partnership with the brutal “cutting to pieces” of power-rape in Paul’s day. So, why do Christians violate the Golden Rule, ripping Bible verses out of context to rip to pieces those about whom the verses were never meant? How, instead, might Christians live the love Paul said summed up the whole of Christian living (I Corinthians 13)? Ruden’s helpful suggestion is this: “Suppose the love people need to carry out, loves them and helps them” to do it!
The NR editors begin their assault against same-sex marriage by mocking proponents’ analogies to yesteryears’ racism and miscegenation and the view that “within a few years … everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about.” NR counters: “Our tolerance for racism is quite limited [and] social sanctions against racism, both overt and implied, are robust.” Well, yes, but things weren’t always thus – as is illustrated by this same NR issue’s honorific obit of James Jackson Kilpatrick who was with NR in the bad old days. He eventually changed his mind, but back in 1963, in his “The Hell He is Equal” for The Saturday Evening Post, he contended that the “Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.” The SEP rejected his piece.
NR claims that, “many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy.” Well, the “social institution” expressed racist “public policy” – until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. And, need we rehearse all the injustices of the institution in much earlier eras and other cultures? Some do lose sight!
NR’s committee-cobbled case against same-sex marriage is cooked up in ignorance, naive assumptions, selective recall, reductionism, false premise, non sequitur and refusal to recognize a heterosexual’s need for structures for intimacy mirrored in a homosexual’s need. NR insists that, “the [the!] reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children”. But sexual intercourse between men and women most “regularly” doesn’t and can’t produce children. Moreover, is legal marriage but a minor matter for the infertile, the elderly, those who choose to be childfree, et al.? Aren’t millions of children “produced” out-of-wedlock, “produced” by rape, “produced” even apart from the biological parents “having sex” with each other? And what about the families in which same-sex couples are lovingly rearing their own or other folks’ kids? Don’t they deserve the legal marriage benefits NR editors demand for their own families?
NR’s final sentence warns that “if our understanding of marriage changes,” (as if it hasn’t changed across time and cultures, including our own) “so much the worse for the future.” And, so much for the lessons of history! Doesn’t NR’s alarm sound a lot like the prejudiced parlance of predictions on interracial marriage?