Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time

by Sarah Ruden

It is a common—and fundamental—misconception that Paul told people how to live. Apart from forbidding certain abusive practices, he never gives any precise instructions for living. It would have violated his two main social human freedom and dignity, and the need for people to love one another.  Paul was a Hellenistic Jew, originally named Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, who made a living from tent making or leatherworking. He called himself the “Apostle to the Gentiles” and was the most important of the early Christian evangelists.  Paul is not easy to understand. The Greeks and Romans themselves probably misunderstood him or skimmed the surface of his arguments when he used terms such as “law” (referring to the complex system of Jewish religious law in which he himself was trained). But they did share a language—Greek—and a cosmopolitan urban culture, that of the Roman Empire. Paul considered evangelizing the Greeks and Romans to be his special mission. “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The idea of love as the only rule was current among Jewish thinkers of his time, but the idea of freedom being available to anyone was revolutionary.  Paul, regarded by Christians as the greatest interpreter of Jesus’ mission, was the first person to explain how Christ’s life and death fit into the larger scheme of salvation, from the creation of Adam to the end of time. Preaching spiritual equality and God’s infinite love, he crusaded for the Jewish Messiah to be accepted as the friend and deliverer of all humankind. In Paul Among the People, Sarah Ruden explores the meanings of his words and shows how they might have affected readers in his own time and culture. She describes as well how his writings represented the new church as an alternative to old ways of thinking, feeling, and living. Ruden translates passages from ancient Greek and Roman literature, from Aristophanes to Seneca, setting them beside famous and controversial passages of Paul and their key modern interpretations. She writes about Augustine; about George Bernard Shaw’s misguided notion of Paul as “the eternal enemy of Women”; and about the misuse of Paul in the English Puritan Richard Baxter’s strictures against “flesh-pleasing.” Ruden makes clear that Paul’s ethics, in contrast to later distortions, were humane, open, and responsible.  Paul Among the People is a remarkable work of scholarship, synthesis, and understanding; a revelation of the founder of Christianity.

Genres: Religion, Theology, History, Christianity, Christian, Nonfiction, Faith

211 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Sarah Elizabeth Ruden is an American writer of poetry, essays, translations of Classic literature, and popularizations of Biblical philology, religious criticism and interpretation.

Reviews

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope to write more about this book later, but for now will just say that it was surprisingly good.

Update:
I am going to be praising this book highly, so let me get just a couple of criticisms out of the way at the very front. This book is a “reimagining” of the apostle Paul, one that defends him from some very common modern misunderstandings. It undertakes this task on the basis of a very wide and deep knowledge of the classical world with which Paul was so often in conflict. Sarah Ruden, in short, is someone who is able to listen to both sides of the phone conversation, and who is able to rescue Paul from the misunderstandings of moderns, only able to listen to Paul’s side of it, and who wildly underestimate what he was dealing with.

My two criticisms are these. Ruden tends to accept what current scholarship (all rise) wants to say about Pauline authorship, and so this limits what she is able to draw on as she reintroduces the apostle to us. This cavalier approach to the inspiration of Scripture also results in her willingness to be critical of what she sees as Paul’s foibles—sort of tetchy, ill-tempered, kind of splenetic—while staunchly maintaining that he was among the good guys and was fighting the good fight. I grew up wanting to be more respectful of the apostles than that. She respects him in the main cause—indeed, that is what the book is about—but she also makes a little bit too free.

The second criticism is that she uses Puritan interpretations of Paul as kind of a foil, not realizing that the Puritans need to be understood contextually, just as she does for Paul. Not only so, but when the Puritans are read in context, and more widely than she does, much the same thing happens. So if you read this book on my recommend, tiptoe past her observations of the Puritans. The good stuff is up ahead.

Now the praise. Sarah Ruden’s knowledge of the classical world is wide-ranging. She is intelligent, honest, and informed. Not only does she have this knowledge, she has the courage to simply put what it was like out on the table. I mean this. She interprets the first century in first century terms, without trying to make their customs and outlook fit into contemporary norms. Moreover, she sees very clearly that it was the apostle Paul’s opposition to those perverse norms that helped get us to the world we now inhabit—from which vantage we turn around to critique the apostle.

She tackles genuine hot button issues. There is a chapter on Paul and homosexuality. There is another chapter on Paul and women. And then she also treats Paul’s instructions to slaves. But unlike so many modern commentators, Ruden actually knows what first century sexual ethics were like. She knows the actual status of women back then. She knows what the institution of slavery was like. In support of her observations, she quotes extensively from the literature of the period, and for the average Christian today, few experiences will be as eye-opening as reading this book. Sure, Paul was a first century curmudgeon. But then you get a glimpse of what he was being curmudgeonly about, and your natural response is omigosh.

When you get into the meat of this book, you find arguments that you can respect. Even when you don’t agree, or if you suspect that she would allow for some things today that you would not, what she provides is real substance for real discussion.

Her chapter on homosexuality ends this way:

“All this leads to a feeling of mountainous irony. Paul takes a bold and effective swipe at the power structure. He challenges centuries of execrable practice in seeking a more just, more loving society. And he gets called a bigot. Well, it’s not a persecution that would have impressed him much” (p. 71).

And I will offer this as a teaser. Her provocative treatment of head coverings inverts the whole question, and is at least worth thinking about. In that day the women without veils were not the liberated women, but rather quite the reverse. Slave women, who were frequently forced into prostitution, would not be allowed to wear a covering. Paul’s requirement for the Christian worship service may have been a staggering promotion for the women with pasts—as though it were the height of the Victorian era and he was requiring all Christian women to wear white at their weddings.

I will finish with an observation that I have made before, and it is one that needs to be made over and over again with regard to the kinds of issues addressed in this book—e.g. sexual ethics, the role of women, and slavery. Often evangelical expositors are less to be trusted with the meaning of the text than liberal expositors. This is because an evangelical is necessarily stuck with the results of his exegesis. The liberal can say that Paul taught xyz about women, ho, ho, ho, but the evangelical, if he comes up with xyz, has to defend it himself. This has led in the past to no small measure of exegetical creativity on the part of Bible “believers.” Ruden is in an odd position. She clearly inhabits the liberal academic world, but shows Paul a great deal more actual respect than he often gets from evangelicals. The evangelicals have to pretend respect while at the same time ignoring such peccadillos as his teaching on head coverings, returned slaves, and the problem of the silken boys.

I don’t agree with everything Ruden argues for. But it was one of the more worthwhile books I have read in some time.

[Darrick Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 nature (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).

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Look at Paul the Apostle
Review of the Image paperback edition (2011) of the original Pantheon hardcover (2010)

I very much enjoyed the readability and the plain modern day language of Sarah Ruden's recent translation of The Gospels (2021). That was enough for me to want to explore several of her other translation works of which I have now located several via the library. Paul Among the People is the earliest among her now several Bible related translations and works. It is also the most popular of her works listed in Goodreads.

Paul Among the People is not a complete translation of the New Testament books that are attributed to Paul, but instead concentrates on a selection of quotes. Paul has historically been credited as the author of up to 14 out of the 27 books in the New Testament, although only 6 or 7 of those are now considered certain. That still represents anything from about 20 to 30% of the writing*. Whichever number it is, it is still a large proportion from a single individual.

Paul the Apostle né Saul of Tarsus (c 5 AD to c 64/67 AD) is significant as one of the earliest proselytizers of Christianity who began to shape it as a faith separate from Judaism. Born a Jew, he was a Pharisee in Jerusalem who persecuted the followers of the early Christian cult until he was famously converted on the road to Damascus. He proceeded to travel throughout the Mediterranean world and founded various Christian communities. His letters or epistles to each of these form the books of the bible that are attributed to him (e.g. Romans, Corinthians 1 & 2, etc.). These letters predate the estimated writing of the Gospels (c 70 to 110 AD), so are among the earliest Christian writings. He has been assumed to be martyred in Rome circa 64 AD during Emperor Nero's persecution of Christians**.

Ruden's thesis, as expressed in the book's synopsis, is to correct the "misconception that Paul represented a puritanical, hysterically homophobic, misogynist, or reactionary vision" and instead to present "a radical message of human freedom and dignity at the heart of Paul’s preaching." The heart of this argument is based on Ruden's attempts to contextualize the original meanings of the Hebrew or Koine Greek words in the New Testament and to also present them in their historical framing of their Greco-Roman times.

I am approaching these books more out of an interest in learning about the context of translation and not as any sort of Christian scholar. I am finding all of Ruden's work to be fascinating for this reason.

Trivia and Links
* The percentages are my approximations and are based on information from here and here.

** See more about Nero's persecutions here.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a lot problems with this book, despite its many positive aspects. Ruden is a elegant translator of ancient texts and this book allows her to frame translations from a wide range of authors around a reading of Paul. Those readers who come to this book from a theological background will be comfronted with a range of new material about the ancient world in which Paul lived and wrote. Those with more familiarty with the ancient world than with Paul, might be less pleased, as I will explain shortly. Another strong point of this book is its attention to the meaning of the Greek words Paul uses, especially in the chapter on sexual pleasure. These philological arguments are fairly rigorous and convincing. The more sociological arguments, however, are often enfuriating.

I was never convinced by her reading of Paul, and I think the way she uses her translations of Classical texts to support this reading is often misleading. For example, she argues that Paul is not guilty of the homophobia which many modern Christians uses him to support. The argument for this, however, is that unlike modern homosexuality, ancient homosexuality actually was brutal, exploitative and almost completely pedophilic. I wouldn’t attempt to excuse or justify the wrongness of ancient pederasty. But I do think Ruden is far too cavaliar in her use of ancient sources to support her vision of ancient homosexual relationships. She treats literary texts as historical documents, even when these texts are themselves exagerated and homophobic. This kind of “scriptural” reading of ancient literary texts deeply oversimplifies historical realities. (What about adult homosexual relationships in the ancient world, such as the ones Timarchos is chastised for in Aeschines’ Against Timarchos?) The argument becomes circular rather quickly. And it merely projects the image of menacing child-molesting homosexuality back onto the ancient world, thus justifying Paul’s prohibition on male-male relationships without offering any real solution for how his readers should deal with this issue in the modern world. The chapter on Paul’s misogyny is equally problematic for me, while the chapters on slavery and the relationship between the church and state are less problematic, because less controversial.

There’s a question that always gets asked when reviewing a book about the ancient world: who is it for? This one is clearly for non-specialists. It doesn’t occupy itself with scholarship on many of the issues it adresses. This is a problem when you are dealing with such disputed and important issues like ancient misogyny, ancient sexuality, and ancient slavery. In place of scholarship, Ruden offers her own personal voice as a way to signpost her arguments. This is a nice touch, but again, for me it didn’t work. Ruden’s experiences and perspective are much more traditional and, dare I say, prim than I could ever be comfortable with. She begins the book with a common rhetorical ploy, claiming that she once too despised Paul but then became his supporter after she discovered the things she shares here with us. In short, her argument is that we should not judge Paul because the things he says were normative at the time. “That’s just the way it was.” This is an unsatisfying way to contextualize any ancient text. If we are still reading these texts now, we should acknowledge their defects, not excuse or ignore them.

Ruden claims this is “a new kind of book” in the epilogue which explains her methodolody. Again, I disagree. I read a book a lot like this a couple years ago called Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton. Both books take a controversial figure and address the major popular criticisms of their work. Both are guilty of preaching to the choir. But Eagleton, in both his title and his arguments, admits to this. Reading Ruden’s title, I wondered which “people” we should consider Paul among. Surely not the common people or the oppressed who flocked to the early church. The texts she cites are written by and for elites, and despite their wide range of centuries and locales, she uses them to posit a unitary image of “ancient Greeks and Romans” that never really existed. The ancient world was messy and full of different groups with different ideas of how to think and behave. Christianity succeeeded in tamping down many of these divergent viewpoints for a while, but no single ideology can ever erase all the differences that humanity creates. So I remain uncoverted, but I appreciate the effort and think that those already in Paul’s camp can gain a lot from this book.

[Sheldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate to be sitting in front of Sarah Ruden when she visited WPMF and dropped off a copy of her latest book, “Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time.” I got first dibs and I spent a great week soaking it up. This is a terrific book and I hope it gets the critical and popular attention it deserves.
In the admittedly small universe of Classical Studies, Ruden is a well known for her sharp and contemporary translations of Greek and Latin texts. Her “Lysistrata” is acknowledged as the standard translation used in most colleges and universities. Her recent translations of the Pertonuius’ Satyricon and the “Aeniad” have received wide critical acclaim. In her most recent book she brings this vast knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, and a keen understanding of day-to-day life in the Roman Empire during the intertestimental period as a means of shedding new light Paul and his writings.

What Sarah has done is to put Paul’s writings into the context of the world in which he spent virtually his entire life; that of a Roman hegemony mixed in with a rich and wide diversity of languages, religions and cultures. Most contemporary Christians, whose knowledge of that period is usually limited to Sunday School, tend to see Paul through the lens of historic Judaism. We overlook that Judea, and its people, religion and culture, circa 50 CE, were just a minor foot note in the ledgers of Roman bureaucracy. Although Paul’s Jewish upbringing and education are apparent in his writings, it is the welter of Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians et al, living in a vast, interconnected empire that was consuming his time and attention. We often forget that Paul was born and raised in the Jewish diaspora. Jerusalem may have been his abstract, spiritual home, but he was truly a citizen of the empire. And it is the pagan Greco-Roman culture at which his sharp pen was generally directed.

What Sarah has done is to take many of Paul’s most controversial teachings and laid them alongside the literature and history of the Greco-Roman world, putting him in the actual social, religious and cultural context of that time and place. And it is an eye-opener! Advocates on both sides of hot button issues such as gender, marriage, slavery, homosexuality and political governance, have alternately co-opted or excoriated Paul, determined to proof text his writings or contort his teachings; usually in an effort to project him onto (or out of) the issues of their particular time and place. After nearly two thousand years Paul remains in the center of our most bitter religious and cultural wars, and often for all the wrong reasons. What Ruden shows is a cultural and political reality of the Roman Empire that few of us can understand or imagine. It is a multinational culture that is both vibrant and violent. As brutal and horrific as black slavery was in 18th and 19th century America, it is a shadow of the institution that existed during that period. Marriage, or perhaps more accurately, “legal marriage” existed for reasons of political alliance and legal continuity of property rights, and “family values” meant that the patriarch had the virtual right of life and death over the entire household. Due process was something unknown to 99% of the population. Infanticide is rife and the commercial sex trade puts any contemporary notion of sexual morality on its head. Paul’s converts were drawn primarily from an oppressed underclass that had to deal with stresses we can scarcely understand. Imagine, if you will, a Corinthian female convert who is a slave in a brothel. How do Paul and the church and Corinth react to such a situation? The answer Sarah suggests presents reading of I Cor. 11:2-7 that would leave Virginia Mollencott and Dr. Dobsen both scratching their heads.


The most penetrating lesson I took away from “Paul Among the People” – and there are many lessons contained therein – is that on virtually any topic in current debate, Paul’s writings may be at best analogous but not necessarily dispositive in defending our particular agendas. Ruden presents Paul’s teachings through the lens of his own current reality, and the results are not usually what you might expect. If you are looking for political correctness, look to the blogs. If you want access to a whole new understanding of Paul and his spiritual legacy, pick up this book.

[Marc Schelske · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Paul, the tireless early Christian apostle, and theologian is essential and challenging for Christians. His influence on both ancient and modern Christianity is impossible to overstate. His letters are the greenhouse of Christian theology. His practical guidance about so many aspects of life has been used for both good and bad for centuries.

But the truth is that Paul speaks to us across a nearly two-thousand-year gap in time, culture, and language. This gap is easy for Christians to overlooks because regular preaching and pulpit commentary has made it seem like Paul is just like any modern preacher and that modern preachers are saying essentially the same things Paul was saying. The trouble with this, of course, is that generations of preachers have made it seem that Paul is against the same people they are against and affirms the same cultural standards and institutions that they think are essential. The fruit of this is that Paul’s writings have often been used to support and make sacred the current structure of power, whether in a church or society. (As a preacher myself, I acknowledge that’s there’s a great deal of pressure to make it seem like this is, in fact, the case.)

Sarah Ruden’s book “Paul Among the People The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time” is essential reading to help us bridge this gap. Ruden is not a theologian, but for her purposes, this is an advantage. She is not coming to Paul to have her theology affirmed or find support for novel theological ideas. Ruden is a classicist, a trained expert in Greco-Roman literature. As such, she is a capable translator of Greek, the language the New Testament was written in, as well as the language of the Septuagint, the only Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that was available to the early church. Not only that, she is also informed about the contemporaneous use of the language in a way that many Biblical language scholars are not. Her deep understanding of the popular writing of the time the church came into existence gives her insight into the culture and norms that early Christians lived within--and thus the cultural expectations that Paul was addressing.

Almost all of the work on Paul that I’ve read in the past decade emphasizes his Jewish background. That work is essential, I think. Paul was thinking and doing theology within his Jewish tradition from the mindset of a person who considered himself Jewish, albeit with a new revelation of the Messiah. Even so, Ruden’s thesis is compelling. As she puts it so graphically, “Greco-Roman culture tended to assimilate conquered peoples with the force of a John Deere harvester, and at this period many Jews of the diaspora lived and thought like Greeks and Romans most of the time.“ (pp. 189-190) The Greco-Roman culture was an all-encompassing culture unlike any the world (western world?) had seen before, or maybe since, except for the modern Western Capitalist Aspirational culture that permeates the globe today. Hearing an expert on classics speak on the particular prejudices and practices of the culture that the early church found itself in for the first nearly two hundred years of its existence was enlightening.

I’ve long suspected that Paul, in some of his hierarchy texts (like the Household codes), was subverting standards of his day, but Ruden makes that plain at a level I’ve never encountered before. Coming away from “Paul Among the People,” I suspect it may be impossible to get the right tone from Paul today without some of this background. While Ruden covers the main difficult themes from Paul—hierarchy, marriage, slavery, sexual minorities, government authority—all of these specific areas of controversy (and Ruden’s resolution of them) really fall under a single central theme. This was a brand new idea to me. Ruden says(p.xix): “The letter to Philemon may be the most explicit demonstration of how, 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.”

This is an enormous claim, and although I don’t know enough about other ancient western literature to know if this claim is accurate, it is compelling. If Ruden is correct, this means that in Jesus’ teaching and example, and the subsequent theological reflection of the first Christians, we see the seed planted for a new way of conceiving of and relating to people—at least in western culture. If this is true, much of our struggle with Paul, especially in the controversial passages, comes from anachronistic readings. We project our worldview and assumptions back into Paul’s context and then are confused (and even angry) when Paul’s guidance doesn’t comport with our assumptions about human dignity. Ruden demonstrates, through the evidence of the popular literature of the time and culture that formed Paul and every early Christian, how alien our ideas about human dignity really would have been.

In many ways, this reading of Paul makes more sense of his life experience. If Paul’s main purpose was traveling around teaching people Penal Substitutionary Atonement, for example, or the idea that if you “accept Jesus as your savior” when you die you’ll go to heaven, Jews would have dismissed him as a silly heretic and Romans wouldn’t have noticed at all. But instead, Paul was training these young Christian communities in a new way of relating to one another and providing a new theological framework for their practice. This new way subverted the expected and normal social order so deeply that those with power couldn’t help but see Paul as a threat. That’s why Paul ended up on the wrong end of the law so many times. If these communities took Paul at his word, the very nature of gender relationships, marriage, the role of sex, the current economic system and its embedded assumptions about class, and ultimately the basis of authority that allowed those in power to remain in power would be overturned.

And that is, in fact, what happened. Looking backward, with our modern assumptions, it’s hard for us to understand the social significance of Paul’s words, and so we often get Paul wrong. Anyone, Christian or not, who wants to make coherent sense of Paul’s writing needs to add “Paul Among the People” to their bookshelf.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is an attempt by a renowned classicist to defend Paul's most controversial texts (about pleasure, homosexuality, women, slavery, etc.) by placing them in their ancient contexts. Ancient poetry and drama (Ruden's area of expertise) are set beside these passages of Paul. Ruden is an entertaining writer and presents a lively tour through some ancient writers. Moreover, her defense from Paul is genuine and not derived from piety or religious obligation (she holds a low view of inspiration and biblical authority). The chapters on homosexuality and slavery in the ancient world were particularly compelling and demonstrate how uneducated some modernist critiques of Paul really are. However, the overall effect of her comparisons to Paul's writings was less enlightening that I had hoped. The Greek and Roman texts do bring some clarity to Paul at times, but I am skeptical of how much we can apply certain concepts from drama and poetry. Also, the texts she cites are as old as hundreds of years before Paul. Her interpretations of Paul are sometimes very doubtful and the product of poor exegesis. By neglecting the Jewish background (and the broader NT context) of Paul, we get only half the story. She is also guilty on several occasions of the same extreme modernist misreadings of Paul that she criticizes in others.

[Joel Wentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW - I don't think i can say enough about this book. Sarah Ruden is an expert in Classic Literature, and this is the primary filter through which she understands Paul in the context of the cultures & people he was writing to - primarily Greek & Roman. This is, hands down, the BEST book I have read in putting Paul in his cultural setting, and it truly breathes new life into some of his most controversial assertions (women's roles in church, slavery, politics, general Christian ethics). Word of warning: Ruden includes direct translations of many poems, plays, and essays from the time period, and she doesn't hold anything back in her translations. Some of them are filthy! However, this direct approach is part of what makes this book so effective.

I cannot recommend this little book highly enough - particularly for those who struggle with Paul's writing. You will walk away with a deeper understanding of how shocking and revolutionary his writings were, and you may find yourself rooting for him in an exciting new way. READ IT NOW!

[Nan · Rating 4 out of 5]

With her deep knowledge of Greek and Roman literature and her translation skills, Sarah Ruden makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Pauline theology. This book is a must-read for any serious Christian who wants to know what the concepts Paul presented in his letters really meant to his audience, first century converts from polytheism. Ruden set a heavy task for herself, but she accomplishes all its complexities with a breezy style that carries the reader along.

The best, most revealing chapter to me was on the letter to Philemon asking him to take back his runaway slave Onesimus. Some in the past have taken it as an acceptance if not endorsement of slavery, but it's quite the opposite.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciated this book for its history, not its theology, and for the author's engaging us in a conversation. She says she's liberal, which is evident, and I appreciate the disclaimer. I found myself amazed at how she often read arrogance and anger into Paul's words.

Also, I thoroughly enjoyed the perspective, imagining what it must have been like to read Paul's words as a first-century Christian. I realize more acutely how ultra-liberating the Gospel was for those people, how it turned the culture on its head.

I gained much from the historical background and am encouraged that if Christians could live in the decadence of the Greek/Roman culture, I can certainly live a holy life in my own culture.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Setting the Epistles of Paul in their social context, as well as looking at the limits of translation, classics scholar Ruden demonstrates that St. Paul, seen by many modern readers as the repressive side of Christianity (with Jesus as the liberating side) was actually very progressive in the context of his times. She doesn't suggest that Paul was faultless (he sounds to have been very difficult to get on with, among other things), but she does make sense of passages that have been problematic to many, including me.

[F.E. Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A slave was, in Greek or Roman eyes, absolutely limited as to the consideration anyone (even a god) could show for him. Even if freed, he would always be treated as a social, civic, and spiritual inferior. A runaway had no right to any consideration at all. Deploying Christian ideas against Greco-Roman culture, Paul joyfully mocks the notion that any person placing himself in the hands of God can be limited or degraded in any way that matters. The letter must represent the most fun anyone ever had writing while incarcerated. The letter to Philemon may be the most explicit demonstration of how, 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." - Sarah Ruden.

I just finished this book a couple of days ago. My boss had me reading this and another book for the 1946 project for interviewing purposes.

Ruden uses Classical Greek Literature to compare and contrast the world of The Apostle Paul and it brings that world into such sharp focus one could use this as a photograph.

It has been my opinion and still remains, that The Apostle Paul can be a giant horses' ass, however, Ruden shows Paul in a very sympathetic light as one of the first abolitionists and even feminists. (( I KNOW, RIGHT!?))

Since the project we are working on is trying to figure out homosexuality and what the Bible does and does not say, no amount of word slicing, or rewriting of the text, is going to find a caveat for what we see as homosexuality today. It just isn't there, especially with Paul.

BUT the contrast here is that Paul, nor any of his contemporaries, would have understood homosexuality as it is today. He nor they could have conceptualized what that means for two men (or two women) to be in a co-equal, loving, relationship/marriage. First off all, it's not the sex thing that is the first hang-up, Ruden makes clear in this book, that "LOVE" being a part of marriage was also rare.

In what she describes as a time of "Emotional Desert" and terrible brutality, Ruden calls the people who existed in this Greco-Roman/ Hellenistic Society "Kindergartners with Knives."

Misogynistic, homophobic, racist, brutal, vicious, Paul actually brings people upward and equalizes them in the eyes of the church. If Paul did anything, it was to lay the foundation of The Church and for what would eventually come (Including Gay people being accepted in the church). As Ruden put it in her above quote, "...Paul created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings."

In regards to Paul being so said horses ass that despite that flaw (and trust me, he was mean to Barabas...Like, how can anyone be mean to Barabas?!) God used him anyway.

It's kind of the point.

I highly recommend this read.

[CJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had the historical/theological knowledge myself to analyze the claims that Ruden makes in this book, because many of them seem very compelling but I'm not in a position to evaluate them, and a few (particularly some of her statements about the history Christianity wrt slavery) seemed off to me. The tone of this book didn't really grab me and I wasn't a huge fan of the style of the in-book translations either (though I'm still very interested to read her take on the New Testament). However, I would still recommend this as a good primer on Paul for people who want to learn more about some of his statements in context. Paul is one of my absolute favorite theologians and imo is absolutely essential to the Church. I've always been frustrated by the way he is perceived by some people so I'm glad this book exists.

[Myra Wollman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't agree with everything Sarah Ruden says, for instance her take on Paul as bad-tempered and hard to get along with is emphasized a little more strongly than I'd like, and the autobiographical segments thrown in occasionally left me more confused than anything else. However if we're going to understand Paul I think it's important to look at him through the eyes of his contemporaries, to see what they thought of his words. Ruden compared Paul's teachings to the Greek and Roman writings she translates, and the contrast is stark. Even when I don't fully agree with some of her methods and assumptions, there's a lot to be learned from her interpretation of Paul.

[Eric Morrissey]

Picked this one up because I thoroughly enjoyed Ruden’s translation of Confessions and was curious what she had to say. This is certainly a reimagining of Paul, at least for me. She analyzes the culture of Paul’s time in regards to women, government, homosexuality, marriage, etc. to help us better understand who Paul was writing too. I certainly found this enlightening in many regards. She also attributes characteristics to Paul that I’d never thought of before, making him more human. I’ll be reading more of her works after this one.

[Willemina Barber-Wixtrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having grown up in a seemingly far more conservative evangelical context than Ruden did, I never shared her deep aversion to the apostle. I was and am the very kind of person the modern evangelical Paul protected and elevated.

Still, I certainly had the wrong picture of him, still. My understanding of who the real historical Paul is began to shift well before this book, but anyone curious about the world he inhabited and how it shaped his writing will certainly benefit from Ruden's work .

[Dolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book for free through Goodreads giveaways program. I fully intended to read it sooner, but it got left in one of my suitcases after a trip and I had forgotten about it for awhile. (OK, it was a whole year.)

In any case, this was a very well-researched book. It's not a fast read, but it was still intriguing and thought-provoking. I liked the historical and religious background, as well as the comparison to literature of the time. While I cannot say that I agree with everything that the author wrote, I did find her arguments to be compelling and I found myself nodding along with her conclusions more often than not. Overall, I thought this was an interesting book and a good book to provide some balanced thought into Christian dogma and the interpretation of the New Testament.

interesting quotes:

"Rather than repressing women, slaves, and homosexuals, he made - for his time - progressive rules for the inclusion of all of them in the Christian community, drawing on (but not limited by) traditional Jewish ethics." (p. xvii)

"The evidence is strong that the full Christian doctrine came not from Jesus' mouth but from Paul's pen." (p. xviii)

"The letter to Philemon may be the most explicit demonstration of how, 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." (p.xix)

"People at war with their own bodies have little respect for others'." (p. 27)

"The ancients believed that it was female hair's nature to influence men, almost like breasts or genitals: men experienced women's hair as powerfully, inescapably erotic, in a way that makes our hair-care product commercials look like an accounting textbook." (p. 88)

"You must marry a very young, very sheltered girl and make sure that she never took it into her head that she was there for anything besides childbearing. The poet Lucretius (mid-first century B.C.), for example, warns husbands against letting their wives move their hips during sex, which was supposed to send the semen off course." (p. 101)

"But nevertheless his new rules give the proper basis for marriage, the erotic one; and they also address the chief reasons that marriages break down: the failure of partners to act generously toward each other, keeping intimacy after passion is gone; and the loss of trust, typical when men have greater freedom and a smaller stake in the relationship." (pp. 101-102)

"Her parents struggle to be friends. They care for each other, but different things interest them." (p. 118)

"To show sympathy and sincere deference to those with power over me, to trust them with my life as if on a battlefield and forgive the very costly mistakes they make, is harder. It's like managing to love my damn parents." (p. 144)

"A male fantasy common in the modern West is sex without fertility. A common ancient one was apparently fertility without sex." (p. 163)

"Suppose that, though human beings fail most of the time, love never does." (p. 181)

new words: sangomas, pudendum, hoplite, manumission

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ruden, Sarah. Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. New York: Image Books, 2010.

What a horrible, confused mess of book. The author explains that she is a classicist and is using that background to interpret Paul from that point of view. She examines a number of issues within Paul’s letters, including the place of women in society, homosexuality, and slavery. In doing this she provides a novel approach that contradicts itself and ignores many historical and sociological studies in pursuit of an interpretation that turns Paul into a mirror image of herself rather than provide an authoritative or even helpful interpretation.
While perhaps it can be seen as anecdotal, her confusion starts from the very chapter. She starts by saying that the classicists and the theology department never crossed paths. OK, so there may not be too many theologians who can translate classical texts, however that does mean that interpretation is incorrect. In addition to there being other fields that are important other than translating classical texts, including history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and political science for example. All fields which have contributed to a greater understanding to ancient times. In addition, just because she never came across theologians are her institution, which does not have a theology school, does not mean that Harvard should be considered the norm.
However, her historical knowledge seems to be deficient. She gets a number of basic facts correct, especially in regards to homosexuality. It seems as if she has never heard of (or chose to ignore) Foucault, Boswell, Wilkin, and Meeks. This ignorance (or again her choice, but then that would negate any claims to being objective, which she states is part of her object) makes me wonder what else I can trust of her work. Because of these glaring errors and presumptions which are grounded in her experience at the exclusion of other experience, I cannot fully trust this book. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book for somebody who wishes to understand Paul’s writings.

[Julie Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

#14 - 2010.

Received this book Thursday before leaving for the Beyond Cana retreat and couldn't quite grasp what it was about. I took it and found it it both easy to understand (essential for my evening reading when helping with a retreat) and fascinating. Sarah Ruden goes to great pains to put St. Paul's writings in the context of Paul's "modern times" of Greek and Roman culture so we can see just what cultural forces he was referring to when he wrote his letters. By juxtaposing her knowledge of those cultures (which were considerably cruder and more hostile to Christian religious concepts than we would think) and writings of the people (not high-brow philosophers) with Paul's writings and concepts, a new picture emerges of just what was being battled and why Christian concepts would be so welcome and revolutionary. I never had the negative image of Paul that many seem to have picked up from his writings and which were the reason the author began researching the info that has become the basis of this book. However, it is fascinating nonetheless to see just how foreign those ancient cultures really were when compared to ours and what we think we know. I'm on page 40 but it has been eye opening already. If you are dubious about the book, take a moment to read her after-notes on the scholarship and sources. It will reassure you. This is not a pop-culture take but a scholarly work that has been brought to our level. Or so it seems to this unschooled reader.

Overall, this is an excellent resource for putting yourself into the culture to which Paul was speaking. The author brings up the common misconception about Paul (such as homosexuality, misogyny, etc), then addresses the reality of the culture on that issue at the time, then cites many examples to make sure the point is clear, then returns to showing what Paul's words really meant as applied to living in those times. Paul emerges as someone who really wants to communicate that if we love God then we must show that love to each other in treating each other as equals, all worthy of God's love.

[elise barber-wixtrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice little overview of the greco roman context of the acts/epistles

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely interesting work that examines the writings of Paul with a new, more direct interpretation of the original Greek he used. Ruden also explores other writings of the time to establish a context for Paul's statements. Finally, to me at least, it makes sense that Paul, who is usually depicted as a stern and not very pleasant scold, managed to bring so many people to early Christianity. Very well written and (I hate to use this term to describe such a scholarly work) fun to read!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading about biblical texts, I am not really interested in questions of faith; rather, I am interested in the cultural-historical horizon in which the different books of the Bible were written and how they were understood as art, literature and legend. In other words, if I am reading about David, I don't care about how his life story is an exemplar of faith that we should all follow. I am instead interested in how the legend of David was formed, what it says about state making in ancient Palestine and the historical conflict between Israel and Judea. This approach to finding books on the Bible poses particular problems when reading about Paul's letters. Paul writes as a man of faith, and his letters are meant to inspire, resolve and admonish the early Christian communities to commit to the new faith of Christianity. Sarah Ruden's book, for a reader like me, takes Paul's letters and situates them firmly within the cultural world of Paul's readers. In so doing, she interprets and explains some of a modern reader's most difficult passages from Paul's letters. And she does it in a way that satisfies the hermeneutic horizon for a reader like me.

Each chapter focuses on a passage from Paul that to a modern reader poses difficulties: Paul on ascetism; Paul on homosexuality; Paul on women; Paul on slavery, etc... In each, by looking at the cultural horizon of the Greek and Roman world and the people to whom Paul would have written, Ruden is able to provide context for what Paul says and why the letters he wrote (and the Gospel he preached) is deeply revolutionary and appealing. Interestingly, it all comes down to love (agape). Through Paul's deep encounter (spiritual, intellectual and biographical) with agape, he turns the assumptions and practices of his contemporaries on their heads. Paul's letter addressing homosexuality, while surely limited by Paul's own cultural biases, is nonetheless a powerful condemnation of Greco-Roman practices that included sexual violence involving pederasty, exploitation of slaves and casual sexual cruelty that even the most "woke" 21st century reader could admire. By the same token, his letter to Philemon regarding Onesimus is a master-class in liberation theology at once sensitively addressing the cultural presuppositions regarding slaves and slavery while slyly, methodically and persistently urging Philemon to embrace this runaway as his brother rather than as a criminal who deserves punishment worse than death. Paul never says: free Onesimus. But that is the beauty of the passage. Through love, Onesimus is already free, a brother to Paul and Philemon and now it is left to Philemon to embrace this new status through Christian love when Onesimus returns to him.

Ruden captures the drama of these moments within Paul's letters by accessing the classical texts that she has studied, translated and interpreted throughout her professional career. The book is accessible to anyone with a moderate understanding of Christianity and a passing understanding of Greek and Roman literature. In other words, you don't need to have read Apuleius to understand how she uses works of classical literature to shed light on Paul's letters. At that same time, I would think that the book carries enough scholarly weight that it could and would inform a professional academic. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to theologian and lay person alike.

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruden is a classics scholar who knows Latin and Greek well, and based on this expertise she tries to to place Paul in the context of his times. She thinks, he is too often read and interpreted with no knowledge or consideration for this context, and the result is a distorted view of Paul.

Paul is frequently considered as an individual who thinks that the body or nature is bad and that the mind or spirit is good. She disagrees, arguing that he has nothing against the body, but his point is that there are two ways of using the body, one for a life that is worth living forever, and the other for a life that has to be sensually enjoyed quickly before age and death cause these enjoyments to vanish.

The key to this notion is the image of Christ’s crucifixion which saves humanity from the death which would otherwise annihilate it. A related idea is that death on the cross is a metaphor for “crucifying anti-social passions that spill over from the metaphysical realm to the natural one. Believers get not only eternal life but a life of the Spirit in community that begins right now.” This may not make much sense but Ruden works hard to show that Paul upended the contemporary Roman view of crucifixion as a disgraceful form of torture meted out to criminals.

What about Paul’s views on women where he is often condemned as misogynistic? Ruden argues that only by understanding the role of women in society at that time can his remarks about women be understood. Women seen in public were often slaves or prostitutes, so his many warnings about the dangers of men engaging with women, even in best pagan cases, had not so much to do with reserving respectable women only for purposes of giving birth to children and heirs, but in attempting to find in marriage grounds for spiritual growth. This was a notion unheard of until the advent of Christianity and completely against Greco-Roman social norms in which women were mostly seen as breeders.

Perhaps Paul’s greatest difference with the values of his contemporary world is expressed in his views on love, found in his letters to the Corinthians. For him, love is a matters of loving everyone selflessly. The ancients had nothing against love, but it was to lead to matter of common sense – sobering up, stop fighting, behaving decently, respecting authority. Paul is in line with that thinking, but for him love doesn’t stop there. It transcends common sense.
To emphasize her points, Ruden quotes from Greek and Roman authors , Aristophanes, Herodas, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, to mention a few that had views at variance with Paul’s. Without seeing what they advocate on pleasure, sexuality, women, slavery, love, Paul cannot be properly understood. In summary, I think Ruden’s effort to better understand Paul is a good one, but Paul can still be appreciated without having all of this contextual knowledge. It helps, yes, but is not essential.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Quaker Sarah Ruden had heard criticisms of Paul all her life, after becoming familiar with the culture of the Greco-Roman world through a career in translating classical works into contemporary English, she realized there was something missing in most people’s approach to Paul. They took no consideration of the culture in which he wrote, not realizing that his criticisms of particular issues were deeply countercultural, even subversive, in his time. Ruden writes not as a theologian or an apologist (though she does seem to be fond of Paul despite his irritability and does-not-play-well-with-others qualities), but as a classicist who sees in Paul’s writings a markedly different appraisal and hope for humanity than in his contemporaries.

It’s very easy for contemporary readers to take cheap shots at those who have gone before us, because they have values we don’t, so I appreciate Ruden taking Paul in his context seriously. Most chapters in here open a door into the Greco-Roman world, often a violent and abusive place. Take Paul’s condemnation of ‘revels’, for instance: a contemporary reader might harrumph that Paul is the quintessential stick in the mud, a proto-Puritan who hates parties, without realizing that the specific word he used referred to a custom of drunk young men going out wandering the streets and stirring up trouble, creating a literal orgy of violence as they robbed, raped, and even kidnapped those in their way. His condemnation of homosexuality, too, doesn’t refer to homosexuality as we know it, because current views of fixed orientations didn’t exist: what was rife was the sexual abuse of social inferiors, especially young boys, by men who wanted to prove their standing – and so fiercely did the Romans look down on the passive partners in these liaisons, forced or not, that men often raped other men to prove the rapists’ manliness. Paul turned tables by attacking the instigators. In another vein, Paul’s fashion advice to women on wearing veils within church reads more differently when one appreciates that appropriate clothing for women varied widely on class and standing: wearing a head covering was considered a marker of high status, reserved for wives and widows, and women who didn’t wear such coverings were either suspiciously unmarried, adulterers, or associated with prostitution. Paul’s admonition was a call for women to conduct themselves with dignity, as beloved children of God, even if the secular world forbade them that dignity because of their economic class or past misdeeds.

Paul Among the People is of general interest, in part because it draws so much on Greco-Roman plays, oratory, and letters, creating a picture of the classical world in the midst of upheaval from within, both by the still-emerging empire and the new force of Christianity. I’ve never read another appraisal of Paul, so I don’t know how Ruden’s analysis of certain topics like secular authority compares against them, but I enjoyed her insight into the culture at the time. Paul’s under-the-belt punches at Roman society remind me of Jesus’ own rebukes — as when he condemns not only actions, but the spirit of said actions, the habits of mind that lead to vicious behavior. I’ll definitely be reading more of Ruden, as she has translations of The Aeneid and Augustine’s Confessions.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I come to this text having used and celebrated Ruden's translations of both Apuleius and Aristophanes for years. She is a witty translator and guide to these comic, often foul-mouthed and misunderstood works of art. It's the 'misunderstood' part that drew my interest to this text. Paul has a hard rep with unbelievers as a sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and irritable defender of slavery, among other lesser charges. Have more or less unthinkingly imbibed much of this tradition of reading Paul, a tradition imparted (oddly) as much by his defenders as his detractors. All of which is to say folks tend to find in Paul, as in Jesus, just what they want to find. So the idea that a sympathetic scholar of Roman and Greek ancient literature would bring to bear her literary expertise to contextualize and illuminate the more thorny passages of Paul is one that appeals. Am generally enthusiastic about historicizing gestures that explain texts that have grown mossy with overfamiliarity, and Ruden bid fair to be one of the better, if not more genial and entertaining pruners of the foliage accruing around Paul. So it's a bit surprising not to like this more. Ruden is a believer and, like Paul, comes off as a particularly crabby one at times. She seems almost to have licensed her own spikier tone here because of Paul's notoriously feisty disposition. And like Paul, Ruden uses autobiographical elements to hammer certain points home. I don't think those (the rebarbative tone and the recourse to autobiography) are good things. I also feel the book could have benefited from more shapely summations that give clearer takeaways from the excursions into classical sources. Sometimes it feels as if Ruden abandons the reader to draw their own conclusions or assumes they must be obvious. Don't get me wrong: long quotations from Petronius' extremely racy Satyricon are dead fun. The immediate connection to the Pauline context sometimes gets lost in the lengthy explanations of the Latin text. I will still use and borrow ideas from this text in my own teaching; I will do some careful pruning of tone and focus instead on Ruden's philological contributions in explaining the meaning of words as Paul would have understood them. Translations of the Bible use words that, for us, have different meanings now and it's good to recover a more authentic Pauline understanding of these terms.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be one of the best books on Paul, and particularly those "troublesome" Pauline subjects, that I've ever read. Ruden employs her expertise in classical Greek and Roman literature to frame the cultural background against which Paul worked and wrote, and the results are eye-opening. The strength of this book is its array of lengthy quotations from Greco-Roman literature that drops the reader into the middle of Paul's first century world. You will read how Greco-Roman poets, statesmen, and playwrights interpreted their society's views on women, slavery, homosexuality, and married life, and you will be staggered at just how paradigm-shifting Paul's Christian ethics were in the life of the churches he planted. In the midst of first-century Greco-Roman life, the Christian virtues flowing from Paul's pen were utterly strange, incomparable, and revolutionary.

While this book is not without disputable conclusions (her treatment of ancient homosexuality paints the picture almost exclusively in terms of pederasty and the powerful's exploitation of the weak, couched entirely in the language of male-male sexual encounters-- this does nothing to explain Paul's denunciation of homosexual practices among females, also, in Romans 1), the wealth of primary source material and how the perspectives behind them likely flowed into the streets, alleys, and bath houses of the Roman Empire is worth the effort of the interested reader. Particularly illuminating is the background material that likely shaped Paul's treatment of Onesimus in Philemon and his treatment of female head-coverings in 1 Corinthians 11.

I highly recommend this book. I see myself returning to this book repeatedly in the future to understand Paul and to help me to help others understand him, as well.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the amount of time and research that went into composing this text with primary sources (much of the translations her own), the effort at doing something original, placing Paul in the daily life of the Greco-Roman world with what limited texts are available from that time period, and making it somewhat brief and accessible to a modern reader, not trained in the Classics. (Maybe this could be a seminary text?)

I also appreciated the breakdown of certain Biblical passages into its Greek origins.

Paul has largely been misused to proliferate patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic views in Western Christianity, and the interpretations just aren’t accurate or applicable considering the culture and world in which Paul was writing. (If these ideas are interesting to you, you can also choose to read specific chapters in this book, and you’d be fine.)

That being said, this isn’t for everyone. The author has been living and breathing and translating the Greco Roman world for 30 years, and it shows in her passionate, imaginative and at times whimsical (allows for comedy in a pretty erudite text) treatment of the Classics. She is comfortable and fluent in this language in which I am not.

Should we consider context when we read anything? Yes. ESPECIALLY the Bible. Amazing how we don’t really contextualize the Bible and just literally take things word for word by Paul… when it benefits.
Does she make it accessible and enjoyable to read? I think she did her best.

*I read this with a book club committed to finishing this book. That definitely kept me going when the book was dry.

[Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruden's study comes across as somewhat facile without straying completely into uselessness: I would have appreciated a larger contextual study of all of Paul's epistles much more than this 200-page breeze through a handful of the passages most critiqued by atheists/liberals/etc.

PAtP seems primarily targeted at Christians who feel the need to argue with atheists/liberals/etc. about the compatibility of Pauline doctrine with modern American sensibilities, so the selections are appropriately chosen for the target audience in the same sense that Scott Alexander's posts are appropriately selected for his target audience of atheists/liberals/etc. And, similar to Scott, Sarah writes a bunch of well-written and interesting context and analysis before producing a synthesis that comes just short of affirming contemporary American conventional wisdom (in 2010).

I do not find this hermeneutic particularly honest, but at least Ruden mostly stays away from obviously-false "historical" conclusions and instead opts for "although Paul's argument sounds reactionary to modern ears, it was actually quite progressive in its time." Many people probably find these conclusion comforting, but they just sounds like Whig history to me: I read the book for the Pauline "is", not the Rudenesque "ought". This is not to say that Ruden does not ever find the Pauline "is", just that her focus "is" almost always elsewhere.

There's also a weird part where Ruden apologizes for criticizing Nelson Mandela (in an essay in the 1990s): I wonder if her contract required such for South African distribution or something.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has an admirable goal to contextualize Paul’s writings into the culture and settings into which they were written. And the author occasionally meets this goal but far too often the author’s writing style and attempts to add her personal journey observations obfuscate things. Many of the points she was trying to make across chapters were just unclear because of her apparent need to bring in unrelated stories from her own life. This extends into literally analyzing Paul’s personality based on her attempts explain how Paul was “kind of a jerk”. A scholar should be able to recognize when she is using a modern filter to assume emotion that is not in the page.

The author is not a theologian nor does she try to be one. Her expertise is in classical Greek and Roman literature and culture. Her knowledge of the class system and politics of the day can be very helpful. Oftentimes though, she cites fictional works written well after Paul’s times to justify her (re)defining some of Paul’s terms or intentions. She justifies this in an afterward by explaining how little culture changed until Christianity started the revolution which seems like a poor chicken and the egg metaphor and even worse justification.

Still. It is clear that she has a deep appreciation for both Romain history/culture and the New Testament. Her final chapter is quite powerful in its attempt to articulate Paul’s gospel of the Kingdom’s love in action even though she concludes it with (what is for her) an apparent contradiction in how Paul could be so petty and mean and still preach this message.

[Katriona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very conflicted how to rate this book. Sarah Ruden does a GREAT job when she provides the cultural context for Paul and some of his most controversial verses. Her chapter on homosexuality was one in which I was expecting to learn the least and I actually appreciated the most with how much it helped clarify that there were no “good” LGBT relationships in the ancient world: they were all centered very firmly around abuse. However, I would be VERY hesitant to recommend this book as a straight read to someone unless I knew them well. It wasn’t the most well-written, and it would have been much easier to read if she had focused on the background context more than she did. The book got better as it kept going, but the first chapter or two were particularly rough. I think that, while the author did try to keep it to a minimum, she came from a very liberal background. This came out in some of what she shared of her own life, and (for me) spoiled some of the effect that Paul’s writings and context would have had on their own merit.

It also felt like she could have focused each chapter a bit more (especially the early ones) to make them more succinct and therefore more clear. It also felt like she would randomly and half explain some inserts of her own life and understanding, but we wouldn’t get the full story or context and it was more of a distraction to her point and clarification.

TLDR: Great at providing context, I really wish the book was better edited to make it more clear (and therefore easier to recommend to others).