Paul Among Greeks

Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time examines Paul’s ethical pronouncements in the context of Greco-Roman morals and literature, with some interesting results.  Paul comes off as revolutionary and subversive on precisely those issues where many believe he is stodgy and prudish.

For instance: “Greeks and Romans had many terms to show disgust for a woman who had more than one sexual partner; on the other hand, a man who was erotically rapacious would not be called names, as long as he followed just a few rules, the one against adultery being the most important.  Paul signaled a vast change in morals by indicating that both an unfaithful man and an unfaithful woman, with no distinction, behaved ‘like whores.’”

She is surprisingly good on Paul’s teaching on homosexuality.

She finds little to admire in James Bowsell’s revisionism that attempted to explain away Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality by distinguishing between “homosexuals” and “homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons.”  Ruden thinks that an examination of Greco-Roman literature on homosexuality might provide more insight into what Paul attacked.  Contrary to contemporary opinion, Greco-Roman homosexuality was not characterized by “Platonic homoerotic sublimity or festive or friendly couplings.”  Greeks and Romans recognized that “the active partner in homosexual encounters used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one.”  Then they turned around and mocked and blamed the passive partner for his depravity.  Greco-Roman society in fact “pressured a man into sexual brutality toward other males,” and “the Greeks and Romans even held homosexual rape to be divinely sanctioned.”

Paul doesn’t blame the passive partner; he doesn’t exonerate the active partner.  There is no distinction: “the whole transaction is wrong . . . . Paul places on a par all the male participants in homosexual acts . . . clearly implying that they are all morally degraded and that they all become physically debilitated from the sex act with each other.”  This, Ruden says, was a “revolutionary message,” this notion that “everyone is responsible for what pederasty has made of society: especially those who, egging one another on in an insolent, boastful clique, damage others with active sodomy and then blame them.”

Ruden also suggests that for Paul head-coverings have an egalitarian message, and one that affirms the dignity of women.  Hair and head-coverings were social markers in Greco-Roman society; respectable women covered their heads in public, with the veil typically signifying either marriage or widowhood: “The veil was the flag of female virtue, status, and security.” Prostitutes left their heads uncovered.   Sometimes, though, more trendy women went about with uncovered, highly decorated hair to show off their leisured noble status.  And hair was often seen as sexually alluring.  By insisting that women cover their heads, Paul was insisting on “an outrageous equality” in that women of all social classes looked the same “without distinction of beauty, wealth, respectability.”  If the Corinthians followed Paul’s directions, “you could have looked at a congregation and not necessarily been able to tell who was an honored wife and mother and who had been forced, or maybe was still being forced, to service twenty or thirty men a day.”  Plus, the women were all there, heads covered, in the ekklesia, not a place that any Greco-Roman pagan would have wanted them to be.