I think I need to write about Paul

A lot of progressive Christians (which would mean most people who read this blog, I suspect) are not big on St. Paul. Marcus J. Borg has noted this in one of his books, and I think his explanation for this widespread dislike of Paul is basically correct:

A number of factors feed the negativity regarding Paul. Some people (including some historians) see Paul as the perverter of the gospel of Jesus, someone who turned Jesus of Nazareth into a divine being and distorted Jesus' message into a complex and convoluted abstract mythological-theological belief system. In the view of these particular critics, Jesus is good, Paul is bad. Certain other critics see Paul as a puritanical moralist preoccupied with sin and guilt, sacrifice and atonement. Still others are put off particularly by passages about gender and sex. The most negative statement about women in the New Testament is found in a letter attributed to Paul, and other passages commonly attributed to Paul speak about the duty of wives to submit themselves to their husbands. Paul is frequently quoted negatively about homosexuality and even about sexuality in general. Moreover, Paul's letters are often difficult and obscure, opaque rather than luminous.¹

I agreed with many of these criticisms of Paul myself after taking an introductory New Testament course as an undergraduate--and I would still agree with some of them--but my mind was changed considerably the next year when I took a course specifically dealing with Paul. I became convinced that Paul can be an important ally in the push to define a progressive and authentic form of Christianity, and I believe that even more today.

One important thing I learned in that Paul course--something that has not penetrated into the mainstream Chrisitan consciousness--is that Paul has been vastly misunderstood throughout Christian history. Some people scoff at this idea, and accuse the scholars who argue this of being arrogant for questioning two thousand years of tradition, but there is a compelling explanation for why this is so: for almost all of Christian history, Paul has been read as if he was a Christian writing against Judaism, when in fact he never considered himself to be a non-Jew. Even worse, most Christians have read his writings with a defective understanding of Second Temple Judaism, which is hardly surprising given historical Christian attitudes toward Judaism. If you misidentify a person's religion, and misunderstand the religious context in which they wrote, you cannot hope to understand their theology without serious distortions.

Some important developments in the last century have changed things dramatically. Most importantly, the Holocaust forced many Christians to seriously reexamine the theological roots of the poisonous attitudes Christians have historically harboured toward Jews. Additionally, archaeological discoveries, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, have allowed us to understand Judaism (particularly in its Second Temple varieties) much better than was ever possible before. It is also the case that much-improved relationships between many Christians and Jews has resulted in greater interaction between scholars of the two religions. Improvements in methodology, advances in technology, and a whole host of other things have contributed as well.

Now, in the last couple of weeks I've been (re-)reading a number of good books about Paul, as well as carefully reading several of his letters, and it has inspired me to devote some time to writing about Paul, while connecting some of his important and frequently misunderstood insights to some of the other things I usually write about on this blog. I've already written a bunch of material. If I can wrestle it into shape, I should be able to post several times this week.

Notes

[1] Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, 228. In a couple of endnotes pertaining to this passage, Borg notes that many of the offensive passages are in books that are not widely considered to be authentic among scholars, and that others can be read in more than one way (258nn.1, 2). Only the most conservative scholars, usually Evangelicals, think Paul actually wrote the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. A substantial majority would add Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians to the list of epistles not written by Paul. I've written about some of the implications of this here.