Chapter 1: Paul and Aristophanes-- No, Really The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment. But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the "fruit of the Spirit" passage in Paul''s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant "just the ability to project my power and essence." Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn''t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sor­cery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace''s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Empire--certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main read­ership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it.

I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity. As I began to read Paul in connection to Greco-Roman writing, I seemed to be actually reading him: understanding his devotion and his constraints, and not simply listening to 1 Corinthians 13 with boredom and irritation, and with smug agreement to excoriations of his "betrayal of Jesus'' message." I came to see how a man whom a divinity student friend of mine called "grumpy-pants Paul" had spread an uncompromising message of love, and how he had estab­lished a community that proved to have, if not a steady power for good, then at least a steady power for renewing its ideals. More and more, I wanted to take his part. This feeling grew even stronger when I researched the ori­gins of our bad impressions of Paul. It seemed that many reactions to him across the centuries had been distorted or incomplete in ways that would not have survived a look at his main contemporary and near-contemporary audiences through their own books. For every implausible reading of Paul, there were Greco-Roman works through the lens of which he showed more plausibly. The contrast between dis­tant views of Paul in a variety of modern authors and the very near view that we can re-create came to seem like a way to organize a book.

Others have written defenses of Paul, but he needs--and deserves--all the help he can get. His faults are obvious enough: his bad temper, his self-righteousness, his anxiety. But we tend not to feel inspired that such a painfully human personality was able to achieve so much in the name of God. And we do not ask the obvious question, which is, what was he doing right in substance that is hidden from us under his manner? He must have been doing a great deal right or he could not have succeeded as he did. And understanding his success is vital for letting him help us now. Paul dealt with several social issues that remain painful today. Read in a way that shows the challenges, ideals, and strategies behind his words, he usually offers diverse people something they can agree on. In the case of homosexuality, it is the passion he had for ending exploita­tive sex, the only physical expression of homoeroticism he likely knew about.

Getting closer to Paul as he really was can allow Christians and non-Christians either to find common ground to build on or to part ways more peacefully, because they see that they merely disagree on how to reach the same goals and can no longer call each other''s intentions evil. Paul is, of course, not easy to understand. Probably many Greeks and Romans themselves misunderstood him or skimmed the surface of his arguments when he used terms such as "law" (referring to the Jewish religious law in which he himself was trained). But their literature is still a good basis for interpretation: they shared a language with him, Greek, and a cosmopolitan urban culture, that of the Roman Empire, and he considered evangelizing them his special mission. What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul''s writ­ings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far--and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the komos and the right to have a really good party. The "fruit of the Spirit" pas­sage in Galatians does not forbid "carousing," the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or "revellings," as in the King James. A kōmos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parade--which could even end in kidnapping and rape.

We have vivid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their eld­ers would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have "orgies," but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgylike, but not the kōmos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of is both serious and customary. I was at first puzzled that nobody had lined up Paul''s let­ters and Greco-Roman literature in any systematic way before, but I soon realized that scholarly disciplines are not set up for it. In seven years at Harvard as a classics graduate student, I got to know exactly two divinity students, and only as friends, not as scholars. I never met any of the divinity professors, wherever they were, somewhere up in the cloudy regions of the North Yard.

Their language courses were separate, and in my curriculum there was not a single piece of Christian literature out of all that belonged to the era I was studying. We behaved as if the New Testament had not been written in Greek, as if Paul had not been a Hellenized Jew and by some accounts a Roman citizen, and as if the Roman Empire at its greatest period of power had not been in the early Christians'' background. I was now stunned at how much perspective this took away from Christianity. "Oh, yeah, we''re not supposed to have orgies, no kidding." Maybe shallowness of perspective is one reason so many people consider the religion passé--not interesting, not inspiring, not useful. To me, even the 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. And as I went on, I found that--almost creepily--the pas­sages to which the modern world has the most resistance were all telling me the same thing: contemporary readers would likely not have seen Paul''s "authoritarian" policies as anything but ways to connect with one another in conscien­tious tenderness. In this way, I was dragged away from a quite dear preju­dice: that the socially concerned church was an invention of the modern era.

(We Quakers have always thought our own sect invented it, but I won''t go into that.) In fact, the compassionate community was there at the beginning, and its founder was Paul of Tarsus. To those asking, "But how do we live, right here, right now?" his answer was always in essence the same: "In a way worthy of God''s infinite love for each of you." This is his story as told not only by himself, but by Aristophanes, Herodas, Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius, and many others he never met. It is the story of his challenges and his triumphs in their world. And here''s a little of what it tells us for today. Chapter 2: The End of Fun? Paul and Pleasure What was Paul''s real message about the body and social life? Don''t ask the Puritans. When these gained power and sought to wipe out the enjoyments (games, drama, feasting, dancing, fancy hats) that the medieval church had spared, the main New Testament authority they alleged was Paul.

Richard Baxter (1615-91) of Kidderminster, in England, cites him over and over in part VII of his Directions to Weak Christians, "Directions Against the Master Sin; Sensuality, Flesh-Pleasing, or Voluptuousness." By this time, "flesh" meant roughly anything that is often done for its own sake, like eat­ing or conversation, and Baxter condemned what we would today call the most ordinary and natural pleasures: Do you think that man is made for no higher matters than a beast? and that you have not a more noble object for your delight than your swine or dog hath, who have the pleasure of meat, and lust, and play, and ease, and fancy, as well as you? Certainly where sensual pleasures are preferred before the higher pleasures of the soul, that man becomes a beast, or worse, subjecting his rea­son to his brutish part. The looming trouble with pleasure of all kinds was that it could come between you and your religion. ("Flesh-pleasing is the grand idolatry of the world,.