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The Problem with PaulThis article was first publlished in Third Way in December 2004. Seen by many as the misogynistic, homophobic, flesh-hating architect of a hierarchical church, the least of the apostles has somehow developed the greatest PR problem since Judas.
Today I've been mostly catching up with emails. Amid the apologies, trivialities and chat, I have shared with grateful friends my opinions on vegetarianism and nihilism, Anselm and Bush, free trade and sexist jokes. (To suit my argument, I'd like to add personal advice to that list, but I'm still waiting to be asked.) I'm sure I take my epistolary and epistomological responsibilities rather less seriously than St Paul, but still it makes me think. Can you imagine if later generations seized on these desultory holdings forth and, taking them as an inerrant guide to life and truth, tried to hammer them into a systematic theology? I don't suppose you can. But we can agree that it would be a bad idea. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a worse posthumous punishment for an opinionated person than to have their opinions deified and then to be blamed for the consequences. Admittedly one of the several differences between Paul and me is that he attributed greater authority to his gospel than to church tradition, to the teaching of Jesus's most trusted disciples, and to the word of God's angels. But I want to ask how synonymous we should make Paul's 'gospel' and his 'letters' - as well, of course, as the perennial question of how well we have understood them. One reason for this is that we are, as you know, living through a tectonic shift in the moral values of the west, that might well seem to be leaving Paul as the ethical dictator of a vast dark continent drifting away from us into the past. For many he is the architect of a misogynistic, homophobic, anti-sex, flesh-hating, antisemitic hierarchical church that has overshadowed the European landscape for the worse part of two millennia, and is now, thankfully, turning into a historic ruin. Many would argue that the church - whatever the achievements of individual saints and philanthropists - has usually been at the rearguard of social progress, from civil liberties to gay rights, and from the emancipation of slaves to that of women. And behind this repression is seen Paul, with his sexual hang-ups and failure to challenge the status quo of the Roman empire. Paul, it is fair to say has a disastrous public image. He is a killjoy: 'Dear Ephiscans, stop enjoying yourself, God's about the place, signed Paul' is how Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sum him up. He is a misogynist: 'That dreadful, dreadful, Paul!…' said Clair Rayner in our own pages. 'He hated women'. He had a horror of sex: a recent Guardian column on Christianity's 'prohibitive, negative and disparaging' sexual ethic blamed Paul's 'sour' and 'curmudgeonly' attitude. Even many Christians of all persuasions feel ambivalent about him. The most common reponse I've had on telling people I was writing a life of Paul - apart from slightly awkward silence and a sudden interest in the weather - is, 'Hmm. I'm not a great fan of Paul.' Usually this is because of his alleged restrictions on women, though one detractor just felt that he wrote too much. Meanwhile other Christians agree about Paul's restrictiveness but uphold it as true Christian morality against western permissiveness. I myself started writing on Paul with decidedly mixed feelings about his influence on the direction of Christianity, but repeatedly found the evidence made me change my mind. So what I'll try to offer here is a realistic look at Paul's attitudes to these areas where he seems most at odds with today's values, chipping in with my widowly mite towards cutting through the dreadful PR and misleading prooftexting to rescue Paul from his despisers and worshippers.
The idea that Paul placed restrictions on women is based on two things: (a) a list of texts - two where he apparently forbids women to speak in church, another where he insists they cover their heads in worship, and several where he tells them to submit to their husbands; and (b) colossal ignorance about the ancient world. A little context then. In Greco-Roman culture, women had no political rights and were expected to be under the rule of father, husband, or, for single adults, a guardian. All that a woman owned - and in theory her very life - belonged to her father, even if she married, until he died. A good woman was universally expected above all to be quiet and submissive. 'Silence is a woman's glory,' said the Greeks. Women were rarely educated: Plutarch was progressive in saying that men should teach their wives - but precisely because they were so foolish when left to their own ways. Plato argued controversially that ideally women would be educated like men and trained for the same roles - one reason being that women are less able than men in all areas and so have no special sphere of competence. But he only had a couple of female disciples, one of whom found it necessary to disguise herself as a man. Aristotle reasserted the status quo: man is made for courage and command, woman for obedience and holding her tongue. 'The male is by nature superior, the female inferior.' Apart from the Stoic Musonius Rufus (who advocated something like a reciprocal relationship between husband and wife, having common property and looking out for each other's interests) it is hard to think of any thinker whose view of women does not now sound shockingly negative. Jewish culture was no better. Josephus wrote, 'The scripture says that a woman is inferior to her husband in all things. Let her, therefore, be obedient to him'. Philo said women should stay indoors. The book of Sirach - hugely familiar to Paul - celebrates wifely silence, and says, 'It is woman who brings shame and disgrace.' Daily prayers gave thanks for not being a woman and female testimony was, as elsewhere, not acceptable in Jewish courts. The first-century sage Eliezer ben Hyrcanus said, 'Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her obscenity' - though there may in fact have been one or two female synagogue teachers in the Roman world. And what about Jesus, whom Paul's misogyny is often said to have betrayed? We have many examples of Jesus explicitly and implicitly challenging prejudice and injustice against women, such as his criticism of divorce. He had many female disciples, going so far as to tell Martha, who virtuously stuck to her womanly chores while he sister Mary sat as his feet as a disciple, that Mary had 'chosen the better part'. But what did he say to challenge the ideal of quiet submission or the female dress code? None of the Twelve were women, he appointed none as leaders or teachers, and none of the seventy-two he sent out to proclaim the kingdom were said to be women. As for writings in the names of Peter, James and John etc., none that touches on the role of women has anything less conservative to say than Paul. Against this background, it is obvious that when 1 Timothy says, 'Let a woman learn in silence and full submission', the one thing that might have raised an eyebrow, Jewish or Gentile, was not 'in silence and full submission', but 'let a woman learn'. So even if we take Paul's strictures at face value, he is among the more liberal writers of antiquity and so hardly deserves his special vilification, or to be used to keep women in traditional roles. He expected all Christian women to be disciples and to be taught just like men - not merely second-hand by their husbands. The fact that he addresses women with non-Christian husbands shows that he welcomed them independently, accepting them into the church on the same basis as men. At the end of Romans, he greets sixteen men and eight women, but praises four of the eight women for their work, and just two of the sixteen men - quite a lapse for a famous misogynist. Where he is nothing short of radical is in allowing women to preach in his churches and considering them apostles. One may dislike his insistence that Corinthian women cover their heads when prophesying and praying in public, but the truly remarkable thing about it is that he assumes without question that women will regularly proclaim God's word in church. His letters reveal an impressive list of women who held prominent, vocal positions in his churches. Priscilla, his 'fellow-worker'; Euodia and Syntyche who 'struggled alongside me in the work of the gospel'; Mary 'who has worked very hard' in Rome; 'those workers in the Lord, Trypaena and Tryphosa'. Most impressively, he counts a woman called Junia in Rome as a fellow apostle, and one Phoebe as 'a servant of the church at Cenchrae', 'servant' being a term that could mean an administrator (i.e. 'deacon') but usually for Paul means 'minister'. Where did Paul's feminism come from? Doubtless (as in 18th-century evangelicalism), the fluidity and freedom of the first churches and the urgent need of workers gave women unprecedented opportunity. But it also seems to come from the heart of Paul's gospel: we are in Christ. In him we are a new creation, all organs of the one body, all quickened and empowered the one Spirit. Traditional, even natural social distinctions and divisions break down. So what on earth is Paul supposed to be doing telling women to be silent, submissive and veiled? Obviously to answer that question properly we would need to examine each passage in detail, which I can't do here, but I can pencil in some basic outlines. Firstly there are questions of translation: these passages is often ambiguous, even impenetrable ('The woman should have authority on her head because of the angels'). How certain is the traditional interpretation? Secondly come questions of authorship. Paul's hand is debated in six of the 13 letters, some more than others. Intriguingly, the bigger the question mark over authorship the more patriarchal the tone tends to be, make of that what you will. Not one of these problem passages is accepted by all scholars as Paul's. Thirdly, there is the basic principle of not divorcing any passage from its context. There are too many evangelical churches who still defame Paul by using 1 Corinthians 14:33-36 - 'Women should be silent in the churches' - to stop women preaching. There are good textual reasons to suspect the authenticity of the passage; but if genuine, it seems to be addressing women who habitually interrupt the preacher, rather than female prophets. (It was acceptable in Greco-Roman culture for listeners to interrupt public speakers with intelligent questions, but rude if one's comments betrayed ignorance of the subject - as it surely would for the average uneducated Greek woman.) The incontrovertible point is that the letter elsewhere unequivocally accepts women's preaching. The choice is yours, but either this passage does not prohibit women preachers in Corinth, or it is not by Paul. Fourthly there is cultural context. In first-century Asia Minor (liberal for its day, but criminally patriarchal by our standards), where wives were generally uneducated, closeted, and half the age of their husbands, Paul's instructions to couples are remarkable, not for the universal expectation that a wife should be governed, but for being reciprocal. To imagine that he would expect educated, experienced, liberated wives today to be subject to their husbands is frankly nuts. Perhaps most importantly we need to bear in mind the difference between preaching the gospel and troubleshooting. If someone tells you to start up your car in second gear while friends push it downhill, you will I hope unflatten your battery, but you'd be ill-advised to make this your general rule for starting a car. Paul made staggering claims for the authority of the gospel he preached, but he never once used that term for the contents of his letters. Preaching was what Paul did in person daily for thirty years, proclaiming a message of reconciliation with God through the death and resurrection of Jesus. His letters were of course stopgaps, a substitute for his personal presence, dealing with local problems, offering encouragement, commendation and rebuke. Their permanent value was not immediately obvious enough to stop a number of them being lost whole or in part by their recipients, and it was only after his death that their worth in preserving his very words was realised. Even some second-century church leaders preferred the recollections of the apostles' followers to their writings. This is not to question the authority of Paul as an apostle of the risen Lord. It is to question whether his letters are equally authoritative on all subjects to all audiences. Are his words about the cross really of the same weight as his opinion (if he wrote 1 Timothy) on whether the male of the species predates the female and what difference this makes to married life? Should his countenancing of slaveowning in the Roman empire have been the rule for the British empire? Clearly Paul's attitude to women was an influence for liberation and dignity. If his instructions sound repressive when transplanted into the modern west, it is because we are 2000 years further down a path that he had been forging for twenty. Those who are truest to his values today are not those who try to turn the clock back, but those who continue in the direction that he led in. |
to imagine that he would expect educated, experienced, liberated wives today to be subject to their husbands is frankly nuts |
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