Bad News Paul?

Some say the Apostle Paul was the “supreme betrayer of Jesus,” a subverter of the gospel, a “dysangelist” (bad news bearer).

Paul had, according to Nietzsche, “a genius for hatred.” Thomas Jefferson thought Paul was a “corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” And of course every Sunday school child knows the misogynistic S.O.B. said the churches should “permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” (I  Timothy 2:11)

If that's the case, what a creep.

Years ago, when I edited a nationwide Baptist magazine, I used to wonder how Paul’s attitudes would fare in modern congregations. I imagined him being confronted by a delegation of angry women and drew a cartoon showing a defensive Paul asking, “Er, was it something I said?”

Over the years, I’ve observed the damage done by these strict interpretations of what Paul said and wrote. There was an odd situation in the generally open-minded Christian college I attended.  The school’s woman president – an internationally known scholar with a Ph.D degree – did not teach boys over 12 in her local church Sunday school to keep faith with the apostle’s rules. 

That a woman responsible for the intellectual development of thousands of women and men, as well as for the hiring and firing of faculty members, would attend a church that prevented women from teaching or having authority over men – well, it seems like a joke.

And in some Christian circles, Paul is a joke.

But one of the scripture passages set aside for the third Sunday in Easter is one of the most dramatic passages in the bible: the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus.

The bible tells us that the resurrected Jesus himself came to Paul and hired him as a missionary. That information suggests to us that Jesus saw something more in Paul than a joke. Perhaps this is the Sunday to give the tent maker of Tarsus the benefit of the doubt – and a second look.

Gary Wills, in his small but highly regarded What Paul Meant (Penguin Books, 2006)  offers several spirited defenses of the Apostle.

Perhaps the most pertinent, at least to Christians who deplore Paul’s disregard for women, is that he was framed.

Modern scholars applying scientific analysis are convinced Paul is not the author of the letter to Timothy, where  misogyny runs rampant. Whoever wrote to Timothy, Wills contends, was expressing an encroaching patriarchal bias that did not exist in Paul’s head or in the Christian gatherings Paul knew.

But Paul is too important to modern Christians to dismiss him lightly. His epistles are the earliest writings we have about the ministry of Jesus Christ on earth. His letters were written long before three of the four canonical gospels we have in our bible. Only Paul writes about what Jesus said and did based on first hand encounters with the women and men who knew Jesus, ate with Jesus, walked with Jesus, listened to his sermons, watched him die on the cross and witnessed his resurrection.

All these people were long dead when the gospel writers gathered the aging threads of several oral traditions about Jesus and wrote them down. Yet when Paul quotes Jesus as he does in I Corinthians 11 (“This cup is the new bond, in my blood. Do the same, as you drink it, to keep my memory”), he is quoting people who actually heard the words from Jesus’ lips.

But Paul is also unique because he is the only writer in the bible who writes first-hand about his personal engagements with Jesus. All other writers were quoting stories that had been passed on several generations earlier.

Certainly there is no more gripping story in Acts than the conversion of Saul, the original son of vipers, the pharisaical hit man who plotted to arrest and execute Christians. On his way to Damascus with a warrant to arrest Christians, he is suddenly blinded by a bright light and deafened by a heavenly voice that asks, in effect, what the hell are you doing?

Moving toward a dramatic climax, Saul wanders blindly for three days until he is taken into the Christian household of Ananias, where he is baptized into the faith. Soon Saul – now Paul – is in the synagogues, preaching Jesus as “the Son of God.”

It’s a great story – theological theater as some scholars have described it – but did it really happen? Paul, one of the most prolific writers of the bible, never mentioned the Damascus road story. He doesn’t even mention is co-star, Ananias.

Paul puts his meeting with Jesus in a different context: not as a blinding intervention, but as a meeting similar to the appearances Jesus made to his disciples after his resurrection.

For I handed in to you as of first importance what I in turn received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures , and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day … he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of who are still alive … Last of all … he appeared also to me.” (I Corinthians 15:3-8)

The resurrection of Jesus is “of first importance” to Paul, and he presses this testimony in all he says and writes. He is, as Wills points out, the only witness to the resurrected Christ who attempts to describe what the resurrected body is like.

But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.  (I Corinthians 15:35-49)

These are more than poetic words: the passage is a powerful testimony by one who has actually seen the resurrected body of Christ. It is the only first-hand eyewitness account we have.

Paul’s personal meetings with Jesus, as well as his interaction with persons who knew Jesus on earth, also lead him to the core of Jesus’ message: Love.

Garry Wills response to critics who say Paul distorted Jesus’ message is that “Paul says the essence if the law is love, and Jesus said the same.”

Paul “surely grasped the key to what Jesus taught during his life on earth,” Wills writes. “Most would agree that the point of the Sermon in the Mount, of the olden Rule, of the frequent commands to love unstintingly was deeply understood by the man who could write this:"

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.  (I Corinthians 13:1-13)

But, history asks, did Paul’s love expand to include equally both genders?

“Paul believed in women’s basic equality with men,” Wills insists. “He does not deserve the primary credit for this attitude. It was given to him in the practice of the Diaspora gatherings he first joined, as in the baptismal formula whose hymn he records: ‘Baptized into Messiah you are clothed in Messiah, so that there us no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, men and woman, but all are one, are the same in Messiah Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:26-28).”

Wills goes on to name the women leaders of the early church who he regarded as his equal: Junia, Prisca, Phoebe, and Chloe.

Still, even Paul’s defenders like Wills have to acknowledge that in I Corinthians 14:34-35, Paul told women to shut up.

But Wills insists Paul was framed by some unknown patriarchal forger.

“Earlier in this very letter,” Wills writes, “Paul had told women to cover their heads when speaking up and prophesying. Paul can be accused of contradicting himself, but not so blatantly in the confines of a single document. This fact has led a great many scholars to condemn this passage as an interpolation, added to the letter when the policy of the letter to Timothy had been adopted. The pseudo-Paul has intruded upon real Paul.”

Alas, separating pseudo-Paul from the real Paul is difficult and millions of Paul’s critics will remain convinced that he shared the Pharisaical opinion that women were inferior to men.

Perhaps the best argument against that is that Paul met the resurrected Jesus and heard his message of love for all people.

It is Paul's first-hand reporting of these encounters that make him an essential faith companion for all of us.And Paul’s fundamental message to us is the one he shares with Jesus and that is passed along to each of us as the foundation of faith:

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.  (I Corinthians 13:13)