I Buried Paul

[vovat]

Having just today finished the book of Jude, I can say I've read the whole Bible. (Well, I COULD have said that before, but it would have been a lie.) Yes, I know the New Testament ends with Revelation, but I've already read that several times. I mean, I took a course on apocalyptic writings in college, so how could I have avoided it?

Anyway, the majority of books in the New Testament are letters to various churches, mostly attributed to Paul. They present these churches as institutions that have already been in operation for a while, meaning that the Bible's only real record of the progression of Christianity as the exclusive territory of a group of Jews who followed Jesus around to a cult with a small but significant Gentile following is in the sketchy and often historically dubious book of Acts.

And now, a few things in these letters that I found particularly interesting:

• Paul provides a fair amount of fodder for religious homophobes. I've seen a suggestion that the thorn in his flesh mentioned in 2 Corinthians 12:7 is a reference to his own closeted homosexuality. 1 Romans 1:23-27 presents "women who exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural" and men who "were consumed with passion for one another" as the same ones who "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." I'm not sure what his take would be on modern homosexuality, since I don't know that very many gay people today worship idols. 1 Corinthians 6:9 refers to male prostitutes and sodomites as people who will not inherit the Kingdom of God. Actually, the King James Version uses "effeminate" for the former, which seems even more troublesome in a way. I mean, what qualifies as "effeminate"? If a guy moisturizes his skin or enjoys shoe shopping, is he destined for Hell?
  
  
• The view of Paul and other early church leaders on women seems rather ambivalent. There are several references to men having authority over their wives, but 1 Corinthians 7 also adds that women have authority over their husbands. Most other passages of this sort say that men should love their wives, but only the women have to be submissive. 1 Corinthians also says that women should shut up in church (14:34-35, a passage that some doubt was even written by Paul) and cover their heads while praying (11:5-7). On the other hand, there are some mentions of women as important figures in early Christianity (Priscilla, Phoebe, etc.).
  
  
• 1 Corinthians 11:14-15: "Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering." This is pretty amusing in light of how Jesus is popularly depicted. Of course, Paul never actually saw Jesus in the flesh, but wouldn't one of his compatriots who had have alerted him to this fact? I've heard that modern scholars think Jesus probably didn't have long hair anyway.
  
  
• According to Romans 14:2, vegetarians are weak in faith. Okay, that's somewhat out of context. Paul doesn't really seem to be condemning vegetarianism per se, just mentioning that the faithful don't really need to adhere to any dietary restrictions, but also shouldn't judge those who do. Kind of interesting in light of the rules associated with Lent, I suppose.
  
  
• I'd heard the "all Cretans are liars" comment (often attributed to Epimenides of Crete) used as an example of paradox, but I didn't know it was mentioned in the Bible. It's right there in Titus 1:12, though, with no real indication of its paradoxical nature. Actually, as a book I have points out, it isn't really a paradox anyway, since a person doesn't have to lie 100% of the time to be considered a liar.
  

I fully intend to read some other holy books in the future. I should probably tackle the Qur'an at some point. Well, a translation of the Qur'an, anyway; it's not really the sacred book of Islam unless it's in Arabic, which does make sense. There seem to be a fair number of American Christians who consider the King James to be THE official Word of God, despite the fact that it's a translation, and hence doesn't totally reflect all of the nuances of the original languages. Before starting on this, though, I think I'll try to finish Dante's Divine Comedy. I read most of Inferno in high school, but never made it to the end.

Comments

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Re: vegetarianism and Christianity-- curiously enough someone else on my friends page linked to this book review the other day and I thought you'd find it interesting to go along with your Bible reading too. Though she linked to it actually to recommend the BOOK because she's all into Whole Foods lately, I thought the review ITSELF raised some interesting theological points on this topic and in general-- like the expert who points out that a lot of people read the Bible strictly for literal instruction and miss all the other ways to read it which are even more enlightening. Also, I like the line "they'll still go to heaven [if they eat the wrong things]... they'll go there a lot sooner."

I actually always liked Paul's letters a lot, but then, in typical stereotypical-Catholics-who-don't-read-the-Bible fashion, I just know the parts that get read in the typical liturgical rotation.

My pastor did a bit on the whole "submissive" thing pointing out that BOTH parties in a marriage need to practice submission. I think it may be a call to keep people from falling into a typical pattern of bitter marriages, and the actual connotation is more like "Wives, don't nag your husbands all the time. Husbands, pay attention to your wives for once."

Doesn't the link with homosexuality and idol worship give further credence to the idea that sexual guidelines were put into the Bible because there were loads of homosexual rites going on in the pagan religions of the time?

And finally, sheez, finished already? I salute your ability to read the entire Bible that quickly and yet thoroughly!

[bec-87rb.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the jewish cultural norm was at the time, but I was under the impression that the Romans were brutally patriarchal and hierarchical, and feminine wasn't even restricted to females - it was a designation of the counterpart of masculine, with masculine denoting martial virtue/strength, and feminine being the opposite.

For instance, if you ever had to read Catullus, a young Roman poet from slightly later than Christ, I think? Anyway, he wrote a set of very famous poems about being the lover of a wife of a Roman senator. In one, he talks about his penis as a little bird she has tamed. (Haha- a love poem about your own penis! ) Later, he wrote another set about Juvenile, a teen age boy he was in love with. This apparent bisexuality didn't put a dent in his fame because the assumption was that he was the penetrator, along the lines of the idea that the important thing to be in a sexual liaison was the Top - the one with the power, the penis, the penetrator. That there wasn't shame in filling someone else's orifice, it only showed weakness (femininity) to be the one being penetrated.

I could be wrong, but that the impression I got.

So, there wouldn't be a big problem with homosexuality in Rome, just a problem for slaves on the receiving end, and they were slaves, so had little status anyway.

If I wanted to distinguish my budding religion from the broader Roman culture, I would pick sexual practices as a requirement. After all, it is the usual practice for cultures to impose certain restrictions on sexual expression as a way to show belonging - it doesn't seem to matter the exact restrictions, just that you have them and that people who want to belong obey them. Also, the Torah specifically forbids men/men sex, I believe, so it would keep my young religion more in line with Judaism, probably a good idea at the time to retain ideas with which new adherents would be familiar.

I have to agree with vovat that I see ambivalence re the womens in Paul's writing - I think he doesn't like women, and has none of the gentleness that you see in Jesus' dealings with them. i think it's one of the clues to Jesus' divinity - that he is weirdly out of touch with the substrates of power and privilege of the time - he ate with whores and tax collectors, a very serious thing to do, because it elevated them to his level. I just don't see this sense of all people as equals in Paul's writing, as fervent as he is. I think he just didn't get much of It, that Thing Jesus was trying to get across. Talk about seeing through a glass darkly.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Well, Judea and a lot of other countries were under Greek control before they were under Roman, and everyone knows about how the Greeks were pretty much required to be bisexual. I'm not actually sure what time period it was in which man-boy love was the norm, though. I want to say it was the Hellenistic era, but I could be wrong.

Paul seems to have taken a rather dim view of sex in general, suggesting that everyone really SHOULD be celibate like him, but to get married if you absolutely can't keep your libido in check. I get the sense that he was pretty sexually repressed, and it showed in his writings. He was also working with the material in the Old Testament, which often blames women for the sins of men (Eve, Jezebel, Solomon's foreign wives, all the "loose woman" imagery in Proverbs, etc.). His attitude toward women might have been more or less typical for the time and place, but it was definitely a step backwards from Jesus' acceptance of the so-called weaker sex.

[bec-87rb.livejournal.com]

I didn't think the Greek "bisexuality" was very different from the Roman version - that women were breeding stock and servants, not really people, and that mentoring and back-dooring young men was part of that overall cultural outlook; if you wanted intellectual intercourse with your bangin' you went to other men for it. That was how it was explained to me in school.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that sounds about right. I would assume that the majority of the Greeks and Romans weren't biologically gay in the sense that we now think of it, though. It was a cultural thing.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I've heard it proposed that Jesus was a vegetarian, even though he's said to have eaten fish. But then, I've also heard people insist that Jesus didn't drink alcohol. I have to say that, if someone magically generated some wine in front of me and then didn't drink any, I'd be pretty suspicious. {g}

My pastor did a bit on the whole "submissive" thing pointing out that BOTH parties in a marriage need to practice submission.

I think there is an impression that it's supposed to work both ways, but Paul's letters do tend to accentuate the fact that women are inferior to men. I don't know that he was particularly misogynistic for his time, but he seems to have been much less accepting of women than Jesus was.

Doesn't the link with homosexuality and idol worship give further credence to the idea that sexual guidelines were put into the Bible because there were loads of homosexual rites going on in the pagan religions of the time?

I think that a significant part of the distinction of Judaism from Baal worship and other Canaanite religious practices is that they didn't use sex in their worship at all, whether heterosexual or homosexual. I'm not really sure of the situation in Paul's time, but the stereotype certainly seems to be that Romans were just really into sex of pretty much any variety. But then, I guess they did have the Vestal Virgins, so the idea of abstinence for religious reasons might not have been that far-fetched.

And finally, sheez, finished already? I salute your ability to read the entire Bible that quickly and yet thoroughly!

Thanks. I had actually read everything up through 1 Samuel a few years ago. It took me a while to get back to it, but once I did, it went more quickly than I would have thought.