Summary
Title: Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography
Author: Bruce Chilton
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 038550862X
Pro:
• Offers many interesting ideas about what Paul’s life might have been like
• Very engaging prose makes a reader feel like they are almost there at the time
Con:
• So much is speculative — it’s tough to know what to believe and what not to
Description:
• Biographical account of Paul’s life, focusing on his intellectual influences and achievements
• Tries to offer explanations for why Paul thought the way he did
• Shows how influential Paul was Abel to become in his social, religious circumstances
Book Review
Because of the central, even towering, importance that Paul plays in Christian history, tradition, and theology, it only makes sense that scholars of Christianity should pay careful attention to him. Paul helped separate Christianity from Judaism by emphasizing the importance of loving God over simply obeying God.
Protestants made Paul the standard by which all theology is judged. Catholicism has, since the Reformation, increasingly emphasized the importance of Paul — in particular his idea that obedience to convention is not the way to salvation. Orthodox Christians have always saved a special place for “the Apostle.”
Unlike with Jesus, we seem to know a fair amount about what Paul believed because of the depth and breadth of the writings he left behind:
- “These were not just conventional communications, but deliberate assertions of his spiritual power across Asia Minor and later into Greece and Rome. Every letter was a catapult, crafted to project his message, his authority, his exorcistic might into communities many miles from Ephesus. Paul exerted his impact within communities swept up in the first-century tumult of prophecy, conflicting loyalties, controversy, exorcism, and healing.”
But what about the rest of his life? Where did he come from, what was his life like, and how did all of this influence his religious belief? To have a biography — even an intellectual biography — we need more than just his theological missives to early churches.
The Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College in Annadale-on-Hudson and a priest at the Free Church of Saint John in Barrytown, New York, Bruce Chilton attempts to address such questions in his book Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography.
Paul may have chosen to focus on loving God rather than merely being obedient to God, but that doesn’t mean that he tolerated disobedience to his ideas or that his theology was easy to follow. Just the opposite is the case, in fact — one of the reasons we have so many letters from Paul is that so many people objected to his commands and tried to do things differently.
His teachings on sexuality, for example, were particularly hard to accept. Paul believed that the end of the world was near and cautioned that sex should be avoided at all cost:
- “As far as he was concerned, he was an emissary from another, eternal world that had no room for touching women. In heaven, flesh was irrelevant; copulating, like eating and drinking, had no place. ...Compared to James and Peter, he was making an extraordinary demand: to give up sex as a vanishing artifact of this world.”
- “Compared to Paul’s teaching, even the requirement of circumcision by Christian Pharisees seemed moderate. ...For Paul, the end of the world was so near that intelligent, responsible believers should dispense with any encumbrance, marriage included.”
It’s not a surprise that Christian churches have failed to live up to Paul’s expectations. At least the earliest churches might be expected to accept Paul’s premise that the end of the world was nigh, and few enough of them agreed with his position on sex or marriage. Even fewer Christian groups in later centuries went along with it.
Thus Paul has be “reinterpreted” in order to “save him from himself.” The requirements of remaining unmarried or celibate have been limited to various religious groups — bishops, priests, friars, etc. — but not imposed upon the great body of believers. If it had, Christianity would have quickly died out and become a footnote in the history of the Roman Empire. Fortunately for Christianity, adherents have always been “Cafeteria Christians,” picking and choosing what they would believe and “reinterpreting” whatever was deemed too inconvenient in light of the surrounding culture.
