Paul Reinterpreted

Studying current Biblical scholarship has been an on and off hobby for me. As a result of these studies, I have changed my judgements about the Bible as a book, about the history and polemic it contains, about the theology and philosophy between its covers, about the cast of characters themselves.

In doing so I have deepened my spirituality, strengthened my sense of ethics, and opened my heart and wallet more and more often to people who were getting a raw deal in life. Yes, a raw deal.

What, pray tell, could possibly make such changes in me? It is just the Bible! A book of stories, many fabricated . . .so what is the big deal here?

Look, I know some of you think religion is a dangerous thing and responsible for lots of atrocities. This is a church even if some of you refuse to use any word but congregation. I know some of you think Jesus never existed. I know some of you think it is ok for people in this congregation to believe anything they want. So be it. I do not believe any of those things.

The material in the Bible and other sacred writings is the basis for the laws and the ethics by which we live, I think that is important. Those laws and ethics help to make Canada one of the most sought after destinations for refugees - in the world. They brought Mr. Mia and his family here. The first teachings I had about what is right and wrong were from the Bible - stories like the good Samaritan and Jesus helping sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath. I learned in church school that it is important to help people who are getting a raw deal in life. I learned that helping people is more important than the politics of the land. I think that these stories are important. I think that what people believe is important. I do not believe that you can be a Unitarian Universalist and believe anything you want to believe.

This morning I am going to show you why searching for the truth is important. Why being able to change your mind is important. Why values matter.

Saul was a persecutor of Christians before he had a conversion experience on the road to Tarsus. After the conversion Saul became the man we know as Paul. For years I have portrayed Paul as the spin doctor who altered the memory of the ministry of Jesus, a radical social ministry, into a message which became the basis of the Catholic Church’s Christian message.

Friends, I stand before you to admit an error in my thinking about Paul. I have listened to new thoughts about who Paul was and have been given a new heretic to add to my models. I believe I was wrong about who the man, Paul, was in his time. I was also wrong about Paul’s message.

John Dominic Crossan, of the Jesus Seminars, has written, possibly one of his best books yet - In Search of Paul (New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). Crossan paints a picture of Paul as a man who was victimized by Luke and others who wrote letters and said that Paul wrote them. Crossan paints a picture of a man who gave his life fighting the Roman Empire - with the Kingdom of God, a man who challenged the idea of Roman battle and substituted visions of justice as the pathway to peace. He sought to convert, not Jews, not Gentiles, but those gentiles who had already made a soft conversion to Judaism. Paul was a teacher who believed that women were equal to men in the early church.

My beliefs about Paul have been turned upside down.

How many time in your life have you had to change your mind because you learned something. Our lives are filled with moments when we have changed our minds - seen a new truth and walked another path, one not taken before.

That is how I feel today. I have started down another path- not so much because I have read this book, or changed my mind about Paul, but because of the way in which Crossan thinks. In the past I learned about Paul from writings about his travels and his letters. Crossan is a more expansive thinker than I have been exposed to before. The book has changed me.

Paul is always cited as being responsible for the Catholic Church’s different treatment of men and women. Lets take a quick look at the evidence through Crossan’s eyes . . . In I Corinthians Paul says that men and women are equal under god but that women must pay attention to the differential dress and status of the culture in which they live. (Crossan, 114)

Crossan is very good at coining phrases which cause an “ah ha.” He says that Paul was emphatically against hierarichal inequality but in favour of differential equality (Crossan, 114). By this he meant that there are differences between men and women and there is little that can be done about that, but those differences do not equate to a different place in hierarchy within the church. That is quite a different message than has hither-to-fore been attributed to Paul. Most of the time two letters attributed to him and one of his letters with additions by later editors have provided the case for his thought on women. In I Timothy (2:8 - 15), a letter not written by Paul but attributed to him by later Christians, women are told to be silent in church and pregnant at home. In a portion of I Corinthians (14:33 - 36) inserted well after Paul’s time, it is said that women should not speak in church and should ask their husbands for explanations at home. No wonder Paul is held in low esteem by many women. (Crossan, xiii) He never wrote that tripe.

I do not offer these insights as an apologia for Paul. In our times his words are not helpful. However, in Roman times he was truly a feminist!

He was also a radical prophet in the same vein as Jesus, only where Jesus had a ministry which was personal and local, Paul’s ministry was both personal and international.

He worshipped Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. As such he was in direct opposition to the Roman Empire whose leader was Nero, son of the Julia Agrippina, the daughter of the divine Claudius. He was the great great grandson of the divine Caesar Augustus. Nero was divine, the son of God. In Rome there could only be one Son of God and it was not Jesus. By spreading Christianity, Paul took on the entire Roman Empire. He and his followers were brilliant in their treason. They eventually co-opted the Empire in Nicea in 325 and its successor today is the Roman Catholic Church.

While I may argue against some policies of the Roman Catholic Church, especially around homosexuality, women in the priesthood, abortion and birth control, I also recognize that their faith helps millions upon millions get through each day with dignity, that the church has massive social programs around the globe without which many people would live in deep misery. They also do not kill on the battlefield to win converts as the Romans did. They do not kill their enemies through sport in colliseums nor hold people in slavery. There are other issues, but it is not the church which is at issue here this morning, it is Paul. Paul isnot responsible for the Catholic Church ass we see it today.

What is Paul’s greatest gift to us? He faced the Romans who believed in Pax Romana, “Peace through Victory” on the battlefield with the idea of “Peace won through Justice.” The Romans believed in a class hierarchy within the global peace (Crossan, 71 ff.) while Paul expected equality through global justice.

The problem for anyone reading the Bible today is that the book is largely the product of people who coopted the message of Paul for their own gain. They even structured the New Testament so that Luke’s words about Paul and all the errant letters sandwich what Paul actually wrote. - you can not get to Paul without having your thoughts poisoned before you read his letters and again after.

A simplistic reading of the Bible does paint a picture of Paul as chauvanistic, misogynistic, patriarchial and hierarchal just the same as Caesar Augustus. But the book paints a lie. Paul was just as radical a reformer as was Jesus. His message of justice as the way to peace remains radical today, and threatening to the world’s hierarchies whether they meet in Rome or in Davos, Switzerland, just as threatening as they were in the first century C.E.

Now here is the thing I love about Crossan’s thinking. He had all this history and the supporting archaeology in front of him, but it was an “ah ha” provided by a small cave in a rock cut high above Ephesus just off the Aegean coast of Turkey that brought him to a different understanding. In that cave there are two sixth century images, one of St. Thecla and the other of St. Paul. They stand together, the same height, the same eyes looking bright and straight forward, and the same hand raised. It is a painting of a man and a woman standing in equality. The cave marks an early Christian site. The imagery has been defaced. The eyes of St. Thecla have been gouged out and the upraised hand scratched to bare rock behind the painting. Someone did not like the equality and tried to erase it. What that person could not have known was that a message would ring through theological circles 1400 years later. The message was clear. Equality was there first and had been overcome by a message of inequality. Paul preached equality! Granted it was only for Christians within the church and before God, but it was equality and that notion was radical in his time. It was a painting that held the key to unravelling some of the Bible’s attempts at hiding history.

OK. So there is a whole lot about Paul, and what difference does this make for the lives of Unitarians.

We have to remember that many Unitarians are process people, so the use for us is in the process. An example of pulling the process out of the talk . . . while we live in a world where it appears that peace through victory holds hegemony, it just does not work. Vietnam was lost. Iraq is a mess. Chechnya is in awful shape. The only thing which brings the Palestinians and Israelis closer together is a slow slow agreement on what is just. Many areas of Africa are no where near peace even after years of war seeking victory. There have been gains, even in Sierra Leone, when the justice seeking efforts of the UN bear fruit.

The justice seeking process drives more change toward peace than the Battle process does - though let us not be too polyanna-ish - in this violent world there is sometime still the need to stop monstrous evil in its tracks with force. But the rush to use force in this world is misplaced. Paul was right, justice leads to peace, lasting peace, more often.

Listen to Crossan’s words about justice . . . .Crossan starts by quoting from 2 Corinthians (8:13-14) about the collection taken for James’ poor church in Jerusalem . . . This is Paul writing . . .
“I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance (in some future time) may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.” (Crossan, 402) parens - kopke

Crossan continues, We cite that text as applying not just to the original situation of the great collection, but to the present situation of our modern world. “It is a question of fair balance.”

The idea of human unity under divine justice ground’s Paul’s theology of history in (his letter to the) Romans. And, after two thousand years, we know it did not work out as he expected, but we also know that it must work out, somehow, if the earth is to have any future. What a world under justice looks like is already given in the citation from 2 Corinthians, (and here it is again . . .
“It is a question of a fair balance between your abundance and their need.” (The ones who are getting a raw deal in life.)
Crossan continues, Is it not clear by now that the safety of the world and the security of earth demand the unity, not of global victory, but of global justice? Otherwise God will be God, but only of the insects and the grasses!” (Crossan, 402-3)

I am sensing a great disjunction between what many of us have called justice and what Paul refers to. Let me reread that section from I Corinthians . . .

“I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance (in some future time) may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.” (Crossan, 402) parens - kopke

A lot of Unitarians talk about justice in the same way. Our talk is about this very concept applied to world trade, the policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and what goes on in Davos, Switzerland, each year as the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies meet. We speak of distributive justice and the inequalities of wealth distribution around the globe. This is just what Paul was talking about nearly two thousand years ago.

This does not make Paul a model to follow, the lesson for us is in another place and it is beyond the scope of this sermon so I am planning a series of classes in the fall to go into the story of paul and what we can learn from it.

We can learn from Paul by observing how it was that his message was buried by others with different plans for the world, plans which were based in battle and preservation of wealth. Why did his ideas find themselves marginalized?

There are many examples of economic justice in history. In the Old Testament farmers are called on to leave a protion of their field unharvested and allow the droppings during the harvest to be gleaned by the poor. There is also a call for people to tithe and that would be distributed amongst the poor. The ideas are not new and they are found in cultures all around the earth.

Paul is not talking about justice in the abstract - he is talking about a tool which can bring justice about - that tool is generosity. Again, remember his words, “It is a question of a fair balance between your abundance and their need.” We have often spoken about generosity. After this new thinking about Paul, I am more interested than ever in generosity. Paul qualifies generosity and limits it in proportion to our abundance and their need. Both are perceptions - our perception - both of our abundance and their need. If we believe and feel that we have some abundance and there is legitimate need, we may be quite generous, however, if we believe that, even in our relative wealth, that we have little or no extra to share, the need might have to be much greater, even threatening to us, before we would be generous.

The key to justice is found in generosity, this is the conclusion which Crossan’s new work on Paul has led me to. Generosity, our perception of abundance and of need, somewhere in that mix there is the greatest challenge to our spiritual growth that we will ever face.

Generosity, abundance, need, how do they interplay in you, how far down the road to creating a just world are you willing to go? Where do you draw the line and why? These are personal questions. I suspect that Paul’s dream of peace through justice will be elusive until individuals have sorted out their own personal decisions about what abundance means, what real need is and how we identify it, and most of all, how we react out of abundance when faced with need. And that, myfriends, is less the teaching of Paul than that of Jesus. This is quite a challenge for humanist Unitarians. It will take faith, we will have to overcome fear, it will require hope, love and joy. We will continue the discussion.