Paul in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle

My graduate seminar on Paul and Early Judaism has just worked through three important chapters from N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God on the philosophical, religious, and imperial contexts of the Greco-Roman world. Students were impressed (and rightly so) with the way in which Wright presented this material in an engaging style which provided both an overview as well as some more detailed analysis of themes and issues relevant for the study of Paul. For my part, I was very pleased with these chapters as well as with the discussion they engendered in class. Students were brought face to face with problems of terminology and anachronism in discussing these ancient cultural phenomena with modern categories, and were challenged to grapple with ancient texts and practices on their own terms.

For example, the generic and seemingly straightforward term "religion" means something quite different today than when we consider the religious world of antiquity. Wright takes pains to show that religion penetrated every aspect of ancient life: home, city, calendar, affairs of state, architecture, art, and so on. Wright explains, “We cannot begin to understand how ordinary people in the first century thought, imagined, reasoned, believed, prayed and acted unless we try to get inside their myth-soaked culture” (255). And while Wright notes that "religion was everywhere because the gods were everywhere” (274), nevertheless this level of understanding about the omnipresence of the gods did not lead to a great concern about morality, doctrine, or even belief (as we might expect of religions today); rather ancient religion was primarily about proper performance of sacrifice or other rituals for the sake of the welfare of the polis. Fulfilling obligations to the gods through sacrifice and ritual was the way to ensure divine favor and to avoid divine displeasure for the sake of the well-being of the city. This is something far different than modern conceptions of religion, particularly in the West. And just as importing our notions of "religion" into the study of ancient religious practices is problematic, so it is with our notion of "philosophy" as well. Rather than being an exercise in academic reflection and theoretical speculation, philosophy in the first-century CE was much more of a "street-level" activity that was concerned with promoting a particular way of life, the good life. Philosophy also had a good deal to say about the nature of the gods and appropriate human responses to them, as well as offering a critique of some religious practices. By raising these kinds of issues, and inviting readers to consider the beliefs, practices, cultures, and customs of the ancients on their own terms, Wright has gone a long way toward setting the stage for a richer understanding of Paul and how he fit into his world. 

One question which this material raises is, "How would Paul and his work of forming communities of disciples have appeared to outside observers? What would your average Corinthian or Ephesian (assuming for a moment there was such an average person) have thought Paul was up to?"

As the comments above about the religious and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world suggest, whatever such a person might have thought, they would probably not have thought that Paul was introducing a new religion. He founded no temple, initiated no sacrificial rites, and was just not concerned with the kinds of things that Greco-Roman religious practice was concerned with. Rather, by traveling throughout the large cities of the mediterranean world, gathering students about himself, gaining the support of wealthy patrons, writing letters of teaching and instruction to his students, exhorting his communities to live their lives in a particular way based on a particular view of ultimate reality, refuting opposing views, critiquing pagan religious practices, and spending his time expounding the meaning of ancient writings and the teachings of Jesus, Paul might have looked much more like a popular philosopher.

Taking this line of thought, E. A. Judge, in a classic essay from 1961, articulated the thesis that Paul may be viewed as a "sophist," not in the pejorative sense of the term as a pseudo-intellectual windbag but in the sense that he adopted the practices of the intellectual, sophistic teachers of the first and second centuries. He explains that he considers Paul a sophist “without prejudice to the value or sincerity of his thought, nor to its independence of other philosophical schools” (539) and that "the term ‘sophist’ has been chosen for lack of a better, and is meant to include many scholars (quite apart from St. Paul!) who would have hotly rejected it” (539). These individuals were learned in rhetoric and also philosophy more broadly, and, because of their influence among the wealthy, and even among the Caesars, at their best “they were intellectual leaders of great eminence, not only in preserving the classical heritage but in guiding public policy and private morality in their own day” (540). Based on his adopting many of the practices of the sophists (by his own reporting in his letters with regard to sponsorship by wealthy patrons; development of a retinue of followers; and so forth) as well as with his emphasis on logos, reason, revealed secrets, gnosis, and his concern for ethics, Judge argues that “the Christian faith, therefore, as Paul expounds it, belongs with the doctrines of the philosophical schools rather than with the esoteric rituals of the mystery religions” (551).

Whether one accepts Judge's view or not, looking at Paul from this perspective of what his practices would have communicated to outside observers can help us to view Paul and his letters in fresh ways, and even open up aspects of Paul's teaching and practice that may otherwise be obscured by our modern reading lenses.

For anyone interested in exploring this issue further, Judge's essay has been reprinted in a collection of his essays, The First Christians in the Roman World (2008), many of which are excellent in their contribution to understanding the Greco-Roman world on its own terms.