J. Albert Harrill, “Paul the Apostle” — How I (Maybe) Got Paul Wrong

J. Albert Harrill.  Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

“I do not understand my own actions.”
—Paul, Epistle to the Romans 7:15

I didn’t either.  It was the beginning of 1970; I was 22 years old, taking a year off between my undergraduate and graduate studies, and I was an exceedingly unhappy camper.  What was worse, I knew I was sabotaging myself with self-defeating actions that seemed absolutely reasonable and essential while I was doing them, but which afterward struck me as bordering on the insane.  I was reading the epistles (letters) of Paul in the New Testament, not for the first time but with a seriousness I’d never brought to them before.  And they spoke to me.

At least, the Epistle to the Romans did.

“I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (Romans 7:18-20).

Freud would have said: it’s not the ego (= “I”) that does it, but the id (= “it”) that’s a part of me.  “Scientific”–pseudo-scientific, many would say–in a way that Paul wasn’t, Freud worked out a model for understanding how such multiplicity can exist in a single human being.  For Paul it remained an enigma, to be explored with the only aid available to him: the words of Old Testament Scripture, seen through the lens of certain ill-defined but overwhelming inner experiences of his own.

To this dilemma, of the willing “I” being overwhelmed by the stubborn “sin” that seemed impervious to the healing medicine of Mosaic Law—indeed to thrive on that medicine, like a strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria—Paul gave a solution.  One could identify oneself, in the fullest and most absolute sense, with the death and subsequent life of a man who’d been horribly, judicially murdered not many years before.  Who was known, or at least believed, to have come back from the grave.

If I’d been brought up as a Christian, that solution might have seemed to me intuitively plausible, as many of my university students have found it.  To a Jewish boy like me, it made no sense.  I couldn’t see what the question and the answer had to do with each other.  Anyway, I didn’t opt for it.

Instead I went into therapy, a distant offshoot of Freud’s “talking cure,” and in a matter of months I was not exactly cured but certainly better.  I was happier, more confident, beginning to understand myself and my life.  “By their fruits you shall know them,” said the man who became Paul’s divinity but in whose earthly life and teachings he seemed mostly uninterested (Matthew 7:20), and my experience had validated for me the psychological, therapeutic approach to human life.  I was quite sure that Paul, however stumblingly and incompletely, had been its pioneer.

J. Albert Harrill, author of the 2012 book Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context, would no doubt say that what I’ve just laid out is the modern Western psychological understanding of Paul, and the sixth and final chapter of the book is entitled, “How the West Got Paul Wrong.”

Harrill is Professor of Classics at Ohio State University, and a New Testament scholar of the first rank.  I’m proud to say that 30-plus years ago he was my student at the University of North Carolina.  In Paul the Apostle he’s achieved a remarkable feat: to lay out, in 166 pages (not counting notes and appendixes), not only who Paul was but who he became in the next 2000 years of people reading and possibly misreading him.  To do this, moreover, without the smallest sacrifice of lucidity, readability, or scholarly rigor.

So who was Paul?

“I am a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city.”  These are Paul’s words, not in any of his epistles but in the New Testament book called “Acts of the Apostles” (21:39) which purports to narrate the birth of the new Jesus movement out of its Jewish matrix, and in which Paul is the dominant figure.  Of course the speeches put in Paul’s mouth aren’t exact transcripts of what he said.  But surely we can trust the Book of Acts to give a generally accurate picture of Paul, his adventures, and his teachings.  Or can we?

Harrill doesn’t think so.  He points out contradictions between what Acts says of Paul and what he says of himself in his epistles, and makes a generally persuasive argument–though it’s certainly not going to end the debate–that the Paul of Acts is not the real Paul.  Rather, this figure represents a very early stage in the re-envisioning of Paul, by what would eventually become the Christian church but was at the time an offbeat version of Judaism.  (The word “Christian” occurs only three times in the New Testament, and in two of them it seems to be dismissive, like “deplorable” in the last election.)

That leaves us with the epistles.  Some of them, like those to the Romans and to the community at Corinth–a complex string of letters and letter fragments preserved under the misleading title “1 and 2 Corinthians”–are acknowledged by everyone as Paul’s genuine writings.  Others, the three letters to Timothy and Titus, are regarded by nearly everyone as having been forged in Paul’s name.  Still others are disputed.  Where in the genuine letters do we begin reading if we’re to dig out the crux of Paul’s thought, the central issue from which the others derive?

I started with Romans, probably because it comes first in the Bible’s order of the epistles.  (Which has nothing to do with the order in which Paul wrote them.)  I came away with an indelible picture of Paul as introspective and psychologically aware, wrestling to the best of his ability with the knowledge of his drivenness and the illusory nature of his free will.  If I’d begun with 1 Thessalonians I might have pegged him as an apocalyptic visionary, radically discontented not with himself but with the world around him, dreaming of an end to that world and of being caught up in the clouds to meet Jesus in the air (4:17).  Everything else I’d have dismissed as peripheral, there in the epistles but not really essential to understanding the epistles.

Harrill is a historian.  That means he’s not content to hear Paul as a disembodied voice speaking to him across the centuries, but obliges himself to listen to that voice as the people of Paul’s world would have heard it.  This was a world whose principal language was Greek, its culture the “Hellenism” bequeathed to it by a Greece that was ancient even then.  A world where the Jews were a significant presence, probably not aggressively missionizing their neighbors but exerting enough quiet attraction to worry pagan moralists.  A world dominated by Roman power, and by Roman conceptions of what it means to be powerful.

It’s this last aspect of the Pauline context that’s gotten the least attention from modern scholars, and as the subtitle of Harrill’s book shows, he’s given it its due weight.  Some of the most brilliant passages of the book are the ones in which Harrill dissects the Roman concept of auctoritas, which he renders as “clout,” and shows how concerned Paul was with the “clout” he might have with people like his correspondents at Corinth.  (Who, to Paul’s distress, seem generally to have been unimpressed with him and his “clout.”)

He’s a historian, too, in his masterful treatment of the rereadings and re-visionings of Paul over the next 2000 years.  He traces the psychological reading of Paul, which seemed to me so natural and self-evident, back to Saint Augustine in the late fourth century.  Augustine, baffled and frustrated by sex addiction, heard what he thought was a child’s voice telling him to “take it and read, take it and read.”  He took up his Bible and opened it to–guess what?–the Epistle to the Romans.

Augustine used autobiography to convey his encounter with Paul.  So, more than a thousand years later, did the Augustinian monk Martin Luther:

“What I am saying here on the basis of the words of Paul I learned from my own experience in the monastery about myself and about others.  I saw many who tried with great effort and the best of intentions to do everything possible to appease their conscience.  They wore hair shirts; they fasted; they prayed; they tormented and wore out their bodies with various exercises so severely that if they had been made of iron, they would have been crushed.  And yet the more they labored, the greater their terrors became.”  (Quoted in Harrill, page 156.)

They didn’t understand, as people in Twelve-Step programs are now taught, that they were powerless over their addictions and their lives had become unmanageable, but a Power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.  This too is part of the Pauline legacy via Augustine and Luther, stripped of its religious terrors but still recognizable.

The bona fide Paul?  I’m not sure.  Harrill might well ask: if what I saw in the Epistle to the Romans nearly 50 years ago was self-evidently the Pauline crux, to which everything else Paul did and said could be traced, how come nobody before Augustine seemed to notice it?  Why did it gain no traction until Luther and the Protestant Reformation?  I grew up in a culture unconsciously saturated with Augustine, with Luther, with Freud who extended their trajectory.  Its world-view was axiomatic for me before I even opened the New Testament.  How do I know I didn’t look in a mirror and see myself dressed up in antique clothing, and say–Aha, there’s the real Paul?

I don’t.  We never know.  As the classicist Wilamowitz-Moellendorf once said, we pour out our heart’s blood to the ancient writers as Odysseus did to the ghosts of the dead.  Only then do they come to life, speak to us.  What I heard in Paul, what I once took to be the heart of his experience and his message–and still do–seemed to me incontrovertibly authentic.  But illusions sometimes do give that impression.

Harrill concludes somewhat wistfully, in the wonderful finale to his wonderful book:

“Finishing this book does not bring closure to Paul.  Just when an interpreter believes to have grasped the ‘real’ Paul, new information in the process of research invariably causes the figure, like the shape-shifting Proteus of Homeric epic, to slip away unrecognizable.  The very act of examining the evidence, as in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, changes the figure into multiple Pauls and meanings.  Critical biblical scholars, myself included, recognize that our incomplete evidence can never support certainty.  On each point of evidence presented in this book, my goal has been to provoke further study.  There is no end to Paul.”

by David Halperin
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Wishing a Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate it, and a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate that.  And to those who celebrate either or both or neither–a very happy and blessed 2018!