Paul's Unconventional Wisdom

Paul has a very mixed press. Though the majority of Christians revere Paul because of his prominence in the New Testament, opinions about him in the academy and in segments of mainline Protestantism are very mixed. Many who admire or adore Jesus don't care for Paul.

The most common charges against him are twofold. First, he seriously distorted the message of Jesus. Because his letters seldom refer to Jesus' teaching, he is accused of replacing the message of Jesus with a message about Jesus, transforming it into a set of theological doctrines that Christians must believe in order to be saved. These "doctrines" are frequently the substance of fundamentalist and conservative Christian preaching.

The second charge: He was a social and sexual conservative. His letters urge slaves to obey their masters, teach the subordination of women, condemn homosexuality, and see sexual behavior as a concession to human weakness ("It is better to marry than to burn," "I wish you would remain single as I am"). As a spelling-challenged undergraduate wrote in an essay exam a few years ago, "Paul preached to the Genitals."

But these charges shortchange Paul. To some extent, they flow from uncritically accepting that all 13 letters attributed to him were actually written by him. But modern scholars are quite certain that at least three were not: First and Second Timothy, and Titus. Three more are disputed: Ephesians, Colossians, and Second Thessalonians. The remaining seven are generally accepted as Paul's writing.

Many passages that form the negative image are in the six letters that may not have been written by Paul. When they are set aside, Paul emerges as a much more radical and subversive thinker than the negative stereotype suggests.

He was a remarkable man: