Many people, evangelical Christians included, regard Paul as a pleasure-hating misogynist and homophobe. Even evangelical scholars claim that he didn’t write the passages that earned him this reputation, or simply ignore them.

Sarah Ruben was much the same, writing, “I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul out the back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.”

In seven years at Harvard as a classics graduate student she realised that, “in my curriculum there was not a single piece of Christian literature out of all that belonged to the era I was studying in. We behaved as if Paul had not been a Hellenized Jew and by some accounts a Roman citizen.”

That led this Quaker classics scholar to attempt to line up Paul’s letters and Greco-Roman literature in a systematic way. She found that, “even the first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before. As I went on, I found that – almost creepily – the passages to which the modern world has the most resistance were all telling me the same thing: contemporary readers would likely not have seen Paul’s ‘authoritarian’ policies as anything but ways to connect with one another in conscientious tenderness.”

This is fascinating reading, probably even more so if you ever studied Latin or Greek – not that she is one of those authors I personally hate who quote long passages in those languages without any translation. Everything here is in plain English. Her knowledge of the writings of Paul’s contemporaries allows her to better explain what Paul meant and did not mean.

All the difficult subjects like Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality, his writing on a woman’s place, his call for obedience to the state, and his failure to condemn slavery, are set in their cultural milieu, and serve to show Paul as compassionate and liberating.

– David McLeod-Jones