Paul Among the People

I am also reading Sarah Ruden's book Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time.   A short, but remarkable and eye-opening book that makes a persuasive argument that much of what the popular culture tells you about the Apostle Paul and, by proxy, the doctrine of the Catholic Church, is wrong.  For instance, Ruden explains that the popular view of Church dogma as being homophobic misunderstands the origins of Paul's criticism of homosexuality, which in its context was an argument for the protection of male children and slaves, who were powerless in the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire to oppose Roman "citizens" who had the "right" under Roman law to rape them with impunity.   Ruden, a classical scholar of the highest order -- her translation of The Aeneid is viewed to be one of the best, if not the best -- recreates what life was really like in the Roman Empire that Paul confronted through close readings of classical literature and erotic poetry.   Safe to say, it was "nasty, brutish, and short," at least for the weak for whom early Christianity tried to speak. 

Ruden's book does what real scholarship ought to do, and so seldom does:  it pushes the contemporary reader out of his comfort zone and forces him to see a familiar story in a new light.