Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.28 (698 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0385522576 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In Paul Among the People, Sarah Ruden explores the writings of the evangelist Paul in the context of his time and culture, to recover his original message of freedom and love while overturning the common—and fundamental—misconception that Paul represented a puritanical, hysterically homophobic, misogynist, or reactionary vision. By setting famous and controversial words of Paul against ancient Greek and Roman literature, Ruden reveals a radical message of human freedom and dignity at the heart of Paul’s preaching. A remarkable work of scholarship, synthesis, and understanding, Paul Among the People recaptures the moral urgency and revolutionary spirit that
The Pagan World, Warts and All (And It Was Mostly Warts) Ulsterman Jesus was good, Paul was bad - so goes the familiar slant on the Bible, which paints Paul as the monster who corrupted the enlightened teachings of Jesus by condemning homosexuals, telling wives to submit to their husbands, telling slaves to obey their masters, and telling Christians to obey the government. Sarah Ruden makes an effort to. "Meaningful Scholarship Written with Grace" according to Mark P. Brown. The reader is greeted in the preface with a fair summary of the bare facts of Paul. Those bare facts are sure to raise the blood pressure of more traditional readers as they firmly set the author as a member of the modern academy. That traditional reader would be at that point ready for yet another 'see Paul really agrees with my modern . Remarkable piece of popular scholarship that really makes you think This is a work of true intellectual honesty -- and, I'm sorry to say, probably could not be written in the setting of the modern academy. Ruden, a classical scholar who has translated Vergil and Aristophanes among others, here takes on St. Paul, the Apostle most responsible for turning Jesus' message into what we know as "Christianity."
She is a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University and lives with her husband in Middleton, Conn.. She has translated four books of classical literature, among them The Aeneid and is the author of Other Places a book of poetry. Sarah Ruden was educated at the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard
Paul’s cross-references show us a Greek and Roman world of great brutality, given to pleasures carried to damaging and even fatal extremes. Her project enables her to call the standard repertoire of Pauline characterizations seriously into question. Slaves were so unequal to masters that they might have been a different, inferior species. From Booklist *Starred Review* The astonishingly high quality of the new literature concerned with the greatest missionary apostle continues in poet and classical translator Ruden’s cross-referencing of Paul and his literary confreres who describe the world in which Paul spread