[Dialogue] 11/12/09, Spong: Origins of the New Testament, Part VI: Paul's Thorn in the Flesh

Thu Nov 12 09:23:39 CST 2009

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Thursday November 12, 2009 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part VI: Paul's Thorn in the Flesh

Have you ever wondered what Paul's deepest secret was? Surely he had one. If you listen to his words, an agony of spirit is easily recognized, perhaps even a deep strain of self-hatred. How else can we read these words, "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. The very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me." He goes on to say of himself, "I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate." Having thus indicted himself, he offers a rather self-serving explanation, which is little more than a feeble attempt at exoneration. "It is no longer that I do it," he says, seeking a satisfying explanation, "but sin that dwells in me." Don't blame me, he is arguing, blame sin! It is like one saying, "It is not my fault, the devil made me do it!" Next he offers what might be a clue. "Nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh," he says. What do you suppose it is that tortures Paul? It is clearly something inside him. Once Paul spoke of "fightings without and fears within," but while he described the external threats, he never identified the "fears within." Now he seems to locate those fears "in my flesh," and clearly he believes that they have power over him to the point that he feels powerless against them. "I can will what is right," he laments, "but I cannot do it." Once more he tries to find something outside himself to blame, and so he repeats his previous idea, "If I do what I do not want (to do), it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me." Still writing introspectively he states, "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin, which dwells in my members." The word translated as " member" is a strange word, at least as Paul uses it. The Greek word for "members" is "melos," which literally means a bodily appendage — like arms and legs. How could sin dwell in one's arms and legs? How could one's arms and legs be in warfare against one's mind? Males, however, have another appendage, called euphemistically "the male organ." It is clearly an appendage, but it is also a gland that does not always obey the mind of the person to whom it belongs. This gland is stimulated on some occasions when it is quite inconvenient. On other occasions, it is not stimulated when one desires it to be. If that were not so there would be no market for Viagra or Cialis! Since Paul is constantly suggesting that evil sin dwells in his flesh, can we not conclude that whatever disturbs him so deeply is somehow connected to his sexuality? It seems apparent that such a connection is real, for he winds up this series of self-accusatory phrases with an outburst that demands some explanation, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?"
In other parts of Paul's epistles he says, "What return did you get for the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death." Paul seems to feel that his life is lived under the sentence of death. He has a deep-seated sense of shame. Paul also reveals that he has a hidden aspect to his life. He calls himself "an imposter who yearns to be true," one who is unknown "who yearns to be known and one who "though dying yearns to be alive."
Paul is also a religious zealot, perhaps a fanatic. He was a strict adherent of the Torah in which he had obviously bound himself tightly. He describes himself as one who obeyed every requirement of the law. I was, he says, "Circumcised on the 8th day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless!" He even says of himself, "I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age….so extremely zealous was I for the tradition of my fathers."
Given that self-description, one must ask what was there about the Jesus movement that threatened Paul so deeply that he was moved to try to stamp it out. Religious zealotry always says more about the zealot than it does about the cause. Again, he says of himself, "I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it." One does not attack Muslims in the Crusades unless something about Islam itself is seen as an imminent danger to the Christian claims that are being made. One does not burn heretics at the stake unless the lives of the heretics threaten something deep within their persecutors. One does not oppress and murder Jews, as Christians have done through the centuries, unless the very existence of the Jews caused that which was basic to Christianity to collapse. One does not fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to "kill the infidels" unless those infidels call into question the truth by which Islamic fundamentalists live. That is the nature of religious persecution. Paul was a persecutor of the Christians, so we need to ask what there was about the Christian movement that caused him to believe that if the Christian movement survived, he would not. That is the question that fanaticism in any form asks. So our search continues.
Another autobiographical detail appears in his epistles when Paul counsels those who are not married "to remain as I am," that is, single. So we know that Paul was not married. He also counseled those who could not control their sexual desires to marry, since as he stated, "it is better to marry than to burn with passion." Paul, however, never sought to alleviate his internal pressures by following his own advice. Paul actually seemed to have negativity toward women. Women do not like him to this day, especially women priests. He warned his readers against even touching a woman, yet he seemed to have a peculiar attraction for a woman's hair, about which he made overt references.
Paul also shared with his readers that he possessed a "thorn in his flesh," which he never defines, but which he had prayed for God to take away. It appears that the removal of this thorn was beyond God's power. There is finally one other revealing passage in the Pauline corpus that for me pulls this investigation together. In the first chapter of Romans, a text frequently cited to uphold the deep prejudice in the Christian Church against homosexuality, Paul suggests that homosexuality is actually a punishment inflicted by God on those who do not worship God properly. That is, Paul argues, that God, in punishment for not paying attention to the intimate details of worship, confuses human sexuality so that men are attracted to men and women to women. It was and is a strange argument, but one perhaps understandable to a religious person who feels driven to obey every jot and tittle of the law.
Some years ago, while studying at Yale Divinity School, I came across a 1930's book written by Arthur Nock in which this author raised for me for the first time the possibility that Paul might have been a deeply repressed gay man. As such he would have been taught by his religion that being homosexual placed him under a death sentence according to the law of God as recorded in Leviticus 18 and 20. Paul would also have been aware of the books of the Maccabees, which were very popular among Jews in Paul's time. IV Maccabees stated that if one worshiped God properly and with consuming intensity "all desire can be overcome."
When I put all of these things together a pattern appears. Paul was a zealot who tried with all his might to worship God properly. He bound his unacceptable (to him) desires so tightly within the law of the Jews that he was able at least partially to suppress the desires that he found natural within him but deeply troubling and intensely negative.
This was the internal pressure that caused Paul to view his body quite negatively. The promise of death, said the Torah, was the end result of the sin, which he felt sure lived in his uncontrollable "member." He experienced the Christian movement to be one that relativized the power of the law to control evil desires in the name of something the Christians called "grace," which they defined as the infinite and undeserved gift of love. He heard Christians telling people that they did not have to struggle as he had struggled to be righteous, but they had only to trust this divine love that accepted them "just as I am," or as each person was. Freedom always frightens people who are hiding from themselves inside a rigid religious practice. So it was that Paul appears to have determined that if Christianity succeeded, his security system built on years of binding repression would fall apart. That is what led to him to persecute. That is also what led Paul to exclaim after his conversion that now I know that "nothing can separate me from the love of God," not even, as he said, "my own nakedness."
Was his thorn in the flesh his deeply repressed homosexuality? Other theories have been offered: epilepsy, a chronic eye disease, perhaps even an abusive and distorting childhood sexual experience. None, however, fit the details we know of Paul's life so totally as the suggestion that he was a gay man. Christians could not listen to this possibility so long as they were in the power of a definition of homosexuality as something evil. That definition, however, has died under the influence of modern science and medicine. So the idea of Paul gay and a good Jew are not now incompatible. Imagine rather the power of the realization that we Christians have received our primary definition of grace from a gay man who accepted his world's judgment and condemnation until he was embraced by the Jesus experience and came to the realization that nothing any of us can say, do or be can place us outside the love of God. Paul, a deeply repressed gay man, is the one who made that message clear. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Rob Friedman, via the Internet, writes:
How do you interpret the episode of Jesus and the money lenders in the synagogue? Taken literally, was his anger out of step with his message of tolerance and forgiveness? Or do you believe the story was devised by later generations with an anti-Jewish message?

Dear Rob,
Neither!
I do not believe it was devised to carry an anti-Jewish message and I do not believe it was an expression of anger that violated the message. My take on this passage, which was introduced into the tradition by Mark, is that it was a messianic sign drawn from the writings of the prophet Zechariah and wrapped around Jesus to proclaim that he was indeed the messiah.
When the book of Zechariah describes the "Day of the Lord," a Jewish term for the coming of the Kingdom of God that would be inaugurated by the messiah, he writes "On that day there will no longer be traders in the house of the Lord." Earlier the hero in Zechariah, known as the Shepherd King of Israel, was removed from his leadership role by those who buy and sell animals. The price of this removal was thirty pieces of silver which were then hurled by the Shepherd King back into the Temple. Matthew, building on Mark, placed those extra details from Zechariah into the passion story in which the Temple authorities, following Jesus' act of disrupting the traders, paid Judas Iscariot thirty pieces of silver to betray the messiah. Judas then hurled the silver back into the Temple.
This passage reveals more than most the necessity of understanding that the gospel writers are not writing history or biography, they are painting interpretive portraits. The first three gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, are clearly products of the synagogue and reflect the fact that in their interpretation of Jesus, they are literally wrapping him in the Jewish Scriptures. The original Jewish leaders of the synagogue understood this. By the first quarter of the second century there were few Jews left in the Christian movement, and Gentile believers, ignorant of what were obvious symbols to the Jews, began to treat the gospels as history and to literalize these accounts. That is what led us to creeds, doctrines and dogmas that served to institutionalize Christianity, but distorted the Jesus experience dramatically.
I hope this opens for you a new way to read the gospel narrations. I spelled this out in much greater detail in two my books, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes and Jesus for the Non-Religious.

My best,
John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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