Thread by @mcjulie

Lotta intense Paul fanatics freaking out about this statement

https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1467626521007325187

“Oh no somebody is dissing Paul! I shall refute it by quoting Paul!”

Attn @paulcarp13 you have so much to answer for.

All right, it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep so I’m going to riff on Letters of Paul for a while.

Back when I was still an evangelical & there was still some debate in the church about how anti-feminist they were going to be, letters of Paul came up A LOT, because, well.

Letters of Paul are pretty much ground zero for scriptural justifications of Christian patriarchy.

Which is ironic because Paul was, actually, NOT IN FAVOR OF PATRIARCHY

He was a misogynist, yes, but his misogyny did not take the shape of “womanhood is an evil that must be tamed by patriarchal marriage & childbirth”

Paul didn’t really think anybody should get married! He’s pretty blatant about it too. He very reluctantly admits that it’s better to marry than to “burn” and that maaaaybe it’s okay if you make new Christians that way, but…

Modern Christian patriarchy is the result of merging Paul’s misogyny (& some other stuff I’ll get to in a moment) WITH some Old Testament stuff about how great it is for a man to be blessed with a lot of children.

Be suspicious whenever Christians base their teachings on what they call the Old Testament. The Christian interpretation is almost always wrong, weird, wildly appropriative (as in, presuming to tell Jews what their own books mean) or ALL THREE.

A pertinent example: The Song of Solomon.
Is this book about being horny for the person you’re about to marry or is it about (ew) the Church being (ew) “horny” (in a metaphorical sense I swear!) for Jesus?

Christians don’t just say “oh, for us it’s more of a metaphor” they have the AUDACITY to claim that’s what it meant all along. It was never “really” about being horny for a person, it was always “really” about being horny for God.

There’s a lot of pro-horny, pro-family, pro-patriarchal stuff in the Old Testament. There’s nothing like that in the New Testament. The NT is (infamously, really) sexually repressed, and until recently I had never thought about why that was.

Chrissy caused an earlier Twitter storm by saying she’s not really a Jesus fan because she doesn’t like apocalyptic prophets. And until then I’d never really thought about it before, how it’s not just Revelation, there’s an “end of days” feel about ALL the stuff in the NT.

Even after all this time, it was tough to face it: Jesus was a false prophet. He predicted things that DID NOT COME TO PASS. He believed that the world was going to end & face final judgment not too long after his own death.

By the time I was being raised in the church, 2,000 years later, we had our justifications for that false teaching. Like… uh, it’s a metaphor. Or, well, the world didn’t end 2,000 years ago, but it’s about to end NOW.

But no, I think everything is just as it appears to be: Jesus taught with an apocalyptic “the world is about to end” view, and this view was still with the early church when Paul was writing his letters.

Early Christianity was a lot more like those weirdo doomsday cults that go out to a mountain to await the space aliens than we usually like to think.

It wasn’t what you would call a FAMILY religion.

This is the context for Paul’s letters, and his view of sex & marriage. He really didn’t think Christians should be getting it on, not with the world about to end and all, but reluctantly had advice in that area *if you felt you must*

Paul’s misogyny takes a few different forms, but “Christian men should ideally be the patriarchs of their own little family cults” is not actually one of them.

One major form of Pauline misogyny is respectability politics. He gives a bunch of advice to women about how to behave that is clearly framed as being “so the outsiders will think well of us”

But back in the day, when this topic was still being debated (before the church settled on “we’re just going to grind women under the fascist bootheel for as long as we can get away with it”) I was told —

(And I don’t know if it’s true) that early Christians had men and women worshiping together in a social context where other forms of worship tended to segregate by sex, so Paul was very concerned that people NOT think Christians were doing temple prostitution.

So a lot of his patronizing advice to women was in that context — in the context of not wanting outsiders to think Christian women were temple prostitutes.

There might be SOME truth in that, but either way, the respectability politics framing is pretty obvious. It’s also not hard to see it as an early work of a “balancer” — “well, hold on now, let’s not go TOO nuts with thinking women are equal to men under Christ”

It is also popularly theorized, usually by non-Christians, that “Paul was repressed & gay”
That his misogyny & general anti-sex views came out of that.

I think there is not much evidence for this view.
What little there is, is probably based on a deliberately anti-gay Bible translation from the 1940s, where statements against child rape were mis-translated to spin them as coming out against adult same-sex relationships.

Instead, I think Paul was a misogynist asshole who used to be a BIGGER misogynist asshole before converting to Christianity. So he kind of saw himself as progressive! He, personally, was progressing. He used to be a lot worse.

But, in the end, two things.
One, Paul himself admits that he’s not Jesus, he’s just a Christian guy with some opinions. Why are his opinions canonized forever in the holy Christian book we call the New Testament?

Maybe because they reflected early Christian practice.
Maybe because the men compiling the canon were themselves misogynists.
Maybe because Paul was a compelling writer or a popular figure of the day.

Paul himself would probably be quite appalled to see a bunch of Christians giving his own letters equal (or greater!) weight with the actual teachings of Jesus.

Two, the Bible is just a book.
It’s a collection of words written down by humans.
Maybe the book is holy to you, that’s your business.
Maybe you think the writers were “inspired by God” but again, your business.

You have to wonder why some people get SO BENT just being reminded that not everybody follows their holy book.