Customer Reviews

Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality

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A key book to understanding ancient people and their worldview. Malina and Neyrey do an excellent job of "digging" up ancient understandings of persons. Using the character of Paul in ancient literature, they cogently and clearly use Anthropology, coupled with ancient literature, to discuss how ancients understood and viewed each other. I highly recommend this volume for students of the Bible and the ancient world in general.

Malina argues that we can only understand Paul if we understand the ancient world, its society and cultural norms.

The ancients, especially the ancient Jews, lived in an honor/shame culture. They "never perceived themselves as single beings but believed themselves to be irreducibly a part of a larger group" (p 12). For the majority of people in the elite, their most important identification was with their city, whereas the poor tended to most identify with their families.

Malina puts it this way: "Honorable people derive from...honorable locales...To know someone means to know their roots, ancestry, and genealogy," (p 24). Greatness was expected to breed greatness; slaves, always regarded as base, were expected to give birth to children who were base.

Appearance was expected to reveal character. The ancient world believed people were composed of earth, air, water, and fire. If these elements were balanced, then the person had a balanced personality. Aristotle distinguishes "between two types of voice....high-pitched voice suggest an angry...person, whereas deep voices indicate an easy temperament" (p 135). Even hair could reveal inner truths. "soft hair shows timidity...those with tawny colored hair are brave, witness the lions. The reddish are of bad character" (p 139). In "The Acts of Paul", a later work, Paul is described as bald, which indicates piety. Who would have guessed?

Anyone interested in Roman and Jewish cultures will want to read this book.

It is important to attend to the cultural context of the writings of the NT in order to understand them, and Malina and Neyrey are quite right to question the ethnocentric and anachronistic assumptions of much NT scholarship. However, this attempt to avoid these problems is doctrinaire, and based on some highly questionable generalisations about 'the ancients' (sic). For all of the promise of the book, there is little of substance here that would pass close scrutiny.