Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time Paperback – August 2, 2011

*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 and strengthened the new faith in Christ. Her project enables her to call the standard repertoire of Pauline characterizations seriously into question. Paul’s cross-references show us a Greek and Roman world of great brutality, given to pleasures carried to damaging and even fatal extremes. Nor was there any notion of inhumane punishment; hence, crucifixion, to which only commoners and slaves were subjected. Homosexuality was basically anal rape of adolescent boys, the more painful the better for the socially superior rapists. Women of high status were veiled, while unveiled women were treated as prostitutes and criminals. Slaves were so unequal to masters that they might have been a different, inferior species. The nonviolent love and community that Christianity preached radically differed from such exploitative, status-based norms, and Paul’s preaching, perceived as being against homosexuality and higher status for non-ruling-class women and slaves, looks very different when contrasted with those Greco-Roman norms as reported by writers from Aristophanes to Apuleius. Judiciously citing her own behavior to bring certain points home to contemporary readers, Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book. --Ray Olson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Praise for Sarah Ruden:

Paul Among the People
“Ruden offers a wholly fresh reinterpretation of Paul’s most controversial writings.” –Washington Post
 
“Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book.” –Booklist
 
“The most exciting book of historical analysis I’ve read in ages – indeed the most exciting book period … What makes reading Ruden such a pleasure, aside from the quality of her thinking and her prose, is her willingness to question settled truths, and to do it with such a lightness of spirit.” –Rod Dreher, Beliefnet

“Wonderfully unexpected.” –Christianity Today

 
The Aeneid
“The best translation yet, certainly the best of our time.” –Ursula K. Le Guin
 
“The first translation since Dryden’s that can be read as a great English poem in itself.” –Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books
 
“An Aeneid more intimate in tone and soberer in measure than we are used to—a gift for which many will be grateful.” –J. M. Coetzee
 
“An intimate rendering of great emotional force and purity . . . The immediacy, beauty, and timelessness of the original Latin masterpiece lifts off these pages with gemlike originality.” –Choice 
 
Lysistrata
“A perfect Lysistrata for the new millennium: rich apparatus and a sparkling, metrical, accurate translation of this inexhaustible treasure of a play.” –Rachel Hadas, Rutgers University 
 
Satyricon
“Ruden has caught, better than any translator known to me, both the conversational patterns of Petronian dialogue and the camera-sharp specificity and color of the Satyricon’s descriptive pages . . . A quite extraordinary achievement.” –Peter Green, Los Angeles Book Review
 
“Relying on her excellent knowledge of Latin, her lively feel for contemporary slang and rhythm, and her infectious love of the work, Ruden gives us the full Satyricon . . . Her book, breathing knowledge and affection, is a delight.” –Donald Lyons, The New Criterion