This study of Paul offers a road-to-Damascus moment

GARRY WILLS is simultaneously one of this country’s leading public intellectuals and American Catholicism’s most formidable lay scholar. To find someone approaching his equal in both spheres, in fact, you probably have to go back to the mid-19th century and Rome’s great convert from Transcendentalism, the abolitionist and champion of labor Orestes Brownson.

Just this week, for example, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wills -- who is formally emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University -- has published a must-read New York Review of Books essay on George W. Bush and politicized evangelicalism and a bracing book of scriptural commentary, “What Paul Meant.” The latter attempts nothing less than the recovery of Christianity’s most influential and maligned early writer, Saul of Tarsus, or St. Paul as so many now know him.

If you think you know Paul, get ready to have all sorts of cherished preconceptions exhilaratingly stripped away. If you’ve ever been vaguely curious, there now is no finer introduction. If you deem Paul irrelevant or distasteful -- particularly because of his alleged misogyny or nascent anti-Semitism -- prepare to think again.

As Wills convincingly argues, Paul matters because his letters are the earliest accounts we have of the movement that grew up around Jesus, the Judean Jewish teacher, whom his followers considered the Messiah. Despite their position in the Christian canon following the Gospels, Paul’s epistles to the widely scattered communities with which he worked were composed at least 20 to 50 years before the earliest of the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ life. It is in Paul’s letters, for example, that the earliest formulations occur of the ceremonial meal that came to be recognized as the Eucharist -- not in the so-called evangelists’ Passion narratives.

Similarly, Paul is the only identifiable individual among the earliest Christian writers, since we have no real idea of who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John really were. Wills points out in rather devastating detail, for example, that Luke’s account of Paul and his mission to the widely scattered Jewish communities of the 1st century Diaspora is historically implausible for all sorts of reasons.

Wills’ method, which will be familiar to those who read either his exemplary short biography of Augustine or his more recent “What Jesus Meant,” is to deploy his formidable skills as a Yale-trained classicist to retranslate the texts at issue from the Koine -- the pidgin Greek that was Mediterranean Rome’s lingua franca -- and then to break them down into historically defensible readings. (It’s worth going back to his “Why I Am a Catholic” just to savor his accurate retranslation of something everyone thinks they know, the Lord’s Prayer.)

In “What Paul Meant,” Wills takes Paul’s critics head-on -- beginning with the apocryphal writers of the early Christian era who denounced him as a father of heresies, to the more contemporary scholars who have taxed him with perverting the message of the lost “historic Jesus” with a “high-flown but dark theology.”

Wills does a particular service by going right to the passages that have made the Paul we think we understand into a valid target for those troubled by the epistles’ sexism and implicit anti-Semitism. By insisting that only those letters Paul really wrote be considered -- only seven of the 13 letters included in the Christian canon actually are his -- Wills disposes easily with sexism charges, most of which derive from the Letters to Timothy, which scholars now agree Paul did not write. So, too, the charges of nascent anti-Semitism, since one of the mind-changing strengths of Wills’ translation of Paul is to situate him firmly in his Jewish context. Paul never conceived of himself as anything other than a Jew of the Pharisaical party or of Jesus as anything but a Jewish Messiah. Paul’s mission and his letters were entirely focused on the Diaspora Jews who then constituted something more than 10% of the Roman Empire’s urban population and on the very large number of converts drawn to their outlook and observances.

In his conclusion, Wills is at pains to concisely summarize why he believes Paul has been so disastrously misread and what an authentic rereading -- undertaken in the light of accurate translation and modern scholarship -- might suggest to us. On the former point he writes: “The heart of the problem is this. Paul entered the bloodstream of Western civilization mainly through one artery, the vein carrying a consciousness of sin, of guilt, of the tortured conscience. This is the Paul we came to know through the brilliant self-examinations of Augustine and Luther, of Calvin and Pascal and Kierkegaard. The profound writings of these men and their followers, with all their vast influence, amount to a massive misreading of Paul, to a historic misleading of the minds of people down through the century.”

Note the characteristic generosity -- and fidelity to history -- that leads Wills to characterize the readings of even those with whom he disagrees as “profound.” Given the well-deserved stature of the philosophers and theologians cited, to speak otherwise seems absurd. But how many other contemporary writers would have avoided -- indeed, dismissed as implicitly ridiculous -- the temptation to buttress their own argument with a sly bit of iconoclasm?

That Wills avoids that pitfall -- and that he does it so unselfconsciously -- makes his summation of this fresh reading of Paul all the more credible -- and all the more troubling: Organized “religion took over the legacy of Paul as it did that of Jesus -- because they both opposed it. They said that the worship of God is a matter of interior love, not based on external observations, on temples or churches, on hierarchies or priesthoods. Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of ‘religion’ and punish those who try to escape them. They were radical egalitarians, though in ways that delved below and soared above conventional politics. They were on the side of the poor, and saw through the rich. They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. Both were liberators, not imprisoners -- so they were imprisoned. So they were killed. Paul meant what Jesus meant, that love is the only law.”

In 1844, when Orestes Brownson stunned intellectual America by converting to Catholicism, Theodore Parker, one of the profoundly disappointed Transcendentalists, sadly mused that the real problem with his defecting confrere’s mind was that it was “intellectual always, but spiritual never.”

What makes Wills’ contribution unique in a country whose shelves of religious books these days overflow with vitriol, bombast and treacle is his singular combination of intellectual integrity and authentically unsentimental spirituality.

Read “What Paul Meant” to get a sense of what the preacher from Tarsus really intended -- and for what Garry Wills has to offer us all.

*

tim.rutten@latimes.com