The fruit at Corinth

The door, once opened, admitted what one would expect. The church Paul founded at Corinth, and instructed that all things were lawful, produced within a few years a case of incest “such as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife,” and the congregation was puffed up about it.¹

1Ὅλως ἀκούεται ἐν ὑμῖν πορνεία, καὶ τοιαύτη πορνεία ἥτις οὐδὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, ὥστε γυναῖκά τινα τοῦ πατρὸς ἔχειν. 2καὶ ὑμεῖς πεφυσιωμένοι ἐστέ, καὶ οὐχὶ μᾶλλον ἐπενθήσατε, ἵνα ἀρθῇ ἐκ μέσου ὑμῶν ὁ τὸ ἔργον τοῦτο ποιήσας;

1It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. 2And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.²

Members of the same church were going to prostitutes, and Paul had to ask them whether they did not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her.³ At the Lord’s supper, one was hungry and another was drunken.⁴

The letter that says “all things are lawful” is the letter that has to deal with incest, prostitution and drunkenness in the assembly that believed it. The fruit is the test, and these are the fruits of the first church built on Paul’s doctrine.

The oldest accusation

The community that James led kept a memory of Paul’s motives that the church later suppressed. Epiphanius, writing against the Ebionites in the fourth century, records their tradition from a text called the Ascents of James: that Paul was a Gentile of Tarsus who converted to Judaism to marry the daughter of the high priest, was circumcised for her sake, and when refused, turned in anger against circumcision, the Sabbath and the law.⁵

The story cannot be verified and Epiphanius reports it to refute it. What it establishes is that the earliest witnesses, the followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam who kept his law, explained Paul’s apostasy from the law by a thwarted desire. They saw, at the root of his doctrine, a woman he could not have.

The modern readings

Modern readers have looked at the same evidence, the war within, the bruised body, the vocabulary, the thorn, the horror of marriage, and reached a conclusion the Ebionites did not. John Shelby Spong, an Anglican bishop, argued that Paul was a homosexual man who never acted on his desire and spent his life at war with it: “A rigidly controlled gay male, I believe, taught the church what the love of God means.” He added that he saw “no evidence to suggest that Paul ever acted out his sexual desires and passions,” and that nothing else could account for Paul’s self-judging rhetoric, his negative feeling toward his own body, and his sense of being controlled by something he had no power to change.⁶

The book on which this site rests cites the same possibility from Ehrman and Engberg-Pedersen, and adds the act of circumcising the adult Timothy with his own hands, by a man who had abolished circumcision, as a further shadow over his orientation and motives.⁷ Whether the desire Paul bruised was for women or for men, the readings agree on the war, and on its issue: a theology in which the body is the enemy and marriage a concession to weakness.

The Islamic measure

Islam names the body a trust and desire a part of the fiṭrah (فطرة, “the natural constitution”) on which God created humankind, to be governed by law and satisfied in marriage.⁸ The Qurʾān commands the believers to marry the unmarried among them, and names among the signs of God that He made mates for them, that they might find rest in them, with affection and mercy between them.⁹

وَمِنْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦٓ أَنْ خَلَقَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَٰجًا لِّتَسْكُنُوٓا۟ إِلَيْهَا وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً

“And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquillity in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy.”¹⁰

Of the monasticism that grew from Paul’s theology of the body, the Qurʾān says that they invented it; God did not prescribe it for them.¹¹ The prophets married, and the last of them said that whoever turned away from his practice was none of his.¹²

Paul bruised his body, loathed marriage, licensed everything and coined a word for the sin he could not stop naming. The Qurʾān’s measure finds, in that record, a man at war with the constitution God gave him; and a man at war with the fiṭrah is no guide to it.

1. 1 Corinthians 5:1–2. ↩
2. 1 Corinthians 5:1–2 (SBLGNT; KJV). ↩
3. 1 Corinthians 6:15–16. ↩
4. 1 Corinthians 11:21. ↩
5. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 30.16.8–9; see Who was Paul of Tarsus? and The first witnesses against Paul. The text Epiphanius cites no longer survives. ↩
6. John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), in the chapter on Paul. Spong credits the suggestion to Arthur Darby Nock’s St. Paul (1938). ↩
7. Acts 16:3; see The letters of a man, with Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). ↩
8. Sūrah al-Rūm 30:30. ↩
9. Sūrah al-Nūr 24:32; Sūrah al-Rūm 30:21. ↩
10. Sūrah al-Rūm 30:21, Saheeh International. ↩
11. Sūrah al-Ḥadīd 57:27. ↩
12. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5063. ↩