When I am called upon to identify myself at ICJS gatherings, I usually say that I am "the associate scholar in charge of Paul because nobody else wants him." Nobody likes Saint Paul very much. Women don't like him because his letters reinforce their traditional patriarchal subordination. Gays and lesbians don't like him because he condemns homosexuality. African Ameri-cans don't like him because he supports the institution of slavery. Jews don't like him because he turns his back on his ancestral tradition, denies the continuing validity of Jewish law, and condemns his former co-religionists as prideful hypo-crites who seek salvation through works of the law rather than through faith. Many Christians don't like him because he's such a bossy-boots.

In the face of nearly universal disesteem, why do I like Saint Paul? Why have I spent so many hundreds of hours over the past fourteen years in the company of such an unpleasant man? Because I discovered long ago that the misogynous, homophobic, pro-slavery, anti-Judaic "Saint Paul" of Christian tradition bears little resemblance to Paul, the fiercely dedi-cated servant of the God of Israel whom God commissioned to be "a minister of Christ Jesus to the gentiles." Without break-ing a sweat I can offer solid evidence to counter all but one of the charges made against Paul in the first paragraph of this article (regrettably, I suspect he really was a bossy-boots). It is impossible to clarify these issues in a brief essay, but I can highlight some of the things that turned Paul's Dr. Jekyll into Saint Paul's Mr. Hyde.

Paul was misunderstood and misrepresented by opponents inside and outside the Jesus movement ("Christianity" as an entity separate from Judaism did not exist in Paul's time) throughout his ministry, and he fared no better after his death. Two thousand years of multiform exegetical abuse have turned his theology into something he and his first-century readers would be hard put to recognize. Paul was a brilliant, creative, highly original theologian/missionary who anticipated Christ's return and the inauguration of God's kingdom in his lifetime. He was, therefore, far less concerned with the long term than were leaders in second- and third-generation churches that were becoming increasingly institutionalized. Church leaders decided that Paul's letters could not be included in the New Testament canon unless his position on certain issues -- e.g., the egalitarian status of women and slaves -- was brought more into line with conventional wis-dom. So unidentified writers added material to Paul's letters and wrote other letters in his name. These interpolations and pseudonymous letters have served ever since to confuse and distort the interpretation of Paul's genuine letters.

Underlying all the wrong turns in Pauline interpretation is the early loss of Paul's historical, cultural, and rhetorical contexts. Setting his letters in their proper cultural context makes it clear, for example, that Paul did not "condemn homosexuality" because the concept as we understand it was unknown in antiquity. In the ancient world, the desire for same sex love was considered natural, but it concerned Paul because it sub-verted male and female roles in a society that put a premium on male mastery of passions and desires.

When it comes to figuring out Paul's attitudes toward Torah, Judaism, and the people of Israel, the number and variety of mistakes Christians have made, and continue to make, beggar the imagination. What most Christians think Paul said about Jews and Judaism is in fact the opposite of what he did say. Why? Because Christians ignored Paul's warning to remember that they were only branches grafted into the Judaic root. Christians read their own post-70 C.E. replacement theology back into Paul's letters, and this misstep led to a whole host of others. Christians assumed, unhistorically, that Paul was a "convert" to "Christianity." They assumed, incorrectly, that Paul's letters were written to and about Jews. They turned Paul's first-century Jews and gentiles into timeless, placeless, generic human beings. They allowed Augustine and Martin Luther to attribute their personal concerns to Paul. They twisted Paul's Greek to mean things it can't possibly mean. They decided that pieces that didn't fit their portrait of Paul -- e.g., "the law is holy" (Rom. 7:12) -- were signs of Paul's inconsistency rather than their own misunderstanding.

Christians have already awakened to the realization that mis-takes in their reading of the life, and especially the death, of Jesus Christ have translated into grievous suffering for the Jewish people, and they have begun to correct these mis-takes. The time has come to do the same for Paul, the apostle who was willing to give up Christ, if he had to, for the sake of his fellow Jews (Rom. 9:3). A corrected reading of Paul would put an amazing new face, not just on Jewish-Christian rela-tions, but on the way Christians proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. And everybody would like Paul a lot more.