← This Guy Sucked
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A
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description.
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Foreign welcome to.
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A
This Guy Sucked the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't lie about the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, as we all know, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Shailey Patel, who is an assistant professor of early Christianity at Virginia Tech. She's a historian of ancient heresy, magic and Christian self definition in the Roman Empire and has a book that just, just came out called Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature as well as another one coming out in October called Smoke and Mirrors, Discourses of Magic in early. I didn't check how to say this either. Early Petrine. Petrine, It's Pauline. So, okay, I guess you could say it.
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B
Either way, no one's going to stop you, right?
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A
For. For everyone at home, it's either one Smoke and Mirrors, Discourses of Magic and Early Petrine slash Petrine Traditions. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for fitting me into. Must be an insane writing schedule if that is your output.
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B
I've been writing for several years and everything's sort of coming out at the same time, so it looks like a lot.
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But yeah, you can also just be like, yeah, I just write. I'm so prolific. I'm such an incredible teacher.
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B
Very prolific indeed.
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A
I want to start with one of my favorite questions to open the show because I haven't asked this in a. In a few weeks. If you weren't a religious studies scholar, what other scholarly field would you go into or time period if you would still be a religious studies scholar? Like, what's something that you're sometimes like, Man, I wish I had thought about that before. Grad school.
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B
Dracula studies. There is a journal of Dracula studies.
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A
Cool.
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B
And when I Learned that I was like, well, what am I doing with my life? Clearly I made the wrong decisions. So, yeah, that's what I would be doing.
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A
Yeah, you do magic. So you could maybe find some way to do like call in vampires or something.
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That's going to be my next article.
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Right.
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Because I'm so prolific.
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A
So Multitude, the collective that the show is a part of also has a show called Spirits, which is about, like spirits and folklore and ritual and tradition and all kinds of stuff. But I sent them your Jesus was a wizard article and they were like, this is the coolest thing ever.
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B
Well, I love that. You know what's so funny is that I think we're talking about the same piece. Is it like the one in the conversation? Yeah. So I like that they were like, oh, this is so cool, or whatever, because I got lots of hate mail.
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A
After that piece, of course.
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And so one of the things I learned when I wrote that was like, you can just repeat scholarly orthodoxy.
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C
Right.
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This is not new. We've been thinking about whether or not Jesus was a magician for a long time.
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Oh, magician, not wizard. That's what it was. Sorry, keep going.
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B
Wizard. Yeah, I mean, we've been thinking about it for a long time.
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C
Right.
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B
And then I put out this public facing piece and then it just sort of becomes a kind of lightning rod.
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C
Right.
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And so a lot of the stuff that I say is pretty mainstream, scholarship wise, and then it just takes on a life of its own.
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A
Well, I mean, this is the podcast for you then, I guess, because there are a lot of things that we'll say and we'll like, every person who comes on here is a scholar, right? Like, has spent years and years and years of their life thinking about these, these things. And in many cases have written like the book on the person we're talking about. But we will talk about things that are uncontroversial in a scholarly sense. Like we'll say there is of some level of agreement that we all have around this person being shitty in one way or another. Like, we all kind of see this and the general public is like, you're wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. And I have to say, I don't know where the wires are getting crossed along the way here. But, like, these people really do know what talking about. Perhaps it is you at home who has never thought critically about this before.
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B
I mean, yes, I always tell people, just read the text.
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C
Right?
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A
Yeah.
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I'm an expert in early Christianity. I teach New Testament. Just read the Text. Yeah. Come back and tell me how wrong I am, but just read the text.
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A
Yeah, totally. And I think this will actually be a good episode for a lot of that, because this isn't really, like, giving anything away, but we're talking about someone who exists in early Christianity. And so much of what people think they know about Christianity has just been absorbed culturally and has no real textual basis. Like, they haven't actually explored the things that they feel that they know very strong or they feel strongly that they know about. So there's a level of, like, assumed knowledge that is not really, like, based in reality or based in Scripture or even, like, in text or anywhere other than just having it sort of filtered down that I find sometimes can be, like, hard to work with. And I'm sure that's much harder for you.
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Yeah, it can be hard. You know, sometimes you have people who haven't really unlearned this idea that different people can make different meanings out of the text.
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Right.
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Like, meaning is not inherent. We interpret texts and apply them, and that means that there's, like, different forms of Christianity. And so what you think, you know, may not be the end all and be all of all Christianity.
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Right.
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And I do agree that there's a lot of people assuming that they know what's in the text. Now, we know that religiosity is not limited to just texts.
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C
Right?
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Sure. But there's a whole lot of people assuming that they know what's in the text and then making prescriptions for how other people should live their lives based on what they think think is in the text and just isn't in the text.
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Right.
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Well, even at the time that the text. Here, we're talking about Scripture, but also people writing about scripture, the text is being produced, people aren't agreeing on it, which is in. In part why the text is being produced in the first place, is to. Is to establish answers to questions that are being asked. So it's for people who are listening. Like, the Tertullian of Carthage episode came out a few weeks before this one. You know, we talk in that episode about the idea that, like, no, there's a lot of arguing happening here about what the right way to interpret this is. And somehow that gets lost a lot of times in contemporary Christian discourse in which we're talking about, like, not scholarly discourse, but, like, just contemporary religious practice, where we kind of forget that, like, no, there's a lot of. There are a lot of differing opinions, even when this text is being produced, on what it's supposed to say how it's supposed to be interpreted.
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Yeah, well, you know what was really funny? If we're talking about, like, the current political moment, am I allowed to do that? Of course, course.
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Yeah. You can talk about anything you want.
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Yeah. I mean, one of the things that, like, I saw when, you know, there was that executive order about the White House faith office, I was like, oh, man, are we going to have a new schism?
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Right.
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Because Christians have been fighting about what Christianity is ever since Christianity started.
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Right.
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And so, like, you know, in the current political moment, we have a number of people who are like, you know, oh, it's Christian to do this or it's not Christian to do that. And I'm like, yeah, you guys. Like, actually, Christianity has never been one thing. And so, I mean, good luck with the schisms. What can I say?
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I mean, it's a. It's kind of a classic religious problem in terms of, like, public discourse on religion or public narratives around religion where people will say, it's actually deeply anti Christian to treat your neighbor this way. It's anti Jewish to do this thing. And actually what you're doing is you are not really the religion that you say you are because you're behaving in a certain way that's, you know, at odds or with this religion. And so there's this. It's this way of, like, discrediting people's practice of religion by saying that rather than saying perhaps our religious belief is more encompassing than we are willing to admit to it being. Because there can be disagreement and has forever been disagreement within it around what the right way to do it is.
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Right.
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So, yeah, it is. I see that a lot and can be hard to explain to people. Like when you say that, like when you say someone is not a real Christian if they do something, actually what you're doing is reinscribing the idea that there is a singular Christianity and there's.
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Not and there never has been.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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And this goes back to the whole, like, people making arguments like, oh, well, you know, pure Christianity, or in the apostolic age, they used to do this. So there's. There's always this sort of. Particularly when you're. You're invoking Christianity in order to make a political point.
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Right.
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Or in order to prescribe behavior for other people. Like, there's this assumption that there was this early pure form of apostolic Christianity and other forms, like, deviated from that. Yeah, we don't really have evidence of that either. We don't have evidence of a singular sort of Coherent, cohesive form of Christianity at its inception.
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Also, we haven't even really gotten into the meat of the show. But one of the interesting things when you sort of follow that thread is also to imagine that there is a pure Christianity, a pure religion in any sense. But we'll, we'll use Christianity because that's what we're talking about today. There's a pure Christianity that exists during the apostolic age. Okay, then why are they having to convince each other that they're right about things like why, why are you having to write letters to the Galatians, to Romans, to the Corinthians, to the. Why are you having to write these if there is an agreed upon on.
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Pure Christianity, why are you having beef with literally everybody? You are fighting with everybody. Like, if there's some sort of self evident, like, pure form of Christianity, you would think everybody would have signed on.
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Right.
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And we wouldn't have these, these letters or all of the theological debate the past 2,000 years. But we do.
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Right?
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And that is evidence enough to say, hey, people, Christianity has always been contested by people.
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Yeah. And I mean, I say this like every single episode, but people are people and have always been people since we.
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Oh, my God.
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Which means they disagree with each other, they're petty, they have grievances. There are all these things. And like to imagine that in this pure apostolic age, they don't behave like human beings. Like, obviously this is also part of the whole religious thing, but, like, they remain people. That's part of the deal. And they, they have different circumstances and live in different scenarios and have different ideas around things and different experiences of the world, but they remain, at their core people who do people stuff.
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Yeah. Human beings, we are messy bitches, right? Like, we're not gonna fall neatly into labels. We're not gonna do exactly what's prescribed by our affiliations, whether that be religious or communal or familial or whatever.
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Right.
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Like I sped on my way home today, right? Like I'm not being a perfect citizen.
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Right.
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So we exceed labels and rules and all of those things that are placed upon us. And I think that that makes humans really wonderful and beautiful, but it also makes us messy bitches. And to assume that, you know, ancient writers were not human or somehow superhuman, I think is probably not what you want as a historian. We do have, with respect to Christianity, this notion that the text itself has been divinely inspired.
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Right.
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And was inspired by God. And when it was written down, it was, it was written down without flaw.
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Right.
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And so I think that that sort of understanding has at times led people to not read these texts as they would other first century texts. And so if that's my appeal today.
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Right.
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It's like we learn so much if we can just read these texts as ancient texts.
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Yeah. And as you said, there are probably lifelong Christians who are listening to this, and we're not even necessarily talking about Christianity as a religion here, because this is a historical show. Like, we're doing this as a historical exercise, talking about a historical person and a history of a thought. Right. And it can be hard sometimes for people who don't live in the sort of academic, scholarly world, especially the world of, like, religious studies, where we're. It's. Religious studies is not about teaching people to be religious.
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Oh, no, we would be terrible at that, wouldn't we?
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Yeah. And it's also. It's specifically formulated in a lot of ways to not fight against that, but to really, like, make it a scholarly pursuit to say that there is worth in. In pursuing this scholarship of it outside of practicing it as a religious practitioner or as a religious leader. Like saying that, no, you can also study religion the way that you would study any other. Not any other, but like another field in the humanities. I hope people listening know that we're not just being like Christianity, because that is also something that I've been accused of doing, which is very much not my st. On any of this.
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Yeah. My response to that has always been like, no, I don't hate Christianity. Nobody gets a PhD in a thing if they hate it. It's just. It's too hard to spend, like, all those years writing a dissertation about a thing that you hate.
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Yeah.
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No one's gonna hate. Study a thing for 20 some years. Like, that's not.
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Yeah. And you could, like. Right. I do Nazis, so I hate them as people, but like the field. Being a historian, I really love being a historian. I really enjoy being a historian and the conversations that come out of talking around Nazism and stuff. Like, I like to have those things. It's always, like a fine line. So I'm. I'm hoping that people listening, especially after hearing the Tertullian episode as well, will, like, understand that we're not talking about Christianity as a religion, but we are talking about the way that ideas get filtered down through Christianity and become accepted as Christian orthodoxy or as Christian doctrine that we're not as sturdy, stable, set in stone as people imagine.
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Yeah.
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Right. Which messy bitch would you like to talk about today?
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Okay, so we're talking about Paul of Tarsus.
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Okay.
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That's right. St. Paul. Yes.
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The Paul.
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The Paul. Yeah, yeah. And I have so much beef with Paul. I have had so much beef with Paul throughout my entire career. So. Yeah.
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And it seems like you're not alone. I will say when I was researching for this show, you sent me a ton of books to, to read and check out and articles to look at. There's so much thought within both Christianity, but also religious studies and academic scholarship on Paul that I'm really excited to talk about. Talk about him. There's so many. People have so many feelings about him.
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We all have feelings. Yeah, yeah.
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A
So let's start with his sort of legacy and contribution so that people understand, have a sort of general foundational understanding of who he was. So we'll go through his life a little bit and then also what he contributes to, to Christian theology. Should we start with like his general influence? Like what would you say are his sort of major contributions?
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Yeah, so I think Paul is probably one of the most influential figures, if not the most influential figure we have from the era of Christian origins. And understand, I'm saying that like in comparison to the evidence that we have for Jesus too.
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Right.
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Paul is hugely influential. There are scholars, for example, who would say that Paul invented Christianity, that he's the one who wrote that we should be worshiping Jesus and we should have faith in Jesus's death and resurrection. Resurrection. Whereas Jesus is preaching the coming of the kingdom of God. And those two things may not be the same.
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Right.
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So there are scholars who make the argument that what we know of as Christianity as the worship of Jesus Christ and not, as you know, expectation of God's coming kingdom or anything like that, that can be traced to Paul. So Paul's influence is massive. Even if you don't buy that Paul quote invented Christianity, there are things that we get from Paul that have become, as you said.
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Right.
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Like part of Christian orthodoxy. Justification by faith, for example, is a thing.
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Right.
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Like if you believe that Christ died for your sins, that is massive. That's a huge part of Christian theology. The idea of being co. Crucified with Christ. Right, that too. Unfortunately, there are, There are some really shitty legacies that we get from Paul too, and other early Christian writers. And we can talk about those. But so many of what we call anti Semitism, so many of those tropes, we see them in Paul as early as Paul.
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Right.
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And Paul is writing in the 50s. So this is the earliest Christian texts that we have are the Pauline letters. So this is very early 20 some years after Jesus is executed.
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Right.
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And so some of the anti Semitic tropes get hardwired into Christian orthodoxy as well.
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Right.
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Like this idea that Jews killed Jesus. No, the Roman Empire executed Jesus. Like this is what they do. Rome doesn't need a lot of excuses to crucify people.
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Right?
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Yeah.
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So Paul has this what I would call a massive outsized sort of legacy on the development of Christian theology. I do not think that we would have Christianity in the same form if we did not have Paul.
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A
Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon Exclusive episode. To subscribe and listen to it in full, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked Shopify's.
- [18:33]
D
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- [18:44]
A
Thanks.
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D
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