The Bible and Disability with Isaac Soon

Isaac Soon People don't realize that they have this kind of normal template of an able body that- Yeah ... well, that's what every human should be. And there's a kind of cultural inertia to push bodies in that direction through prosthetics, through medication, through scriptural texts. Access to religious buildings, for example. Everyone's welcome to this church, but if you are a wheelchair user, you can use the ramp around the back.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Oh, man. I'm stoked. Today's a cool conversation. I'm looking forward to it. I think we got some good stuff coming. So- Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think this is going to be of great interest to folks.

Dan Beecher Yeah, absolutely, and a way of thinking about the Bible that I don't think most of our listeners are going to be used to. Mm-hmm.

Isaac Soon So, I'm excited about that. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Hopefully, this will provide some new tools to people who are out there looking for new lenses to put on the Bible. Yeah. And so, we have a guest today. Let me introduce our guest. This is Isaac T. Chung. He is a professor of New Testament at Crandall University in New Brunswick. How are things going in New Brunswick today, Isaac?

Isaac Soon Yeah, very good. A couple flurries, but we're doing all right. Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah, it was a- Are there times when there aren't flurries? It feels like...

Isaac Soon Only for three months in the summer, yeah. Yeah. All right.

Dan McClellan Well, I had to scrape ice off my windshield this morning when I took my daughter to high school.

Dan Beecher Yes, we know.

Dan McClellan We've broken that barrier for the year.

Dan Beecher So- I don't like it. I don't like it ...

Dan McClellan upset about that. Yeah. I am not okay. But Isaac recently published with Oxford University Press, a book entitled "A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul." And we're very excited to be talking about that book today. But I wanted to, before we get into the book itself, this is a field of study that a lot of folks are not going to be familiar with. Would you be willing to walk us through disability studies a little bit, help people draw a bead on what we're trying to do here?

Isaac Soon Sure, absolutely. Thanks for this and thanks for the opportunity to join you guys here. Disability studies is a wider field, it's about 40 or 50 years old. Of course, with the introduction of the ADA and more access to higher education for people with disabilities, there were more and more scholars who had disabilities or experienced disability, theorizing and trying to understand disability and its dynamics, of course, in concert with public accessibility and civil rights. So, there's been a lot of disability studies, connected in the humanities, in cultural studies, sociology for a long time. For the study of the Bible, it's a little bit younger. Mm-hmm. Probably about 20 or 30 years, since some of the earliest landmark works. There's one theological book, but an essential book for a lot of early Bible scholars is Nancy Eiesland's "The Disabled God." This is in 1995. Mm-hmm. And then we start having a number of new works in biblical studies in conversation with disability theory, disability studies, more widely in the humanities in the 2000s. So, there's edited volumes by Hector Avalos, Jeremy Skipper, Candida Moss, a lot of great works. So, there's been quite a few prominent scholars working in disability and New Testament, especially Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, lots more there. Hmm. Starting to burgeon a little bit in early Christianity. But there haven't been too many book-length monographs. To date, there's only been, as far as I know, three. One is in 2018 by one of my colleagues, Louise Gosbell. She has a great book on disability studies and in conversation with the Gospels. And then there's a great book by Rebecca Solfagg, "Renegotiating the Disabled Body" by SBL Press, also in 2018, actually. Hmm. And then my recent book on Paul as a disabled apostle. So, there's been a lot of scholars who've been working in the field, but I think there's critical momentum picking up and engaging with disability studies and disability scholars and philosophers and theorists to try and help us gain some language and understanding ancient texts. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Talk to us a little bit about how, because as I read the Bible, I think as most people read the Bible, there's not a lot of focus on description. And of course, the ancient world had a different relationship with what we now call disability- Mm-hmm ... than we have now. So, how do you approach a book that doesn't explicitly mention disability, really, from that viewpoint? What's the methodology? How do you approach that? Yeah.

Isaac Soon So, this is a really, really key question here. In the past, scholars have approached it from our own biomedical kind of categories. Like visual impairment or what we would call blindness, or people with hearing impairments, things like that. So, disabilities we recognize today. As scholars have started to think about disability more as kind of relative socially, so disability depends on a particular culture's bodily ideal, and there's no single bodily ideal that goes across, it's not trans-cultural, it's not timeless. Even today. If you're in North America, South America, if you're in Oceania or in Asia, there are different types of bodily ideals. And depending on those bodily ideals, then there can be different types of disability. So a lot of scholars in the past, method-wise, have approached disability in the New Testament from kind of medical taxonomy, medical categories, blindness or visual impairment, things like that. Where my study departs is that I try and look at conditions or physical embodiments that differ from Paul's or the environment of Paul's own bodily ideals, and then trace what I would think are disabilities in that particular time to understand them better. So that's why in my book, I look at three kind of unconventional disabilities at the time. One is circumcision, another is demonization or the idea that someone has some kind of evil spirit or oppressed by some kind of unseen spiritual force. And then another is a short stature, which may or may not relate to medical modern dwarfism or different conditions like that. Yeah, so understanding disability as relative to a particular culture, that it depends on the particular bodily ideals of that culture, help us to interrogate this kind of phenomena in the past.

Dan Beecher Before we dive into Paul, do talk a little bit about that relationship of a body to the ideals of the culture, because I don't think that a lot of people think of disability in that way. I think a lot of people think of disability as it's just obvious that your body doesn't work right, or that somebody's body is just disabled in the way the rest of us are able to do this, and that body isn't able to do this, and they don't think that it's a cultural construct. Yeah. So talk about how that could be and give us a background for that.

Isaac Soon Yeah, no, Dan, this is such an important point. The thing is, what you're pinpointing here is the idea of the normal or what Rosemary Garland-Thompson calls the normate, right? So for disability theorists and philosophers, one of the things they've really problematized and made complicated is the fact that normal is just innate to human nature, right? When you say, well, of course, if someone has a visual impairment, well, of course they would want to be able to see, or if they have a hearing impairment, well, of course they would want to be able to hear. What sociologists and theorists point out in that is, well, actually, that's just kind of the cultural stream which people, the bodily ideal which people have inherited from the culture that they live in. We live in a culture... I remember being at a wedding once talking about my work amongst a bunch of other medical doctors, and when I started to talk about disability as a social construct, they all started to laugh because for them in medical school, biomedical sciences, well, there's this very strict kind of set idea about, well, function and form, this is how it's supposed to be. But as we've taken a look at diversity in nature, diversity amongst humans, but then also diverse bodily ideals, then we start to interrogate, well, actually, wait a minute, it doesn't mean every single human has to kind of adhere to this bodily norm that I think that is real. It often is connected to the idea of human flourishing, right? So, if someone has a disability or is not able-bodied in this way, well then, are they living their most flourished life? And I think there's a lot of theorists and scholars who are trying to disconnect that idea that to live a flourishing or a fulfilling human life has to be connected to some kind of bodily norm there. So your question is really important because people don't realize that they have this kind of normal template of an able body that, well, that's what every human should be. And there's a kind of cultural inertia to push bodies in that direction through prosthetics, through medication, through procedures, through scriptural texts. Access to religious buildings, for example, right? Everyone's welcome to this church, but if you are a wheelchair user, you can use the ramp around the back. Yeah. Right? So all of it, our architecture, our language, it inculcates this kind of normal ideal body, the body that everyone should have, but in reality, no one really meets.

Dan McClellan I think you raise an interesting point. At the beginning of this discussion, you mentioned that the rise of disability studies really corresponds with the injection of a lot more people who are disabled into the academy. If you don't have something recognized as a disability, you're not really aware of the many different ways the world around us is constructed to serve the interests of the normal. Exactly. And I think one way that this might make it feel a little more intuitive to people who maybe aren't getting a grasp of what's going on here, I get sunburned really easily. Yeah. I have to put sunscreen on all the time. There are a lot of people in the world who never have to wear sunscreen because they have a lot more melanin in their skin. My skin could be seen as a disability if the opposite were normative within society, and I would be the one who was seen to be my body was not normal. My body was impaired by the fact that I get burned easily by the sun. But as it happens, that's not how our society is constructed, so that is not something that is seen as a disability. Yeah, absolutely.

Isaac Soon It's relative to a particular time and place. Yeah. You're absolutely right that if that condition generated stigma, if you lost access to things because of your skin condition, if you were not provided with economic means or medicine or access to healthcare, if you were stigmatized on the Sunday, blessed are the people who don't have burnt skin. So all those kind of cultural effects start to impact and start to lead to someone saying, "Well, actually, yeah, maybe that is a problem."

Dan McClellan Which I think is a reason we need to take folks seriously when they're sharing their own experiences, even if we may not be able to sympathize, even if we may not have ever seen the world through that lens. And I think that's why disability studies is something that needs to be taken seriously. This is giving us a lens that we otherwise would probably just ignore. Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Well, and it's funny, one of the things that sort of my brain went to as I was reading your book, Isaac, is I'm just thinking about normal bodies in scare quotes versus just bodies that are different. I know that for the longest time, and I think a lot of people probably think of short stature, dwarfism, whatever, as a disability, but wouldn't think of a person equally abnormally tall as disabled. You know what I mean? Only the deviations that society decides are too different or different in an uncomfortable way or whatever become labeled in that way. Yeah.

Isaac Soon It's those extremes, right? If you look at the way, for example, the exploitation of disabled people in sideshows or carnival things, you would see those extremes of people who had short stature, but then also people who had excessive stature. Mm. A seven-foot tall person. So yeah, and it doesn't seem intuitive, but it's there.

Dan Beecher So with that in mind, dive into Paul a little bit. Let's talk about what we're looking at in the New Testament with this lens. How are you getting to Paul?

Dan McClellan And before we do that, I want to point out that this is a little bit of a departure from normal disability studies engagement with the New Testament. You have a paper in "The Journal of Disability and Religion" where you point out the overwhelming majority of scholarship in this field that's treating the Bible is talking about the Gospels. Primarily, I imagine, because they have a historical narrative, so we're talking about characters rather than these epistles. So your approach is a little off the beaten path by trying to examine the author rather than the character within the text. And I love the discussion of an angel of Satan at the beginning. What's going on with this angel? Yeah.

Isaac Soon So Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 12, he talks about this kind of thorn in the flesh, this angel of Satan, which has been given to him, it's been put in his body, and he keeps praying to God to take it away, and God doesn't take it away. And he kind of makes peace with it and says, well, and actually incorporates it into his theology, kind of plays into this paradox of, well, if it's here, it has to be here for a theological reason, so maybe there's strength in kind of weakness, and this kind of lines up with his imitation of Christ, this kind of weird self-flagellation of following the kind of brutalization of Christ's body in a very close way. But that Paul talks about this thorn in the flesh and calls it an angel of Satan. A lot of scholars and a lot of people in the past have given a multitude of different diagnoses. It's malaria, it's facial pain, it's this or that. But the phrase angel of Satan is actually kind of really obvious because for ancient readers in the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world, they would've just understood this as some kind of malevolent spirit. They don't live in a kind of disenchanted world like we do, where demons are mental illness or some kind of cognitive impairment. For them, these kind of forces are real. In my book, I'm not arguing about whether those things are real or not, but for Paul's readers- Right ... they're thinking about this, if they hear this, he's got this angel of Satan, and it's in his flesh, it's gone into his body, then in this way, he must be afflicted by some kind of malevolent force.

Dan McClellan And this is something we see in different places in the Gospels as well. Yeah, absolutely. This notion that if somebody is disabled, this is a product of some kind of either possession by a demon or they have done something wrong and, in some way, they're being afflicted by some kind of malevolent or benevolent divine force that is either punishing them or exploiting their sin or something like that.

Dan Beecher It's such a good thing that nobody talks about that anymore, and nobody- Yeah ... believes that someone being disabled is caused by demons anymore. That would be terrible if people- Yeah. Wow. It's that- ... still did that.

Isaac Soon There is a real sense, and it carries forward to today, as you're kind of suggesting, Dan. There's a real sense in the Gospels where there's a fear, like the body is a house, right? And there's this fear that there's these forces that are going to kind of penetrate and do harm. And so yeah, for the ancient mindset of Paul's hearers, they're hearing this thing and it affects his reputation. Is this person to be trusted? How does it work that he's an agent of the Holy Spirit, but then also is afflicted by some kind of demonic force?

Dan McClellan And you talk in the book about this notion of penetration, that you have the arrows and things like that of God- Yeah ... or these forces that penetrate and, in my own book, I've discussed the idea of God's spirit penetrates into people to take possession of them, like Saul. Yeah. Most translations say, "The spirit of God will overcome you," or something like that. Right. But the verbal root means force entry- Yeah ... into, and then you will be given a new heart, and you will be a new person, so they're benevolent but also malevolent forces. Yeah. Like Jesus saying, "You have to bind the strong man- Yeah, exactly ... who's invaded the house," and- Exactly. Yeah ... things like that. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Although, with Paul, it is Yeah, I think it's interesting that in, what is it? We're in second Corinthians, is that where we're in? Yeah. Where he says, "To keep me from being too elated." It seems to indicate that the Lord is who gave the thorn in the flesh. Yeah. It says a messenger of Satan, but it was given to him by the Lord. Yeah, absolutely.

Isaac Soon So that confuses a lot of people today because there's this idea that God and this kind of Satan or kind of evil forces are pitted against one another, but that kind of competition motif, I think, doesn't really come out in full force till like second century. In ancient Judaism, it's a theodicy problem if you have demonic forces and satanic forces running around without the consent of the God of Israel. Hmm. So there's this idea that even though this demonic force might be an agent of Satan, it's still under the jurisdiction, still under the sovereignty of this God of Israel, which is why Paul appeals to the God of Israel to take it away, which complicates our kind of understanding of ancient cosmology that, well, it's not Satan and his forces and God over here. It's actually, well, God's also stringing along these other forces. Just like Dan talks about with Saul getting filled with the spirit of God.

Dan McClellan I wanted to ask about something you mentioned in the previous discussion. You talked about weakness versus strength, and weakness is a theme that keeps popping up in these epistles. And you talk at some length in the book about the contrast of weakness and strength and how a weakness can be a strength. Could you talk a little bit about the theme of weakness in Paul and in your book?

Isaac Soon Yeah, sure. It's a great question. Weakness is an important topic for Paul, and it's very wide-ranging. The Greek word he uses, asthenia, can mean a lot of things. It can mean sickness, it can mean moral failing. It's a very kind of broad term, and Paul uses it in all these things. He characterizes his own suffering as weakness. He characterizes his beatings as weakness. He characterizes his kind of ministry as kind of this ministry of weakness. This paradox is central for Paul. So in 2 Corinthians, one of the things that he's doing is also he's defending his apostleship. People are saying, "This guy writes really angry letters, but when he's with us in person, he has such a weak body. Why should we listen to him?" And Paul, rather than saying, "Well, actually, I'm really strong," he actually doubles down on the weakness and says, "Actually, well, if you want to see how much of a fool I can be, here's how I'm a fool. I've been whipped. I've been given a whipping five times. I've been beaten by rods. I've been shipwrecked. I have anxiety about the church. I've been let down in a basket. What the heck's about that? And then I've got this demon in my flesh." Who is weak and who is not weak? And so he's kind of charting this course. He's headed towards Jesus as this kind of ultimate paradox of strength and weakness because Jesus dies on a cross. It's a seditious death, but it's this kind of powerful event which breaks death and allows the spirit of God to pour out, just Jeremiah 31, right? To entry into people's bodies, even in Gentile bodies. So this kind of cataclysmic event in Christ requires this strange paradox where weakness in disease, in broken bodies, in the kind of subjugation of human flesh to all manners of human violence suddenly can become this kind of means of grace, of salvation, whatever you want to call it. And Paul has no choice but to really double down on this concept of weakness as a strength because for him, it's central to the scandal of the cross. It's central to Jesus' kind of messianic identity, and Paul following in that way.

Dan McClellan So he's kind of appropriating this idea and leveraging it to advance his rhetorical interests rather than try to apologize for it and try to back away from it. Yeah.

Isaac Soon I don't know if he's appropriating idea from Jesus, for example, but I think his construction of Jesus' ministry as a ministry of death, that's 2 Corinthians 4. Mm-hmm. I think he kind of expands on that into his own life. In the same way that Ignatius of Antioch in the second century, he's on a martyrdom to Rome. He's kind of playing up that scenario. Paul also, too, he's wrestling with his own bodily weakness, and he's trying to theologize his way out of it. He's trying to rationalize it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Beecher So for instance, in 2 Corinthians 12, he says that he appealed to the Lord about the thorn in his side, and the Lord said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." So yeah, there's that power weakness- Yeah ... sort of construct. When I was reading about this, I was put in mind of Dan and I did an episode a few weeks ago where Jordan Peterson talked about how he couldn't stand the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth, and really everybody should be monsters, and they should be strong and just have a sword but keep it sheathed. And I just thought if weakness, if Paul, sort of one of the great progenitors of the Christian movement, can talk so powerfully about weakness being owning your weakness and weakness being the strength that he needs, weakness being the thing that empowers him- Yeah ... it feels so against the whole alpha male Christianity line that we're seeing right now.

Isaac Soon Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Dan. I think people tend to read Paul as kind of, if you read his Galatians letter, he's an angry dude, and he can be quite forceful. But people can mistake that for machismo. Paul is the opposite. In many cases, he puts his own gender on the line. His masculinity, by ancient Greek and Roman terms, threads very closely to the effeminate, and I'm thinking of my work of my colleague, Grace Emmett here. Paul lives a very weak ministry, a weak life. And so it makes sense that for the Corinthians, who are kind of this New York of the ancient world, who have philosophers and sophists and orators pass through their city, and they're great speakers. It's TED Talks, right? These are men who are talking about, I don't know what they're talking about, but they're talking great things. And then you have this person come along, and he's talking about this Jewish guy who died on a cross, and he's not a very good speaker, but he seems to have a lot to say. Why should we trust this person? I think it's a misunderstanding for people to think of Paul as this kind of man's man. He really, at least in his letters, the way he self-portrays himself, is quite the opposite.

Dan McClellan So we're not going to have Mark Driscoll pounding the pulpit about Second Corinthians two anytime soon.

Isaac Soon Oh, you never know. You never know with Driscoll.

Dan McClellan Another indication that all of the New Testament is not reducible to a single outlook as well, but there are different rhetorical goals and different levers that are being pulled to try to achieve those things. Yeah. Now, throughout the book, this thorn in the side is kind of treated as a great mystery. Do you have an idea about what? You talk about this as something that is represented as perhaps some kind of demonic possession as an interpretation of a disability. Right. What are some of the ways that you explore that mystery?

Isaac Soon Yeah, I think it's connected to the story of him kind of having this apocalyptic vision of going up to the third heaven, and he's seen things which he's not supposed to talk about. And so I connect it to, I don't know if it's a verbal impairment or something like that, but he's restricted in his speech that if he shares this kind of divine material, then it kicks off or triggers this thorn in the flesh. But other than that, I don't try to dive into diagnosing specifically what it is, particularly because scholars for the last 200 years have thrown all manner of diagnoses to it. And one of the things with disability studies is there's an avoidance of retro-diagnosis, the idea that we can use medical, our instruments today to try and diagnose things in the past. We just don't have that kind of information. And it also kind of reduces Paul's experience to diagnosis, right? Like what this condition is. If I just figure out what it is, that's it. Yeah. But the more significant thing is that this has social ramifications for Paul. It affects his interpretation of his letters. And there's a whole wider network of stigma attached to that. So I think that's kind of where I gesture to in the book. Yeah.

Dan Beecher It seems like it's much more important that we know how, whatever his disability is, it's much more important that we know how it affected his relationship with the rest of the world than what the specific thing is. Mm-hmm. But it is a physical thing, right? In Galatians, he talks about a physical infirmity. Is that right? So there's something- Yeah, you're thinking of Galatians 4. Yeah.

Isaac Soon For 2 Corinthians, this thorn in the flesh, I do think it is physical, at least from what we can tell from Paul's letters. He does think that it's physical. It's in his flesh. It's not metaphorical. It's not kind of made up. But beyond that, I hesitate to guess into the past.

Dan McClellan Now, the next thing you move into is a discussion of circumcision as a disability. Now, in a Jewish world, this was the idealized body. Absolutely. But Paul's not really operating within an exclusively Jewish world. How is this a disability for the Roman world? Yeah.

Isaac Soon So great question. So, and you're touching on a really important point there about the relativity of bodily ideals, right? For Jewish communities, for ancient Israelites and Hebrews, and for North African people, other people in the Levant, circumcision was an ideal part of their body, part of what they were. In the wider Greco-Roman world, though, there's a lot of stigma towards anything other than men having their foreskin intact. Foreskin and male genitalia are just all over the place in the ancient world. Anyone who's gone to a museum and seen a Greek statue, you're a 12-year-old and you start giggling.

Dan McClellan Or a gift shop in Athens- Yes. Exactly ... where they're going to be hanging from the walls.

Isaac Soon All those secret potions, the secret phallus potions and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Was I supposed to stop giggling at ding-dongs on-- Because I keep doing it. I feel like I maybe didn't make it past that stage. Well, but that's the job.

Isaac Soon That's what they're supposed to be doing, right? In the ancient world, you have male genitals, you've got phalluses, which are there, oftentimes they're used apotropaically to avert your eye from envy. They're there to make you laugh. They're there to put you into, if you intend to harm someone else, to change your mind, to be a distraction. But in the ancient world, the foreskin was important, covering particularly, and for your listeners, we're going to get physiological here. So covering the glans of the penis is a very, very important thing because exposing that glans suddenly evokes all those apotropaic, a lot of stigma, right? It's either in a sexual context, it's either in- ... a votive context where people are offering gifts to the gods for healing. There's also the context of gods of fertility like Priapus, who have giant phalluses. In frescoes in Pompeii, I think there's a fresco of Priapus that he has diphallia. He has two penises, and they're giant, and they're exposed. So the exposure of the penis is a powerful act. It's often associated with hypersexuality, sometimes enslavement. And in the ancient world, in Greek and Roman society, one of the few times you would see circumcised penises is on the bodies of people that they considered barbarians. So we have drawings of, for example, Egyptians. Ancient Egyptians practiced circumcision, and that was a part of their ideal body. But we have images of Hercules fighting Egyptian priests, and the artist has intentionally made their bodies look like animals, and their clothing is extra short to expose the kind of barbarian genitalia that they have. The other place which I discovered in my research, which is in the book, where you see circumcision is also on centaurs, so these kind of hybrid human ancient monster beings. So there's this idea that if you're circumcising, you're cutting off foreskin, or you're altering genitalia in some way, it's a representation of incivility or uncivilized kind of culture. And so that's where some of the stigma towards circumcision as a disability arises.

Dan McClellan So would it be accurate to say that the idea is that the exposure of the glans is reserved for certain compartmentalized domains of society? Yeah. And outside of that, it is evoking the wrong things. It's considered in it. So it's kind of a modest is hottest approach- Yeah, exactly. ... when it comes to- Exactly ... the ancient penis. And so that- Exactly ... this is othering them. People who are exposing this outside of the domains in which it is appropriate are othered, and they are- Yep ... barbaric. They're doing this wrong. And so in that sense- Yeah ... they've got a big problem. Yeah.

Isaac Soon It's a faux pas, right? And they're really conscious about it. You've got athletes in Rome or in Greece who intentionally pin or tie up their foreskin so that the glans doesn't get exposed in the middle of a spectacle. Right.

Dan McClellan So there's a real- Can get painful, I imagine, if things go sideways. Yeah. And then you have operations as well, what I imagine to be extremely painful operations to hide circumcision as well.

Isaac Soon Yeah, exactly. Usually under the term epispasm, which can describe a variety of different procedures. But in the medical literature, there's a lot of different procedures. If the foreskin of a child is too short, these are the applications or the ways you can stretch it out. But if it's Jewish circumcision, these procedures might not work because it's too extensive to do any repairs. So even in the medical language there, the need to have a medical procedure to restore, quote-unquote, "genitals to a particular condition," that's signifying of a disability dynamic happening there.

Dan Beecher So help me understand Paul's relationship to circumcision and what he says about it.

Isaac Soon Yeah, Paul's relationship to circumcision is actually really complicated, because as I argue in the book, he actually participates in the stereotyping of Jewish people and circumcision. One of the weird things that he does in his letters is, because he talks about two ethnic groups, the Jewish people, and then the other group who he calls the nations, but also known as Gentiles or non-Jews. And one of the weirdest things he does in his letters is he names these ethnicities by types of male genitalia. He calls Jewish people the circumcision, and he calls non-Jews, not the uncircumcision. He says the foreskin, acrovostia. That's specific anatomical language. Wow. So you have these letters being read out in the community, and this guy yelling about the circumcision and the foreskin, and people are like, "What's going on here?" His ethnic framework is being categorized by these terms. But by using circumcision and making it synonymous with Jewish believers, he's participating in the reinforcement of circumcision as stereotypically Jewish. So he's actually participating- It's an identity marker. Exactly. So it's an identity marker, but he's participating in this kind of stereotyping of Jewish people. And it gets complicated because, and I know you guys just had Matt Thiessen on, talking about the Gentile problem. The Gentile problem, part of it is that we have some early Christian believers who are not Jewish, but who feel compelled or are being forced to circumcise. Mm. And Paul warns about this in Philippians, in his letter to the Philippians in chapter 3. And he calls people who are forcing other people to circumcise, he calls them this very offensive term. He calls them the mutilation, katatome. And that's an intentional play on words with circumcision, which is peritome. Mm-hmm. So how can this be a difference? If these people are going around wanting to circumcise Gentiles, what's wrong with that? Well, for Paul, Jewish circumcision is peritome. It's fine. But if it's a circumcision on a non-Jewish body, on Gentiles, it's a mutilation. So when Paul does that, he again is participating in disabling a particular type of circumcision. Circumcision on a Jewish body, perfectly fine. Circumcision on a non-Jewish body, Paul treats as an impairment. Wow.

Dan Beecher That is a fascinating way of looking at it. And maybe you can help me. Maybe I should have you just help me draw this line because that feels like a leap, like thinking of that, something that isn't even exposed, that isn't even obvious unless it is chosen to be exposed. Hmm. How does that then impair a person? Yeah.

Isaac Soon So, if you think about impairment only in terms of medical pain or within a particular biomedical framework, it might not fit. But impairment is often defined as form and function. And because the removal of the foreskin changes the form of the human body, right? So then it becomes a deviation from the norm, which is foreskin. But then also functionally, when you remove the foreskin, then there's no opportunity for the glands of the penis to be covered up and therefore hidden away. So therefore, it's always exposed, always a marker of uncivilizedness or hypersexuality, constantly exposed like that. So that's how I would argue impairment there with regards to form and function. When circumcision happens, at least for Greeks and Romans, that's how they're thinking about it as an impairment. Interesting.

Dan McClellan So I wonder if we have any modern analogs to this idea that circumcision on a Gentile body is impairment. It strikes me that if this is being used as an ethnic identity marker, that this is crossing ethnic boundaries in an inappropriate way. Right. Somewhat similar to the idea of appropriating practices from- Sure ... groups that you're not a part of. Sure. But in this case, it is maybe not cultural appropriation so much as you're doing something that Paul thinks is not necessary and is harming yourself just for the sake of trying to inappropriately cross this boundary. Is that analogous in any way?

Isaac Soon To contemporary issues? Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, not necessarily just Jewish folks. Right. But is the idea of cultural appropriation something that at least resonates with what Paul might be saying? Yeah. Hmm.

Isaac Soon I'm not sure that Paul views it as a kind of a cultural appropriation. I think he thinks that if, in Galatians 5, he talks about if people get circumcised, they're going to be circumcised or cut off from Christ. So for him, it's theological. Okay. It creates a theological problem, that if you're going to be circumcised, it's a whole host of theological issues. So I don't think he's necessarily worried about Gentiles living like Jewish people. I remember having a conversation with a colleague, Mark Nanos. He said, "I think Paul would be happy for Gentiles to live as Jewish people, but not if those things become the reason why they think that they have received righteousness from God," right? So this Christ Jesus as a key factor for faith is essential there. And if circumcision fills in that place or any Sabbath-keeping fills in that place, then that becomes a theological problem for Paul. So I'm not sure if it's cultural appropriation- Okay ... that he's concerned about, but more concerned about the kind of theological consequences of taking on something that wasn't necessarily meant for them. Interesting. Yeah.

Dan Beecher So we've talked about a thorn in the side. We've talked about circumcision. There's a third wing of your discussion. Mm-hmm. Will you introduce us to that?

Isaac Soon Yeah, sure. So the last part of the book, I talk about Paul possibly being short-statured, so having a kind of lower than average, below average height. And listeners might be curious as to where I find this information. I alluded to it in the first part of this episode, talking about Paul being lowered in a basket in 2 Corinthians 11. And I tell the story one time, I'm sitting reading the New Testament. My kids are climbing all over me. I think it's probably mid-COVID, early COVID days. And I'm reading this passage, and a thought occurs to me. I think, "Well, how small do you have to be to be fit into a basket," right? Being lowered from a city wall, that's a pretty serious kind of thing. I'm not into physics, so I couldn't calculate it or anything. But I thought, "Well, maybe that's strange. I'll look into the word." And when I studied the language used in 2 Corinthians 11, but also repeated in Acts 12, it's a really small basket. And I connected it to an early Christian apocryphal tradition in the Acts of Paul and Thecla. So that's a life of Paul from the second century. Very, very popular, actually. And it actually has a physical description of Paul. He was monobrowed, he had aquiline nose, he had bowed legs, and he was short. Mikros, that he uses this Greek term. The term mikros, short, is not just kind of he's a couple inches shy of an average height. Short is used almost pathologically, that this person has a below average, way below, possibly short stature. And I go through a number of examples of where this term, someone who is short, is used to describe someone with short stature or possibly dwarfism.

Dan Beecher And what do you draw from the idea of a short-statured Paul? Where do you go with that? Yeah.

Isaac Soon So it heads into, of course, in one of the chapters, I look at how short people or a person with short stature and people with dwarfism are stigmatized and there's negative cultural violence towards them, sometimes literal violence, when they're tokenized and put into gladiator fights as boxers. What the book tries to do with all of these different types of disabilities, whether it's the angel of Satan, whether it's circumcision, or whether it's short stature, is that it's not just, well, we've discovered this fact, that's great, but it actually has implications for how we read Paul's letters. And so what I do in the last chapter with Paul's short stature is I reread sections of Paul's letters where he uses his short stature theologically, but also sometimes to describe his own self-harm. So I talk about Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 says, "I'm the least of all apostles. I'm an ectroma," which is almost like a miscarriage or an abortion. That's very strong language. And interpreters have tried to figure out what's going on. Why does he say that in that particular place? What relevance does it have? And I argue, well, actually, that term is also synonymous with people with short stature because they're viewed as synonymous with premature births, and that explains the shortness of their height, the proportion of their bodies. And so Paul pokes fun at himself there by using a stereotype for people with short stature. Elsewhere, there's this athletic imagery that Paul uses where he says, "I train the body, and I train myself up and I pummel myself or beat myself." And this is often interpreted and it's valorized, like Paul's working up his body, he's getting ready. But I draw on the idea that short statured people were also known as pugilists. They were also known as boxers. And so this idea that Paul draws on him being a short statured person who's repeatedly punching himself and boxing in the ancient world, sometimes they have metal or stones strapped into their boxing gloves. So he's actually self-harming himself. And this touches back onto this weakness and strength thing that Paul almost views his ministry as this kind of self-flagellation, that he's hurting himself. And so it casts a different light on, well, actually, it's not a valorous image, a valorizing image, but it's actually a dangerous image of an apostle who is using self-harm as a model for this kind of Christian life. So it complicates that.

Dan Beecher Well, and he doesn't just talk about self-harm, he talks about having the crap beat out of him. You alluded earlier to the list of woes that he's encountered in 2 Corinthians 11. Yeah. Where he talks about just all of the ways that he has just been completely pummeled. Yeah. Which in no way is he talking about the way that he, as a champion, fought back and valiantly took the day or anything.

Isaac Soon Oh, no. Yeah. He's not fighting back. He's just taking the punches.

Dan McClellan It sounds like there are a lot of different convergences of concepts of weakness here. I'm short, I get beat up a lot, I have this thorn in my side that I have. Yeah. So it sounds like he's really doubling down on the rhetoric of weakness. But Paul is also the innovator of what we think of today as Christianity and responsible probably for its most significant spread in its early years. Hmm. Do you think that this rhetoric was instrumental in that? Was this a big part of the success of Paul, or do you think that Paul was successful in spite of this rhetoric?

Isaac Soon Yeah, this is a really interesting question. I think in some ways, Paul is influential because he's following this turn-the-other-cheek motif with Jesus. Like the way through to victory. This might be idealized, but at least the idealization in early Christian texts is you don't respond with that kind of violence back. You accept in weakness and then that's your witness to the community. Mm-hmm. There does seem to be a shift, of course, when Christianity becomes state powerful, and then you have all the bodies that would normally be administering violence towards Christians, now the Christians are in control of that. Right. And so there's a kind of forgetting of that weakness, of that not trying to fight back, not trying to punch back, not trying to relay evil for evil.

Dan McClellan I think it's so fascinating that the Book of Revelation is one of the primary proof texts for that kind of imperialist approach to Christianity that results in things like the Crusades and stuff like that, which is ironic in light of the fact that you have the lamb slain as one of the images that keeps coming up in the Book of Revelation as well. Right. So you have the convergence of these two polar opposite ideals in Revelation, but it depends on who's doing the deploying, what gets centered and what gets marginalized. Yeah. And so today we have a lot of folks, particularly on social media, you and I see it on Twitter all the time- Yeah ... who promote that warrior kind of Christian ethos associated with Western ideals, if you can even label something Western. What do you think the implications are for this kind of research, for this kind of study to how people not just read the New Testament today, but deploy the New Testament today?

Isaac Soon Yeah, I think it's a great question. My hope for the research, I think my first hope is that people pay attention to disabled experiences, that disability is not peripheral to Paul or to the development of the New Testament, but that it's central to it. And a very easy way in to think using the New Testament for ethics, whether you copy and paste it as normative or prescriptive, or whether you use it in dialogue, or whether you just think it's an interesting thing to read. So my hope for the book is that people start to pay attention to disabled experiences and how it's central and formative in the early years of the Christian and the Jesus movement. It is a response in many ways, an alternate response in many ways to the kind of Christian culture we see growing and flourishing in North America that wants to hijack or glorify an ideal human body which is violent and strong and powerful and dominates and subdues other people. I think my work, especially, we've been talking about weakness today. I hope my work would play into a kind of alternate portrayal of, well, if you're going to do that, that's fine, or maybe it's not fine, but don't connect it to the New Testament as though it's inherent in the text there, right? Yeah. Paul is an apostle of weakness, and that just doesn't square with the kind of model he presents in following this Jesus. So if you're going to do that, don't try and connect it to anything that Paul thinks is righteous or right or exemplary. Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 2, he says, "We're in a triumphal procession," but the triumphal procession is not as victors. They're the slaves, they're the captives who have been taken and are being led to Rome to be sacrificed and made as example. Yeah. So I think it really is an overturning of this idea that this kind of manly man or super strong, or there's no weakness in Christianity. Actually, at the heart of the early Christian missions, it was weakness.