Paul, our mother?

You have drawn attention to very different images of St Paul that scholars and artists have propagated. The year dedicated to the apostle produced a fresh re-imaging of him. Has this new literature anything of particular interest to us in Malta?

There has been indeed a new portraiture of St Paul. It has occurred in the context of re-thinking early Christianity in relation to the Roman Empire, and the Church today to contemporary Imperialism.

Even those who take part in the band march on St Paul's feast day in Valletta on Wednesday from 1 to 5 p.m., salute him as "the Apostle of the Nations". It used to be taken that "the Nations" referred to those who were not Jews. The new school of thought holds that the opposition established by Paul is even more between Romans on one hand and all other nations including Jews on the other, than between Jews and other nations.

There are several reasons why these scholars (such as the contributors to Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. by R. A. Horsley, 1997 or J. D. Crossan and J.L. Reed, In Search of Paul, 2004) are proposing this major change.

The most plausible is the following: The Romans themselves consistently divided the world between Romans, pre-destined by fate to conquer and dominate over everybody else, and the rest, whom nature fashioned to be subordinated, if not enslaved, to Rome. The audience Paul addressed in his letters was more likely to understand the phrase "the Nations" as it was understood in the culture to which they belonged, the Roman, rather than in the way in which it was understood by the Jews.

A very interesting slant is added by Davina Lopez to this theory (which incidentally makes it particularly pertinent to us in Malta). She documents extensively the fact that throughout Roman both literary and visual expressions, Rome, the Conqueror, is represented as male and the Nations, the Conquered, as female. "Conquest is portrayed as a penetrative, sexual act that sows the seed of a fertile Roman future."

Moreover, she studies at length such passages in St Paul's Letters as the fourth chapter of Galatians in which St Paul shifts his self-presentation from that of a strong penetrating male to weak penetrated female, and to anguished, painful, creative mother - "my children, for whom again I suffer birth pains until Christ is formed in you."

The scholars who present Paul as a hero of anti-imperialism begin by restricting consideration only to the Letters that are generally accepted to have come from Paul himself and not from disciples writing in his name. The passages of the epistles which underrate women are assigned by them to a deutero-Pauline author, that is a disciple writing in Paul's name after his death with not only a distinctly different literary style but also a content that softens the subversive and counter-conventional attitudes characteristic of his authentic writings.

Why did you say that these interpretations of Paul were particularly pertinent to the Maltese context?

Other scholars have pointed out that the Maltese islands seem to have remained even after the time when Paul came to Malta faithful to the religion which we associate with the Mother Goddess.

In the official Roman religion, as in the Greek, she had been replaced by a male chief god, Jupiter, corresponding to the Greek Zeus. The personification of the Nations as female and the Romans as male parallels the reversed gendering of the god-head. So Paul's self-presentation as a mother-figure in relation to the communities he founded is not only an expression of solidarity and belonging to the conquered but also bound to be more appealing to the Maltese.

Our ancestors are called in the Acts barbaroi i.e. they spoke neither Latin nor Greek, but probably Phoenician/Punic, which implies that Paul could best communicate directly with them through Aramaic/Hebrew. The persistence of Phoenician/Punic culture in Malta is testified not only with reference to language and religion, but also through the qualification of Publius as protos in terms of political institutions.

The Maltese translators of the Bible from Saydon onwards could not conclude whether the Greek word (literally meaning 'first') was a generic term simply indicating primacy of status or a precise, technical designation of a specific office. This uncertainty can be removed in the light of the monograph by Raimondo Zucca Svfetes Africae Et Sardiniae, Studi storici e geografici sul Mediterraneo antico (Carocci, Roma 2004).

Zucca studies the continuation under Roman rule of institutions set up in areas that had been under Punic governance, namely the sufes, co-existing sometimes with two other roles, the magistratus and the princeps. The bearer of the corresponding title to princeps in Carthage was the official responsible for the finances of the town.

If the hypotheses of Lopez and Zucca are correct, the significance of Publius in the account of Acts becomes more pregnant.

Is there any correspondence to such images of Paul in the characteristic Maltese representations of him, to which you drew attention on the occasion of the Pauline exhibition at the Wignacourt Museum?

Yes. Compare for instance, the paradigmatic Perez d'Aleccio painting of the Shipwreck in St Paul's church at Valletta with say that by Rubens at the Berlin State Museum. The Maltese image counterposes the Centurion as the figure of the Empire with that of Paul. The Roman becomes even more prominent in d'Aleccio's successors, such as Erardi at Rabat. This is not at all the case in Rubens. D'Aleccio's landscape is, as Theresa Vella pointed out, identifiably St Paul's Bay, indicating that the localisation of the event is significant. The landscape in Rubens, on the contrary, is a cosmic symbolisation, deploying the four elements, water, fire, air and earth.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.