Below is an exchange between Cavan Concannon and Robyn Walsh on Concannon’s new book, Profaning Paul (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Robyn Walsh: Thank you, Dr. Concannon—Cavan— for joining me today to talk about this exciting new book— Profaning Paul— with University of Chicago Press. I have so many questions and not enough time, so allow me to jump right into it: first and foremost, can you tell me why ethics in the study of Paul matter?
Cavan Concannon: I think that ethics in the study of Paul matter because we have neglected that conversation outside the currents of biblical scholarship influenced by feminist biblical criticism. The mainstream of the field has been mostly interested in articulating itself as a historical enterprise and in thinking about ethics only in the narrow sense of method. For the field, ethics has meant attention to how we present ourselves as historians to the rest of academia, rather than theologians. The main problem with this ethical myopia is that it has centered a white male perspective. This has meant that interpretation is limited by the horizon set by white male Protestants in the nineteenth century, with their own political and theological interests. The widespread acceptance of historicism (which we call the historical critical method) as the dominant method in the field has also meant that a whole bunch of theological work gets done outside of view, blocked out by the rhetoric of objectivity, rigor, and scientism that attend to how our field articulates its historicism.
If you’ve ever spent time at or on an academic panel on Paul, you’ll know what I mean. Pauline scholars often talk about how rigorously historical their frameworks and perspectives and interpretations are. And yet, it’s often quite clear (though rarely to the individual scholar) that this “rigorous” work is deeply inflicted by a whole host of unarticulated theological commitments. What I'm interested in with Profaning Paul is trying to be transparent about the ethical and theological commitments that people bring to the study of Paul or the study of biblical literature, not to strip those things away, but to ask a different set of questions about how one interprets an archive of material like this. I want to stop pretending that we’re all just disinterested historians.
Robyn Walsh: Could you say a little bit more about the task of evaluating the so-called “historical Paul”? How can— and should— that kind of endeavor differ from traditional approaches to theory and method in the field?
Cavan Concannon: I think we are about to face a huge epistemological and methodological problem in our field. There are corners of the field right now that are asking really difficult questions about how we have access to the texts that we claim to interpret. I’m thinking here of scholars like Brent Nongbri and Liv Ingeborg Lied. Their work, along with others, is going to force us to face up to the fact that our manuscripts are much later than we have often thought. And it’s not entirely clear to me that the result of that work is going to give me the confidence to say that I have Paul’s words in front of me when I open my Nestle-Aland. And the problems proliferate from there to most of our “earliest” sources. It’s not entirely clear to me that we’ll be able to keep doing the kind of historical work that has been centered in the field since the nineteenth century. Those projects may be too hard for some people to give up and they may just continue to go on doing things, as usual. I suspect that a large number of people in our field will do that. But I want to take the problem of our sources (and the access to historical persons that we presume lie behind them) seriously, so I am not entirely clear that there is a historical Paul yet that we can talk about. I think we would need to think more critically and more carefully about our surviving manuscripts before I am ready to figure out what might be said about the historical Paul
So, in that regard, I think that anytime we’re talking about interpreting Paul we’re talking about interpreting an archive of materials that has come to us through a process that’s opaque to us. Sometimes we have an understanding of how that collecting and editing process worked, but the details of how Paul’s letters circulated are largely unavailable to us.
We also, I would argue, receive the Pauline archive as always already framed within a whole set of assumptions and histories that we rarely take into account in the field, except insofar as we occasionally dismiss those frameworks as being theological. And so, part of the goal of this project is actually to force us to think about what, to use a really, really nerdy term, are the prolegomena that need to be sorted out before we can say we're studying Paul. What that entails is interrogating the theological frameworks that surround Paul even as he transitions into secularized spaces, whether that be the secular academy or whether that be philosophical conversations, while also interrogating the work that Paul’s archive has done over the last two millennia. One of the things that I would push biblical scholars to do would be to spend less time and energy on what Paul said and to devote more time and attentiveness to how these texts get put to work. This is not necessarily a call to reception history, which often presumes that we have access to Paul’s intention against which we can measure later readings. Rather I would push biblical scholars to work on the cultural history of biblical texts. This is something that we can do; however, we have not arranged the priorities of the field to value such work. We are too comfortable engaging in the project of recovering the voice of the text and not comfortable enough with analyzing what people have done and still do with these texts.
Robyn Walsh: This is a perfect segue into my asking: who is this book for?
Cavan Concannon: I really don’t know who it’s for. I am the author, of course, but I’m not sure that I’m totally in control of my intentions. Were I to psychoanalyze myself, I would probably say that I was mad at biblical scholars and mad at people who have done terrible things with Paul’s archive. I would also say that I am frustrated at those with whom I might agree politically or theologically yet who claim to base their theology or politics on a recovery of the “real” Paul. Such work hides the agency of the interpreter behind the facade of a “historical” Paul and also acts as a means of avoiding a real grappling with the legacy of Paul’s archive.
Robyn Walsh: Before I go into other questions related to methodology, what kind of outcomes are you hoping for from this book? In terms of new conversations, you just raised one related to manuscript traditions. But what other aspects of the field do you want to see changed?
Cavan Concannon: I would like to see nondisciplinary conversations about Paul’s archive, how his writings and themes moved through western history and how that movement involved configurations and operations with other texts, institutions, and politics. The scholar who I most admire right now in biblical studies on this front is Vincent Wimbush. Wimbush has been trying to get us to think about scriptures as not things but as texts caught up in webs of scripturalization. In other words, what Wimbush forces us to recognize is that the texts we study are not simply texts but are actually complex assemblages of people and things and institutions. So I would like to see scholars shift their intellectual energy to asking questions about how Paul’s archive has operated, instead of arguing over which participle is the best way to frame a particular argument about justification.
Robyn Walsh: Since I’m asking you questions that are deep dives into your innermost desires— and since you referenced putting yourself on the couch, as it were, a moment ago—allow me a brief detour here to ask you a little bit about Freud. Freud plays an interesting role in this book, beginning with the opening epigraph—could you talk about where you see your own approach intersecting with psychoanalytic theory? Personally, I have serious reservations with continuing to invoke Freud— the stereotypes and speculation in his writing are so deeply problematic, never mind his approach to the study of religion. Do you think a rehabilitation is possible?
Cavan Concannon: I would say that that this book does involve something of a dialogue between Freud and Lacan and Kristeva and myself, not necessarily because I’m offering a fully fleshed out psychoanalytic reading of Paul’s archive. I have become convinced (largely through the work of Maia Kotrosits) that one of the things that our historicism in biblical studies privileges is historical and cultural difference. In our classes we talk about how the ancient world is different from the modern world. We frame a lot of our teaching and a lot of our interpretation around marking what’s different from our perspective and the perspective of ancient people. I think that’s an important thing that historical approaches do. But I think along the way, what that ends up doing is flattening out our ability to imagine ancient peoples in their complexity. In the service of creating difference we end up stereotyping ancient cultures, with a cultural anthropological veneer. These are the social codes, and this is how things operate, and this is exactly how people would have thought back then. I think this flattens our ability to understand the complexities of life lived in the ancient world. In the grand scheme of human evolution the 2000 or so years that separates now from then is not that far. So, while we should understand and pay attention to the difference between then and now, I think it’s also worth attending to the possibility that a lot of our ancient sources had similar drives and desires and fantasies as we do and that their texts are driven by a fantasy life that might be interestingly described with psychoanalytic approaches. To me that’s a reason why psychoanalysis can be interesting in terms of helping us to think more broadly about how we construct an ancient world.
Robyn Walsh: Can I ask you to say a bit more to make sure that we distinguish between the theories and approaches of thinkers like Freud and your own intervention?
Cavan Concannon: Yes. I’m thinking about psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry. I wouldn’t say I am a Freudian. I’m probably more of a Lacanian. What I’m reaching for here is engagement with the psychoanalytic tradition and in all of its complexity and messiness as a way of thinking about our frameworks.
Robyn Walsh: Let’s talk about method. This book does something a bit radical that we’ve rarely seen in the field by incorporating some elements of personal narrative or autobiography. I know that elsewhere you've talked about how you were interested and finding a way to get the reader to trust you— to be willing to go along with you on this interpretive ride. I want to give you an opportunity to discuss this objective further, particularly given the question of ethics already raised.
Cavan Concannon: What I tried to do with the autobiographical sections of the book is to reveal something about myself, not necessarily a Truth about my history but something that feels true from my perspective about my past, that also contributed to the arguments that the book was trying to make. So there is a point to what I'm revealing when I reveal something about my life. This was an idea suggested to me by Jenny Knust. Her work (as well as that of Ann Cvetkovich) has braided together the autobiographical and the analytic in a way that I found really exciting and really innovative. And so the autobiographical parts of the book are designed to advance the arguments of the book itself. This is not to say that they're inaccurate, but rather that they are attempts to push the conversation forward. For example, the first autobiographical section explores feeling shitty, which serves as a reminder that discourses of waste, excrement, and filth also land in people’s bodies.
I also wanted to include these autobiographical vignettes because I want to show that I operate as a reader, interpreter, and scholar from a position, and that position is not always best described in the simplistic categories used by Human Resources departments. I want to push other white-presenting male authors like myself to be more upfront about why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Robyn Walsh: Branching off this last point about positionality, I'll just be explicit: you present as a white cis male author. What do you say to those who feel that your position or perspective is already represented in the field to such an extent that your experience, even in its own particularity, might largely attract only similarly positioned readers?
Cavan Concannon: I would absolutely agree that there are too many white-presenting men who write about Paul. I would like there to be less. I would like to have different conversations. I hope that writing this book might encourage people who look like me to do something different. And maybe someone who does not look like me will feel invited into the conversation around Paul’s archive and will then change it and make it better and more interesting.
Robyn Walsh: Where is the line between an autobiographical vignette and, say, confessional? This is certainly admirable and radical scholarship— at the same time, it evokes associations with certain theological approaches…
Cavan Concannon: I'm not sure that there’s an easy line drawn between either of those binaries. But maybe the difference between a vignette and a confessional is that my vignettes are confessionals that went through multiple edits and peer review. At least I had that chance to edit the confessional.
One of the things that I have taken from reading a lot of Bruno Latour and William Connolly is that it’s not entirely clear to me that one can differentiate method from ethos or method from theology. I say this partly out of experience. We’ve all had the experience of sitting through an SBL panel listening to someone give a paper who is clearly theologically committed and who also says they're doing rigorous, detached history. And it’s very clear from listening to them that those two things live together in them in a way that they don't live in me.
Robyn Walsh: And they can’t distinguish…
Cavan Concannon: Right. They can’t see it. Now, the typical answer to that has been to say let’s purge the theology. But I don’t know that you can purge the theology and still have what we call the historical critical method. To me the very wonkiness of that phrase is an indication that we’re not actually talking about doing history. We’re talking about a very particular bespoke set of procedures that were created by mostly German Protestants to interpret biblical texts and to skirt questions of theology that were pressing upon them. So if we’re going to ask people to strip the theology out, we have to get rid of historical criticism. One of the things that Latour has pushed me to see is that when it comes to the politics of any particularly overdetermined issue (and what is more over determined than Paul?!), it’s very easy to set up a framework where one’s own position is not interrogated and then presented as natural. And the effect of that is that many other ways of seeing an issue are marginalized, meaning that the conditions of felicity for real communication are shut down. It seems to me a disservice to what we try to accomplish with the invocation of “doing history” to say that those people over there are theological in this, that, or any other way, and therefore they aren’t really doing historical criticism. That approach to solving the knot of theology and historical criticism is really just doing liberal Protestant theology in a different key. Ultimately, I think it’s worth saying that I am theologically committed—I’m just not Christian theologically committed. However, I am committed to certain epistemological and ontological assumptions about how the world operates. Thus, I don’t think that pushing theology out of the conversation is the solution. I think we need to be careful and critical and nuanced about how we engage with the ontological commitments and embodied dispositions that we bring to the reading of texts, but we need to work to figure out how to do that and not try to push it to the side.
Robyn Walsh: In other interviews you’ve stated that scholarship would do well—that we would be “happier people”— if we stopped scrutinizing Paul’s language. There are some corners of the field that would say that we’ve never properly translated Paul (or maybe I should say “Paul”!)— so, for example, one might say that we remain largely inattentive to his use of Stoic and Middle Platonic terminology. Wouldn’t continued attentiveness to language be a good thing for our historical knowledge and understanding?
Cavan Concannon: So, I would say that I’m not trying to argue that we throw out history. I would like us to throw out historical criticism, but I don’t think that we have to get rid of history, which I associate with a disciplined and nuanced attentiveness to the complexity of the past. I think that a project that seeks a non-theological reading of Paul would be helped by a) being clear about how that reading shifts from Christian theological frameworks to another arrangement of ontologies and epistemologies; b) rigorously interrogating how that Christian theological framework was produced in the first place and how it has been sustained and how it has proliferated over the last 2000 years. So, I think that you can’t necessarily do one without the other. I also think that the point of returning to the language of Paul’s context is itself also a clearly theological project because it’s not like the Middle Platonists didn’t have theology. They just thought about the world differently than Paul’s later Christian interpreters. And knowing that Paul thinks with Platonic concepts and assumptions doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of how these texts operate historically. So, if we were to describe how Paul sees the universe differently, I’m not sure that that halts or disrupts or even engages with the drive to make Paul work in the present or how Paul has worked throughout the last several thousand years. So I think doing those things in conversation might actually produce something really interesting. Reading Paul as a Platonist also doesn’t necessarily help us know which “Paul” we are getting. It’s entirely possible that the language of Middle Platonism is introduced by Christian scribes at a later period because that’s where their minds are at.
Robyn Walsh: Well, you could argue “Middle Platonism” is just a category invented by scholars, but what it would show is that Paul’s language is incredibly close to that of other first and second century writers interested in similar subjects, like Philo or Plutarch. In that sense, you can break down the perceived uniqueness of Christianity.
Setting that aside for a moment, I’m struck by this question: are you giving Paul power by hating him so much? [laughter]
Cavan Concannon: Paul is for me overdetermined. He’s a lot of things: an imagined person, a saintly construction, a set of literature, histories of interpretations, dispositions and affects, and how all those intersect with my own personal biography. I get the concern that Paul remains centered in a book about Paul. But I want to push on what Paul we’re talking about when we say that. I’ve tried to write a book that engages with the messiness that surrounds that word Paul and then makes it messier. So I don't know that I'm giving Paul power. I think that I am wrestling with what that word has signified for me in my work and in my own biography. I’m also listening to other people who don’t look like me or have similar backgrounds to me, listening to how they have interacted with the messiness of Paul and what that has meant for them. In that sense I don’t think it is a question of “giving power to” Paul. That way of thinking about the act of writing presumes a pre-Foucauldian notion of power, which is to say that power is something that someone gets to have. One of the things I have learned from feminist biblical criticism, within which I was trained, is an attentiveness to the messiness of kyriarchal texts and their interpretation and how each is embedded in not just one history, but many histories. It is not clear to me that the outcome of such a mode of interpretation is that Paul gets power.
Now I do think that a lot of biblical scholarship attempts to hide the messiness of Paul’s archive, sometimes out of a concern for theological orthodoxy but also in the service of liberal or progressive politics. By not interrogating what I call the canonical function of Paul’s archive, Paul remains a limit on one’s interpretive horizon, which is to say that whatever progressivism or liberalism that the interpreter holds to has to be grounded in what they think Paul would have said. That is a project that can be fairly accused of retaining Paul as an authoritative figure. Rendering Paul excremental, as I do in the book, is a way of creating the space wherein Paul ceases to be the thing that we argue about and becomes the thing whose use we examine.
Robyn Walsh: Would you like to talk about the title you originally had for this book?
Cavan Concannon: The original title for this manuscript was Paul’s Shit. I worked very hard to get Chicago University Press to agree to it. I wrote several lengthy defenses of the title and the analytical work it was doing for the argument. And my editor Kyle Wagner, who is just amazing, really pushed for it. But, at the end of the day, the board did not like it. I loved working with everyone at Chicago and I love how the book came out, so it was a minor loss in the end.
What I liked about the title was the ambiguity it allowed me to foster. On the one hand, the title could indicate that the book was about Paul’s shit, the apostle’s own use of shit or the shit he might be concerned with. On the other hand, Paul’s shit can also be a contraction for “Paul is shit,” which indicates a different focus on the ethics of interpretation and the evaluation of Paul and his archive. I do both in the book and so I liked the playfulness of that title (which is now a title of one of the book’s chapters).
Robyn Walsh: Since the pandemic has become a marker for all of us, was this book written before, after, or during the pandemic? Depending on your answer, how has the pandemic impacted any aspect of your argument?
Cavan Concannon: So, the final draft of the book was finished right before the first lockdowns, but it was edited several times in the course of the pandemic. I think that what the pandemic has convinced me of is that the dynamics that were operative in the neoliberal world order before the pandemic are just kicking into higher gear. The last two years have shown us the problems within our society that are laid bare by this kind of catastrophe. A catastrophe of mismanagement and lack of care and concern for our fellow humans. It’s also been a period where we’ve seen further evidence that all the things that we were concerned about before—the rise of fascist movements and anti-democratic forces that are fueled by wealthy billionaires growing richer off an increasingly speculative and financialized economy and the reckless acceleration towards the civilization-ending cliff of climate change—none of that has changed. In fact, all of that is continuing to escalate. The forces that produce and sustain prosperity and death and violence in our world are only growing stronger. So, the first chapter of the book that talks about shit as a discourse within which to think about how our systems work to me seems more accurate now than when I wrote it.
Robyn Walsh: What’s your next project?
Cavan Concannon: So, I am working on a book on ancient Christian networks, but I’m doing it differently than I did before I wrote this book. I am trying to write a book on ancient Christian networks that is attentive to the problems of our manuscript traditions and our access to our sources. I’m also trying to analyze the role that networks play in our field. Basically, the idea is that if we think that network theory offers an interesting way to think about understanding early Christianity, we also might need to think about how that same theoretical orientation might be used to interrogate how that knowledge is produced in the first place.
Robyn Walsh: That sounds fabulous and sorely needed! Thank you so much, Cavan, for this incredibly engaging chat and for this incredible contribution to the field!
Cavan Concannon: Thank you so much for this great conversation!
Cavan Concannon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Profaning Paul (Chicago, 2021), Assembling Early Christianity: Trade Networks and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge, 2017), and ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale, 2014). He is also the co-director of the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative.
Robyn Faith Walsh is Associate Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. An editor at the Database of Religious History, her articles have appeared in Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications. Her first monograph, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture was recently published with Cambridge University Press.