Reading Paul on Fridays

One of the things that I enjoy about Saint Mark's is gathering with a group of people on Friday mornings, known as the Friday Book Group. Over the years, we have read and studied various things. We've read Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally and The Heart of Christianity. We've read Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief. We've read John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity and Who Killed Jesus?. We've read Roberta Bondi's Memories of God (although I seem to love this book more than most of the rest of thre group did) and Nora Gallagher's Things Seen and Unseen. This Lent we read Stephen Patterson's Beyond the Passion:Rethinking the Life and Death of Jesus. This made us want to learn more about Paul.

We have really enjoyed learning about how scholars can help us to see the Jesus movement in some new ways, in the the process hear anew what God is saying to us in our time. We are women (who else is free at 10:30 on Friday mornings ?-- although we know that some male parishioners with regular "day jobs" are often reading along side us) who have grown up believing that Paul was responsible for people thinking that Scripture expected us to wear hats and be silent and be subservient to our husbands and other males. We are aware of the ways in which our understanding of Paul has been shaped by Augustine and by Luther and we resist that Paul. We are ready to see how scholars are rereading and rediscovering Paul in his first century Jewish context and hope to learn from his mission and ministry about how we can proclaim the Good News in some new ways in our very different place and time.