Woman and Man in Paul – overcoming a misunderstanding

Attempting to readjust traditional views of the Apostle Paul as relatively insensitive to, and completely caught up in, the gender biases between men and women in his own day, Norbert Baumert, S. J., in this work, tries to clarify the issues. Through a painstaking restudy of Paul’s original language in his letters, and the reformation of the interpretations this affords, interwoven with the input of the Early Church Fathers, Baumert helps us glimpse Paul’s gender attitudes in a fresh and surprisingly revealing light. By fleshing out the context – legal, linguistic, and gender-related – of Paul’s thoughtworld, and by comparing it with that of today, Baumert suggests that we, both as Christian individuals and as Church, may have to do our own contemporary rethinking of the relations between men and women in terms of sexuality, marriage, and celibacy, based on these new Pauline insights.