In A Disabled Apostle: Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul, Isaac Soon weaves together insights from biblical scholarship and disability studies to offer the first full-length treatment of Paul and disability. Employing a socio-cultural model of disability, Soon defines impairment as ‘a condition that is functionally and/or aesthetically deviant from a socially constructed bodily ideal’ and disability as ‘an impairment that generates negative effects in its social and cultural environment’ (p. 9). With this distinction, Soon is able to analyse a range of bodily conditions that may have been disabling within their respective ancient cultures, even if not considered disabilities today.
The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one of Paul’s disabilities: the thorn in the flesh (chapters 1–4), circumcision (chapters 5–8) and short stature (chapters 9–11). Within each section, Soon’s argument follows a similar pattern. First, he provides textual and material evidence that Paul had a particular bodily condition. Second, he demonstrates how this condition deviated from aesthetic or functional ideals within ancient cultures, thereby constituting an impairment. Third, he examines the negative sociocultural effects generated in response to this impairment, thereby constituting a disability. Finally, he considers the implications of Paul’s impairment and disability for biblical interpretation.
For example, in the first section, Soon enters into the lengthy history of interpretation surrounding Paul’s thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:7). According to Soon, a growing number of scholars have responded to the historical tendency to overdiagnose Paul’s thorn by adopting an agnostic approach to Paul’s embodiment. While these scholars often present a variety of options for interpreting Paul’s thorn ranging from illness to persecution, they ultimately maintain the unknowability of Paul’s condition. By contrast, Soon draws upon conceptual metaphor theory to argue that Paul’s thorn in the flesh is an angel of Satan. In this reading, the angel of Satan threatens Paul with physical affliction, thereby preventing him from sharing revelatory knowledge without divine permission (chapter 1). Soon then examines terminological overlaps within ancient Jewish and Graeco-Roman conceptions of angels and demons to demonstrate how the angel of Satan could be considered a form of demonic habitation (chapter 2). From here, Soon argues that demonised bodies were divergent from ancient bodily ideals (impairment) and generated negative responses (disability), including stigma, exclusion, ridicule, liminality and violence (chapter 3). Finally, having established Paul’s demonisation as a disability, Soon returns to 2 Corinthians 12 to reflect on the relationship between Paul’s thorn and the God of Israel (chapter 4). Ultimately, read in light of Paul’s emphasis on divine strength in physical weakness, Soon argues that Paul’s thorn in the flesh functions to subvert ‘the socio-cultural processes of denormalization which demarcate demonized bodies as impaired and disabled’ (p. 80).
In the following two sections, Soon launches similarly structured arguments with regard to circumcision and short stature, respectively, carefully marshalling evidence to argue that these conditions functioned as impairments and disabilities within ancient cultures. While the structure of Soon’s argument is consistent, each section yields distinct and novel insights for biblical and theological interpretation. I especially appreciated Soon’s careful attention to the contradictions within Paul’s treatment of circumcision across the epistles, at times celebrating Jewish circumcision as ‘socially and theologically enabling’, and elsewhere ‘mirror[ing] the ways Greek and Roman culture denormalized the condition’ (p. 130). This nuance allows Soon to observe the ways Paul both subverted and perpetuated disabling attitudes within ancient cultures—even regarding his own disabilities.
The conclusion explicitly challenges several widespread assumptions within New Testament scholarship: that ‘prominent figures of the early Jesus movement were, by default, able-bodied’, that Paul could not have had multiple disabilities because of his active and accomplished ministry, or that Paul could have only ‘acquired impairments through missionary activity’ (p. 216). Soon asserts that these assumptions reflect an underlying ableist bias within the field of biblical studies. Moreover, Soon offers a ‘gentle rejoinder to Pauline scholars who have been agnostic about the specifics of Paul’s disabilities’ (p. 217). On this point, even as I remain sceptical of the possibilities of recovering knowledge of ancient embodiment, I was challenged by Soon’s insistence on the significance of embodiment for biblical interpretation, urging scholars to move beyond analysis of the sociocultural dynamics of disability within Pauline literature to consider how the apostle’s embodiment shapes the text.
Finally, the epilogue turns to consider this study’s implications for contemporary culture. Here, I appreciated Soon’s refusal to allow analysis of disability to be limited to modern conceptions of disability and his related insistence on allowing ancient conceptions to inform and challenge our own. At the same time, Soon’s broad definitions of impairment and disability raised questions about how to delineate disability from other forms of marginalised embodiment (e.g. race and gender). While Soon explicitly acknowledges this tension, I would have appreciated greater attention to questions of intersectionality throughout the book, especially around the racial and ethnic dimensions of circumcision. Rather than constitute a major shortcoming, such questions signal the generative work accomplished by the book. By centring embodiment within biblical interpretation, A Disabled Apostle is a valuable contribution to the fields of biblical studies, disability studies and Christian theology.
