One of the keys to the successful utilization of a rhetorical strategy is to be the right sort of person. It is not everyone who can, for example, put false humility to good use. Such a posture may flatter an esteemed orator like Dio Chrysostom (“I have never given any one to understand that I am an able speaker or thinker” [Dial. 2; Crosby, LCL]), who can be confident that no one will mistake him for a man who is in fact ordinary.Footnote ¹⁰ A lowlier speaker, though, runs the risk of having self-deprecation taken at face value, and thus sounding cringing and servile (see Aristotle, Eth. nic. 4.3.28–29, 35 [1125a]).

It is not insignificant, then, that the majority of the comparanda that appear in scholarship on 2 Cor 10–13 derive from the Greek and Roman elite.Footnote ¹¹ This means that what they preserve are not universally applicable principles of rhetoric, but rhetorical strategies deemed effective for men [sic] of a particular social location.Footnote ¹² Yes, Quintilian's ideal orator is a good man speaking well (Inst. 12.1.1), but, more particularly, he is a good citizen and statesman speaking as befits a man of his station (Inst. 1 pr. 9; and see Plutarch, De laude 2.1 [539E]; Epictetus, Diatr. 3.1.34–35; Ps.-Demetrius, Τύποι ἐπιστολικοί pr.). Our ancient sources thus give little indication how the rhetorical strategies they exemplify and describe would have been received coming from the mouth of an itinerant Judean laborer and self-described apostle.

Although the problem of Paul's access to elite literary and rhetorical traditions has been discussed at length,Footnote ¹³ exegetes have seldom paused to reflect on this more basic consequence of the social location of the comparanda with which they seek to illuminate his rhetoric. As a result, comparative studies of 2 Cor 10–13 often beg the question of Paul's own social location, implicitly attributing to him a position of social power by presuming that he could successfully have adopted the same rhetorical strategies that served a Plutarch or a DemosthenesFootnote ¹⁴ —or, in some instances, by presuming that Paul possessed sufficient discursive stature to subvert the elite rhetorical conventions he had taken up.Footnote ¹⁵

Margaret Mitchell's otherwise insightful comparison of Paul's “fool's speech” with that ascribed to St. Antony (Athanasius, Vit. Ant. 38–39) furnishes a telling example.Footnote ¹⁶ In the course of an exhortation to a delegation of visiting monks, Antony acknowledges that it is not fitting for one to boast (οὐ δε . . . καυχ σθαι [cf. 2 Cor 11:30; 12:1]) of one's spiritual accomplishments; nevertheless, he wants to speak of his own spiritual training (ἄσκησις) in order that it might provide an example for his audience to imitate or to rival (38 [PG 26:897–900]). Here allusion to Paul's foolish boasting allows him to have his cake and eat it too:

Through allusive appeal to the precedent of Paul, and use of what is surely a universal commonplace (“It's for your own good!”), Athanasius “gets Antony off the hook of self-praise.”Footnote ¹⁷

So, as Mitchell observes, these two speakers use a similar rhetorical strategy—a “fool's speech”—to effect a similar end. And yet notice how differently the whole thing comes off in Antony's mouth than in Paul's. At least since John Chrysostom, for whom Paul's words arose “from some hot and frenzied passion” (xxx ἀπό τινος ἔρωτος θερμο καὶ μανικο [Hom. 2 Cor. 23.1; PG 61:553]), readers have heard in 2 Cor 10–13 the voice of a profoundly emotional man.Footnote ¹⁸ Paul at turns pleads, cajoles, threatens, and vituperates. Athanasius's hero gives us none of this distress. On the contrary, he has been given the even-tempered voice of a self-assured moralist—a voice, in this regard, like that of Plutarch, or of Philostratus's Apollonius.

This is not simply a matter of temperament, nor an incidental stylistic quirk. No, what is important to see here is that such differences in rhetorical demeanor result from the fact that these two utterances, despite their formal similarity, are, due to the different rhetorical situations faced by their speakers, doing fundamentally different work. Antony—at least as depicted by his hagiographer—speaks from a position of presumed authority. When his visitors respond to his exhortation with deference and renewed ascetic vigor (Vit. Ant. 44), we are not at all surprised, for it was with just such an end in view that they sought out his instruction. Thus what Antony achieves by alluding to the foolishness of narrating his own spiritual feats is to reinforce his reputation not only as a great spiritual leader, but also as an admirably modest one.

Paul is in a very different position. Certainly he sees himself as the source of edifying spiritual instruction and considers his own experience exemplary (see Phil 3:17). But what he lacks in Corinth are deferential followers. Indeed, his foolish boasting is occasioned precisely by his desire to win some. Thus, whereas Antony can get away with “boasting” because of status already granted him, Paul finds himself “boasting” to reassert status that has been denied him. Unlike for Antony, then, for Paul to acknowledge the foolishness of his boasting is not merely a matter of decorum; it is rather an attempt to preempt the response of his Corinthian critics, who already are all too eager to write him off as a buffoon, self-important but insubstantial (2 Cor 10:1, 10). In sum, then, insofar as Paul and Antony inhabit different social locations and thus address different rhetorical situations, theirs are two fundamentally different rhetorical moves.

There is perhaps nothing very profound about this observation, but it is important to notice that it is available only when our comparative analysis avoids allowing formal similarity to beg the question of the work each speaker is doing as a social subject. Indeed, comparisons that treat the problem of Paul's boasting primarily as a problem of form are ill-equipped to generate an adequate account of its meaning as “a piece of human behavior.”Footnote ¹⁹ To address this question, what is needed, I suggest, is a different mode of comparison. Specifically, to use the distinction Jonathan Z. Smith derives from Adolf Deissmann, what is needed is a comparison that is not genealogical but analogical.Footnote ²⁰

Unlike the formal comparisons that have dominated scholarship on the rhetoric of 2 Cor 10–13, the explanatory power of such a comparison does not derive from postulating influence. Nor does asserting the comparability of Paul and Occom suggest that they are, in some essential sense, “the same.” On the contrary, an analogical comparison presupposes difference, yet “selects and marks certain features within difference as being of possible intellectual significance by employing the trope of their being similar in some stipulated sense.”Footnote ²¹ Such a comparison enables what Smith calls the “defamiliarization” of our data—it “[makes] the familiar seem strange in order to enhance our perception of the familiar.”Footnote ²²

The distinction between analogical and genealogical comparison is complicated here by the fact that there is indeed a genealogical relationship between the two texts and two figures I intend to compare. Like Antony before him, Occom views himself as heir to Paul's missionary calling and utilizes language derived from 2 Cor 10–13. But these two speakers share something more as well, and something that Antony, tellingly, does not: they inhabit analogous social locations that also constitute the rhetorical situations their writings address. Thus, even after the genealogical relationship between them has been considered, there remains additional ground for comparison. What I aim to describe here, then, is this surplus of similarity, whatever it is that makes Occom's voice more “like” Paul's than is Antony's, despite the fact that each stands equally in historical dependence on Paul.

“Born a Heathen and Brought up In Heathenism,”Footnote ²³ Samson Occom (1723–1792) converted to Christianity as a youth amidst the missionary fervor of the First Great Awakening and quickly became a poster child for evangelistic efforts among the Native Americans of New England.Footnote ²⁴ For Occom, religious conversion went hand in hand with the desire to “Learn the English Letters”: “I usd to wish, I was Capable of Instructing my poor Kindred, I use to think if I Coud once Learn to Read I Woud Instruct poor Children in Reading.”Footnote ²⁵ Animated by this hope, Occom set off to study at Eleazar Wheelock's “Charity-School,” which was soon to become, due largely to Occom's success as a student and then as a missionary—and Wheelock's recognition that he could secure funding by publicizing this success—an “Indian Charity-School,” tasked with training Native American missionaries to serve among their own people.Footnote ²⁶ Before long, Occom was writing out the Lord's Prayer in Latin, Greek, and French,Footnote ²⁷ and Wheelock had begun to receive financial support on his behalf from the New England Company, a prominent mission agency.

After a number of years as a schoolmaster among the Montauk, Occom was ordained in 1759 by the Long Island Presbytery.Footnote ²⁸ The remarks of Rev. Samuel Buell in his ordination sermon were a harbinger of the symbolic weight he would come to carry: this Indian preacher, Buell proclaimed, was “an ornament to the Christian Religion and the glory of the Indian nation.”Footnote ²⁹ His Indian/Christian identity was quickly becoming a valuable commodity; trade in it was not something over which he always had control.Footnote ³⁰

Beginning in 1761, Occom worked as a missionary among the Oneida on behalf of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. In New York City to launch his initial trip, Occom found himself in high demand. As he remarked in a letter to Wheelock, “I am invited to the City Every Day to Dine with Some gentleman or other; Some times Two or three Invitations at once, Especially the Minister, of all Sects and Denominations are Extreamly Kind to me.”Footnote ³¹ An Indian missionary was evidently a curiosity;Footnote ³² more than that, though, his very existence served as testimony to the transformative power of the gospel. Occom “embodied the move from ‘savage’ to ‘saved,’” standing in for heathen/sinner in the white self and thus dramatizing the boundless possibility of conversion.Footnote ³³

But of course Occom could function as the paradigmatic convert only so long as he remained an Indian. And so, although the discourse of race in the eighteenth century emphasized its mutability, and although conversion was widely celebrated as a means of cultural and even racial transformation,Footnote ³⁴ still for Occom the price of being noble was being savage.Footnote ³⁵ Like the colonial subjects described by Homi Bhabha, anglicized but not English, Occom's utility to the colonizing imagination lay in being “a reformed, recognizable Other. . . almost the same, but not quite.”Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, as Keely McCarthy notes, “what whites would find valuable about such a figure. . . would be his difference, the novel juxtaposition, the seeming contradiction”:Footnote ³⁷ “This Preacher was born & bred an Indian,” marveled his contemporaries.Footnote ³⁸

Wheelock's competitors, the Boston Commissioners of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, clearly understood the nature of Occom's appeal. Envious of his growing fame, they attacked the authenticity of his Indian identity, claiming that he “was bro't up Regularly and a Christian all [his] Days” and “cant Talk Indian.”Footnote ³⁹ And so Occom found himself insisting that his Native origins had not been exaggerated: “I was born a Heathen. . . and my Parents in perticular were very Strong in the Customs of their fore Fathers” (cf. Gal 1:14).Footnote ⁴⁰

The pinnacle of Occom's fame came in 1766 when, on behalf of Wheelock's Indian Charity-School, and at the invitation of the great revival preacher George Whitefield, he made a much-publicized fundraising trip across the Atlantic.Footnote ⁴¹ In England Occom made quite a splash:Footnote ⁴² “He preached in the chapels of the kingdom's leading divines, dined with nobles, waited on the king, and was recruited for Anglican ordination by the archbishop of Canterbury.”Footnote ⁴³ His journal entry from Sunday, May 11 gives some indication of how he was received: “Preach'd at M^r Brewer's to a Crouded Audience, and the L^d gave me freedom to Speak, and the People attended with great affection—Praise be to god—In the evening I Preachd at M^r Shillon's to a throng'd Congregation, and there was a Solemn appearance of the People, the [Lord] was with us, Glory be to his great Name.”Footnote ⁴⁴ When he was bedridden following his inoculation for smallpox, he “was kindly visited by Genⁿ and Ladies Constantly. . . I Cou'd’n't be taken Care of better by my own Relations.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, such was his fame that he became the subject of popular parody,Footnote ⁴⁶ and rival mission agencies fought to establish their records as his patron.Footnote ⁴⁷

Occom arrived back in Connecticut having raised more than £12,000.Footnote ⁴⁸ He had also garnered considerable praise. “Your very decent and proper behaviour,” wrote Dr. Andrew Gifford, “charmed most, if not all, who had the pleasure of conversing with you; and your humility and piety I doubt not contributed much to the success of your application for the Indian school.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Wrote one Rev. Peter Jillard to Wheelock: “It was Right to send over M^r Occum, as a Specimen of the benefitt of y^e School—As far as I hear he pleases in every Town & city. . . . Tho’ I write in my own name only, I'm persuaded, I might easily gett many hundred persons to join me.”Footnote ⁵⁰ He had won, in short, the “adulation of the crowds combined with the respect of his contemporaries.”Footnote ⁵¹

It was when he returned home that he found out he was still just an Indian. Wheelock had provided only the sparsest of support to Occom's family during his absence.Footnote ⁵² His wife, alone and beset by illness, had been forced to borrow funds. Other debts remained outstanding.Footnote ⁵³ And now Occom had no consistent means of income: By travelling to England as Wheelock's protégé rather than as a representative of the society that had funded his mission ventures, he had alienated the latter and thus could not now expect their support.Footnote ⁵⁴ As for Wheelock, he had had a change of mind and now sought to move the college to New Hampshire where he would educate a greater proportion of white missionaries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wheelock was convinced, as he wrote to Whitefield, that “God does not design y^t Indians shall have y^e lead in y^s affair at present.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Occom he had only suspicions: “I fear his tour to England and the great Respect Shewn him there will have the Sad Effect to make him aspire after Grandeur and ease and prevent his future usefulness.”Footnote ⁵⁷ And thus Occom, despite his recent fame, “was forced to lead a hand-to-mouth existence as an independent itinerant preacher in direct competition with white missionaries who were being paid by some missionary society.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Although Paul considered himself the founder and “father” of the Corinthian assembly (1 Cor 3:6; 4:15; 2 Cor 10:14), by the time he wrote 2 Cor 10–13 his primacy was very much in doubt. For our purposes, we need not parse the array of rival influences to which Paul refers—Apollos, Cephas, pseudo-apostles, super-apostles, an unnamed “wrongdoer.”Footnote ⁵⁹ What is clear is that other apostles were staking a claim in what he considered his divinely apportioned territory (2 Cor 10:13–16; 11:2–5).

And so Paul, in a bid to reassert his status, boasts—or at least this is the word generally pressed into service to render καυχάομαι and its cognates. Although perhaps an unavoidable translation, it is important to note that our English term carries with it, as a result of centuries of Christian moral discourse, connotations foreign to Paul's world. The word in Paul does not mean bragging, as though what he sought to describe by it were an anticipatory violation of the Christian-era virtue of humility. It refers rather to an assertion of status, honorable when well founded—that is, when based on a viable καύχησις (2 Cor 1:12; 10:15)—and dishonorable when unfounded or “vain” (Gal 6:4; 2 Cor 7:14; 9:3).Footnote ⁶⁰

This is not to suggest that Paul's contemporaries saw boasting as unobjectionable. On the contrary, Greek and Roman authors frequently remark on the potential offensiveness of self-praise.Footnote ⁶¹ Importantly, though, when they do express such concern, what troubles them is not, like Occom's white handlers, the inner problem of inappropriate self-regard, but rather a dangerous external consequence—the potential of unrestrained self-praise to unleash the destructive force of envy.Footnote ⁶² Interestingly, Paul himself shows little awareness of the nexus between boasting and envy (see only Rom 11:13–14). What concerns him instead, and what his repeated disclaimers are intended to preempt, is the possibility that his boast will be deemed merely “foolish” (2 Cor 11:1, 16, 21; 12:6, 11)—which is to say, that his claim to status will be derided.Footnote ⁶³

Although Paul goes on to “boast of the things that show [his] weakness” (2 Cor 11:30), the passage begins with what have generally been taken as unambiguous assertions of honorable status: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I” (2 Cor 11:22). It is widely acknowledged that Paul's emphasis on his “Jewish credentials”Footnote ⁶⁴ here is a response to the claims of his rivals, who themselves depend for their credibility on their Judean heritage.Footnote ⁶⁵ But just what was at stake in the contestation of authentic Judean identity in Roman Corinth? And what had Paul to gain by insisting on it?

The surprising dearth of evidence regarding Judeans in first-century Corinth makes the problem more acute.Footnote ⁶⁶ The only literary evidence that predates Paul is Philo's report of a letter from Agrippa I to Caligula that includes Corinth in a lengthy list of places where the mother-city Jerusalem had established “colonies” (ἀποικίαι [Legat. 281–282]). The reliability of the reference is uncertain, precisely because its rhetorical purpose is clear. To buttress his claim that his nation merits the Emperor's consideration, Agrippa asserts, by analogy with Greek colonizing practice, the respectability of diaspora Judeans: here were no mean peregrini but rather honorable colonists, noble inhabitants of the Empire's “most celebrated” (δοκιμώτατοι) places. We cannot be confident, then, lacking other evidence, that Philo had specific knowledge of a particularly vibrant Judean community in Corinth.Footnote ⁶⁷

In any case, such a picture would be difficult to square with the material evidence, which does attest to an increasingly confident Judean community in the third through fifth centuries, but also makes it doubtful that Judeans were a notable civic presence before then.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Peter Richardson has shown, the evidence suggests that only in the fourth or fifth century did the community venture a “purpose-built synagogue, near the theater, publicly visible, reflecting a moderately well off community asserting its presence.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Evidence of an earlier, third-century building comes from a “crudely lettered inscription” on a lintel, and suggests an adapted residence—a building for “a poor community, of modest size, with a doorway indistinguishable from others except for the inscription.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Perhaps one can extrapolate from this trajectory, as Richardson suggests, an even more modest “house-synagogue” dating to an earlier period, though there are no material remains.Footnote ⁷¹

It is with caution, then, that one must approach the account in Acts, which suggests a robust and visible Judean community in Corinth: a dedicated synagogue building frequented by Judeans and Greeks and presided over by an ἀρχισυνάγωγος (synagogue official) named Crispus (18:4, 7–8). Indeed, the whole scene is so thick with Lukan redactional themes and its cast of characters so familiar from other cities depicted in Acts that it is difficult to credit.Footnote ⁷² Even Luke's description of Crispus, which might seem to be verified by Paul's reference to his baptism of a man by the same name (1 Cor 1:14), is suspect: Paul gives no indication that Crispus was Judean, that he was of high social status, or that he was baptized together with his household; all of this supplemental information is in accord with Lukan interests.Footnote ⁷³ Hence, wherever he got the name Crispus, it would be unwise to put too much stock in the details of Luke's portrait.Footnote ⁷⁴

If we have no evidence, then, that Judeans were a prominent part of the social landscape of first-century Corinth, what would Paul's addressees have heard when Paul and his rivals insisted on the authenticity of their Judean identity? Here it is noteworthy that by far the best evidence we have for Judeans in first-century Corinth comes from the Corinthian correspondence itself, and the majority of it concerns not native Corinthians but itinerant apostles like Paul: Cephas and Apollo, and perhaps Prisca and Aquilla.Footnote ⁷⁵ In other words, most of the Judeans in Corinth for whom we have reliable evidence were, in the helpful formulation of Heidi Wendt, “freelance religious experts,” who, like other “ethnically coded” religious specialists—Chaldean astrologers, Egyptian priests, Persian magi, Indian Brahmans—traded on the popular association of eastern peoples with ancient and occult wisdom.Footnote ⁷⁶

Like other foreign religious specialists, such Judeans were met with what was at once fascination and disdain. Indeed, one can often detect both responses in a single text, since the literati only bothered to disdain what was more straightforwardly fascinating to their “superstitious” neighbors. When Plutarch, for example, decries those who “distort” and “sully” their tongues in prayer “with strange names and barbarous phrases”—μαράνα θά, perhaps, or ἀββά—one gets the measure both of the popular appeal of such exotic utterances and the scorn in which the cultural elite held their popularizers (Superst. 3 [166B; Babbitt, LCL]). Similarly, Juvenal bemoans the credulity of a Roman woman who entertains all manner of exotic religious experts, including a Judean exegete and dream interpreter:

The ability to unveil the prophetic value of Moses's “secret tome” (Juvenal, Sat. 14.102 [Ramsay, LCL]) was evidently a highly valued form of expertise,Footnote ⁷⁸ even while those who possessed it were often susceptible to stereotype and derision. Indeed, the hard-fought debate concerning the status of Moses himself—lawgiver (νομοθέτης) or magician (γόης)Footnote ⁷⁹ —was often quite transparently a proxy for another contest, one that concerned the status of those whose repute depended on their mastery of his oracles: Did these foreigners have unique access to the divine, or were they abject frauds?

Here authenticity was crucial, especially because it could not always be taken for granted. As Pauline Ripat observes, a number of ancient authors “express disdain for those who claimed to depend on ethnic intellectual traditions that they did not really understand, suggesting that such sorts were perceived to be common.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Strabo, for example, tells of one Chaeremon who pretended to expertise in the mysteries of the ancient Egyptian priesthood at Heliopolis, but was generally scorned as a boastful dilettante (γελώμενος δὲ τὸ πλέον ὡς ἀλαζὼν καὶ ἰδιώτης [Geogr. 17.1.29]). And Josephus, whose own repute derived in no small part from his mastery of his people's prophetic books,Footnote ⁸¹ does his best to undermine the claim made by a Judean teacher in Rome to just such exegetical expertise (προσεποιε το. . . ἐξηγε σθαι σοφίαν νόμων τ ν Μωυσέως): Yes, the man was Judean, but a Judean fugitive, a transgressor of the very law he purported to interpret (A.J. 18.81).

It is when viewed in this context, I suggest, that the meaning of Paul's insistence on his “Hebrew” identity begins to emerge. His rivals have impugned his credentials as an authentic tradent of Judean wisdom and qualified exegete of Moses's oracles, and, in so doing, have undercut a primary basis of his appeal.Footnote ⁸² In short, a Judean religious expert without appropriate pedigree can only be a fraud—that is, like Chaeremon, an ignorant braggart (ἀλαζὼν καὶ ἰδιώτης; cf. 2 Cor 11:6).Footnote ⁸³

And so, like Occom—though for a very different reason—Paul found himself insisting on the authenticity of his exotic ethnic identity. As in the case of Occom, this was by no means a straightforward claim to honorable status. For if asserting that he was really a “Hebrew” was necessary to being viewed as a credible heir to Moses, it also meant highlighting an aspect of his identity that located Paul outside the dominant social hierarchy of his Greek/Roman addressees.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Cavan Concannon's subtle analysis has shown, the inhabitants of Roman Corinth were very aware of the status implications of ethnic identification, and those who aspired to prominence had to be adept at negotiating Greek and Roman aspects thereof.Footnote ⁸⁵ One did not gain social standing—at least not the ordinary kind—by emphasizing that one was a Judean.Footnote ⁸⁶

If Occom's “Indianness” distinguished him from the other missionaries with whom he competed for support, the ambivalence that attended Paul's ethnicity-based status claim was something he shared with his Judean rivals, who were likewise susceptible both to honor and to derision on this account. But here Paul's rivals seem to have been different from him in one key respect: Unlike Paul, they, by all appearances, otherwise comported themselves respectably—which is to say, they successfully asserted social power.Footnote ⁸⁷ Importantly, this was precisely the sort of demeanor that would have sublimated the potentially humiliating aspects of Judean identity, allowing them to portray theirs as an exotic but dignified paideia of the sort even the likes of Varro could commend (Augustine, Civ. 4.31) rather than merely another degrading and barbarous superstition (Plutarch, Superst. 8 [169C]).Footnote ⁸⁸

For Paul things were different. Homologous with the ambivalence that attended his Judean identity, at once a source of legitimacy and marginality, was the unstable status that derived from the nature of his claim to be an emissary of the divine—specifically, a man in whose weak and mortal body God's Christ was revealed (Gal 1:16; 4:14). When Paul arrived in Corinth, he did so, he says, “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Cor 2:3). Perhaps he was sick.Footnote ⁸⁹ Perhaps bruises and lacerations from some rod or whip still stung painfully, infected and oozing (2 Cor 11:23–25). Perhaps he was emaciated from hunger (1 Cor 4:11), dressed in tatters and rags (2 Cor 11:27). We lack the data to speak with precision, but Paul makes it clear that he was keenly aware of the ignobility of his body.Footnote ⁹⁰ Curiously, though, when he speaks of this ill-used σ μα, he frequently presents it as a site of the revelation of Christ (Phil 1:20; Gal 6:17; cf. 2 Cor 12:7–10). Most striking is 2 Cor 4:10–11:

In other words, Paul sees himself as a “Christ-bearer,”Footnote ⁹¹ his abject, dying body a “one-man verbal, visual and biographical re-presentation of Christ crucified.”Footnote ⁹²

Although the ancients seem often to have expected special access to the divine to be accompanied by noble and godlike appearance,Footnote ⁹³ nevertheless Paul's association of religious authority with his marginal body was not unique. As Richard Buxton has observed, the “complementary co-existence of power and defect recurs often in Greek myth”Footnote ⁹⁴ —and indeed in contexts far from the Greek world as well.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nicholas Vlahogiannis cites the example of Teiresias, “the blind seer,” who “was both marginalised by his disability, his punishment for seeing Athena bathing naked, but also privileged with compensatory powers as a prophet.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Or consider epilepsy—the “sacred disease,” as it was called—a shameful affliction indeed, but one that could also produce divine “visions and revelations” (2 Cor 12:1).Footnote ⁹⁷ My intent here is not to advocate for any particular interpretive tradition regarding Paul's “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor 12:7; Gal 4:13–15).Footnote ⁹⁸ The point is rather that again Paul's status derived precisely from that which was otherwise recognized as marginality.Footnote ⁹⁹

And so, trembling or not, Paul had been well received in Corinth, winning followers for Christ—and, he evidently assumed, followers for himself as Christ's ambassador, the father of this assembly (1 Cor 4:14).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But it was not long before he was brought back down to earth. No sooner had Paul left town than rivals began to undermine his influence. Reports came to him from “Chloe's people” telling of the allegiance of many to other, more impressive teachers (1 Cor 1–4). By the time he wrote 1 Corinthians, Paul felt decidedly marginalized (περικάθαρμα, περίψημα [1 Cor 4:13]).

Adding insult to injury, although his rivals were being paid for their efforts (1 Cor 9:4–7), the Corinthians gave Paul no financial assistance (1 Cor 9:12, 15; 2 Cor 12:13). That he was affronted by the preferential treatment shown “the rest of the apostles” (1 Cor 9:5) is evident from his line of questioning in 1 Cor 9: “Do we not have the right to our food and drink?. . . Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living?” (vv. 4, 6).”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Paul had supported himself by his own labor while in Corinth (vv. 12b, 15a). The fact that he now must insist at such length that he would have had the right to demand payment suggests that he had had no other choice—that is, that the Corinthians had offered him no financial support.Footnote ¹⁰² Still, it seems he was unable to avoid giving the impression that he was a slippery type (2 Cor 12:16), a man who, despite his insistence to the contrary (1 Thess 2:5; 2 Cor 2:17; 6:8; 7:2), saw his apostleship as a way to improve his lot—to escape, like the pauper-cum-philosophers of whom Lucian complains, the drudgery and penury of manual labor (Fug. 12–17).Footnote ¹⁰³ And thus Paul, like Occom, “was forced to lead a hand-to-mouth existence as an independent itinerant preacher in direct competition with [rival] missionaries who were being paid by [the assembly he claimed to have founded].”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Matters came to a head when Paul visited Corinth a second time. The details are obscure, but what can be said with certainty is that Paul was humiliated (2 Cor 12:20). As his indignant response—the “Letter of Tears” preserved in 2 Cor 10–13Footnote ¹⁰⁵ —makes clear, he had been derided as abject (ταπεινός [10:1]), weak (ἀσθενής [10:10]), and ineffectual (13:3). Indeed, the very σ μα that had once been honored as the site of the manifestation of Christ was now despised as merely frail and sickly (φησίν. . . ἡ δὲ παρουσία το σώματος ἀσθενής [10:10]).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The marks of Jesus, maybe, but we still don't want your whippableFootnote ¹⁰⁷ Judean body at our respectable gathering.

In September of 1768, four months after returning to New England a celebrity, now feeling forgotten and struggling to support his family and pay his debts, Occom composed his Short Narrative. More accurately, he revised and expanded a short autobiographical account he had prepared in advance of his transatlantic journey, creating a strangely lopsided hybrid: an autobiography that morphs into an apologetic plea for recognition.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

What was most immediately pressing was money. Occom, like Paul, was plagued by humiliating financial accusations. He had been charged with extravagance—specifically, of attempting to exceed his station in life by milking Wheelock and the missionary societies for all he could get.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ So, after providing a brief account of his childhood and conversion, Occom proceeds to “an Account of [his] Circumstances and manner of Livining,”Footnote ¹¹⁰ wherein he seeks to explain the difficulty of his financial situation and to emphasize how hard he has been working to stay afloat:

It is at this point that Occom's catalogue of κόποι begins to sound like a palimpsest of Paul's: “Besides all these Difficulties,” he continues (cf. 2 Cor 11:28), “I met with adverse Providence.” And then, after an account of his misfortune, he makes an aggrieved comparison of himself with an English rival:

“I speak like a fool, but I am Constraind.”Footnote ¹¹³ What is the function of this parenthetical allusion to Paul's own parenthesis? Certainly Occom benefits from confronting his readers with “rhetoric from their own authoritative text”Footnote ¹¹⁴ —or, to use Homi Bhabha's formulation, from using “the words of the master” for what is “at once. . . appropriation and resistance.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ More basically, though, the usefulness of this disclaimer derives from the constraints of Occom's rhetorical situation: Occom sees no way forward but to boast, and yet he cannot afford to be seen as boastful. The “Indian preacher” knows that he is, by prevailing standards, of incontrovertibly lower status than his white rivals, and he knows that any straightforward attempt to claim status can only demean him further. Such a claim could only be judged a grasping and pathetic attempt to win more honor than he is due.

But what of the praise of the English clergy and nobility? Had he not been universally esteemed? And had not Wheelock himself opined that “an Indian Missionary may be supported with less than half the Expence. . . And an Indian who speaks their Language, it may reasonably be supposed, will be at least four Times as serviceable among [the Native Americans]”?Footnote ¹¹⁶

Occom, then, is caught between two apparently irreconcilable experiences of himself—that is, of his social identity. He is both celebrated and disregarded, and both for the very same reason: he is an Indian preacher. His Short Narrative, then—and his foolish boasting in particular—is an attempt to negotiate this dual identity, to show that his “Indianness” makes him more of a missionary, not less of one, and yet to do so without overreaching himself and thus being written off as a man who “hath forgot what he was.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Under such constraints, Occom “could not escape inhabiting the space of a ‘poor Indian,’”Footnote ¹¹⁸ even while resisting the implications of that demeaning designation. Therefore, only by expressing his awareness of the inappropriateness of his self-assertion—its absurdity when viewed from the perspective of those from whom he seeks recognition—could he avoid making it simply derisible. Yes, I'm just a poor Indian; still, I think I am not in the least inferior to your white missionaries (cf. 2 Cor 12:11).

As was emphasized above, to compare Paul and Occom is in no way to deny the differences between them, but rather to “[select and mark] certain features within difference as being of possible intellectual significance by employing the trope of their being similar in some stipulated sense.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ My contention here is that insofar as each seeks to regain control of the discourse concerning his identity, Paul and Occom are doing similar rhetorical work. Throughout his letters, and especially in the Corinthian correspondence, Paul's self-description is curiously Janus-faced, a tortuous blend of plea for recognition and glorying in divine vocation. What engenders this ambivalent self-presentation is, I suggest, an unstable experience of his social identity that parallels that of Occom. Paul, like Occom, has been both debased and admired. He has known the degrading blow of the rod, the humiliation of being chained (2 Cor 11:23); he has also known glory and acclaim as an emissary of the divine. Albeit in rather different ways, the manifestly marginal bodies of Paul and Occom both have served as a revelation of divine power; both have served also as a “Gazing Stock, Yea Even a Laughing Stock,”Footnote ¹²⁰ to quote Occom's self-description, or, in the words of Paul, as a θέατρον (“spectacle”; 1 Cor 4:9).

And so Paul, like Occom, finds himself in a rhetorical bind: he sees no way forward but to boast, and yet he cannot afford to be seen as boastful. Paul has already been accused of overreaching himself, of claiming greater status than is merited by his abject demeanor (2 Cor 10:1, 8–11), and yet he cannot resist the urge to self-assertion. Paul's foolish boasting, then, is an attempt within these constraints to negotiate his controverted identity as the “least of the apostles,” to assert that his whippable Judean body paradoxically makes him more of an apostle, not less of one, and yet to do so without inviting further ridicule as a man who seeks to exceed his station. Only by expressing his awareness of the inappropriateness of his self-assertion—its absurdity when viewed from the perspective of those in Corinth from whom he seeks recognition—could he avoid making it simply derisible. Bound by these constraints, there is no way for Paul to talk around his weakness (ἀσθένεια). That is, he cannot avoid inhabiting his lowly social position. Instead, he acknowledges his weakness, even makes it his boast, and attempts to refigure it as a mark of divine strength.

When Occom reuses Paul's disclaimer, then, he does so, I suggest, not only because he seeks to borrow for his words Pauline authority, but also because the two speakers are negotiating analogous crises of (social) identity and thus face analogous social and rhetorical constraints. Each has been both derided and acclaimed, and, importantly, neither appears to have the option of parsing out derisible aspects of himself from those that have garnered esteem. Instead, both Paul and Occom challenge prevailing evaluations of their honor by boasting precisely of such missionary labors and hardships as derive from their marginal status as self-supporting itinerants (2 Cor 11:23–33). In so doing, each adopts what we might call a rhetoric of results: I may be a poor Indian, says Occom, but this poor Indian has accomplished more than any of your white missionaries. Yes, I am the least of the apostles, says Paul, but “I worked harder than any of them” (1 Cor 15:10). And each seeks to preempt further ridicule by voicing his awareness that such speech transgresses the social strictures that govern self-assertion: I speak like a fool, but I am constrained. In short, then, whereas Athanasius's Antony negotiates the pitfalls of self-praise by means of self-assured decorum, Paul and Occom are driven to the more desperate and hence riskier strategy of boasting of such accomplishments as derive from their liminal status.

When Hans Windisch first suggested that Paul had composed a Narrenrede, he insisted that, although Paul was playing the fool's “role,” nevertheless his boasting was in earnest.Footnote ¹²¹ Those who have borrowed Windisch's designation of the passage have not always attended to the subtlety of his interpretation. Since the proposal of E. A. Judge that Paul's “fool's speech” was a parody of the self-praise of his rivals, it has become common to assert that Paul's “boasting in weakness” was a deliberate rhetorical strategy intended to “satirise precisely those kinds of achievements of which his opponents were most proud.”Footnote ¹²² As Duane Watson has it, “Paul could have boasted on the highest levels of ascribed and acquired honor, but rather focuses his boasting in weakness” in order to subvert the Corinthians’ values.Footnote ¹²³

This study has attempted to disrupt such readings by considering how Paul's social location constrained the options for self-presentation that were available to him. Once esteemed but now humiliated, Paul sought to reassert his status in Corinth, and he did so by adducing the only καύχησις that he had. The tensions in the text, I have suggested, derive not from parody nor a theological dialectic but from the fact that Paul, like Occom, could boast only of such characteristics and accomplishments as were also implicated in his marginal status. In particular, our comparison of Paul and Occom has highlighted three aspects of Paul's self-assertion that the dominant interpretive paradigm characteristically neglects: first, the ambivalence of Paul's appeal to exotic ethnic identity, which could provide only such legitimacy as was also fraught with marginality; second, the instability of the status claim constituted by Paul's assertion that his abject body was a site of divine manifestation; and, finally, the close association of the labors and hardships Paul vaunts with these most problematic aspects of his identity. My goal throughout has been to make Paul's boasting intelligible as boasting—that is, not only as form, but also as social practice. Much like Occom, Paul was on the horns of a dilemma that resulted from the particular place he occupied in the social space of the Corinthian assembly. Thus Paul's “foolish boasting” is not an ironic rhetorical ruse. Rather, this is an earnest, even desperate plea for recognition the shape of which derives from the ambivalence of Paul's status in Corinth. Paul speaks like a fool because he is constrained.