Introduction

What could it mean for Paul to express contentment and joy in prison? This question lies at the heart of this book. Its force is often blunted, however, by heroizing depictions of Paul that render his joy the singular feat of a legendary apostle. Misleading juxtapositions with other ancient prison letters have only reinforced this tendency, and comparisons with Stoic discourses of eupathic joy have failed to reckon with the concrete social and somatic location from which Paul writes. This introductory chapter sets the theoretical groundwork for a different mode of comparison, one rooted in the premise that Paul’s letter to the Philippians is an artifact of Paul’s imprisoned body. A history of Paul’s emotions, it argues, is also a history of his body, which is itself a history of his social interaction. Comparison with modern prisoners serves to defamiliarize the ancient evidence and suggest how it might be redescribed.

Conclusion

The book concludes by summarizing key arguments and contributions; articulating how the abject joy it describes relates to accounts of early Christian abjection inspired by Julia Kristeva; briefly justifying the biographical interpretive mode it exemplifies; and returning to the question raised in the Introduction regarding the moral entailments of contentment in prison. The joy of which Paul writes in Philippians pertains to a distinct social location and a distinct emotional community; it is not the joy of the sated or the sage, but of the subjugated. Unburdened of his role as universal paradigm, Paul gives poignant witness to something at once more modest and more exacting: the strange, unruly art of making do.

Far More Imprisonments

This chapter takes as its point of departure 2 Corinthians 11:23 and the multiple imprisonments of Paul to which it attests. Surveying the uses of prison in the administration of Rome’s eastern provinces, it argues that the detentions of Paul and other early Christ purveyors were mostly undertaken not by Roman provincial authorities but by local magistrates. This conclusion has significant implications for reconstructing the accusations against Paul and describing his social location. Paul was not charged with treason (maiestas), as some recent scholars have suggested. Rather, local officials took punitive or coercive action against him for much the same reason they periodically sought to contain other freelance religious experts, whose activity was often deemed disruptive. For historians of the Roman prison, the detention of Paul and other early Christ purveyors provides valuable and largely neglected evidence for such use of punitive confinement.

Rejoice with Me

This chapter explores the expressions of joy that are surely the most conspicuous feature of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, making three complementary methodological moves: close reading of the language of joy in ancient letters between friends and kin; comparison with modern prisoners’ expressions of joy; and engagement with recent studies of collective emotions and their regulation. Emphasizing the role of Paul’s Philippian addressees in producing and sustaining his joy, it describes Paul’s letter as an epistolary vehicle for the cultivation of positive affect—the Philippians’ as well as Paul’s own.

To Die Is Gain

This chapter locates incarceration within a broader economy of violence in the Roman world. Prison was legible, it argues, in relation to embodied scripts of honor and shame, self-mastery and slavishness, and what might be called the somatic grammar of subjugation. Among the elite, who were accustomed to bodily inviolability, imprisonment breached a key symbolic boundary that distinguished persons of honor from those subject to them. For Paul, however, as for others among the non-elite, prison was an acute instance of an all too familiar reality—namely, subjection to the mastery of more powerful men. Paul’s desire to die and be with Christ (Phil 1:23) must therefore be read alongside his vision of glorious somatic transformation, a transformation that is also and not incidentally an inversion of power relations, with Paul now sharing the sovereign glory of Christ, before whom all knees must finally bow.

Speaking with All Boldness

This chapter examines the complex role of prison in the social imagination of the Roman world by outlining four common tropes: the prisoner of war, the fallen aristocrat, the common malefactor, and the unvanquished herald of truth. Whereas most treatments of the ancient prison reproduce the elite perspective of their literary sources, this survey privileges evidence that attests to the experience of the non-elite. This provides a richly textured backdrop against which to read Paul’s suggestive yet curiously undeveloped self-depiction as a prisoner, and, in particular, his insistence that he will continue in all boldness (parrhēsia) despite his chains. With his non-elite addressees inclined in any case to sympathize with his plight, here Paul gestures toward a familiar trope wherein prison signifies the tyrant’s ineffectual attempt to silence a divine messenger.

I Have Learned to Be Content

Chapter 4 takes up Paul’s assertion in Philippians 4:11 that he is satisfied (autarkēs) even in prison. Although often read in relation to Stoic ideals, Paul’s claim in fact reflects a much more broadly attested moral ideal; philosophical discourses of autarky are not its source but coincidental products. Comparison with modern prison writing and ethnography invites a redescription of Paul’s rhetoric as an affective practice of survivalist dissent. As with other prisoners, for Paul to assert that he is satisfied in prison is to exercise his residual agency and thus perform an unabjected self, even as the hard somatic fact of his deprivation leaves him eager for relief and dependent on his Philippian addressees.