Major: Religion
Thesis: “All Things to All People: Intersections of Theology and Identity in Paul’s Corinthian Epistles”
Summary: “I think I know this guy better than 2,000 years’ worth of smart people who’ve been reading and writing about this same guy.”
Saint Pault writing his epistles
James O’Connor delved into Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and found that this controversial apostle was “complex and multifaceted” and can’t be “whitewashed into one type of person,” as many scholars had done.

“True genius of theology—or a snake-oil salesman?” asks O’Connor. “That’s the dichotomy in Pauline studies now.”   

Paul’s reputation as a con man arose because, when the apostle traveled between the first Christian communities, he always asked for money. Plus, he was a serial contradicter, tweaking his theology for each audience. But here’s the maybe-genius part, as per I Corinthians 9:22: “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” 

O’Connor was brought up “über-Catholic” in Rockport, Maine: he was an altar boy and Eucharistic minister. These days, he has “lost the convention of practicing religion, but I’ve gained great appreciation for it as a phenomenon to study.” To that end, O’Connor did a close reading of I and II Corinthians, the letters Paul wrote to the Christian sect at Corinth. In working on the project, O’Connor also “had the greatest conversations of my life,” with Robert Doran, his adviser and the Samuel Williston Professor of Greek and Hebrew.

Paul wrote a lot because he wasn’t a great face-to-face preacher. “He describes himself as a small, bumbling, stuttering man,” explains O’Connor, whose thesis characterizes the future saint in three primary ways: as a Hellenized Jew, orator and believer.

Other scholars have “tried to whitewash Paul into one type of person,” says O’Connor, with “an implicit bias toward one of those categories.” That’s too narrow a lens, he argues. “My position was that Paul wasn’t one of those options: he was all of those options. He was complex and multifaceted, just like any other human being.”