I’m your saint? Cohen and St. Paul studied in ‘Prophets of Love’
As Matthew R. Anderson suggests in the subtitle of Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, the idea of a kinship between Leonard Cohen, raunchy Jewish poet, and the apostle Paul, follower of Jesus, seemed unlikely to me indeed. I began reading the book as an expert on neither man but knowing — as a Jewish woman in Canada in 2023 — significantly more about one than the other, and I was intrigued to see what Anderson would argue in this slim, colourful book.
Right from the start, Anderson had some work to do to win me over, as he asserted almost immediately that Paul remained a Jew even as an apostle of Jesus. While there are myriad definitions of what makes someone Jewish, depending on who you ask and denomination you consult, they all generally share one basic tenant: if you believe Jesus was the lord and saviour, you’re Christian, not Jewish. The fact that Christianity as an organized religion didn’t exist yet was not a particularly compelling argument to me; by any modern interpretation, a man who wrote “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Paul, quoted in this book) was not a Jew.
My trust was further shaken when Anderson quoted John C Gager and claimed that “nothing ‘has produced more animosity between Jews and Christians’ than history’s usual and mistaken Christianized readings of Paul.” With two thousand years of persecution to draw from, I can think of a few things that cause more animosity than whether Paul was actually Christian. Anderson does go on throughout the book to acknowledge the history of Christian genocide against Jews and antisemitism as the result of successionism — the idea that Christians replaced Jews as God’s chosen people — present interpretations of Paul’s story. Although these acknowledgements warmed me slightly to Anderson’s claims, as a Jew, I have yet to be moved by any claim that you can be a Jesus-follower and still Jewish. Such claims, as heard through so-called “Messianic Jews” (more colloquially known as “Jews for Jesus”), have led to far more antisemitism over the years than quandaries over Paul’s faith.
My own misgivings about assertions of apostles as Jewish aside, I can see why it was important for the book for Anderson to make such a claim. Paul was certainly born Jewish, as was Leonard (as Anderson calls Cohen for parallelism), and both men spent their adult lives entranced with ideas of Jesus. I was fascinated throughout the book to learn what a deep hold the imagery and symbolism of Jesus had on Leonard. Jesus was, for both Paul and Leonard, a physical representation of love and sacrifice and a way to engage with and connect to the divine.
For a book called Prophets of Love, it makes sense that love is the thread that ties the book together. For both Leonard and Paul, love and desire are intrinsically connected to divinity, although as Anderson demonstrates throughout the book, they come at desire from very different directions. For Leonard, engaging in sex, desire, and longing were part of reaching for divinity. For Paul, celibacy and asceticism as redirections of desire helped him overcome his body as he reached closer to God. Both men, we learn, considered longing to be a sort of divinity, but for Leonard, giving in to desire was essential for real love and divine connection, while for Paul, love and divinity existed in the elongation of longing.
Anderson, who holds the Gatto Chair in Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., writes, “Where Paul approaches individual relationships from the starting point of a divine encounter, Leonard touches on the divine by first focussing on the individual: often the sexual, erotic, individual.” Throughout the book, we see these two men, so inspirational both in their own lives and after, engaging in lifelong quests for connecting with divinity. Though they often approach this from opposing angles — one through sex and desire, one through the absence thereof — Anderson deftly explores the ways that both Leonard and Paul never stray from the central core of what they consider the divine: love.
Through extensive text comparisons, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory endnotes, Anderson creates a fascinating comparison of two writers who, on the surface, could not seem further apart. Prophets of Love is an engaging, easily readable exploration of love, divinity, and poetry for Bible scholars, Leonard Cohen enthusiasts, and anyone in between.
Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul by Matthew R. Anderson is published by McGill-Queens University Press.
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