Reading the Bible against Desire

Reflections on the Lectionary for May 25th

An overview of the ruins of Philippi, taken by the author in 2018.

For several years now, I have had a book project percolating on the subject of desire and the Bible. I don’t mean scenes or acts of romantic or sexual desire within the Bible, exactly—although that’s an interesting question too. Instead I am interested in thinking about the ways the Bible becomes a place to work out various forms of desire and attachment that might be mostly invisible, but that nevertheless exert powerful forces on us as we encounter biblical traditions.

The lectionary for May 25^th includes a passage where this question of hidden and powerful desires is especially prominent. Acts 16:9-15 is the story of Paul’s visit to Philippi, where he met Lydia and “her household,” stayed with her, and baptized her whole household. This story might seem straightforward at first, but I think it echoes with certain kinds of desire that influence how we read it, and how various interpretive devices (study Bibles, sermons, tour guides, traditions) help interpret the story for us and make meaning from it on our behalf. This desire is centered in geography and colonialism, and it is funded by the modern Euro-Christian impulse to place Europe at the center of the story of Christianity. This is a form of desire that seeks to make Christianity into an essentially European movement.

You may be wondering: what does this story about Paul’s journey to Philippi have to do with Europe? It’s a good question, since the text itself doesn’t say anything about Europe. But if you read very many commentaries on this passage, or even if you look at the notes or headings in many study Bibles, you’ll see that this story is often presented with some form of the framing “The Gospel Arrives in Europe.” Up until this point in Acts, the story has followed the earliest followers of Jesus in Jerusalem and then the figure of Paul, as he traveled further and further from Jerusalem. All those stories took place in the area we now know as Asia, on the eastern end of the Mediterranean and then in Asia Minor in the regions now known as Turkey. But with the transition in 16:11-12, “we therefore set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Phillipi,” the text takes us to lands that today are known as Europe. With Paul’s arrival in Philippi, the gospel can be said to have arrived in Europe.

Or, at least that is true from our modern perspective. Today we divide the world’s landmasses into seven continents, and we tend to essentialize those continents and the people who live there in problematic ways. Think, for example, of how and why the phrases “African cuisine” or “Asian communalism” or “South American politics” make sense. Those phrases only make sense because we essentialize whole continents and pretend that continents (land masses) are a useful way to categorize people and their characteristics. In reality, Africa and Asia and South America each contain hundreds of millions of people, dozens of cultures and languages, and a dizzying diversity of human beings. “Asian communalism” (which has been used, for example, as an excuse to crack down on groups of migrant workers thought of as poorly suited for capitalism) assumes an essential commonality between people as diverse as Malaysians, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, and Koreans—ignoring the fact that many of the people from those places and cultures understand themselves as fundamentally different from or even opposed to other groups of people on that same list. These kinds of biases help shape our thinking, and guide us into thinking that geography is an important indicator of the characteristics of individual people. All of that leads us modern folks to think of Europe as a really different place from Asia or Australia or North America, and so forth. Thinking specifically about the Europe and Asia, we are preconditioned to understand that there are essentialized versions of “European culture” or “Asian culture,” “European religion” or “Asian religion,” “European ethics” or “Asian ethics,” and so on.

This is nonsense, for some of the reasons I have already mentioned. “Europe” and “Asia” don’t describe anything reliable or durable about all the people who live in those places, and geography is not a reliable way to describe human beings. And—here is where all of this matters to the story of Paul’s trip to Philippi—these categories are dubious at best even for describing geography. Asia and Europe are famously divided by a mountain range, not an ocean, so they are already marginal and somewhat arbitrary as far as continents go. (Hence the term “Eurasia” as a catch-all). “Europe” and “Asia” are iffy for describing continents in modern terms, but they would have made no sense at all in the ancient world, when nobody had satellite imagery of landmasses or even very accurate maps made with modern surveying. Look at the journey described in Acts 16:11-12. Paul and his companions (this is one of the mysterious “we sections” of Acts) travel around the northern rim of the Aegean Sea, hugging the land and checking in at various harbors along the way. This was smart sailing in a time before the Coast Guard was hanging around waiting to rescue you from a shipwreck; staying close to the coast meant that you had better chances at survival if something went wrong, and a better chance of avoiding high swells from storms. It also meant that for someone like Paul, traveling from Troas to Philippi would have felt exactly like traveling from Miami to Charleston, from Seattle to San Francisco, or from Houston to New Orleans. It was a trip along a landmass, never far from shore, always an experience of continuity rather than discontinuity. It was never an open-sea crossing. The whole journey described in Acts 16:11-12, Paul and all the other passengers would have felt like they were traveling along the shore of one stretch of land. And they were, since the whole time they were hugging the Aegean coast.

But on modern maps, and in modern ways of reckoning geography, they were crossing from Asia to Europe. Paul would have had no idea, as he journeyed from Troas to Philippi, that he was moving from Asia to Europe, but we make it into a big deal today. When I visited Philippi in 2018, the first thing the tour guide told us was that we were standing in the place where the gospel was first preached in Europe. The guide took us to a little shrine by a small river (the same one mentioned in Acts 16:13) and told us confidently that were at the spot where the first convert to Christianity in Europe was made.

Tour guides, I have learned, are a pretty accurate reflection of desire. Much of what a guide will tell you at most major tourist sites is dubious or outright made up, but in another sense, it’s not a full fabrication. Rather, a lot of the information you will get at a tourist site is just the stuff they assume you, the tourist, want to hear. It’s desire, reflected back to you. I visited Philippi as part of a church group, and the guides knew that. The guides at Philippi assume that a group of white Christians will want to see themselves at the center of the story, so they emphasize Philippi as the place where Christianity made the jump to Europe—never mind that that claim would have made no sense to anyone in the story found in Acts. Neither the book of Acts nor the characters in the story it tells make any reference to either Asia or Europe in telling this part of the story, because they literally had no context for thinking that it was important. The only thing that makes it important to us, today, is the desire of European-descended Christians to see themselves at the center of the story. Even if that desire is under the surface and unexpressed, it’s enough to guide our interpretations.

The theme of desire extends to Lydia herself, who so frequently gets labeled as “the first convert to Christianity in Europe,” or something like that. Lydia is described in this passage (in Acts 16:14-15) as a worshipper of God, as being from the city of Thyatira, as a dealer in purple cloth, and as the head of a household. These are all important details, and many interpreters make much of Lydia’s seemingly high status to show how Paul’s missionary work was successful in Philippi (and in Europe). But those same details should make us a little bit suspicious. Thyatira was a leading city of a region called—believe it or not—Lydia. The region of Lydia at large, and Thyatira specifically, were known for their production of—believe it or not—purple cloth. It’s like meeting someone named Atlanta from the capital of Georgia who was a peach merchant, or it’s like meeting someone named Hollywood who makes movies in California. Lydia’s name, place of origin, and trade all suggest that she’s as much a product of desire as a figure of history.

What do I mean, that Lydia was a product of desire and not a figure of history? I mean that Lydia likely was a character invented by the author of Acts to get a point across, and not a flesh-and-blood human being. She was a symbolic character, symbolically named and symbolically characterized. Look at how she functions in the story itself. Lydia does two things, and two things only. First, Lydia serves as the ideal convert, quickly acquiescing to Paul’s proselytizing, and bringing her whole household (her slaves, if we remove the niceties from it) with her into baptism. Second, Lydia gives Paul and the others in his group a place to stay in Philippi. Lydia is a personification of the author’s desire to facilitate Paul’s story as a tale of success and good fortune. (I think it’s also possible that the author of Acts knew a tradition of a Lydian woman who met Paul in Philippi and helped him, and filled in unknown details about her with stereotypes based on the region of Lydia). Lydia is a literary device who exists to advance Paul’s story in those two ways, and it is telling that once she has done those two things, she disappears from the narrative. (That’s a common pattern with Luke’s inclusion of women. Luke includes more women in both his gospel and in Acts than other gospel-writers do, which earns him praise from some interpreters. But if you pay attention to how Luke uses those women in his narrative, they are usually deployed for some specific purpose and then discarded as soon as their narrative usefulness is exhausted).

Maybe you find my arguments here unnecessarily skeptical and untrusting of the biblical text. That’s fair. There’s value to taking the text at its word, and there can even be value, I suppose, in emphasizing the spread of Christianity into (the region we now know as) Europe. But I also think there is value in understanding what makes biblical texts tick, and in understanding what we want from them as readers, and why we want it. I think desire is a handy way to talk about that—a way to encapsulate all the things we want from the Bible, whether we know we want them or not. The Bible is, after all, a powerful thing that exerts powerful forces on us and on our culture. The Bible is a location of desire, a deep well of gravity into which a lot of our aspirations and anxieties sink. When we read the Bible, we read it with all the forms of desire that have accumulated to it, whether we are aware of it or not, and among those forms of desire is the desire to see the Bible as an essential Euro-Christian story. It’s a desire that has been cultivated and refined over centuries, and embedded in our habits of interpretation, so that we hardly even notice it anymore. “The Gospel Arrives in Europe” becomes a natural and naturalized way of reading this story of Philippi and Lydia, even if it’s absurd as a matter of history. The only way to get around that desire—the only way to short-circuit its powerful effects—is to become aware of how it acts on us, and to re-read the story of Paul’s journey to Philippi and the conversion of Lydia against the grain of Eurocentrism.