Was Paul disabled?

Christians have long wrestled with the meaning of Paul’s writings and the implications they have for us in our own contexts. Some see Paul as a herald of Christian freedom through justification by faith, while others see him as the villain who transformed the egalitarian Jesus movement into a hierarchical church. Some scholars attempt to arrange Paul’s writings into a systematic theology, while others argue such attempts fail to grasp the episodic and pastoral nature of Paul’s writings, as he sought to apply unfolding understandings of the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to the communities he guided.

The scriptures Paul knew were concerned with human bodies: what purified and defiled them, what sort was needed to enter the Jerusalem temple, what they should and should not eat. Paul’s writings shared that concern, and so he, too, wrote about bodies: how to clothe them, with whom they should and should not have sex, and how they should arrange and conduct themselves at worship and communal meals. For Paul, those who believe in Jesus form a collective body of their own, which he calls “the body of Christ.” Paul is also concerned with his own body: how it is perceived, what it signifies, and what he wants his communities to see in it. He argues that his body is a sign of his faithfulness to the call he received to be an apostle: his scars and suffering prove both his commitment to the gospel and God’s ability to work through a weak body.

Isaac Soon argues for a reading of Paul as “a disabled apostle” who “participates in and experiences disability as his impairments interact negatively with the society and culture around him.” Soon uses the framework of disability to elucidate how Paul’s communities might have perceived his body, focusing on three ways Paul’s body falls short of cultural expectations: his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7), his circumcision, and his short stature. Soon avoids trying to give medical explanations for Paul’s body and instead employs a sociocultural model of disability, which understands disability as resulting from systemic social exclusion.