When I was a boy in Sunday school, I disliked the Apostle Paul. Intensely. His rigid rules, his asceticism, his demand that people live as if their actions might lead others astray–I hated all of that. But I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for decades: his poetry, his fiction, and his music, from his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen to You Want it Darker, which released in 2016 just three weeks before his death. I would never have thought that Paul and Leonard had much in common, aside from being Jewish. In Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, Matthew R. Anderson argues, convincingly, that despite their many differences, they share many, many things.

First of all, Anderson would tell me that I’ve got Paul all wrong. Only seven of the letters ascribed to him in the New Testament were written by him; the rest are almost certainly not his, according to recent scholarship, including the ones that used to bother me so much. Still, he writes that “after decades of studying, teaching, and researching his life and letters, I know I would almost certainly not get along with Paul in person.” He was volatile, argumentative, rude, passive-aggressive, imperious. Leonard, on the other hand, was charming and seductive. When Anderson listens to his “bleak and magnificent poetry,” he finds himself “startled–sometimes to laughter, sometimes to regret, and most often to an appreciation of the dark, rich, sweetness of love and loss.” (I’m following Anderson’s use of first names, which makes sense, since Paul doesn’t seem to have had a surname.) At the same time, though, Anderson acknowledges, “I might not always have liked everything about Leonard Cohen in person.” Seen through the lenses of gender and power, Leonard’s life and work generate discomfort. The complex response Anderson has to both figures is one of the qualities that links them together for him.

That’s where Prophets of Love begins, but it’s not where it ends. In the first chapter, Anderson lays out the framework of the comparison he intends to make. Both Leonard and Paul were Jews; both were religious, both were writers. Both knew how to persuade others with their words. Both worked hard “to encourage warm identification with their audiences, despite suffering very public moments of relational failure and raw vulnerability.” From here, the book explores these points of similarity: their Jewishness, their fascination with Jesus (although that fascination took different forms for each of them), the way both surrounded themselves with women (although, again, the way they related to women was different for each of them), their asceticism (celibacy for Paul, fasting and the boot-camp life Leonard lived in the Zen Centre at Mount Baldy in Los Angeles), their masculinity, their rhetorical abilities, their senses of divine vocation, their mysticism, their awareness of suffering, the way their work carried on after their deaths. By the end of the book, Leonard and Paul have become nearly interchangeable, despite their differences. For Anderson, “it was precisely because Leonard knew how fleeting success could be, and how fickle humans love, that he could write about divine mercy and diving judgment that speak to us above and beyond history.” At that point, he stops–a pause marked by the beginning of a new paragraph–and asks, “Did I just write that about Leonard? It could have been Paul.”

Prophets of Love is the result of decades of classroom experience; it guides its reader through its comparisons carefully, not making claims it can’t support and qualifying the similarities it finds between Leonard and Paul with recognitions of their differences. Each chapter even ends with homework: songs and writing on which to meditate, additional reading for the ambitious or fascinated. The last chapter even ends with a suggestion about how people teaching Second Temple Judaism to undergraduates could use Leonard’s poem “Song of the Hellenist” to get their students thinking about the experiences of Hellenized Jews in the second century BCE. Throughout the book, I sensed the presence of a warm, friendly teacher helping a skeptical student (me) understand how two very different figures could share so much. I’ll bet Leonard, if he was still with us, would enjoy this book, too.