Introduction

Reading Paul Today

In this study we encounter the Apostle Paul: difficult and dazzling, pastor and preacher, theologian and teacher. Our text is a letter (“epistle”) Paul wrote to the Christian church in Corinth around 53-54 C.E. Like all of Paul’s letters, 1 Corinthians is “episodic” — that is, it addresses some specific episode, a specific time and place and specific questions and problems, facing the people to whom Paul wrote. We are literally “reading someone else’s mail” when we read any of Paul’s letters. But this letter, of course, is included in the canon of the Christian scriptures, so we also expect that, in some way, this letter still speaks to us, the Church gathered in Ridgewood, New Jersey, today.

Our study of this letter together therefore involves at least two things: first, trying to understand what Paul was communicating to those first century Christians in Corinth; and, second, trying to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to us in and through this letter as twenty-first century Christians in Ridgewood. Those are not necessarily the same things — after all, we don’t live in first century Corinth — but as we listen, study, and contemplate the text prayerfully and reflectively we expect themes and patterns to emerge that will guide our faith and lives in our time and place.

Ancient Corinth

Corinth is located in Greece, on the Gulf of Corinth, which separates the Peloponnese peninsula from mainland Greece:

Ancient Corinth was a very large and important city in ancient Greece. It was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, but was restored and rebuilt in 44 BC, after which it was made the Roman provincial capital of Greece. By Paul’s time, Corinth was a bustling port city with two large harbors, an amphitheater, and numerous temples. It was a center of trade, power, and politics, and an important location for the imperial cult — the political-religious worship of the Roman Emperor.

You can get a bit of a feel for what it must have been like to walk down one of the city streets in this photo:

Imagine bustling shops and stalls, smells of animals and cooking food, people talking and going about their business, political and military people hurrying to their meetings, pilgrims coming to the large Temple of Asclepius for healing, slaves buying things to supply the villas of their rich masters, sailors coming in from the ports bringing goods from around the empire, some of them also probably them looking for a brothel or a place to gamble, and on the Sabbath, Jews walking to the synagogue.

In the First Century CE — that is, within the decades after the death and resurrection of Christ — the church in Corinth was one of the early Christian communities that developed in cities in the Roman world, in what is today Greece, Italy, Turkey, and the Middle East. You’ll recognize some of the names of these cities from Paul’s letters — Rome, Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus, Philippi. These churches reflect Paul’s missionary activity, described both in his letters and in the book of Acts. Others you’ll recognize from the text of the book of Revelation — including Ephesus as well, but also Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicia. These may represent another stream of Christian communities originally associated with the Apostle John.

Within the New Testament corpus, you can see a strand of texts with a “Pauline” theology — Paul’s letters and other texts attributed to Paul — and another strand with a “Johanine” theology — the Gospel of John, the epistles attributed to John, and Revelation. There are also other texts with perhaps a different kind of “Jewish” wisdom emphasis — the epistle to the Hebrews, the author of which is uncertain, and James, attributed to the James the brother of Jesus, along with the letters attributed to Peter, which are strongly apocalyptic. (I put “Jewish” in scare quotes here because modern scholarship emphasizes the Jewishness of Paul’s letters as well.) Of course, the map also includes the Church at Jerusalem, a center of where the Jesus movement first began, as narrated in the Gospels and in Acts.

Paul and the Corinthians

Paul was an educated and zealous Jewish person, a Pharisee, who persecuted the early church. His life changed when he dramatically encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, where he had intended to arrest Christians (people “of the Way” in the language of Acts) present in the synagogue. (See Acts 9.) Contemporary scholars debate whether to call this event a “conversion” or a “calling” or “commissioning” of Paul. Paul did not renounce Judaism, but understood the revelation of Christ as belonging to the Jews first, so Paul was not really converted “away” from Judaism (see Romans 1:16). Yet, Paul did consider himself an emissary, and Apostle, of God’s mission of reconciliation in Christ to the Gentiles — “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).

Paul’s missionary activities eventually took him to Corinth. In his excellent survey The Writings of the New Testament, Luke Timothy Johnson explains that

Paul established the first Christian community in Corinth (1 Cor. 4:15). . . . Paul came to Corinth from Athens and met Aquila and Priscilla (see 1 Cor. 16:19), who had recently been expelled from Rome with other Jews by [the Emperor] Claudius (Acts 18:2). Paul joined them [in their trade of] tentmaking, and began preaching in the synagogue. Rejected there (18:6) and rejoined by [delegates he had previously sent to Corinth] (1 Thes. 3:6), Paul moved next door to the house of Titus Justus (Acts 18:7). He converted Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue (Acts 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:14), and stayed in Corinth some eighteen months (18:11). During that time, he was brought before the proconsul Gallio (Acts 18:12). When Gallio dismissed the case, a Jewish crowd beat Sosthenes, whom Acts refers to as a ‘ruler of the synagoge’ (18:17) and who appears as Paul’s ‘brother’ and co-writer in 1 Cor. 1:1.

Johnson, 262.

If this run-up isn’t dramatic enough, Johnson further explains the tension that will develop when Paul leaves Corinth to continue on his journeys:

When Paul left Corinth to return to Antioch, he took Aquila and Priscilla with him as far as Ephesus (Acts 18:18-21). In his absence, Priscilla and Aquila encounter the charismatic Apollos, instruct him, and support his journey to the province of Achaia (18:24-28).

Johnson, 262

Acts 18 describes Apollos as follows:

He was a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. .

Acts 18:24-26

As we’ll see, Apollos’ influence in Corinth became troublesome. The Corinthian Christians were from mixed backgrounds — Jewish and Greek (pagan), lower class and wealthy. Some of the more refined members of the community apparently gravitated to Apollos’ intelligence and rhetorical skill. Others defined themselves against the “Apollos” faction by identifying with Paul or Peter. Further, some members of the community felt empowered by the freedom and charismatic gifts they were experiencing as Christians, and that empowerment slipped into spiritual elitism. On top of all that, tensions were simmering between community members from Jewish and Greek backgrounds over questions about how to live a holy life in a pagan metropolis. As Johnson puts it, “[t]he Corinthians’ faults came from over-enthusiasm, not tepidity.” (Johnson, 263.)

1 Corinthians was not Paul’s only correspondence with this community. Paul’s letter that we call 1 Corinthians responds to a letter he received from the Corinthian Christian community about how to respond to the problems they were experiencing. (See 1 Cor. 7:1.) There were at least five letters between Paul and the Corinthians, and as Johnson notes, “probably more,” including the other letter in the Biblical canon, 2 Corinthians, which might be a collection of several edited letters, as well as letters that have been lost. (Johnson, 264.) Therefore, in 1 Corinthians, we have one piece of a broader pastoral and theological reflection and instruction from Paul to this disputatious early Christian community that he founded and loved.

The Corinthian Correspondence in Context

It’s also helpful to note that 1 and 2 Corinthians also relate to Paul’s epistle to the Romans. Romans appears first in the order of texts collected in the New Testament, but that doesn’t mean Romans was written before the Corinthian correspondence. A common theme in the Romans and 1 Corinthians is a collection these and other churches are taking that Paul plans to deliver for the poor in the church in Jerusalem. (1 Cor. 16; Romans 15:25-28). In 1 Corinthians 16:1-4 Paul instructs the Corinthians to take up the collection, and in Romans 15:25-28 he says he is on his way to Jerusalem to deliver a collection, so the Corinthian correspondence seems to precede Romans.

Pauline scholar Douglas Campbell, in his interesting book Framing Paul: an Epistolary Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2014), argues based on the data in Paul’s letters alone that Paul likely wrote

• 1 and 2 Thessalonians in 40-42 CE — about 8 years after his initial conversion / calling / commissioning — followed by a ten-year period of travel and mission work, from which we have no surviving correspondence (which Campbell calls the “years of shadow”);
• Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon while imprisoned in the mid-50’s CE;
• 1 Corinthians in the Spring and 2 Corinthians in the summer of 51 CE, while Paul was visiting Ephesus;
• Galatians in the fall-winter of 51-52 CE and Philippians while imprisoned during that end of that period; and
• Romans in the Spring of CE 52 after being released from prison, after which Paul left to deliver the collection to Jerusalem.

Much of this timeline, including whether Paul himself actually wrote Ephesians or Colossians, is debatable (there is no serious debate, however, that Paul wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians). For our study, a very important, and contested, position Campbell takes is that 1 Corinthians is the “letter of tears” referred to in 2 Corinthians 2:4: “I wrote you out of great distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to grieve you but to let you know the depth of my love for you.” This could frame 1 Corinthians as a harsher correspondence that Paul softens in some respects in 2 Corinthians after hearing that the first letter has caused great upset. But scholars disagree about this and propose various other chronologies and ideas about what the relationships between 1 and 2 Corinthians.

Also, unlike the narrative from Luke Timothy Johnson’s introductory survey, Campbell’s more detailed reconstruction does not integrate any information from Acts. Campbell says he is working on another book that will consider the timelines in Acts, but he notes that it is difficult for a number of reasons to know whether Acts always presents information that can be taken at face value chronologically. The most interesting question, for our discussion, is the often fraught relationship Paul had with the Church leaders in Jerusalem, including Peter. Acts at times seems to portray Paul in a more subordinate role to Peter, while Paul at times seems to offer a different picture. In Galatians 2, Paul vividly describes his perspective on the a conflict with Peter about the place of Gentiles in the church, which came to a head when the two men met in Antioch:

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray

Acts 2:11-13

This could add a little more flavor to the collection Paul wants to deliver to Jerusalem: it could be a symbol of goodwill and unity between these “Pauline” congregations and the Jerusalem church, and also a way for Paul to subtly reinforce his authority as an Apostle against various kinds of opposition he has faced. Paul may have been facing a personal crisis around 51-52 CE, when it seemed that conflict with Peter / Jerusalem over the role of Gentiles in the church (see Gal. 2:11-21) and opposition within his own church plants might cause his entire missionary project to crumble. 1 Corinthians is one of several letters from Paul that survive from this time of crisis in his life and ministry.