This does not mean that these observations cannot and should not be challenged (what would be the fun in that? Questions generated by sex and gender roiled the Corinthians, and they roil us still today. The church at Corinth was a mess. Equally important, some of these converts seem to have been wealthy, forming an additional contrast with the poor pagan handworkers and street converts. It creates further differences that become places of further tension, dispute, and conflict. Some strands of ancient Greek thinking disparaged matter and material things. It keeps no record of wrongs. But things were even nastier in the ancient world. Christian leaders must help their communities navigate their current locations ethically with due depth, sensitivity, and courage, as Paul did for the Corinthians. Homogeneous and idealized communities mask how tough it is to practice this kindness and consideration across social divisions where it needs to bridge and heal and not merely to fit into a group that already gets along quite well. In this way, the puffed-up ones, as Paul calls them, could continue to attend the plethora of idolatrous events that structured the ancient pagan city—its processions, feasts, festivals, and sacrifices. Sadly, there was another factor at work at Corinth that was closely related to the leadership failure, and it made things still worse. The wealthy local converts who dominated the community were behaving as Greco-Roman leaders behaved. Neither do they factionalize into bitter partisan disputes. Among the former, one generally finds 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians, while among the latter are 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called Pastoral Epistles. Corinth exposes this countercultural challenge. By journeying down into the human condition and ultimately accepting a shameful death, Jesus revealed that God was a reaching God, an inclusive and gentle God who valued everyone, including the most despised and marginalized. Some of the community leaders were intellectually arrogant. (The older theological term for this virtue was condescension, a word that has now been inverted into its opposite, being freighted with unhelpful connotations of superiority and haughtiness.) Vocabulary, style, and even key Pauline concepts have been either ignored or changed to represent the church as a rigid hierarchy modeled on the patriarchal household. His research focuses on Paul, early Christianity, and Roman history and archaeology. What if I were to tell you that one of these two portraits had been painted by the famed painter Rembrandt and the other by someone else? When we take a step back from all the ins and outs of the issues in the letter, we can see that Paul is urging something simple on the Corinthians. The two letters are the 13th and 14th books of the New Testament canon. 10:1–22). The Pastorals present a different set of issues. They wrote a reply to Paul with a number of questions. So there were Jewish converts and God worshipers in the Corinthian church alongside the pagans. But something seems to be making considerate and appropriate relating especially hard at Corinth, and we don’t have to look far to find out what that was. 8:1–13). On one level this partisanship is entirely understandable. Paul’s final extended argument in the letter (15:1–58) addresses the denial of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and our intellectuals are probably in view here again. Those whom society looked down on, God was especially concerned about and eager to reach. He might even have had an ongoing battle with some unsightly disease like acute conjunctivitis. First, Paul’s ethic of Christian love was deeply countercultural and highly demanding. The top 1.5 percent in some cities monopolized at least 20 percent of all the resources. Douglas A. Campbell teaches New Testament at Duke Divinity School. It asks its leaders to be sensitive to “the least of these”—if necessary, living alongside them. Moreover, there were problems of leadership that prevented the Corinthians from resolving their differences. The letter was written from Corinth after his coworker St. Timothy returned from Thessalonica to report that the new converts had stood fast in the Lord despite persecution. Letters of Paul to Timothy, either of two New Testament writings addressed to St. Timothy, one of St. Paul the Apostle’s most faithful coworkers. Paul corrects this insensitivity with his basic relational argument. Every community is always involved with these powerful relational dynamics which do not always play out smoothly. The Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Paul contain both congruent and inconsistent accounts of Paul’s mission and message, which leads scholars of Christian origins to inquire about the difference between story and history, or between fact and fiction. They loved what people looked like, how much money they had, their connections, and how they spoke. Christian thinking must not be separated from Christian acting in relation to other Christians. Moreover, even as we occupy our present locations, we must pay constant attention to what our current imperfect bodies are doing. This article was most recently revised and updated by. Christians are to love, support, and encourage one another, not compete with one another, and their leaders are to follow in the footsteps of the crucified Christ. Assistant Professor, University of Southern California. We have already noted how many problems are evident here. So many problems in Corinth—and I suspect in many other places—would be solved if Christians were simply kinder to one another. We learn a lot from this Corinthian debacle. Idols aren’t anything, but these pagan events are intertwined with the evil powers that roam the cosmos outside the church. Although it is technically correct that food doesn’t matter to this degree anymore, such arrogance hardly possesses relational integrity. 6:12–20). By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. What fools!” (1 Cor. The church at Corinth had many problems. Partisanship was a standard feature of ancient Greco-Roman city life, and it hasn’t exactly gone away. Paul is rather horrified by this line of thinking. They looked beautiful and spoke beautifully. The unusual degree of factionalism in the Corinthian community is traceable in large measure to the handful of elite figures who are in it—the wealthy and highly educated converts that Paul and Apollos had made in and around the synagogue, including Gaius, Crispus, and Sosthenes. Here we see both the importance of Christian leadership and its true nature. Disconnectedness is the greatest threat to our spiritual security. But our amateur theologians reversed this attitude and paid it back with interest. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Moreover, they were competing in the terms that their surrounding culture dictated, in terms of appearances and money, so they were undermining Paul’s leadership as they elevated the merits of their patrons. The bitter partisanship evident at Corinth is linked tightly with another feature of the community: life in the ancient city was a desperate struggle for survival and an equally desperate climb up the proverbial greasy pole to the top. Of the thirteen letters ascribed to Paul, scholars have long recognized seven as “undisputedly” Pauline: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Of the thirteen letters ascribed to Paul, scholars have long recognized seven as “undisputedly” Pauline: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. He is the author of When You Were Gentiles: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence (Yale University Press, 2014). David Eastman on the three letters in the New Testament known as the “pastoral epistles.”. To top it all off, Paul’s converts were navigating relationships with people of different genders in all the complex and diverse ways that people usually do this—as singles, betrothed, and then in various married situations, whether happily married, unhappily married, married to another Christian, or married to a pagan. Paul's Mission and Letters Carrying the 'good news' of Jesus Christ to non-Jews, Paul's letters to his fledgling congregations reveal their internal tension and conflict. They happily ate their idol meat and mocked those who had a problem with it. But he began the letter with the heart of the matter: the partisan divisions in the Corinthian community. Spiritual things had been trapped in material things the way we might get our car stuck in a mudslide. Every part is linked to every other part, no matter how humble it might seem to be. The Corinthians are factionalized. Written before the Gospels, Paul’s letters complement and stretch the Gospels, and remind the Church to keep moving beyond Jerusalem and Judea into the dynamic world God loves. Christians apparently believed that it was useless to work, because the end of the world was close at hand. Here, too, he is saying that bodies matter. Paul instructs this group of Corinthians not to play with fire (1 Cor. Some of the Corinthians were Jews or were strongly committed to Jewish ways of living. When the church was founded ten years before this exchange of correspondence, in the early 40s, Priscilla and Aquila worked with Paul to convert people in the handworker community and probably also in the streets outside the small factory-shops the handworkers labored in. Pagan culture might not be what it says it is, but it is still dangerous. This leadership must be formed on Christ’s leadership, modeled by Paul and his students. The theological conceptions that Paul used so frequently are absent, but the major reason why some scholars believe that Paul did not write these letters is that the ecclesiastical order that these letters presuppose did not exist in Paul's day. A categorization in which people (or other objects) are ranked relative to each other, some higher and some lower. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... biblical literature: The First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians. Having a qualitative basis or being influenced by point of view rather than objective. He was quite brilliant and a leader in his own tradition, being highly skilled in the things it valued. //-->. If they are to take root, above all they require the right sort of leadership. A version of this article appears in the January 3 print edition under the title “Culture wars at Corinth.” It was adapted from Douglas A. Campbell’s book Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, forthcoming from Eerdmans. Attending an idolatrous worship event is creating a foolish vulnerability to evil, as well as being deeply unfaithful to God. Can we really attend a black Sabbath and escape unscathed? The article was edited on January 4 to reflect the most current scholarship on wealth and poverty in the ancient world. Chapter 12 uses the image of the body of Christ to lay out the way the community should relate together. Perhaps the letters were written by someone who was an admirer of Paul and who wrote the kind of instruction of which he believed Paul would approve. They were competing with one another for influence, status, and power—no love lost in this battle! Third, we learn that intellectualism is damaging when it comes in the form of aggressive theological and ethical judgments that are separated from right relating and from the right depth in the Jewish tradition. The Rembrandt, according to art historians, is the one on the right, and their determination is made by analyzing a series of factors, like lighting, brush strokes, and the paints, colors, and forms. They were highly competitive, aggressive, tough people who sat on those beneath them and fended off their rivals ruthlessly.

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