1 Corinthians
Hello and welcome to the twenty-ninth installment of my Biblical scholarship effortpost series. This time, we’ll look at 1 Corinthians. Last time, with 1 Thessalonians, we saw an example of Paul communicating with a church - a relatively placid example. In 1 and 2 Corinthians, we’ll see a church where there were considerably greater struggles for Paul - with the church in Corinth, Paul faced serious challenges to his authority and his message. (Originally, I planned to do both letters together - but 2 Corinthian’s textual history is complicated enough that it deserves its own post, and I put these together slowly enough that it will be a while before I get to that.) With 1 Corinthians, then, we’ll get a bit of an introduction to the relationship between Paul and the Corinthian church - as noted, much more fraught than his relationship with the church in Thessalonica.
The letter was written to the church in Corinth, in the early 50s CE. According to Acts, Paul spent about a year and a half building the Christian community there, beginning around 50. The letter was likely written from Ephesus a couple of years later. Corinth had been destroyed two centuries earlier in an assertion of Roman power, then rebuilt a century later (a century before the letter was written, roughly) as a Roman colony. At the time Paul was writing, it was an important trade city due to its location where the geographical bodies that today are northern and southern Greece meet, and was rich as a result.
The letter begins with a standard introduction including prayers and the like, but quickly gets into the meat. Paul has heard from “Chloe’s people” (as well as receiving a letter from members of the Corinthian congregation, which he mentions later), and the situation in the Corinthian church is not good. The letter is largely spent asserting his authority over the community, which has major problems with group cohesion and with individual behaviour, explaining some theological issues along the way.
The problems in Corinth are a combination of community factionalism and personal behaviour. Early on in the letter, Paul appeals to the church to be united, rather than defining themselves by who baptized them, and disparages the value of human wisdom (it seems that some commmunity members boast of superior wisdom). Based on material in chapter 6, there are problems with members of the church going to court instead of working differences out within the community, and chapter 8 can be taken as indicating some community dispute over whether it was OK or not to eat meat that had previously been sacrificed to pagan idols. Concerning personal behaviour, Paul writes about sexual immorality, which must not be permitted in the community, and discusses marriage in the light of sexual morality (as well as the issue of mixed marriages between believers and unbelievers). Beyond this, he gives instructions on various important, though less divisive, issues.
1 Corinthians is a very memorable letter - it might be one of Paul’s most quoted - and the wide variety of topics it covers has made it important to Christians. For our purposes, the important part here is that it shows Paul facing the problem of exerting his authority at a distance. Further, it serves as an introduction to the community for when we consider the significantly more complicated 2 Corinthians.
From a scholarly position, what can we tell about the Corinthian church? Paul refers to his audience as former pagans, who had worshipped idols, in 12:2. This would line up with what we saw in 1 Thessalonians, where Paul also addresses his audience as former pagans. This doesn’t necessarily mean they were all ex-pagans, but it indicates that enough of the audience was that he could generally address them as such. We have a bit more to go on when it comes to socioeconomic status. Paul reminds his audience near the beginning of the letter that “not many of [them]” were educated, powerful, or of noble birth. By implication, some of them were. What does Acts tell us about the community there and Paul’s involvement? In Acts 18, Paul shows up in Corinth and befriends a couple of Jewish Christians, Aquila and Priscilla (mentioned in the letter), who had come to Corinth (Josephus mentions the Jewish community there) following an expulsion of Jews from Rome (this shows up in Suetonius, who states that Jews in Rome had been causing trouble due to one “Chrestus”; this might be a garbled interpretation of conflict caused by Jewish-Christian proselytizing in the Jewish community there).
Paul argues in the synagogue, attempting to convert both Jews and Greeks (“Greek” being most likely used here as a shorthand for gentiles; presumably they are “God-Fearers” (gentiles adopting bits of Judaism but not all; usually they liked the God but didn’t want to give up pork or foreskins). Following a rejection by the Corinthian Jewish community, Paul and his companions go to the gentiles instead. This is relatively easy to reconcile with the text of the letter - the majority of the church are gentile ex-pagans, so he addresses them.
There is no serious scholarly dispute that Paul wrote the letter. There has been some attempt to address the disjointed nature of certain points in the letter through theories suggesting it was written in stages, but most scholars think it was written as a unified letter.
So, 1 Corinthians is our introduction to Paul’s relationship with the Christian community of that city. Evidently, they had a lot of community problems, and in 1 Corinthians, you see Paul’s attempts to deal with this by letter. The situation got more complicated, as we’ll see, in 2 Corinthians - which is, we’ll also see, a document with a considerably more complicated textual history.
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