The Letters and Legacy of Paul

Fortress Commentary on the Bible

Margaret Aymer, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, David A. Sanchez, Margaret Aymer, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, David A. Sanchez

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506415918
• eBook ISBN: 9781506415925
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This commentary on the letters and legacy of Paul, excerpted from the Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The New Testament, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. Contributors connect historical-;critical analysis with sensitivity to current theological, cultural, and interpretive issues. Introductory articles describe the challenges of reading the New Testament in ancient and contemporary contexts, as well as exploring other themes ranging from the Jewish heritage of early Christianity to the legacy of the Apocalyptic. These are followed by the survey "Situating the Apostle Paul in His Day and Engaging His Legacy in Our Own." Each chapter (Romans through Philemon) includes an introduction and commentary on the text through the lenses of three critical questions:
The Text in Its Ancient Context. What did the text probably mean in its original historical and cultural context?
The Text in the Interpretive Tradition. How have centuries of reading and interpreting shaped our understanding of the text?
The Text in Contemporary Discussion. What are the unique challenges and interpretive questions that arise for readers and hearers of the text today? The Letters and Legacy of Paul introduces fresh perspectives and draws students, preachers, and interested readers into the challenging work of interpretation.

1 Corinthians

Laura S. Nasrallah

Introduction

First Corinthians is not the first letter that Paul and his coworkers wrote to those in Christ at Corinth (1 Cor. 5:9), but is part of a pattern of correspondence (7:1; 8:1; 12:1), oral reporting (1:11; 5:1), and visits from travelers (1:11; 4:7). This letter from Paul and Sosthenes to the community was penned from Ephesus (1 Cor. 16:8, 19) and dates to approximately 52 or 54 CE. The gift of the Corinthian correspondence, unique in the New Testament, is that it includes more than one authentic letter, allowing for historical reconstruction of a community’s relationship with Paul over time. The letters collected in 2 Corinthians allow us to see that 1 Corinthians did not meet with universal success at Corinth. Second Corinthians 2:4, for example, mentions a letter of tears, and 2 Cor. 10:1—13:20 may be that letter of tears, in which Paul claims he has to act like a fool and boast. The passages 2 Cor. 2:14—6:13 and 7:2-4 together form an apologia, or defense, of Paul’s apostleship. Because we have multiple letters to Corinth, we can glean more data and form a richer interpretation of productive struggle regarding ideas and practices over time between Paul and the Corinthians, between Paul and other traveling religious teachers, and, likely, among the Corinthians.

After nearly two millennia of study and commentaries on Paul’s letters, the task of the commentator is more to curate what she or he thinks are important data and interpretations than to offer something new. But one contribution this commentary makes is that it joins other scholarly work that elucidates not what Paul meant in his communications with the Corinthians but the possible responses of the community in Christ. It considers what the participants in the ekklēsia had at hand in Roman Corinth theologically, religiously, politically, and socially. That is, what were the conditions out of which those in Christ developed their rituals and beliefs, made ethical and political choices, and evaluated Paul’s critiques and suggestions?

Ekklēsia

If we move the focus away from Paul—ignoring the binary of whether he was a heroic apostle or a traitor to Christ’s true message (the latter was Thomas Jefferson’s view), and turn instead to the communities to which he wrote (Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah), we must ask what ekklēsia, their word for themselves, may have meant. What did it signal about how their community worked or how they ideally envisioned themselves? Some have argued that the term is a translation of the Hebrew qahal, a congregation. Certainly, Jewish associations, which used the Greek term synagōgē, existed in the Diaspora and attracted gentile converts and allies. Some have argued that ekklēsia signals the similarity of these earliest communities in Christ to so-called voluntary associations—guilds of people who gathered based on their employment (a guild of textile workers, for instance)—whose community together included worship of a god, meals, and often financial contributions (Ascough et al.). Some have pointed out similarities to philosophical schools (Stowers 2011b). Recent scholarship has shown that many associations were quite small (Kloppenborg). We should not assume that those to whom Paul wrote understood themselves to be, or to be in the process of becoming, a tight-knit, unified community (Stowers, 2011c). Further, the common translation for ekklēsia, “church,” risks picturing something anachronistic.

Those who heard the term ekklēsia in antiquity may have understood a range of meanings, but certainly a political, civic assembly would have been evoked in an urban context (to which Paul’s letters are aimed, after all: Meeks 2003). The term in the classical period had referred to the democratic assembly of the city, usually made up of free adult male citizens. At the time of Paul’s writings, political assemblies in Greek cities around the Roman Empire still bore the name ekklēsiai, or in the singular, ekklēsia, and still met to engage in democratic deliberation about what was best for their cities (Miller). Were the ekklēsiai to which Paul wrote places of democratic debate and deliberative discourse, of authoritative speeches and challenges to those speeches, of the busy roil of argument, struggle, and the testing of ideas (Schüssler Fiorenza 1987; 1993)?

In this short commentary, I use the term ekklēsia instead of church. I also avoid using the term “Christian,” since applying it to Paul’s letters would be anachronistic: the term was coined only approximately forty years after the writing of 1 Corinthians (see Pliny, Ep. 10.96; the statement in Acts 11:26 represents Luke’s significantly later view). Moreover, while Paul had experienced an important change in identity, it was not to a known quantity called Christianity. Paul described himself as a Jew (e.g., Gal. 2:15)—a good Jew (Stendahl; Gager; Eisenbaum)—who had had a revelation of Christ and who was now called to communicate to “the nations” (NRSV: “Gentiles”) about the righteousness of God that was available through faith (pistis) in this Christ (christos, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word that we render “Messiah” in English).

The Sociopolitical Context of Roman Corinth

To better understand the religious, political, and socioeconomic context within which the Corinthian ekklēsia developed their new identity in Christ, we must investigate Roman Corinth. In 146 BCE, the forces of the Roman general Mummius destroyed the city. It survived in a diminished form until Julius Caesar reestablished it as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, after which time it again emerged as a leader on the Peloponnesus. Corinth lay on a significant trade route in antiquity, on the isthmus connecting ancient Attica to the Peloponnesus. It nestled inland between its ports of Lechaion to the north and Kenchreai to the south, and near Isthmia, a town renowned for its quadrennial games. To transfer cargo from the Saronic Gulf to the southeast to the Gulf of Corinth to the northwest, ships had to negotiate with Corinth, unless they wanted to circumnavigate the Peloponnesus (Strabo, Geog. 8.6.20). Julius Caesar, Nero, and Herodes Atticus all attempted to dig a canal across the isthmus near Corinth, but failed, leaving it to Corinth to control a seven-meter-wide paved roadway (diolkos) that allowed oxen to drag ships or cargo across the narrow spit of land. Analysis of ceramic finds indicates Corinth’s importance in trade (Slane).

Who made up the new, Roman Corinth? In literature of the first century BCE, the city is characterized by its tragic history and as a site of grief (Cicero, Tusc. 3.53; Nasrallah 2012). Some inhabitants remained in the region between 146 BCE and the city’s refounding as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, but Corinth was largely resettled at that time. Unlike many Roman colonies, Corinth was repopulated not by military veterans but by ex-slaves. Numismatic evidence indicates that a mix of freedpersons—former slaves—and traders became leaders in Corinth upon the founding of the new colony (Spawforth). Although freedpersons were not usually eligible for magistracies, Caesar made exceptions for colonies he founded (Millis 2010; 2013; Williams). Thus some characterized the city as populated by “a mass of good-for-nothing slaves,” in first-century-BCE poet Crinagoras’s language (Harrill, 71; Spawforth, 169). Yet the rhetoric about low-status freedpersons may be precisely aimed to discredit the high-status freedpersons who emigrated to Corinth to take advantage of this commercial hub (Millis 2013).

Thus it may not be coincidental that in a letter to Corinth we find the only use in the New Testament of the technical term “freedperson” (apeleutheros, 7:22). Some freedmen in Corinth held high civic positions and the Forum was marked by the benefactions of ex-slaves. Paul’s words “Let . . . those . . . who buy [be] as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it” (7:29-31) would have been particularly thought-provoking to Corinthians-in-Christ in an urban setting in which buying and dealings with the world were central to civic identity—and in which having been bought and later manumitted were part of the identity of local elites (Nasrallah 2013).

Ethnicity and Identity in Roman Corinth: The City and the Ekklēsia

Given this history, what about ethnicity in Roman Corinth? Paul writes as a Jew who both asserts and reframes his ethnicity (9:19-22) to a community that is largely gentile (e.g., 12:2). We should not be surprised that gentiles sometimes wished to affiliate with Jews and even to shift their ethnicity and to become Jewish (Lieu; Cohen). Although archaeological evidence of Jews at Corinth is late and meager (a poorly incised lintel that once read “Synagogue of the Hebrews”; an impost capital with three menorahs), Philo mentions Corinth as having a Jewish population (Legat. 281) and Josephus states that Vespasian sent six thousand Jews to Corinth to work as slaves in the canal across the isthmus that Nero was attempting (J.W. 3.540; Millis 2010).

Although those to whom Paul wrote at Corinth were mostly gentiles, their choice to affiliate with Jews in Christ meant a shift in their ethnicity. In 1 Cor. 10:1, Paul argues that “our fathers were all under the cloud,” referring to the story of Moses leading them through the Red Sea, and thus writing gentiles into the story of Israel. Such shifts in, debates about, and reflections on ethnicity were not rare in Roman Corinth (Concannon); the historical and mythical prestige of the city’s Greek past was highlighted, even in the Roman period, through monuments and through the dissemination of iconography associated with the myths of Corinth (Robinson). Yet the city’s dominant Romanness is signaled by a vast majority of its public inscriptions that appear in Latin only (Millis 2010).

In 2 Corinthians, Paul fights opponents whom he mockingly calls “super-apostles,” but in 1 Corinthians he struggles with the Corinthian community itself, or at least with some members of it. The cause of this struggle has been the subject of debate. A variety of theories have been presented regarding the theological-philosophical inclinations of these Corinthians in Christ and their interest in being “spiritual people.” The thesis of F. C. Baur (1831) and others, of Judaizers or other Christian factions as outside opponents, has largely been left behind. In the mid-twentieth century, Walter Schmithals’s theory that the Corinthian community tended toward “a pneumatic-libertine Gnosticism,” which was at the same time Jewish, was popular. Hans Conzelmann qualified this by calling the Corinthians “proto-Gnostic,” employed the label “Corinthian libertinism,” and talked about their “enthusiastic individualism.” More recent scholarship demonstrates that we cannot discover a pre-Christian “Gnosticism” that may have affected the Corinthians, as Schmithals maintained (Pétrement 1990; K. King).

Scholars have long characterized the Corinthians as gnostics, libertines, Judaizers, and especially individualists, concerned about their private spiritual success rather than that of the community. Such approaches assume that Paul’s letter neutrally records events and that his viewpoint is normative (see Wire; Castelli; Schüssler Fiorenza 1999). Instead, 1 Corinthians should be investigated as part of a larger correspondence, some of which is lost to us, that provides data about a community that included men and women, poor persons and those at or above subsistence level, slaves and freedpersons and free, who sometimes accepted and sometimes resisted Paul’s characterizations of them. The Corinthian correspondence indicates a context of deliberative debate as happened so often in the civic ekklēsia—of back and forth, of struggling together toward a better future. Paul’s letters are written to particular communities about particular situations; they are not systematic theology or doctrine in their first instantiation. He uses his rhetorical arts to persuade the Corinthians, and we can use the letter to reconstruct vibrant debates at the very beginnings of what we have come to call Christianity.

Those debates were conducted as the appointed time was “growing short” (7:29-31; 15:51-57). Paul and the communities to which he wrote, like many who framed their lives in terms of Jewish apocalyptic thought, understood themselves to be awaiting the imminent end of the age and the parousia (“appearance”) of Christ. Nonetheless, their attention is focused in this letter on things great and small: the resurrection of the body, what they should eat, whether they should have sex, to give a few examples.

Paul has been characterized as promoting faith over law and works. Readers often approach 1 Corinthians in light of Paul’s emphasis on faith and as a letter enjoining early Christian morality. Indeed, much of 1 Corinthians is about making ethical and practical choices in the world, and faith—faith in Christ, God’s faithfulness, a concept that Paul explains in light of God’s covenant with Abram (Gen 12:3; see Gal 3:6–18) and in the midst of a Jewish discussion about how God’s faithfulness may or may not extend to “the nations,” or gentiles—is central to Paul’s letters. But when we look more closely, we realize that the binary of faith versus works may need dissolution and that the vague language of morality may not be adequate. Paul’s writings about “morality” involve practices of communities in Christ, something we could even call “works.” Is faith itself a matter of practice, or works? First Corinthians is, after all, very much about sex and eating, and even about whether Paul is owed a wage, as much as it is about things we might label more spiritual or faith-based: wisdom, spiritual gifts, and the resurrection.

The Text

The complex work of reconstructing the Corinthians in Christ is made somewhat easier because, other than some arguments about the place of 1 Corinthians 15 in the letter, most scholars agree that 1 Corinthians is a unified letter. In addition, it has few text-critical issues: its Greek text is remarkably uniform in various manuscripts (Fitzmyer, 63). It employs deliberative rhetoric (Conzelmann; Schüssler Fiorenza 1987; Mitchell 1991), the “political address of recommendation and dissuasion” that focuses on the future time as its subject of deliberation, urging audiences to pursue a course of action for the future, and often employs language of concord or harmony (Mitchell 1991).

Outline of the Letter

Chapters 1‒4 of the letter contain the greeting and the stasis, or main point of the letter, and are characterized by a discussion of wisdom and an argument regarding how the Corinthians ought to think of themselves: they are not quite as spiritual as they thought themselves to be. In 5:1—11:1, Paul discusses particular case studies in ethical and theological practice, treating especially themes of sex and eating, as well as discussing the marital, ethnic, and social conditions in which persons may have been “called” to be in Christ. In 11:2—14:40, Paul treats further issues of practice in the ekklēsia, ranking the spiritual gifts the community experienced and seeking to control their use. Paul grounds these discussions in the political rhetoric of unity and “one body.” In chapter 15, Paul turns to the topic of the resurrection of the dead, bringing together the cosmological hints about wisdom and the cosmos in chapters 1‒4, together with concerns about the body’s purity and practices in 5—11:1 and interest in the spiritual in 11:2—14:40. The epistolary closing comes in chapter 16.

Conclusions

According to the style of this volume, each section of my commentary on 1 Corinthians will be divided into three subsections: “the text in its ancient context,” “the text in the interpretive tradition,” and “the text in contemporary discussion.” These divisions are heuristic. We should not think we have access to an ancient context that is pure data, neither disturbed nor enriched by our contemporary situations and by the long interpretative tradition. There is no true division between what the text meant and what it means today. Rather, we can use our locations of interpretation to open new questions about these ancient texts, and we can turn a critical eye to the limitations of our own locations. That is, we should approach the text with a disciplined intimacy, acknowledging the feeling of closeness that we may have with this text, whether as Chri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Abbreviations
• Series Introduction
• Reading the Christian New Testament in the Contemporary World
• Negotiating the Jewish Heritage of Early Christianity
• Rootlessness and Community in Contexts Of Diaspora
• The Apocalyptic Legacy of Early Christianity
• Situating the Apostle Paul in His Day and Engaging His Legacy in Our Own
• Romans
• 1 Corinthians
• 2 Corinthians
• Galatians
• Ephesians
• Philippians
• Colossians
• 1, 2 Thessalonians
• 1, 2 Timothy
• Titus
• Philemon