1-2 Corinthians

Gerald L. Bray, Thomas C. Oden, Gerald L. Bray

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830897490
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

In Paul's letters to the Corinthian church, the pastoral issues of a first-century Christian community stand out in bold relief. And as the apostle responds to these challenges, the fathers lean over his shoulder, marveling and commenting on his pastoral wisdom.Best known among these patristic commentators is Chrysostom, whose seventy-seven homilies on the two Corinthian epistles are a treasury of exposition and application. The fragmentary works of Didymus the Blind and Severian of Gabala give us samples of Greek exegesis from the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools. The partial work of Theodore of Mopsuestia was long valued in the church, and the comments of Theodoret of Cyr are notable for their sensitivity to the intertextuality of Scripture. Then there are Origen and Pelagius, whose notable errors need not obscure their brilliant insights into Scripture. But pride of place in this volume goes to the unknown fourth-century commentator now dubbed Ambrosiaster. His excellent commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians was previously unavailable in English translation.This Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume opens a whole new way of reading these New Testament texts. The pastoral and theological interpretation of the fathers offers spiritual and intellectual sustenance to those who would read Paul again with open minds and hearts.

INTRODUCTION TO 1-2 CORINTHIANS

How is it possible to smooth the way for a modern reader to explore 1 and 2 Corinthians through the eyes of the ancient Christian writers? To help in this task, we must first consider four different questions:

1. Who wrote the epistles to the Corinthians?

2. Why are the epistles to the Corinthians important?

3. How were the patristic quotations used here selected?

4. How has the process of reading them been made easier for you?

Who Wrote the Epistles to the Corinthians?

On the question of the authorship of 1 and 2 Corinthians, virtually all commentators, both ancient and modern, agree that the author of the epistles was the apostle Paul, though there are doubts about whether the current form of 2 Corinthians in particular is original to him. Even in ancient times, there was a suspicion that Paul wrote other letters to the Corinthians, and it was not clear even then whether or to what extent their content had found its way into the canonical texts as we have them. Dating the epistles is therefore a complicated procedure, especially if we have to take a later redaction into account. In any case, we know that they cannot have been written before A.D. 49-51, when Paul was in Corinth, and it seems most likely that they should be dated at some point between A.D. 52 and 56, with the second epistle coming a year or so after the first.

Why Are the Epistles to the Corinthians Important?

The all but unanimous agreement about the authorship of the epistles is matched by an equally widespread consensus concerning their importance. First Corinthians is the longest of Paul’s epistles, and furthermore, it was written to the church in the largest and most important city of Greece at that time. Second Corinthians follows up the themes of the first epistle, bringing out certain fundamental themes that were touched on though not fully dealt with in the earlier letter. The epistles are important because of what they tell us about the difficulties encountered by one of the most important churches planted by Paul. Many of these difficulties focused around the vexing questions of authority and leadership. The Fathers do not explicitly state that monarchical episcopacy was the solution to the Corinthians’ problems, though that message must have been clear enough to their readers, since Paul is portrayed as insisting that only he or those specially delegated by him would be able to resolve the difficulties of the church.

The nature of the problem becomes clear in the second epistle, where the apostle feels obliged to defend his record and his qualifications. The awkwardness of this comes across in every line, and the Fathers were not slow to pick up Paul’s mood. They were accustomed, thanks to their familiarity with classical rhetoric, to the uses of irony, and they responded to Paul’s defense with instinctive sympathy. Furthermore, they were acutely aware that unhappiness with the apostle meant unhappiness with his teaching, which in turn meant heresy. This was a living issue in the fourth century, when there were false prophets like Arius and Eunomius, who appeared to be doing the same thing to the church of their day that the false prophets at Corinth did in theirs. The close link in the patristic mind between doctrinal heresy and immorality comes across clearly. None of the Fathers seems to have doubted that the man who slept with his stepmother (1 Cor 5) was also the church’s leading heresiarch.

Uncertainties about leadership at Corinth had produced a situation in which the church was in danger of dissolving into competing factions based on personalities, some of whom were teaching false doctrine as well. From the experiences of their time, the Fathers were aware that unity and truth went together, and they constantly emphasized this link in their commentaries on these epistles. At the same time, however, it is interesting and important to note that they knew little more, and perhaps even less, than we do about the people Paul mentions. Particularly revealing in this respect is the confusion over the expression “Chloe’s people” in 1 Corinthians 1:11. Some of the Fathers apparently thought that Chloe was a place, not the name of a person, which demonstrates that by the fourth century there were conflicting traditions about the earliest days of the Corinthian church.

The epistles do not deal directly with the problem of relations between Jews and Gentiles in the way that Galatians and Romans do, but the question is never far from the surface. The epistles are important because they reveal the nature of the problem of sanctification in a Gentile milieu. Jews solved this problem by segregation. They refused to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols, and often they maintained few if any social relations outside their own communities. Gentiles did not have this option, even though some Jewish Christians tried to impose it on them. Gentiles had to live in their own milieu without being contaminated by it and without giving offense to those who did not or who could not understand the subtleties of their position. Paul’s basic response, here as elsewhere, was that they should defend the principles of Christian freedom against both the law of Moses and paganism, but when this caused personal difficulties they should graciously sacrifice their private opinions for the sake of peace. This meant not eating food sacrificed to idols, which might offend Jews, but it also meant being willing to socialize with pagans and even to maintain marriages already contracted with them.

At another level Gentile Christians were also forced to reconcile the competing claims of philosophy and religion. In the Greek world these things were separate and often mutually hostile. Many philosophers followed Plato in regarding religion as an irrational superstition that should be put aside. Much pagan religious practice, by contrast, had little to do with morality and occasionally involved practices like ritual fornication. These were still living issues in the fourth and fifth centuries, and here the Fathers are genuinely closer to the mindset of the first Christians than we are.

Neither philosophy nor religion had much to say about practical considerations of charity, which take up a major slice of 2 Corinthians. Generosity toward fellow believers in distress was a hallmark of ancient Christians because it was unheard of in the pagan world. Once again the Fathers were more conscious of this than we are, if only because we have inherited centuries of tradition in which charity has become associated with almsgiving.

The Fathers sensed that the epistles were important because of what they say about basic Christian doctrines. Many of the early commentators knew that the Corinthian epistles are less doctrinal than is the epistle to the Romans, but this did not mean that 1 and 2 Corinthians are not full of fundamental Christian teaching. The resurrection of the body was the most obvious example of this, but that immediately raised the question of Christ’s incarnation and divinity. Spiritual gifts were another matter, and this issue forced the Fathers to consider both the divinity of the Holy Spirit and the nature of the Christian life. What did it mean to be born again in baptism and receive divine grace? Why did Christians in the fourth century not speak in tongues or prophesy in the way that the first Christians had apparently done? The witness of these epistles forced the Fathers to define their understanding of the Christian life both in this world and in the resurrection. These definitions were intimately connected with the Christian understanding of God, and the Fathers lost no opportunity to demonstrate that the apostle Paul taught the doctrine of the Trinity, the basic and most distinctive Christian belief.

How Were the Patristic Quotations Used Here Selected?

The epistles to the Corinthians have always been among the best known and most frequently quoted New Testament texts. From the patristic period there are thousands of quotations and allusions, all of which can be recovered without difficulty, thanks to the possibilities that have been opened up by computer research. The combined resources of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and of the Centre de Textes et Documents (Cetedoc), as well as the digital version of the Patrologia Latina, have made it possible to obtain a virtually complete collection of patristic references to Corinthians that, if they were all reproduced, would take up several volumes. For our purposes, many of these references can be ignored. Some are merely passing allusions to the text that shed little or no light on its meaning. Others are quotations that are intended to reinforce a point made on the strength of some other part of Scripture, and more often than we would like, they are there taken out of context.

Allusions to the text of 1 and 2 Corinthians are almost all that we have to go on for the earliest period (before A.D. 200), and so a few quotations from authors like Irenaeus and Tertullian have been given in order to give readers a flavor of how the Corinthian epistles were used before commentary writing became common. These allusions must be used with a certain degree of caution, since in many cases the writer was making some other point and using Corinthians in order to bolster his argument. For the purposes of this collection, an effort has been made to ensure that such references do have a genuine link with Paul’s epistles, but even so, readers will be well advised to treat this material with discretion.

We do possess a few commentaries on the epistles, though the material available in this form is much less than for the epistle to the Romans. The first full-length commentary that has survived is also the greatest produced in the ancient church. It was the work of an unknown scholar, writing in Rome sometime between 366 and 384. He wrote in Latin, and throughout the Middle Ages his identity was merged with that of Ambrose of Milan (d. 397). It was not until Erasmus (1466-1536) examined the text that it became clear that this attribution was a mistake. The commentary on this and on the other Pauline epistles was the work of a much greater scholar than Ambrose, whom Erasmus somewhat punningly chose to call Ambrosiaster, the name by which he has been known ever since.

Ambrosiaster wrote a literal commentary, and he was fully aware of many of the problems posed by historical and textual criticism. His work can easily stand comparison with modern writings on the subject, so close were his methods to those generally employed today. Who Ambrosiaster was is a matter of speculation, the most intriguing suggestion being that he may have been a monk known as Isaac the Syrian, who was a converted Jew in Rome. If that is true, it would certainly explain Ambrosiaster’s deep and sympathetic knowledge of Judaism, though we are constrained by lack of evidence from making any definite decision on the question. Whoever he was, he was soon being widely read and imitated, though never altogether successfully. It is a pity that his work is not available in English translation, and so it is unknown to most readers. For that reason, this edition contains rather more of Ambrosiaster than might otherwise be the case, since in effect it is introducing him to a wider reading public for the first time. We are indebted to Janet Fairweather for much of the translation of Ambrosiaster in this volume.

Contemporary with Ambrosiaster are a number of Greek commentators whose work survives only in fragments. They are Didymus the Blind of Alexandria (313-398) and Severian of Gabala (fl. c. 400). Their work may be found in the Staab edition of Pauluskommentare aus der griechischen Kirche (NTA 15). Severian represents the Antiochene school of biblical exegesis, which concentrated heavily on the literal interpretation of the texts and which is full of historical details, textual criticism, and so on. The fragmentary nature of the surviving material means that it is impossible to do justice to these commentators, but the selection presented here will give some idea of how they went about their task. Didymus wrote from Alexandria, which was the great rival of Antioch, and where an allegorical interpretation of Scripture was more favored. Nevertheless Didymus himself resisted this tendency to a large extent, and the style of his commentary is not noticeably different from that of the others.

The next full-length work to appear in Greek was the sermon series of John Chrysostom (347-407), the famous preacher who became patriarch of Constantinople but was exiled by the court because of his boldness in criticizing its corruption. Chrysostom has left us forty-four homilies on the first epistle and thirty on the second, all of which are verse-by-verse expositions of Corinthians. Each homily concludes with a long section relating to practical application, most of which has had to be omitted from the present edition. It is, however, readily available in English translation. As is to be expected from homilies, Chrysostom’s style is more rhetorical than that of the others, and he often tends toward ad hominem arguments. At the same time, he was a good historian and critic, and his conclusions about the authorship and dating of Corinthians are what most commentators today would still propose. For a book like this one, which aims to reach pastors and ordinary Christians rather than professional scholars, he is often the most user-friendly commentator of them all.

Contemporary with or slightly later than Chrysostom is Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428), another Antiochene whose work survives only in fragments. Theodore was a truly great commentator, and if his work survived in toto he would rank with Ambrosiaster or even higher. His feeling for Paul’s language and meaning was deep, and his critical sense was acute. His judgments were almost always apposite, and it is our good fortune that so many of them have survived in the Catenae1 even though the complete text has disappeared.

After Theodore’s time, there were further commentaries in Greek, of which the most notable was written by Theodoret of Cyr (Cyrrhus) (393-466). This survives, almost uniquely among the Antiochene commentaries, although it is not available in English translation. Theodoret was dependent on Theodore of Mopsuestia, and from him we can catch a glimpse of the greatness of the Antiochene tradition. He eschews allegory, concentrates on historical and grammatical details and stays close to the apostle’s original intention. His comments are usually helpful and retain their freshness even after the passage of time. He is particularly inclined to draw the reader’s attention to other parts of Scripture that support what the apostle is saying to the Corinthians. Because of all this, we have chosen to offer a fairly extensive selection of his work, so that both he and the tradition he represents may be made more familiar to modern readers.

After Theodoret’s time there was a commentary by Gennadius of Constantinople (d. 471), of which only a few fragments survive, and another by Oecumenius of Tricca (sixth century), which is likewise fragmentary though more extensive. These texts also may be found in Staab (NTA 15). On the whole it is prone to speculation when it does not follow earlier sources, and it is of relatively little value.

In addition to the commentaries that are available, there is a wide choice of other patristic works in which particular passages or verses of Corinthians are mentioned and commented on. In making a selection of them for this volume, two considerations have guided our choice. The first of these is the prominence and representativeness of the writer or source being used. There is little point in quoting an obscure author or writing in order to demonstrate a knowledge of his or its existence. But this is often the only way that gives us access to Syriac and Coptic sources, and an exception to this rule has been made for them. Otherwise we have preferred to rely on mainstream writers whose works have entered the spiritual tradition of the church and who may therefore be taken as more fully representative of patristic thought as a whole.

A special word of explanation is needed regarding the inclusion of the archheretic Pelagius (c. 354-c. 420) in this commentary. Pelagius’s original text was presumably explicitly heretical in more ways than the present redacted version displays. What we have now is largely unexceptional, even if it is possible to detect points of disagreement with Augustine. Some earlier version of the text, predating this one, was undoubtedly written by Pelagius and survived for many centuries because it was thought to have been the work of Jerome. The text as we now have it was probably reworked and brought closer to orthodoxy in the sixth century either by Cassiodorus or Primasius or both.

The textual problems associated with the commentary of Pelagius remain highly controverted.2 The original commentary, written before 412 by Pelagius, was revised before 432 probably by a Pelagian redactor (possibly Caelestius), and eliminated certain phrases of the commentary in light of th...