Prof: The situation with
Paul's church in Corinth is very
different from the situation we
saw in 1 Thessalonians.
1 Thessalonians shows us a
church that is new in its
infancy, it has just been
founded.
1 Corinthians shows us a church
in its sort of adolescent
period.
 
They've had some growing pains,
and they've got some problems,
but you can tell that they're
not all brand new Christians.
Look at 1 Corinthians 15--take
your Bibles out,
remember you have to follow
along--1 Corinthians 15;
this is when Paul is addressing
the issue of the resurrection of
the body.
 
Early Christian groups wrestled
with the kind of question that
people sometimes still do which
is, what happens to you when
you're dead?
 
Are you dead like Rover and
dead all over or does your soul
go off to some other place,
or does some part of you get
reincarnated into somebody
else's body?
In the orthodox Christian
confessions, you confess the
resurrection of the body at the
end of time, at the end of this
worldly time.
 
So Christians were dealing with
this stuff.
Paul has to address this
question in 1 Corinthians 15
because there's some confusion
or some debate in the church
there.
 
Read along with me.
 
1 Corinthians 15:20,
I'm going to skip around a bit
but I'm going to cover a lot of
ground in this lecture.
You need to really follow along
in the text as best you can so
you don't get confused with
where I am.
1 Corinthians 15:20:
But in fact Christ has been
raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who
have died.
 
For since death came through a
human being, the resurrection of
the dead has also come through a
human being.
For as all die in Adam,
so all will be made alive in
Christ.
 
But each in his own order:
Christ the first fruits,
then at his coming those who
belong to Christ.
Then comes the end when he
hands over the kingdom to God
the Father, after he has
destroyed every ruler and every
authority and every power.
 
Notice the resurrection of
Jesus for Paul,
this is going to be very
important,
the resurrection of Jesus for
Paul is not different in kind
from the resurrection that
Christians can expect.
The resurrection of Christians'
bodies will be just like the
resurrection of Jesus' body in
kind.
That's important because a
whole lot of people think that
what Jesus experienced,
what the early Christians
believe about Jesus,
was something very different
from what they confess about
Christians,
but for Paul they're the same
kind of resurrection.
That's why he just calls
Christ's resurrection "the
first fruits."
 
It's just the first apple on
the tree,
it just lets you know that
harvest time is now here,
but it's just the first apple,
you'll have lots of other
apples.
 
Christ's resurrection is the
first fruits and then there's a
big war type thing and then
Christ defeats all the rulers,
and the authorities,
and powers on earth and hands
over the kingdom.
 
Verse 25: "For he must
reign until he has put all his
enemies under his feet,
for the last enemy to be
destroyed is death."
 
That's good enough for that
point, but now skip down to
verse 35.
 
What happens is that some
people in Corinth are
questioning this.
 
Now what are they questioning?
 
Are they saying that people
don't live forever at all or
that there's no afterlife
experience?
It looks like not,
it looks like what they're
really questioning is simply the
resurrection of the body idea,
because of course they're
saying--they might be thinking
like a lot of people in the
ancient world,
there were other--lots of Jews
believed in the resurrection of
the body and so it was an idea
that was not unknown to people
but think if the people in the
ancient world also objected by
saying,
but how is that possible?
We all know the body rots when
you put it in the ground,
it just decomposes and it just
becomes all little molecules of
other things,
and how did--then that grows
into trees and other grass,
the molecules from a dead body
become recycled in the universe.
 
The ancient people knew this,
they would even say,
what about sailors who were
lost at sea and fish eat their
bodies,
and then other fish eat those
bodies of those fish,
and then other fish eat those
bodies of those fish,
and then maybe one of those
fish gets caught and you
eat that body.
You have some of the little
pieces of Fred the sailor in
your body, how is God going to
pull all that stuff together and
resurrect that body?
 
This was a debate that people
in the ancient world had too.
Apparently some of the people
in Corinth are having this same
kind of idea.
 
How is this possible?
 
Paul addresses that.
 
Someone will ask,
"How the dead are raised?
With what kind of body do they
come?"
Fool!
 
[that's just what it says]
what you sow does not come to
life unless it dies.
 
And as for what you sow,
you do not sow the body that is
to be but a bare seed,
perhaps of wheat or of some
other grain.
 
But God gives it a body as he
has chosen and to each kind of
seed its own body.
 
[Just like a seed goes into the
ground,
what comes up is a flower or
plant,
it doesn't look like the seed,
it's not even necessarily all
the same complete stuff,
its new stuff,
but it's still continuous with
it.]
Not all flesh is alike,
but there is one flesh for
human beings,
another for animals,
another for birds,
and another for fish.
Now notice that's in kind of a
hierarchy there of beings.
Humans are higher than animals,
animals are higher than birds,
birds are higher than fish on
this kind of ontological scale
of different kinds of bodies
that Paul is working with here.
This is a common assumption in
the ancient world also.
There are heavenly bodies and
earthly bodies.
What are earthly bodies?
 
Ours, this, dogs,
cats, everything's a body
that's physical for these
people.
What are the heavenly bodies?
 
The sun, the moon,
and the stars;
all these things are themselves
in ancient ideas bodies that
simply actually are fixed into a
kind of a dome that's the sky
and they travel around on that
dome.
The earth--all these things in
the sky are also bodies.
The glory of the heavenly is
one thing that of the earthly is
another.
 
There is one glory for the sun,
another glory for the moon,
another glory for the stars.
 
Indeed star differs from star
in glory [again,
a hierarchy of different kinds
of bodies]
so it is with the resurrection
of the dead.
What is sown is perishable,
what is raised is imperishable.
It is sown in dishonor,
it is raised in glory.
It is sown in weakness,
it is raised in power.
[Now here you get into a
translation problem.
My translation here says in
verse 44:]
It is sown a physical body,
it is raised a spiritual body.
Does anybody's translation have
something different at that
verse?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: "It is sown a
natural body and it is raised in
a spiritual body,"
is that what it says?
Anybody else have a different
translation for those?
The problem is the word
translated "physical"
here is not really the Greek
word "physical".
There is a Greek word
"physical."
What they're talking about here
is what is sown is as psychic--a
body made of psuchos,
the Greek word for
"soul."
 
What is sown as a "soulish
body" is what he's talking
about.
 
It's a heavy--it's a denser
kind of body,
and what is raised is a
spiritual body,
but whereas in the modern
world, we tend to think
spiritual is something that's
immaterial,
spiritual means not matter,
it's invisible,
it's something that doesn't
exist as matter.
That's not what pneuma
means in the ancient world.
In the ancient world
pneuma is like--is a
stuff, it's like what air is
made out of.
When the wind blows around
that's pneuma,
when you take in breath you're
taking in a form of
pneuma.
 
That Greek word pneuma
does refer in the ancient world
to some kind of stuff.
 
It doesn't refer to immaterial
substance as it does later in
Christian theology or in some
philosophies.
The translation here is
misleading because what Paul
says is,
when your body is put into the
ground,
when you're dead,
what's put in there is sort of
a psychic body,
it's a body that carries life,
sure,
because that's what psychic
means for--
in the ancient Greek world,
it's a living body but it is
more like something--
it's a natural body.
It's kind of the body that
you're just given naturally.
When it's raised it's going to
be raised to say a pneumatic
body,
but now a pneumatic body--so
it's not the same thing as it
was put in the ground,
it's raised a pneumatic body
but it's still some kind of
stuff.
 
If there is a physical body
there is also a spiritual body,
a pneumatic body.
 
Thus it is written,
"The first man,
Adam, became a living
being";
the last Adam became a
life-giving pneuma.
But it is not the pneuma
that is first but the
psychic and then the
pneuma.
The first man was from the
earth, a man of dust;
the second man is from heaven.
 
Notice that he talked about
heavenly bodies earlier,
and he says the resurrected
body is going to be a heavenly
body also.
 
This indicates that in a lot of
ancient thought they thought
that the sun,
and the moon,
and the stars were themselves
pneumatic bodies.
They were bodies made of the
stuff of pneuma.
As was the man of dust,
so are those from the dust;
as was the man of heaven,
so are those from heaven.
Just as we are born in the
image of the man of dust,
we will also bear the image of
the man of heaven.
What I am saying,
brothers, is this:
flesh and blood cannot inherit
the kingdom of God,
nor does the perishable inherit
the imperishable.
"Flesh and blood cannot
inherit the kingdom of
God."
 
Notice that what he is saying
is that the resurrected body
that he is expecting is not a
flesh and blood body.
When Paul's thinking about
however the resurrection of
Christ happened,
he doesn't imagine it as the
very same flesh and blood.
 
It's not like it is in the
movies, where the very same
flesh and blood of the dead
Jesus body somehow resuscitates
and walks out of the tomb.
 
That's how people popularly
imagine it, and that's how
clearly some early Christians
thought of it.
Some early Christians thought
precisely that it was the flesh
and blood body of Jesus that got
up and walked out of the tomb.
Paul must not have thought that
because he says,
the body that we will as
Christians,
as followers of Christ,
have when we are resurrected is
a pneumatic body,
not a flesh and blood body.
It's still a physical body in
Paul's sense,
but he believes that
pneuma is matter,
so what will be raised is this
pneumatic body.
Why is Paul getting into all
this?
For one thing it shows,
like I said,
this is a church that's not a
totally infant church but it's
also an adolescent church.
 
These are people who have much
more exposure to Paul's teaching
and to the Gospel,
and different Christian ideas
than,
say, the Thessalonian
Christians did.
 
But they're still very confused
about a lot of things that Paul
seems to be quite certain about.
 
Apparently some of these people
in this church,
they had heard this teaching
about the resurrection of the
body,
so apparently they have heard
this already.
 
They're not like the
Thessalonians who just don't
seem to know that anything's
going to happen to their
brothers and sisters after their
death so they're--
Paul has to say no,
no, no, no the dead in Christ
will rise,
we'll go meet Jesus in the air,
there will be a big party,
and if they're dead now they
won't miss out on the party.
 
The Corinthians don't have that
problem.
They know that there's some
kind of afterlife preaching and
teaching,
but some of them seem to be
rejecting the most obvious crude
way of understanding the
resurrection of the body:
as if the very flesh and blood
will somehow resuscitate and
come back to life.
And so Paul says no,
no that's not how it happens,
it's more complicated than
that.
There is a spiritual body and
then there's this natural body,
and the spiritual body is the
one that's going to be raised.
Now it's perfectly natural,
though,
for people to have raised these
objections,
precisely because if they heard
Paul's preaching about the
resurrection of the body,
they precisely would think,
well now how would that happen?
 
They would skeptical of it,
especially if they had any kind
of sort of more philosophical
education.
They would think that's
superstition,
the idea that body's
can--zombies can kind of get up
of the grave and walk around,
that's just superstition.
Simple people might believe
that, but we're more educated;
we don't believe that kind of
stuff.
This shows that this church is
in a bit of a different
situation.
 
There's going to be some cosmic
transformation that will happen
at the end of time and this is
not an individual thing either.
It's not like every individual
person sort of experiences your
afterlife experience and your
resurrection all at a different
time.
 
It's all the same time.
 
Paul seems to imagine that
people will sleep in the ground,
and then, at the end of time,
the Messiah will come back,
and this big resurrection of
pneumatic bodies will occur.
Notice though that this is the
issue he relates in just 1
Corinthians 15,
and we're going to back up then
and talk about how does that
issue about the resurrection of
the body relate to other parts
of the letter and how--
what does that tell us about
this church.
First a little background on
what this is.
Corinth is a very important
city in the ancient Greek world.
It's right on the isthmus of
Corinth,
that little narrow strip of
land that connects the main part
of Greece where Athens is,
Achaea, to the southern part of
Greece called the Peloponnese or
the Peloponnesus.
It was an important throughway,
both by land,
because all trade and travel
that went from northern Greece
to southern Greece,
or vice versa,
had to go right through Corinth
so it was very important for
trade.
 
It was also,
though, where they didn't--
they have a canal there now so
that you don't have to sail
around the southern part of
Greece,
you can just go through the
canal, but back then they didn't
have a canal so they had these
big tracks and so ships would
come up on Cenchrea,
one part on one side of Greece
and they would unload all their
stuff,
put them on these big tracks,
and they would take it across
the isthmus and then load it
back on other ships.
So this is a hugely important
city as far as trade went.
It was also important for Rome.
 
Rome had destroyed Corinth
previously in the 140s BCE
because Corinth was helping to
lead rebellions against the
Romans who were increasing their
power in the eastern part of the
Mediterranean.
 
The Romans destroyed Corinth
and then left if that way for
about 100 years.
 
It had been refounded again in
the 40s and then settled with
Roman veterans.
 
By the time that Paul writes
this letter, in say the middle
of the first century CE,
our era, Corinth is still a
very Romanized kind of place.
 
So it's got a blend of Greek
cultures and a blend of Roman
cultures.
 
In fact, the inscriptions in
Corinth up until the year 130 or
so were still predominantly in
Latin in Corinth,
which was very unusual in the
ancient world,
but it shows that the Romans
and Latin was very important.
Corinth was a Roman colony
which made it both a Greek place
and a Romanized place.
 
Paul founded the church there
himself,
it talks about it in Acts
18:1-18, and in this case we
don't have a whole lot of way to
dispute a lot of what Acts tells
us about Corinth,
although we can't take it as
straightforward historically
either.
Paul writes his letter to the
Corinthians from Ephesus,
as he says in chapter 16.
 
And Paul has gotten his
information about what's going
on at the church in Corinth from
several different sources.
We're going to flip around a
bit.
Look at 1 Corinthians 1:11:
 
For it has been reported to me
by Chloe's people that there are
quarrels among you.
 
Some people say,
"I belong to Paul,"
or "I belong to
Apollos,"
or "I belong to
Cephas,"
or "I belong to
Christ."
Chloe's people,
what does that mean?
Well Chloe's obviously a
woman's name,
and when you hear this in
Greek, somebody's people,
those--it has to be those
around Chloe,
this refers to probably members
of her own household.
They could be slaves,
they could be her freed
persons,
they could be clients,
it probably refers to clients
or slaves,
or freed men of Chloe of
herself.
They're members of this
church--now it doesn't tell us
that Chloe herself is a member
of the church.
She might be because Paul names
her out by name,
but we don't know that for
sure, but at least some of the
members of her household are,
and they have gone to Paul and
told him stuff that's going on.
 
He gets some of his information
from Chloe's people,
and, like I said,
those may well be slaves or
freed persons.
 
Is that important?
 
Well at least it means they're
probably not members of the
upper class or high status
members.
He also gets information from a
letter,
so in 7:1 he says,
"Now concerning the
matters about which you wrote:
'it is well for a man not to
touch a woman.'"
Then he gets into the issues of
sexuality,
marriage, divorce,
and those kinds of things.
 
He's also, though,
received a letter that--from at
least other people in Corinth
that raises different issues.
What do we do about divorce?
 
What do we do about marriage?
 
What do we do about sex?
 
So from chapter 7 on he raises
different issues that may have
been raised in their letter to
him, so that's one place he gets
information.
 
He also mentions in 16:12 that
Apollos has come and is with him
in Ephesus, and Apollos has come
from Corinth.
So he probably gets some
information from Apollos,
who is not--Paul talks about
Apollos as a coworker,
not as his sort of servant,
or his assistant,
or anything like that.
 
In fact, when Paul talks about
Timothy it's clear that Timothy
is Paul's assistant because Paul
says,
"I sent Timothy"
someplace,
but when he talks about Apollos
he says,
"I have urged Apollos to
go,
to come visit you."
 
In other words,
Paul doesn't say he sent
Apollos anywhere.
 
This indicates that Apollos is
on something more of an equal
status with Paul,
maybe Apollos is considered
another Apostle,
or a teacher,
or something like that in the
early church.
Paul may have gotten some of
the information there.
Then in 16:17 he talks about,
"I rejoice at the coming
of Stephanas and Fortunatus,
and Achaicus,
because they have made up for
your absence."
Now there are a couple of
interesting things about these
names.
 
Achaicus would mean--would be
sort of a name or a nickname for
someone who's from Achaea,
the area just north of Corinth;
that means that area of Greece.
 
Stephanas is a very Greek word
meaning "a crown,"
and Fortunatus,
though, is not a Greek word,
it's from the Latin.
 
Fortunatus means
"fortune,"
someone who's fortunate or
lucky, like having a person
named Lucky.
 
Does this mean that this guy
was himself Roman or maybe was a
freed person of a Roman,
therefore had a Latinized name?
We don't know about that,
but Paul apparently has gotten
information from them also,
and he talks about a church in
that house.
 
What's going on in Corinth is
there seem to be different house
churches in Corinth.
 
It's not all one group meeting
all the time in one place.
We can imagine different house
churches meeting in different
places and maybe made up of
different kinds of people.
One of the ways we're going to
talk about this is to see what
was the social class of these
people.
In 1 Corinthians 1:26 we get
our first major clue,
"Consider your own call
brothers and sisters not many of
you," again the Greek
doesn't have "sisters"
they've added into the English
to make it more inclusive.
"Not many of you were wise
by human standards,
not many were powerful,
not many were of noble
birth."
 
Now all three of those words in
the Greek are status symbol
words.
 
"Wise"
doesn't mean just smart,
it means "educated."
 
Not many of you are well
educated, not many of you are
powerful,
that is you're not people
occupying government positions
or anything like that and you're
not of noble birth.
 
But God chose what is foolish
in the world to shame the wise.
God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong.
God chose what is low and
despised in the world,
things that are not,
to reduce to nothing things
that are.
 
Now at one point those verses
were taken to indicate that all
of the Corinthian church were
just completely low class,
that they were all either
slaves, or poor freed men,
or lower class manual laborers.
 
This kind of went along with
the image that you saw a lot
about Christianity in popular
movies like "Ben Hur,"
or "The Robe,"
or things like this which has
the earliest Christians all kind
of hiding away from the Romans
in little dark rooms and all
being very much laboring class
people.
 
More recently scholars have
said, yeah but that's not
exactly what Paul says,
he says "not many of
you" were these things,
which at least implies that
some people in the Corinthian
church actually were wise,
maybe educated,
of noble birth or having some
kind of access to power.
 
This is one clue that's caused
scholars in the last thirty,
forty years to reread the
Corinthian correspondence,
both 1 Corinthians and 2
Corinthians,
precisely by looking at what's
going on with regard to social
status and social class.
 
And now it gets really
interesting because the typical
way to read the Bible that most
of us grew up with is you read
it very piously.
 
You read it as having something
to say about theology,
you read it as having something
to say about God,
and all those are obviously
important ways to read the
Bible.
 
It's also when you add in
issues like,
might this text not only have
something to say about theology
but also about issues like
social class and power,
and scholars have said it's
precisely in 1 Corinthians,
it's one of the places we see
in the New Testament,
the best evidence we have that
the early churches weren't all
homogeneous when it comes to
their social status level and
they may have actually
experienced conflicts in their
groups due precisely to
differences in social status and
social power.
 
That's the way I have
interpreted 1 Corinthians,
and it's debated by some
people, but it's much more the
consensus view now among
scholars that--
especially the Corinthian
correspondence does have these
evidences of class levels.
 
Let's see, how is this working
out,
I just read the first passage
where Paul seems to say,
some of you are claiming I'm
for Paul,
I'm one of Paul's people,
I'm one of Apollos' people,
I'm one of the Cephas' people,
and of course Cephas is just
the Aramaic name for Peter,
exactly.
Peter is the Greek name,
Cephas is the Aramaic name for
"the rock,"
and some people in the church
are saying,
I'm one of Christ's men.
There are parties that seem to
have been developed or at least
there are some kind of glomming
onto different leaders.
Some people have said these may
actually represent four
different specific delineable
parties in Corinth.
I tend to doubt that because I
don't think you see any evidence
the rest of the way in the
correspondence that there are
four distinct groups.
 
I do think there are basically
two groups that are going on in
opposition to one another in
Corinth and that's what I build
my reconstruction on.
 
People are having their
favorite Apostles,
what are some of the other--the
resurrection of the body is one
thing but there are several
other issues and now that you've
all read 1 Corinthians so
carefully in the last several
days,
and read it over I'm sure three
or four times each day,
you yourselves can tell me what
are some of the other issues
that come out in 1 Corinthians.
First, we have favorite
Apostles and we have differences
about the resurrection of the
body.
Those are two of the issues
that Paul has to address in 1
Corinthians, what are some of
the others?
Anybody?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Okay,
sexual conduct,
and what kinds?
 
because there are actually
several different issues on
sexual conduct in Corinthians.
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Exactly,
a man is sleeping with his
stepmother and Paul says that's
a big no, no,
even for the Greeks he says;
even the Greeks don't do that
kind of stuff.
 
What other sexual conduct
issues are going on?
How about chapter 6 in
Corinthians--1 Corinthians?
Some men in a church are
visiting prostitutes,
what it means in 1 Corinthians
6 when it says,
"Do you not know that
whoever is united to a
prostitute becomes one body with
her," so some men in the
church seem to think,
well what's the big deal,
I'm in Christ,
I'm a Christian?
But what you do with your body
is not that important,
so every guy's got needs,
so some of these Christian men
are visiting prostitutes,
and Paul has to address that
issue.
 
Any other issues of sexuality
that Paul has to address in 1
Corinthians?
 
There's one more major one.
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Pardon?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Virginity.
 
He does bring it up but that's
not as big an issue for him as
simply the idea of should you
get married.
Remember in 1 Corinthians 7:1
they seem to have asked him,
this is actually put into
quotation marks in some of your
Bibles,
"It is good for a man not
to touch a woman."
 
Now scholars debate,
is that Paul's view or is that
a quotation of a slogan of
theirs that he's quoting back to
them?
 
So there's a debate about that
among some scholars,
but at least some people in
Corinth have written him asking
particularly about should we
have sex at all or should we be
totally ascetic,
that is avoid sex and be
totally continent.
 
Sex and asceticism,
which leads to also issues of
marriage and divorce,
so what other issues are going
on?
 
What about the first part of 1
Corinthians 6?
"When any of you has a
grievance against one another do
you dare to take it to a court
before the unrighteous instead
of taking it before the
saints?"
Now notice this is the part in
1 Corinthians that's before Paul
mentions the letter,
so this seems to be part of the
information he's gotten,
maybe from Chloe's people,
that some people in the
Corinthian church are taking
other members of the church to
court and suing them;
so court cases is one issue.
 
Right after that it's the one
about the prostitutes,
then marriage and divorce in
chapter 7.
And then chapters 8-11 are all
about one big complex issue,
and that is food offered to
idols.
Now why is that a problem?
 
Well in the ancient world most
of the time--
I'll talk about this a little
bit further,
most of the time meat was
expensive,
and if you were not rich it was
hard to come by.
The one place where most people
in the ancient world actually
had any chance to eat meat was
in a sacrificial festival.
What would happen in Greek
sacrifices is that somebody
rich,
or the city,
would pay for a bunch of
cattle,
or different kinds of animals,
to all be slaughtered,
the blood would be poured out
and part of the animals would be
put on an altar and burned for
the gods,
but all the rest of the meat
would then be passed out,
and different people who went
to the festival would eat it.
You would go with your buds and
you would get a big hunk of meat
from the sacrifice,
then you'd go off and barbeque
it, and have your own barbeque
as part of this sacrificial
festival;
or you'd take it back to your
family, store some it,
boil some of it,
that sort of thing.
 
So the main place that most
people in the ancient world ate
meat was connected to some kind
of sacrifice to some kind of
god.
 
Now of course this is part of
the sacrificial cult,
you're eating--you're sharing a
table with that god by eating
that sacrificed material.
 
It's like you're sitting down
to dinner with Zeus when you do
this, right?
 
If you're a Jew in the ancient
world this causes problems
because it means you don't
believe in these gods,
you're supposed to avoid these
gods,
you're supposed to avoid
idolatry, but if you eat that
meat you're seen by many Jews as
participating in that cult with
that god.
 
Also, some people believed,
some of the people thought this
was kind of superstitious,
that if you ate that stuff then
whatever the power that lie
behind that god could get into
your body by means of the food.
 
You can imagine how this
happened.
A lot of Jews believed
that--they didn't believe that
the idols were just nothing but
stone, or rock,
or wood, or metal.
 
They believed there was
something there that was causing
that thing to have power,
because they looked around and
they said,
this person claimed to be
healed by Asclepius.
 
Well I can see he's now healed,
so who healed him?
I don't believe that Asclepius
is actually a god,
but I believe Asclepius is a
demon.
So a lot of Jews would go
around--and Christians later
saying--
that the powers that lie behind
the gods of other nations are
not really gods but they may be
demons,
and if you participated in
eating their meat,
that demon could get in your
body.
 
Food offered to idols became a
big problem in the early church.
Should you eat it?
 
If so, would it hurt you?
 
Did it mean you were
participating in sacrifice?
In chapter 11 another issue:
women praying without veiling
their heads;
 
Paul has to address that.
 
Notice he doesn't say that
women can't pray in church,
but he says,
if they are going to pray in
church they need to put a veil
over their heads because of the
angels,
whatever that means.
There's been a lot of us who've
written a lot on that,
and I have my own theories,
which most of my friends don't
like.
 
In chapter 11 later he gets
into a big conversation about
what they're supposed to do in
The Lord's Supper when they come
together to eat the Lord's
Supper,
and it's not turning out the
way it's supposed to be,
so that's another issue,
the Lord's Supper.
In chapters 12-14,
nobody raised this issue,
chapters 12-14 what's the big
issue that Paul has to address
there?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: Speaking in
tongues,
so the technical term for that
is often glossolalia,
which comes from the Greek word
for "tongues,"
so speaking in tongues.
 
Some people in the church are
speaking in tongues.
Speaking in tongues of course
just refers to speaking some
kind of unknown esoteric
language that you'd only know by
miracle, it's a special gift.
 
It's not a language you learn.
 
There's a debate among people
about when people talk about
speaking in tongues,
are they talking about speaking
some other human language,
which is known but not learned
by you?
 
That's what it sounds like in
Acts.
In Acts the tongues of fire
come down upon the Apostles,
and they all start speaking
these strange languages,
and it says everybody who was
there visiting from around the
world could understand the
Apostles speaking in their own
language.
 
So the writer of Acts seems to
think that speaking in tongues
in the early church refers to
this speaking other known human
languages.
 
Other scholars think that at
other times it referred to just
speaking some kind of unknown
language that would sound to
anybody like gibberish,
and that's often how it happens
nowadays.
 
If you go to a church where
they're speaking in tongues,
they're not speaking another
discernible human language.
They're speaking something else.
 
Paul calls it,
at one point,
the language of angels,
so some of these early
Christians seem to think that
when they spoke in tongues they
were speaking the angelic
language and they were learning
it miraculously.
 
So speaking in tongues is an
issue, and Paul addresses that
in those chapters,
in 12 through 14.
Then as we said,
the last major issue is the
resurrection of the body.
 
Now what holds these different
issues together?
Are these just random sorts of
things that are splitting the
church?
 
Is it just because some people
like speaking in tongues and
others don't?
 
Some people are doing it and
others don't,
is it just because the court
cases, it's just an isolated
incident here or there?
 
Is the issue of food offered to
idols,
and their debate about that,
is that at all connected to
their disagreements about the
resurrection of the body?
Are those connected to their
disagreements about sexual
conduct?
 
Because obviously they're
disagreeing about this,
this is why Paul is getting
different reports from people.
He's getting some reports from
Chloe's people and then some
others write a letter,
and whoever wrote the letter is
probably not the same people
that are giving him the oral
reports,
so Paul's getting information
from different factions in this
church.
The big question is:
do all of these issues just
represent totally different
disparate arguments or is there
some bigger reason that these
are a debate and is there some
sort of major divide along which
people are lining up?
You get a really wonderful
brilliant book written by a
famous New Testament scholar,
moi, called The
Corinthian Body.
 
What I tried to do in that book
was precisely to take all of
these different issues and show
how they could line up on one or
two sides of what was a social
status issue.
I argued that--it wouldn't be
totally neatly but I tried to
say is that in a bunch of these
different issues if you you had
more money,
if you had more access to
power, if you had a better
education,
likely you would end up on one
side of these issues.
If you didn't have money,
you didn't have power,
and you didn't have education,
you were more likely to line up
on the other side of these
issues.
I argued that the Corinthian
church,
which, remember,
was in different house
churches,
and it may have been that one
house church tended to be on one
side,
and another house church tended
to be on another,
we don't know that.
 
We know that there were
different house churches being
represented here in the church
in Corinth,
so when we talk about the
church in Corinth we're not just
talking about one house church,
we're talking about the
collection of them,
and apparently they may have
all gotten together sometimes
for a special sort of festival
for the Lord's Supper at times,
but they apparently would have
been meeting in other people's
houses at other kinds of times.
Let's look at how this would
work.
First, the whole Lord's Supper
issue,
and here is something that I
didn't write about on my own,
this was by a famous scholar
named Gerd Theissen,
a German scholar.
 
He published a series of
articles in the 70's and 80's in
which he made this argument.
 
He pointed out just like I
already have,
that meat--the availability of
meat in the ancient world was
very much linked to sacrificial
cult,
the argument I just gave you.
 
Even if you weren't going to
participate in the sacrifice
itself,
chances are if you went to a
butcher shop and wanted to buy
meat,
and it would be expensive if it
was meat at all,
the chances are that butcher
had gotten that meat from some
kind of sacrificial activity
because the priests sometimes
would own the meat--
sometimes in order to make
money for themselves they would
sell meat to butcher shops.
It would be almost impossible,
it would be very difficult
unless you yourself were wealthy
and you could raise your own
meat,
have it slaughtered your way,
and consume it yourself and
know that it wasn't connected to
the sacrifices at all,
but if you weren't wealthy and
couldn't raise your own meat
like that,
and you just depended upon
festivals or the butcher shop it
would be very difficult to avoid
meat that had not been
sacrificed to idols.
 
So he argued about that.
 
He also pointed out that the
Lord's Supper,
when we look at the Lord's
Supper, notice what is
happening.
 
This is in 1 Corinthians
chapter 11.
Start reading at chapter 11:17:
Now in the following
instructions I do not commend
you, because when you come
together it is not for the
better but for the worse.
For, to begin with,
when you come together as a
church, I hear that there are
divisions among you,
and to some extent I believe
it.
Indeed, there have to be
factions among you,
for only so will it become
clear who among you are genuine.
[I think he's being ironic
there but it could be a debate.]
When you come together it is
not really to eat the Lord's
Supper.
 
For when the time comes to eat,
each of you goes ahead with
your own supper,
and one goes hungry,
and another goes drunk.
 
What!
 
Do you not have homes to eat
and drink in,
or do you show contempt for the
church of God and humiliate
those who have nothing?
 
What's going on here
apparently, remember I said,
the early Christian Eucharist
service,
the Lord's Supper wasn't simply
a little bit of wafer and a
little bit of wine.
 
It's a meal of which part of it
would be then the saying the
consecration thing;
repeating what Paul says Jesus
had said,
"This is my body,
do this in remembrance of me,
this is my blood,
do this in my memory."
 
That might be part of it but
it's clearly part of a wider
meal and it looks like it was
something like a potluck.
Either the rich--the rich are
members of the church and I
don't mean to imply that they're
really,
really rich,
we don't think any of these
members of Paul's churches were
actually members of the top
elite of the Roman Empire.
 
They weren't senators,
they weren't even equestrians
but some of them clearly had
their own homes,
some of them clearly had
slaves, some of them clearly had
some kind of access to financial
power.
If they show up at the dinner
first,
chances are they've either paid
for it themselves,
because in the ancient world it
was typical for people who were
wealthier to supply something
for the community.
The wealthy people provided the
sacrifices for town sacrifices
if the town didn't buy it
themselves.
Usually the town didn't buy it
themselves;
usually what the town did was
it expected wealthy people in
the town to pay for big civic
festivities and sacrifices,
so that's what happened.
 
Usually the wealthier people
would provide the stuff for the
festival or the supper by paying
for it, or they might have
brought it themselves.
 
Imagine what you have is a
potluck like this.
If you're fairly well off you
can show up at,
say, five o'clock.
 
I'm going to show up at five
o'clock with my buds,
we're going to have a little
drink before dinner,
brought a bottle wine,
and then the other people will
show up when they can when they
get off work.
Well, when you get off work,
if you're a laboring person or
a slave in the ancient world,
and slaves didn't work at
regular jobs so they would
follow a work day.
You got off work at sundown.
 
If you're a working person or
especially a slave you can't go
to the church service until the
sun is down.
By that time,
apparently some of the better
off people have already been
there,
and Paul seems to say they're
already drinking and eating,
and having a good time before
the rest of the people even show
up.
 
What he says,
he talks about people who have
nothing, and he says,
don't you have homes to eat and
drink in?
 
Well a lot of people in the
church would have said,
no we don't have homes;
we're poor.
The poor lived kind of anywhere
they could.
Paul is addressing two
different kinds of people in
this very chapter,
some of them have--in fact he
calls them the haves and the
have-nots,
that's the Greek he uses.
 
The Lord's Supper is splitting
the church along this social
status line and Paul's solution,
Paul even says,
if you take The Lord's Supper
without discerning the body,
and what I think he's talking
about is discerning the body of
Christ,
that is the other people there,
and discerning the body of your
neighbor,
if you don't pay attention to
the needs of the other bodies
that are there,
and you take the Lord's Supper,
it will turn into poison and it
will kill you.
He says that's why some of you
are getting sick.
Paul believes that some of the
Corinthians,
because they're not taking the
Lord's Supper with the proper
ethical concerns for their
neighbors,
the other church members,
are actually getting sick off
the Lord's Supper rather than it
helping them.
What is Paul's solution?
 
Wait.
 
If you're that hungry,
eat at home before you get
there so you can wait on the
other people to come who have to
come later.
 
Paul's solution is to alter the
behavior of the higher status
members of the church to
accommodate the needs of the
lower status members of the
church.
If you see what's going on here
you can see that Paul does this
over and over again with these
different activities.
I can't go into much detail,
go out and buy the book,
The Corinthian Body,
you can get it on Amazon.com
and you can read all about it.
 
On each of these things I tried
to argue there that food offered
to idols, what is Paul's
solution?
Well he says it won't
actually--you don't really have
to worry about it,
but those of you who think it's
okay to eat food offered to
idols should give it up if it's
going to cause people who think
it's wrong to do it,
to do it anyway,
because that might hurt their
conscience.
 
In other words--and it's also
clear that the people who would
have thought this whole thing
about--
worrying about demons getting
to you because you eat idol
meat,
if they thought that was
ridiculous,
chances are they had some kind
of exposure to ancient education
because ancient education taught
people that that was ridiculous,
gods don't do that sort of
thing.
 
The food offered to idols,
again, looks like it split the
church along these social class
lines.
The resurrection of the body,
I said who would have found the
resurrection of the body to be a
ridiculous idea,
people with more education,
people exposed to a little bit
more education.
 
Who would have been taking
people to court?
If you were poor in the ancient
world you didn't take people to
court because you would lose.
 
Roman law was even explicit,
telling judges if you have a
rich man in your case and a poor
man in the case,
well of course you'll decide in
the favor of the rich man
because he has less incentive to
cheat.
The poor are the ones who have
incentive to cheat,
so Roman law was clearly biased
toward the wealthy and the
people with power.
 
If anybody is taking other
Christians to court it would be
people of higher status not
people of lower status,
and it may have been that
people of higher status were
taking their lower status
Christian brothers to court.
Paul then tells them,
don't go to court.
If you have a dispute let it be
handled within the church
itself.
 
Now notice again,
just like he talked about
Philemon last time,
who would have been the
majority in the Corinthian
church, rich people or poor
people?
 
Poor people.
 
There may have been some people
who were better off but they
would have been vastly
outnumbered by the poorer
people.
 
By telling the rich people they
have to handle their problems
within the whole church,
he's placing the rich in a
situation where they're the
minority and that therefore
increases the power of those of
lower status.
In each of these cases,
in other words,
I've argued that the Corinthian
church's problems--
were they were coming to
different views about Christ,
about the body,
about sex, about women and
covering their heads when they
pray and prophesy and that sort
of thing,
they were coming to these
different views because they had
different exposures to upper
class ideology or lower class
ideology,
to different exposures of
levels of education.
Now what happened?
 
Well apparently 1 Corinthians,
as a letter did some good,
because we have fortunately
other materials.
From most of Paul's letters we
don't know whether they
succeeded or not because we
don't have any other writing.
We do have 2 Corinthians,
which is made up of at least
two other letters.
 
2 Corinthians is actually--the
first part of it is one letter
and then chapters 10-13 of 2
Corinthians is another letter,
and if you read them side by
side you can tell because Paul's
tone changes radically when he
gets to chapter 10 in 2
Corinthians.
 
In 2 Corinthians we have at
least two more letters that Paul
wrote.
 
And then Paul mentions in 1
Corinthians another letter he
wrote to them,
so there was another letter
going back and forth;
we don't have that one probably.
In 2 Corinthians Paul mentions
a tearful letter,
a letter he sent but was very
difficult for him to write,
he cried over it.
 
Is that referring to another
letter, or does that refer to 2
Corinthians 10-13,
which is a very angry letter?
We don't know and there's a
debate about that.
What we can tell is that the
basic things about Paul that
Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians
seem to have been settled by the
time we get to 2 Corinthians,
although he has other problems.
The biggest problem is in that
section 10-13 of 2 Corinthians,
because here we get Paul having
to defend himself.
And this is very telling
because Paul says,
well you're talking about these
"super Apostles,"
some other people must have
come on the scene we don't know
who they were,
but Paul ironically calls them
super Apostles.
 
You talk about these super
Apostles,
they're perfectly willing to
mistreat you,
they're arrogant,
they treat you as if they have
all the power,
pardon me that I was too
weak to do that.
 
I treated you well,
but maybe that's my weakness
showing itself.
 
Somebody has said,
well he's very strong in his
letters, but in person he's kind
of a wimp, he's very weak in
person.
 
His speaking style,
well this was a social status
thing.
 
A man in the ancient world,
if he was upper class,
upper status he was supposed to
be able to talk powerfully in
public and if he couldn't he was
servile.
In 2 Corinthians Paul is forced
to defend himself from charges
that he is uneducated,
weak, and powerless,
and therefore not much of an
Apostle.
Now that goes on in 2
Corinthians, eventually what
happens, we don't know what
happened.
Did writing this really
scathing letter to them in 2
Corinthians 10-13,
did that settle the issue?
Did they all just say,
okay, we were wrong,
you're our Apostle,
you're the big daddy,
everything's fine?
 
We don't know.
 
We do have a reference in 2
Clement [correction:
1 Clement],
which is a letter written in
Rome around the end of the first
century,
beginning of the second
century, in which an author
talks about the Corinthians as
being an ancient and great
church.
 
So at least by the next
generation the church in Corinth
is strong and powerful and
respected, so eventually Paul's
work in Corinth succeeded.
 
What we see by looking at 1
Corinthians and 2 Corinthians
all together,
is the struggles it took for
Paul to get that church from
this,
what I call an adolescent
phase, where they're arguing
about everything,
they're really confused about
what they think about basic
doctrinal or life issues,
and then to finally settle down
into some kind of coherence.
That's what makes these letters
really fascinating for us is
that they give us little
snapshots of one church that
Paul founded at at least three
different stages of its
development.
 
Those three stages being
represented by what we can read
from 1 Corinthians,
which kind of gives us one
snapshot of this problem they're
having,
what we can read from 2
Corinthians the first nine
chapters,
which sounds like they've made
up and things are okay,
and what we can read by 2
Corinthians 10-13,
which we don't know whether
that written after the first
part of 2 Corinthians or before
it.
 
It's difficult to place these
things, but it shows Paul in a
very defensive posture with
regard to this church.
We get a very good idea of how
churches struggled to actually
start becoming what we are
seeing will become Christianity.
They've got a long way to go
yet.
Any questions or comments?
 
I've covered a lot of area
today, you can go back and read
it.
 
And I haven't even talked about
Philippians because I wanted to
make sure that you understood
what was going on in scholarly
opinion about the Corinthian
epistles.
Any questions,
comments, outbursts?
Okay, I will see you on
Wednesday.
