Can we know anything about the situation of the Corinthian church after the time of Paul? There is an apocryphal letter of Third Corinthians which is know from Armenian manuscripts of the New Testament, some Latin fragments, and a 3rd century Greek copy in the Bodmer Papyri. Both the Syriac and Armenian churches accepted the letter as authentic, but with the discovery of a Coptic version in 1894, it has been shown that the letter is actually part of the apocryphal Acts of Paul. It is absolutely certain that the letter is a forgery. About A. D. 200 Tertullian reported author of the Acts of Paul was a presbyter in Asia Minor who confessed that he forged the book “out of love for Paul” (de Baptismo 17).
In the letter of Third Corinthians Paul writes to two men, Simon and Cleobius. They have recently arrived in Corinth and “pervert the faith of many with pernicious words.” The letter then lists these pernicious doctrines: God is not all powerful, he did not create humans or even this world. Jesus did not come in the flesh nor was he born from Mary. All this strikes me as Gnostic theology, indicating a much later date than the mid-first century.
The only element of this apocryphal letter which seems related to the problems of the authentic Corinthian letters is a denial of the resurrection. The writer alludes to Jonah and the men raised by the bones of Elisha as examples of resurrection from the scripture. If God can raise people just as Jonah, so too could he raise Jesus from the dead. The forger of the letter did not bother include any ethical issues drawn from the book, there is no allusion to any of the social problems found in the canonical books.
To me, this makes it a fairly poor forgery and probably why the man was found out so quickly!
It would be interesting to take this letter apart line by line in order to show what texts the author used to create this apocryphal letter. There are lines which are clearly drawn from Paul, but in several cases there are allusions to the words of Jesus (“O ye of little faith” and calling the false teachers a “generation of vipers,” for example.)
Since the letter has little to do with the actual church at Corinth, there is little here which informs us of the situation in Corinth.
Bibliography:
Dana Andrew Thomason, “Corinthians, Third Epistle To The,” in ABD 1:1153.
W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:213-237 for the introduction to the “Acts of Paul,” 2:254-257 for the text of 3 Corinthians.
It is here I am reminded of just how little we have of the life of St. Paul, in Acts and his own Letters, but what we do have is both historical and Canon! And thankfully that is more important than much of our suppositions. I am not negating suppositions, but the grid is always Holy Scripture.
It would be virtually impossible to write a modern “biography” of Paul, although we have more material to illustrate his life than any other NT personality except Jesus. I suppose that is what makes the Apocryphal Pauline material so interesting to me, others had the same sort of questions I do!
Personally, I like to grapple with the “heart & mind” of St. Paul, which I find in his Letters! A true Roman Jew, who was always a Jewish-Hellenist! And he must have read many of the Greek philosophers! (2 Tim. 4:13) And of course, “I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry.” (Rom. 11:13)
Something that I find intriguing but also kind of sad is that Paul wrote so many more letters to the various churches during his time, yet we only have a select few that survived. It would be so cool to travel back in time and read those letters, or better yet, hear it straight from Paul and his associates!
Something that doesn’t surprise me is that there are letters floating around that claim to be from Paul, yet clearly are not. It is almost as if the forgers were not even trying; the theology does not even line up with the rest of his letters. 3 Corinthians is a prime example of this. I was quite intrigued with this blog, so I did a little research outside of it and read 3 Corinthians. I found it fascinating but also dumbfounded: How could some people believe this was written by the same Paul that wrote Romans, 1-2 Thessalonians, or even 1-2 Corinthians?! Also, as mentioned in this blog post, the social issues do not correlate between 1-2 Corinthians and “3 Corinthians.”
Within the letter, the authors talk about how there is no “…resurrection of the flesh…” and “…man was not made by God…” yet the Bible clearly states both of these to be true. Jesus did physically die and was physically resurrected, and there were others in the Bible who were physically resurrected (Lazarus, multiple instances involving Elijah and Elisha throughout 1-2 Kings, Jairus’ daughter, the list goes on). When it comes to man not being made by God, this claim is clearly false and goes against not only Christian belief, but also Jewish belief. If the authors thought they could twist Paul into being solely Jewish and not Christian, they neglected the fact that Jews have many similar beliefs and teachings.
I think one main question I have is “why?” Why did the authors of this letter feel the need to write something claiming to be Paul when they clearly have opposing beliefs and views? Were they trying to discredit Paul and his other letters?
Sources:
ESV Study Bible
3 Corinthians: https://pages.uoregon.edu/sshoemak/321/texts/3_corinthians.htm
It does not seem improbable that Paul could have penned a Third Corinthian letter to his churches in Corinth. This is because there was at least one other letter written to the Corinthians before 1 & 2 Corinthians in the modern-day Bible. Therefore, it makes sense that Paul might have written one more letter, or a series of letters, after 2 Corinthians continued encouraging and building up the Corinthian churches. However, I thought it was very interesting how there was not only one manuscript found that was said to be the third letter, but several copies. I also thought it was very intriguing how the manuscript that proved all the other texts that were said to be the third letter to be not authentic was not found until 1894. Therefore, after hundreds of years of questioning whether the manuscripts from Armenian or the Greek copy was legitimate, the manuscript found in 1894 admitted that the text was written by someone who wrote it for Paul, separate of the apostle. Scholars can tell if a letter is not inspired by looking at what we have in the original Bible and by looking at God’s character. For example, in this manuscript, God is said to have not created human beings or that Jesus did not come as a man with a humble beginning. We know that these claims do not line up with the rest of Scripture, and definitely does not align with the rest of Paul’s original writings.