Corinth

What is Third Corinthians?

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).

What is Third Corinthians?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.

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1 Corinthians 6:12-20 – Gluttony, Drunkenness and Immorality

Paul must correct the church because of gluttony, drunkenness and going to prostitutes at private banquets (6:12-20). The issue here is attendance at banquets given by the rich elite of the city.  There is plenty of evidence concerning the types of things that went on in a Roman banquet of the first century from contemporary writers.

Winter gathers a number of references from Plutarch describing the combination of gluttony, drunkenness and sexual immorality that were a part of the “after-dinners” as he calls them.   There was an association between gluttony and sexual excess, as is seen from the well known saying reported by Plutarch, “in well-gorged-bodies love (passions) reside.” The writer Athenaeus said that the goddess Cypris (Aphrodite) does not visit the poor, “in an empty body no love of the beautiful can reside.”  Plutarch also said that in “intemperate intercourse follows a lawless meal, inharmonious music follows a shameless debauch” (Winter, After Paul Left Corinth, 84).

These banquets would only have been attended by the rich elite of the city of Corinth.  The poor were not invited, only those of some social standing. In Corinth there was a major city-wide banquet for all citizens celebrating the games.  Not only would there have been pressure to attend these banquets on a social level, there was the added pressure of begin a good citizen of Corinth and of Rome

These sorts of banquets are in the background of 1 Corinthians.  Members of the church are not visiting brothels as we might think of it today.  They are attending meals with the elite of Corinth, either hosted in the home of a wealthy patron of the city or in a temple.  The practice was considered not only acceptable, but in some cases required for social mobility.  If one wanted to gain the favor of a wealthy patron in order to advance a business plan, then attendance at a banquet hosted by the patron was a necessity.

Why would the Corinthian Christians think that they had a right to participate in these banquets?   Paul seems to have taught them that Christians are to be separate from such activities, and the strong Jewish ethic of many of the founders would have argued against going to a temple, eating food sacrificed to idols, and participating in the “after-dinners.”

It appears at the very least that the Gentile converts to Christianity did not see this activity as sin. As with most of the problems Paul treats in 1 Corinthians, the congregation is slow to de-paganize.  The practice of going to temples to share meals with the elite of Corinth was socially desirable for the wealthy and “wanna-be” elite.  Perhaps individuals in the church thought they had to do their civic duty by doing to the banquets (a virtue) and did not yet see the additional practices as a vice yet.

While it is easy to point at the Corinthians and judge them as “immature,” it seems to me that the church in general as well as individual believers are quick to compromise with “the world” when money is involved.  Sin is condemned with the poor people are doing it, but if a wealthy member of the congregation is involved, the condemnation is quite a bit less severe.  A church might borrow a practice from the corporate business world  because it “works” without really thinking about the origins or ramifications of the practice.  I can think of a hundred great excuses for behaving any way I please as a Christian, most of them are well-intentioned.  I suspect Paul would have an equally strong condemnation for the modern church as he did Corinth!

1 Corinthians 1-4 – Division in the Church

It is well known that division in the church of Corinth was over leadership. Some considered Paul their authority, others Apollos, others Peter, and still others accepted only Jesus as their authority.  It is possible that these divisions represent competing house churches, some founded by Paul and others by Apollos.  But even if multiple house churches are founded by different leaders, Paul passionately argues that the body of Christ cannot be divided in this way. In fact, these divisions are a sign of worldliness.  How can the presence of divisions be described as “worldly”

Division in the Church

Bruce Winter details the Greco-Roman practice of discipleship in the second chapter of After Paul Left Corinth. He finds that there is a great deal of parallels between the disciple-teacher relationship in the culture of Corinth and the problem of divisions in the church over the authority of teachers. Dio Chrysostom visited Corinth about A.D. 89-96. He described the activities of the disciples of the Sophists – the professional orators who could command large audiences, charge high fees for educating youth, and often wielded considerable power within the city. There was extreme competition among the orators for honor and power.  The better the orator, the higher the fee, and the more disciples he would attract.  Dio Chrysostom complained that Corinth was filled with “wretched” sophists, many of whom were debating one another with “shouting and abuse” near the temple to Poseidon. (I suppose that if Dio were commenting on the modern world, he would describe the “wretched bloggers” shouting abuse at the temple of WordPress…!)

Paul enters this world of “wretched Sophists” and preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He gathers disciples and establishes a church, a meeting place for educating his disciples.  He begins the process of developing them into leaders who will also preach the gospel and found more churches. The Gentiles coming into this new Church do not seem to be able to see the differences between it and a Greco-Roman philosopher gathering disciples and educating them in a particular philosophy.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul consciously avoids disciple-teacher language. Paul did not want to present the Gospel as an orator, competing for students as they did.  In fact, Paul never claims them as disciples. This is really what is behind his disclaimer on baptism in 1 Corinthians 1:14-16.  He came to Corinth to create a community of disciples from which he might receive patronage and prestige.

Paul does not want to be considered a philosopher who is gathering disciples, nor does he want that for Apollos or Peter or any man.  So rather than detailing their accomplishments as orators, Paul describes their functions (Paul planted, Apollos watered, etc.)  Christians are all disciples, or better, stewards and servants of the mysteries of God (1 Cor 4:1).

The real problem behind the “divisions” is that the church continues to act like Christianity is just another philosophy, and teachers are in competition with each other just as the Greek orators competed.  They are still acting “just like the world.”  This is the challenge of the “divisions” in 1 Corinthians –  how does the modern church act “just like the world”? In what ways have we failed to “de-paganize”? I do not think things have improved much since the first century.

Corinth as “Sin City”

Since I am spending time in Corinth this week (in class, not it real life, sadly enough), I thought I would dispense right away with the classic Pastor’s preaching point that Corinth was a “San Francisco of the ancient world.”  I think Chuck Swindoll said that, so most pastors have picked it up and try to illustrate how bad Paul’s church was by comparing it to Haight-Ashbury circa 1969.  This is one of those points that gets picked up in a commentary and repeated with little additional research, sadly it is not exactly accurate.

Usually the evidence for this sexual freedom is that the city was built around two ports and attracted sailors.  In addition, there is usually some reference to the temple of Aphrodite with more tan 1000 prostitutes. Maybe Corinth’s reputation is deserved, but it has little to do with the city that Paul visited. All of these sorts of things were true of Greek Corinth, almost 400 years before the time of Paul!  As Jerome Murphy-O’Connor says:

Such success inevitably provoked the envy of those less fortunate in their location and less industrious in their habits, and so in the 5th–4th centuries b.c., Athenian writers made Corinth the symbol of commercialized love. Aristophanes coined the verb korinthiazesthai, “to fornicate” (Fr. 354).  Philetaerus and Poliochus wrote plays entitled Korinthiastes, “The Whoremonger” (Athenaeus 313c, 559a). Plato used korinthia kore, “a Corinthian girl,” to mean a prostitute (Rest. 404d). These neologisms, however, left no permanent mark on the language, because in reality Corinth was neither better nor worse than its contemporaries. (Murphy-O’Connor, ABD 1:1135).

In fact, the whole Roman empire at the time Paul visited the Corinth had sexual morals significantly different than those of Jews and the early Christians. Corinth was no less moral that Ephesus or Thessalonica. This is not to say  the city of Corinth was virtuous, but no one was singing “I Wish They Could All Be Corinthian Girls.”  Perhaps it is better to think of the Greco-Roman world as having a radically different sexual ethic as Christianity. The type of sexual morality Paul’s gospel demands simply cut across the grain of the culture of the Greco-Roman world, as it should in the modern world.