It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. Chapter 12 uses the image of the body of Christ to lay out the way the community should relate together.
No part of the Christian body is unimportant. Every part is linked to every other part, no matter how humble it might seem to be. We have already noted how many problems are evident here.
It is nevertheless amazing to observe how many of these problems would disappear if the Corinthians would just be nicer to one another.
Neither do they factionalize into bitter partisan disputes. So many problems in Corinth—and I suspect in many other places—would be solved if Christians were simply kinder to one another. When the church was founded ten years before this exchange of correspondence, in the early 40s, Priscilla and Aquila worked with Paul to convert people in the handworker community and probably also in the streets outside the small factory-shops the handworkers labored in. These potential converts were out-and-out pagans.
They were tough, poor, uncouth people. In the synagogue in Corinth, however, Paul was more successful than usual. Generally, he got expelled from the local synagogue after he had tried to convince everyone there to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and sometimes he was quickly chased out of town. But in Corinth he had some outstanding successes. By the time he wrote his Corinthian letters, ten years later, another Jewish synagogue patron had been converted, Sosthenes. So there were Jewish converts and God worshipers in the Corinthian church alongside the pagans.
Equally important, some of these converts seem to have been wealthy, forming an additional contrast with the poor pagan handworkers and street converts. Ancient society was marked by considerable differences in wealth. The top 1. The rest of the top 10 percent owned the next 20 percent of income. The bottom echelon of society lived in constant hunger, literally "from hand to mouth," meaning that when they got any food they immediately ate it. By our standards, then, ancient society was extremely unequal.
The elite were very wealthy and well connected compared to everyone else, and vastly superior to them in terms of power and status. Every community is always involved with these powerful relational dynamics which do not always play out smoothly.
In short, the Corinthian church was crisscrossed by significant differences. It was composed of people who were from an utterly pagan background, who were half-Jewish pagans that is, converted God worshipers , and who were Jews. There were many poor converts but also a number of high-status and wealthy figures, along with their households.
And as always, there were complicated gender dynamics surrounding sexual activity. These diverse Corinthian converts brought into their Christian community all the hostility, suspicion, and misunderstanding that arose from these differences in race, class, and gender.
Moreover, there were problems of leadership that prevented the Corinthians from resolving their differences. Paul composed 1 Corinthians carefully in five blocks of argument, each one of which addresses a cluster of related problems. But he began the letter with the heart of the matter: the partisan divisions in the Corinthian community. The Corinthians are factionalized. On one level this partisanship is entirely understandable.
The United States recently came through an extraordinary election in which both sides vilified their opposition. But things were even nastier in the ancient world. There was no liberal veneer to cover things over.
The bitter partisanship evident at Corinth is linked tightly with another feature of the community: life in the ancient city was a desperate struggle for survival and an equally desperate climb up the proverbial greasy pole to the top. The tiny number of people who inhabited the top 1 percent were survivors. They were highly competitive, aggressive, tough people who sat on those beneath them and fended off their rivals ruthlessly.
They also used the considerable resources of Greco-Roman rhetoric to mock and denigrate their competitors. The unusual degree of factionalism in the Corinthian community is traceable in large measure to the handful of elite figures who are in it—the wealthy and highly educated converts that Paul and Apollos had made in and around the synagogue, including Gaius, Crispus, and Sosthenes.
These local civic leaders were acting as they usually did, striving with one another for attention and influence in an intensely competitive fashion, all while preserving their privileges and status from the great unwashed who made up the rest of the congregation. In addition to their competitiveness, the Corinthians have a cultural view of leadership, and this problematized their relationship with Paul.
Greco-Roman cities loved appearances. They loved what people looked like, how much money they had, their connections, and how they spoke.
Fully trained rhetorical professionals could captivate audiences for hours. They were the rock stars of the ancient world, and they commanded huge fees for their performances. They looked beautiful and spoke beautifully. In one of the most profound passages he ever wrote, Paul points out that the Christian God revealed in the crucified Jesus could not be more different from this — By journeying down into the human condition and ultimately accepting a shameful death, Jesus revealed that God was a reaching God, an inclusive and gentle God who valued everyone, including the most despised and marginalized.
Those whom society looked down on, God was especially concerned about and eager to reach. The Corinthian church, divided because of the arrogance of its more powerful members, should work together for the advancement of the gospel. They should repent of their rivalries, build up the faith of those who are weak, and witness effectively to unbelievers. Paul received an oral report and a letter from the Corinthian church.
These revealed a church struggling with division, immorality, idolatry, and theological confusion. It shows us the conflict between an apostle and a struggling church. In the end, it seems as though the parties were reconciled and restored to unity once again, for the apostle made his third visit to Corinth where he wrote the wonderful epistle to the Romans which does not suggest any further conflict in Corinth.
Denver: Accent, , Introduction to the New Testament. Howard Clark Kee; Nashville: Abingdon, , Guthrie and J. Motyer; Grand Rapids, Mich. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, , A Survey of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Mich. Nashville: Word, , Since the text and audio content provided by BLB represent a range of evangelical traditions, all of the ideas and principles conveyed in the resource materials are not necessarily affirmed, in total, by this ministry.
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