Thursday 31 May 2018

Paul and Corinth


3/10 June                    1 Corinthians 1-2

May I speak, and may we hear, not words taught by human wisdom, but words taught by the Spirit. Amen.                                                                cf 1 Cor 2.13


Over the next few weeks the majority of our sermons will take us on a journey through St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. A lot of people shy away from Paul because he is considered difficult to understand. Even when he first wrote his famous letters, that was the case. St Peter, who got to know him well, wrote that Paul’s ‘letters are hard to understand’ and that some people distorted what Paul said, but that Paul was full of God’s wisdom (2 Peter 3.15-16). Paul’s letters are full of energy, and sometimes we see Paul working his ideas out as he spoke them to whoever was scribing each letter.
As we begin, I would like to invite you to read this letter in one sitting. Ideally, read it aloud – perhaps you could get together with some friends. Have a coffee, or a glass of wine, perhaps take a chapter each in turn, and read with as much energy and emphasis as you can. By hearing the whole letter in one go, you’ll get more of a sense of what Paul’s overall intention and how it all connects together, as well as getting more of a sense of Paul’s voice. I strongly commend it.
Let’s begin by setting the scene. Corinth is in Greece, in a region that was called Achaia. It had three large harbours, and was a centre of trading and commerce attracting people from all around the world. For hundreds of years it had been one of the most important of the Greek cities, and boasted many temples, including a particular cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. in 146BC the Achaians went to war against the Romans, and Corinth suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of Mummius, who destroyed the city. For the next hundred years Corinth was a shadow of its former self, until in 44BC Julius Caesar reinvented it as a Roman colony for former soldiers. Corinth became once again a thriving trading centre, now with a strongly multicultural feel. Its inhabitants were former soldiers and their families from all over the new empire, along with a changing population of traders from across the known world: India, China, Indonesia, North Africa, Italy, Spain, Northern Europe. Corinth became known as a place of new beginnings, where you could leave behind one identity and take up a new one. It attracted many freed slaves, living their free lives in a place where they weren’t remembered as slaves – some of the names mentioned by Paul in this letter are typical slave names – Quartus, for example – and may well be people who started out in Rome as slaves and came to Corinth for a new start. It was a city of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, a city where many people passed through as stopping points on longer journeys and others stayed, enjoying the vitality and colour of the place.
Here, early in 51AD, Paul arrived, travelling from Athens by himself, but soon to be joined by his friends Timothy and Silas. Paul stayed with Prisca and Aquila, Jewish followers of Jesus who had left Rome when Claudius threw the Jews out, and settled in Corinth, where they could thrive in their tentmaking business. Paul stayed with them and shared their workshop. AD 51 in Corinth was a good year for tentmaking, as it was a year when the Isthmian games was held. People travelled a long way to take part or to watch the great games, and many stayed in tents – the workshop would have seen plenty of new customers during that year.
Paul wasn’t there to take advantage of a great time for the tentmaking business, though that must have been an advantage. His purpose was twofold: to share the good news of Jesus, and to collect money for the poor members of the church in Jerusalem. The gospel was already known by some in Corinth. Prisca and Aquila were great evangelists, and others had passed through. The followers of Jesus in towns like Corinth were always glad to welcome visits from apostles like Paul, who encouraged them and taught them much more about Jesus. Other apostles travelled too. St Peter regularly visited the young churches across the Mediterranean, St Thomas journeyed in a different direction into India, and St John settled in Ephesus. Some time after Paul’s visit to Corinth, Peter also visited, and made just as strong an impression as Paul.
Wherever Paul travelled, he always began in the synagogue, or wherever Jews met if there was no synagogue. Following Jesus’ example, he began with the people of Israel. Given that Paul is known as the apostle to the Gentiles, and that he is known for his strong arguments for including Gentiles freely within the family of Jesus’ followers, it is easy to forget how important it was to him to make sure that wherever he went his Jewish brothers and sisters had the chance to hear that the scriptures had been fulfilled in Jesus. But we need to remember this in order to understand him. In Corinth Paul taught about Jesus in the synagogue for some time. He brought the synagogue ruler, Crispus, to faith, and baptised him with his whole household. Other Jews came to faith as well – and as always happened wherever Paul went, there was increasing tension between the Jews who followed Jesus and the Jews who did not, particularly over Paul’s mixing with Gentiles and his failure to insist that Gentile believers should fully convert to Judaism and undergo circumcision and obedience to the Jewish law. In Corinth, the Jews became abusive. Crispus had to leave the synagogue, and (as always happened with Paul), Paul had to stop preaching to the Jews and concentrate on the Gentiles.
In Corinth, the next thing Paul did was rather provocative. He accepted an offer to hold regular worship and teaching sessions in the home of a Gentile worshipper called Titius Justus. As it happened, Titius Justus’s house was right next door to the synagogue. Paul was asking for trouble. He saw a vision of Jesus telling him to stick with it, that all would be well, and that vision encouraged him to keep on talking of Jesus in the tentmaking workshop and at worship sessions in the house by the synagogue. Eventually the Jews – led by their new synagogue ruler, Sosthenes - made their attack on Paul, and brought him to the proconsul, probably some time in AD52. The proconsul was Gallio (brother of the philosopher Seneca), and his ruling was a landmark ruling that affected the way that Jesus followers were seen in Roman law.
Jews were excused attendance at Roman sacrifices and were not expected to worship the deified Caesar. They were an exception to the usual rules followed by Romans about religious practice. When Gallio listened to the case against Paul he heard what the Jews had to say and then forbade Paul to speak – he had probably been warned about the length of Paul’s speeches, or perhaps had heard about the long defence Paul had made when last on trial, in Athens. Instead Gallio ruled that the dispute was an internal one amongst Jews. By deciding that, Gallio was declaring that all Jesus followers counted – at least in the eyes of Rome – as Jews, and that meant that all Jesus followers were exempt from worshipping Caesar and the other Roman gods.
Paul stayed on in Corinth for a few more months before moving on in the company of Prisca and Aquila. Timothy and Silas stayed on for a while in Corinth, presumably helping the young church, especially the groups converted by Paul, to carry on comfortably without Paul present. Meanwhile Prisca and Aquila set up a new workshop in Ephesus, where Paul would later join them, and Paul went on a journey visiting other churches that he and Barnabus had founded during the first missionary journey. Prisca and Aquila soon met a new and enthusiastic young preacher in Ephesus who had learned about Jesus from group of John the Baptist’s disciples. The young preacher, Apollos, hadn’t quite got all his facts right, but the tentmaking couple invited him to stay with them and explained the gospel to him properly. By the time Prisca and Aquila were finished, Apollos was ready to be an evangelist, and the church in Ephesus trusted and encouraged him. Apollos felt called to go to Achaia, and was sent with the blessing of the Ephesians, and, no doubt, letters of recommendation from Prisca and Aquila. Apollos was as successful in his ministry as Paul – indeed possibly more so, as his preaching would have been easier to understand than Paul’s! By the time Paul wrote the letter we are studying, Apollos had returned to Ephesus, and he and Paul had got to know each other. Indeed, when Paul signed the letter off he wrote that he had tried to persuade Apollos to be one of the group who went to Corinth to deliver the letter. That didn’t fit in with Apollos’s plans, but he promised via Paul to make a return visit to Corinth before long.
Everything I’ve told you so far can be found in Act 18, or in 1 Corinthians. Some things, however, we can only guess at through the clues in the texts or in what we know of the history of the period. The church in Corinth, which would have consisted of a number of small groups meeting in private houses and only coming together as a whole city group very occasionally, grew and was influenced strongly by the different people who visited the city. Many of the churches were very charismatic in style – there was much speaking in tongues and a great expectation that the Holy Spirit would work dramatically amongst them. Over time, the cultural influences brought into the group from the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds came into conflict, and it wasn’t always easy to remember how to balance the cultural practices of Corinth with the teaching of Jesus. What to do when sitting wealthy people and poor people down to share a meal in the same room? What to do in a town with many prostitutes and different understandings of how marriage worked? Believers disagreed on how to deal with certain problems, and some of them wrote to Paul about their difficulties and disagreements.
The letter we call 1 Corinthians is almost certainly not the first letter Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. In chapter 5.9 Paul mentions a letter that he had sent before about a particular problem that had been brought to his attention. We’ll talk about the problem itself later in this series. After Paul settled in Ephesus with Prisca and Aquila, he received a visit from some of his Corinthian friends, including a group he calls ‘Chloe’s people’. They brought him letters from Corinth and updated him on the state of the church there. Although they could report good teaching from Apollos, and that Peter had made an influential visit, the news was not all good. Paul was very disappointed in what he was told, hearing about a church that divided itself, and members who put their arguments and grudges ahead of being one united group of followers of Jesus. He was also disturbed at the immoral behaviour of some of the members. This letter is his response to that visit.
Paul’s letters were usually co-authored with someone else, and in this case the other author is called Sosthenes. We can imagine Paul and Sosthenes sitting down with the scribe, and Paul pacing the room, dictating as he thought. Sometimes he lost the flow of thought or interrupted himself. Occasionally we can imagine Sosthenes interrupting or correcting him. For example, in today’s reading Paul listed those he had baptised – only Crispus and Gaius. I imagine, as he told the scribe to write that no one else was baptised by him, Sosthenes saying – ‘But Paul, you baptised Stephanus’s household too!’ A pause. ‘Oh yes, I did, didn’t I? Was there anyone else?’ ‘No, I don’t think so’. So Paul adds a comment about Stephanus and the patient scribe carries on. The ‘I’ in Paul's letters always denotes Paul, so we have to live with the frustration of knowing almost nothing about Sosthenes, or how he came to be writing with Paul.
We’ll think more about the divisions in the church that Paul was writing about in the second sermon of the series. If you don’t have time to prepare for this sermon series by reading the whole of 1 Corinthians in one sitting – although it would take you more than an hour – then at least read chapters 1-3.
Over the next few weeks we will get to grips with this famous letter, asking what it meant to the people of first century Corinth, and what it means to us today.

1 comment:

  1. I am printing this as agreed for the people I visit on behalf of the Pastoral Team -people who cannot get to Church.
    Thank you for this explanation.

    ReplyDelete