Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Religion, 2 Corinthians

Crowdsourcing Paul’s Letters to Corinth

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Last week I noted a few of the many new tools and online sites available for reading and interpreting Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. I was a little surprised to find so few digitally annotated commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians given the relative ease of coding a text through TEI markup language, the availability of online platforms that have simplified the process, and the currency of crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. One can find commentaries through subscriptions in biblegateway, of course, but there are now platforms available for producing collaborative crowdsourced commentaries.

Consider Genius, a site freely available for annotating musical lyrics. Their website claims to have made available annotations of literally millions of songs that include “all of Kanye and Kendrick, but also Hamlet, TV and movie scripts, Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, and even the Chipotle menu…”. The platform allows users to highlight difficult or obscure lyrics, annotate, comment, and add context and images to help individuals make sense of text. The site also provides a Genius Web Annotator which, through a Chrome extension, gives users the ability to mark up any internet page, make one’s own website annotatable, and easily share annotations with anyone. The website already has many Corinthian-related texts uploaded by their user community including Pausanias’ Book 2, Lord Byron’s “Siege of Corinth,” and chapters from modern scholarship such as Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body.Genius

For one successful model in using Genius to mark up the Corinthian correspondence, check out Professor Laura Nasrallah‘s commentaries on the Pauline epistles and the Corinthian correspondence crowdsourced by Harvard University undergraduates. Nasrallah’s guide for students includes both practical suggestions such as formatting and multimedia, as well as contextual questions for students to consider as they annotate:

  • What is the significance of the historical context of the political power of the Roman Empire?
  • What is the significance of the socio-economic context of the first century CE?
  • What do the various arguments within the Pauline correspondence reveal about the debates in which the earliest Christians were engaged?
  • How does your experience help you to bring new interpretive contexts and to ask better questions?

CrowdsourcedCorinthiansNasrallah’s student commentaries build on earlier semesters with the result that students may interact with earlier classes. You can see the full list of Nasrallah’s annotated chapters and books here.

Crowdsourced platforms such as Genius have a wide range of potential uses that include but go well beyond academic contexts for reading Corinthian texts. Virtually any group or community could use such a platform for a collaborative study of 1 and 2 Corinthians. And it would be great to see someone put together a digital patristic commentary on these letters–an online version of Gerald Bray’s ancient Christian commentaries on 1-2 Corinthians. If you have worked to digitally annotate these letters, send me a link and I’ll add it a static webpage when I convert some of these posts into more static pages.

This is the sixth post in a series on resources for the study of ancient religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include:

 

 

Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions

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This new Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Eric Orlin and a team of collaborators, claims to be the “first comprehensive single-volume reference work offering authoritative coverage of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world.” As the publisher page describes it:
The volume’s scope extends from pre-historical antiquity in the third millennium B.C.E. through the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. An interdisciplinary approach draws out the common issues and elements between and among religious traditions in the Mediterranean basin. Key features of the volume include:
  • Detailed maps of the Mediterranean World, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic World
  • A comprehensive timeline of major events, innovations, and individuals, divided by region to provide both a diachronic and pan-Mediterranean, synchronic view
  • A broad geographical range including western Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe

This encyclopedia will serve as a key point of reference for all students and scholars interested in ancient Mediterranean culture and society.

Orlin, Eric, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Routledge, 2015.
Not possible to outline an A-Z encyclopedia running over a thousand words, but the associated keywords suggest enough connections to Corinthiaka:
Abraham. Acolyte. Aeon. Aggadah. Apis. Assumption. Baptism. Byzantine Rite. Catharsis. Church of Rome. Codex Vaticanus. Constantinople. Cult Statue. Dead Sea scrolls. Demeter. Dionysius Exiguus. Eldad and Modad. Exorcism. Falcon. Fascinus. Flavia Domitilla. Glossolalia. Hagiography. Harpokrates. Healing Cults. Heaven. Heliopolis. Herodotus. Incubation. jackal, sacred. Jannes and Jambres. Jonah. Jude, Epistle of. Kerdir. Kirta Epic. Kronos. Lady Elat. Leviathan. Liturgy of John Chrysostom. Maccabees, First Book of. Magic bowls, Aramaic. Marduk. Midrash Rabbah. Monk. Nazirite. Netinim. Obadiah. Oracle. Pantheon. Peplos. polis religion. priestess. Ptolemaic kingdom. Renenutet. rites of passage. Sacrament. Samaritan Pentateuch. Saturnalia. Selkhet. Sinai, Mt. Sophokles. Taurobolium. Theodoric. Tobiad. Urartu. Vestal Virgins. Witchcraft. Yeshiva. Yohanan ben Zakkai. Zealots. Ziggurat.
Google Books has digitized and made available a significant chunk of the encyclopedia including the forward, which outlines the reason for the work and approach to subject (new theoretical currents, interdisciplinary approaches to religion, and the growing importance of material culture, among others). Digitized text also includes maps and numerous entries, which range from a hundred words to a page or more. A keyword search by the word “Corinth” turns up a couple of dozen hits from the currently digitized material.

Reading 1 and 2 Corinthians in the Digital Age

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A few years ago, a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Americans on average were broadly illiterate about the core beliefs, writings, and teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Only about half of Americans, for example, know the Koran is the sacred text of Islam, Martin Luther was somehow associated with the Protestant Reformation, or that the four gospels of the New Testament are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (see the executive summary here). The findings echoed those of Stephen Prothero’s New York Times bestselling study, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t  (HarperCollins 2007), which documented the public’s general lack of knowledge about religions that many claim as near and dear to their hearts. Prothero argued that religious illiteracy was not simply an internal problem for particular religious groups and denominations but a fundamentally civic one that Americans need to remedy: presidents and politicians regularly invoke religious texts in civic discourse, after all, and knowledge of world religions would contribute to more informed foreign policy.

Whether or not you agree with Prothero, it is striking that the high rates of religious illiteracy — at least in respect to knowledge of the Hebrew and Christian bibles — can so easily coexist with the widespread availability and accessibility of ancient texts. Never before has it been easier to read, hear, and understand 1 and 2 Corinthians. Anyone with an internet connection has a thousand new digital resources at their fingertips. You can visit the Bible Gateway to read the Corinthian correspondence in dozens of languages (ancient and modern) and translations along with devotional readings and commentaries, or go to the Blue Letter Bible to find commentary, study tools, Greek text, images, sermons, music, and cross-references. Have a question about a certain part of 1 Corinthians? Ask it at biblical hermeneutics stack exchange, a crowdsourced resource designed for theologians, bible students, and anyone interested in exegetical analysis of texts. There are audio sermons galore freely available at sites such as SermonAudio and Preach It Teach It. And YouTube, of course, has a growing body of video sermons: a search on “Corinth” and “sermons” turns up nearly a thosand hits.  Then there are sermons, homilies, and studies that are constant on the internet.

I’m not sure if such resources contribute to any deep literacy about the Corinthian situation, or simply create a glut of information, but they have widely disseminated to an unprecedented extent the content and interpretations of Pauline literature and the Corinthian churches of Corinth. Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to look at different ways that scholars are using both digital media and alternate forms of publication to explore the religious world of Corinth in the first century CE and educate a public that has the decreasing ability to read and study a long text.

This marks the fifth post in a Lenten series on resources for the study of religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include

An Open Bibliography in Corinthian and New Testament Studies

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I’ve just surfaced from a week-long purgatorial session editing and indexing the proof text of The Isthmus of Corinth. It was awful–or maybe it was wonderful–but the manuscript is better for it. And now I now understand why authors sometimes cut corners and pay others to index their works.

I’m back on track this morning and eager to deliver my overdue Lenten Wednesday series on New Testament studies, this time on Thursday.

First a word on the Corinthian Studies library general. The most up to date bibliography for Corinthian Studies runs to 2,758 individual items and covers subjects from deep prehistory to the modern era. You can find other useful bibliographic lists of Corinthian Studies online, but you won’t find a more comprehensive and searchable open library than this one. You can access the bibliography in two ways:

  1. On the web at the Corinthian Studies Group Library hosted at Zotero.org. Simply search the library as a whole, or search the collections within the library by keyword. This only requires that you visit the Corinthian Studies group library and search or browse through the collections.
  2. As a downloadable RIS file, which can be imported into a bibliographic program such as Zotero, EndNote, or Reference Manager.

If you ask me, you should download and and install a reference managing program such as Zotero. Using software to mine the bibliography offers much more powerful and complex search capabilities than the web version. For an introduction to Zotero and further details about the Corinthian Studies bibliography, see this page. Zotero is free and easy to use. Try it.

PaulCorinthThe collected bibliography includes nearly a thosand entries related to ancient Christianity, Judaism, and New Testament Studies. As I noted a couple of years ago, there are plenty of select bibliographic lists floating about related to the Pauline mission, or the study of 1 and 2 Corinthians, but this collection has a number of key strengths that you will not find elsewhere. Some highlights for someone interested in understanding  scholarship on, say, some passage in 1 Corinthians (much of this applies to other subjects as well, of course):

  • Free. It is completely free and open to public use, not locked inside a pay-to-use database.
  • Comprehensive. The bibliography aims to be comprehensive. It includes articles and books from Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013). It includes all relevant Corinthian studies material listed in the bibliography of Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Corinth in Context, Corinth Volume XX, and Bridge of the Untiring Sea. And it includes works listed in a number of commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians, and relevant material from JSTOR and WorldCat searches (see this page for more information about coverage).
  • Current. The coverage from 2010-2016 is especially good, and thereby offers up-to-date views of what scholars are saying today about Corinth and the New Testament situation.
  • Open. Many of the entries include links to articles, books, and material that are partly or fully accessible online through journal websites, Google Books, Internet Archive, or Academia. Abstracts are included when available.
  • Browsable. The library is divided into three main collections (I. Archaeology and History, II. New Testament, Judaism, and Early Christianity, and III. Geology) and tagged accordingly (.ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY or .CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM or .GEOLOGY). These show up as the first three tags in the Tags area to the lower left of the Zotero Library (expand the tags if you don’t see them). An item may belong to multiple categories. You can also view the most recent material from 2015 by looking at the individual folders.
  • Searchable.  The collection is tagged with keywords such as “Roman,” “1 Corinthians”, and “2 Corinthians”. Much of the New Testament material is also tagged by chapter, e.g.,  “_1 Cor. 13”. This is especially useful f you are looking for some discussion of an enigmatic passage in 1 Corinthians of a recent discussion of the love chapter.
  • Variety.  The collection includes articles, books, PhD theses, and sermons

The bibliography is a work in progress. There are holes and inaccuracies and the entire collection needs better tagging. But it does provide a good place to start.

And it’s worth noting that the bibliography has been created largely through my own labor, and student help funded through work studies positions at Messiah College. If you’re interested in improving the quality of the collection, I’d be glad to have your help or support.

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: New Testament, Christianity, and Judaism

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This is the third in a series of five bibliographic reports related to Corinthian scholarship published or digitized in 2015. This post also marks the next installment in a Lenten series on resources for the study of Judaism, New Testament, and early Christianity in Corinth (see last week’s post on Corinthian-related blogs). Today’s report presents scholarship published or digitized in 2015 related in some way to the subjects of Christianity, Judaism, and the New Testament. This includes some scholarship on the Hellenistic and early Roman “backgrounds” of Christianity and Judaism but most of this material relates to New Testament studies.

Download the PDF by right clicking on this  link:

I generated these reports through Zotero tags and searches, and there are undoubtedly missing entries as well as false positives. Next week, I’ll put together a post about using the bibliographic database for the study of religion in Roman Corinth.

If you see references missing from the list, please send to corinthianmatters@gmail.com

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014

 

The Long Lent

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The liturgical season of Lent begins today in the western Christian churches. If you don’t know what this is, Lent is a penitential season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving that culminates in the celebration of Easter / Pascha. As far as liturgical seasons go, it’s a pretty old one that had emerged clearly by the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and perhaps earlier in some form. Today it is universally celebrated by different Christian denominations (even the anabaptist and brethren in Christ college where I teach usually serves up an Ash Wednesday service to students). Sometimes eastern and western calendars are closely aligned so that Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians are celebrating the season (nearly) simultaneously. This year, these traditions have conspired against each other to produce about the greatest timespan possible between the celebration of western Easter (March 27) and Orthodox Pascha (May 1). This means that between eastern and western calendars, Christians will be in a lenten penitential season for nearly three months this year. And that’s a whole lot of Lent.

This liturgical season intersects in a number of ways with Corinthian studies.  The New Testament letters of 1 and WinterSkyCentralPA2 Corinthians, with all their discussion of repentance, salvation, the memorial of the last supper, and resurrection, among others, have made good material for for the lenten cycle of scripture readings (even this morning, at an Ash Wednesday mass, I heard 2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2). And the Corinthian saint Leonidas and his companions were martyred and are celebrated during Pascha/Easter (Sneak peak for next year: Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants will be celebrating Easter / Pascha the same day and on April 16, the feast day of Leonidas and companions. I’m working now with some Latin students at Messiah to prepare a little translation of the relevant passages about those saints from the Acta Sanctorum)

So it only seems appropriate that I re-launch my weekly series on resources and books for reading and understanding 1 and 2 Corinthians, early Christian communities, and religion in Roman Corinth. Yes, I planned to do this two years ago but wasn’t on my game. In fact, I’m pretty bad at delivering any series consistently. But I have a little more time this semester, and will aim to deliver a Wednesday series.

The Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklesia (Richard Last)

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Last_PaulineChurchI was interested to see the release of Richard Last’s new book The Pauline Church and the Corinthian Ekklesia: Greco-Roman Associations in Comparative Context  (Cambridge University Press 2015), which publishes the author’s 2013 dissertation from University of Toronto. Published as volume 146 in the Society for New Testament Monograph Series, the work adopts a fresh approach to the role of religious associations and philosophical cults and and Judean synagogues generally for understanding the first Christian communities of Corinth specifically. The table of contents (here for the PDF) list chapters that suggest interesting discussions about Greco-Roman associations as a category, the meeting places of the Christian communities, the very small size of the earliest Christian group (so, in the abstract below, “all ten members”!), the economic capacities of associations, and the internal dynamics, structure, organization, hierarchies, and financing of assocations.  Among Last’s provocative interpretations include the view that the first Christian groups at Corinth were internally structured from the beginning, and that ecclesiastical organization was not simply a later development from a primitive egalitarian community.

The publisher page outlining the scope of the book suggests conclusions that are sure to spawn debate in New Testament studies generally and the Corinthian correspondence specifically:

Moving past earlier descriptions of first-century Christ groups that were based on examining the New Testament in isolation from extant sources produced by analogous cult groups throughout Mediterranean antiquity, this book engages with underexplored epigraphic and papyrological records and situates the behaviour of Paul’s Corinthian ekklēsia within broader patterns of behaviour practiced by Greco-Roman associations. Richard Last’s comparative analysis generates highly original contributions to our understanding of the social history of the Jesus movement: he shows that the Corinthians were a small group who had no fixed meeting place, who depended on financial contributions from all ten members in order to survive, and who attracted recruits by offering social benefits such as crowns and office-holding that made other ancient cult groups successful. This volume provides a much-needed robust alternative to the traditional portrayal of Pauline Christ groups as ecclesiastically egalitarian, devoid of normative honorific practices, and free for the poor.

The publisher has made available most of the introduction here, and you can look to Google Books for some additional excerpts.

People Under Power: Early Christian and Jewish Responses (Lebahn and Lehtipuu)

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This new book edited by Labahn and Lehtipuu looks broadly relevant to the study of Judaism and early Christianity at Corinth and the Corinthian correspondence with all its emphasis on power and weakness:

Labahn, Michael, and Outi Lehtipuu, eds. People under Power: Early Jewish and Christian Responses to the Roman Power Empire. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

The book, which will be out next month, has chapters devoted to Jewish communities under empire, the New Testament within the context of empire, and early Christian texts in light of imperial ideologies.

 

According to the publisher page, “This volume presents a batch of incisive new essays on the relationship between Roman imperial power and ideology and Christian and Jewish life and thought within the empire. Employing diverse methodologies that include historical criticism, rhetorical criticism, postcolonial criticism, and social historical studies, the contributors offer fresh perspectives on a question that is crucial for our understanding not only of the late Roman Empire, but also of the growth and change of Christianity and Judaism in the imperial period.”

 

I’ve transcribed the Table of Contents below (with a more readable PDF version here)

Table of Contents: 

Introduction: Christians, Jews, and Roman Power (Outi Lehtipuu & Michael Labahn)

Part I Jewish Communities in the Shadows of the Empire

“The Kittim and Hints of Hybridity in the Dead Sea Scrolls” (George J. Brooke, University of Manchester)

“The Politics of Exclusion: Expulsions of Jews and Others from Rome” (Birgit van der Lans, University of Groningen)

“”Μεμορια Iudati patiri”: Some Notes to the Study of the Beginnings of Jewish Presence in Roman Pannonia” (Nóra Dávid, University of Vienna)

Part II Contextualizing New Testament Texts with the Empire

“Imperial Politics in Paul: Scholarly Phantom or Actual Textual Phenomenon?” (Anders Klostergaard Petersen, University of Aarhus)

“Das Markusevangelium – eine ideologie- und imperiumskritische Schrift? Ein Blick in die Auslegungsgeschichte” (Martin Meiser, Universität des Saarlandes)

“„Ein Beispiel habe ich euch gegeben…“ (Joh 13,15): Die Diakonie Jesu und die Diakonie der Christen in der johanneischen Fußwaschungserzählung als Konterkarierung römischer Alltagskultur” (Klaus Scholtissek, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

Part III Imperial Ideology and Other Early Christian Texts

“The Shepherd of Hermas and the Roman Empire” (Mark R. C. Grundeken, Catholic University of Leuven)

“Noble Death or Death Cult? Pagan Criticism of Early Christian Martyrdom” (Paul Middleton, University of Chester)

“Nero Redivivus as a Subject of Early Christian Arcane Teaching” (Marco Frenschkowski, University of Leipzig)

Corinthiaka

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Every month I sort through hundreds of google alerts, scholar alerts, academia notices, book review sites, and other social media in an attempt to find a few valuable bits to pass along via this site. I ignore the vast majority of hits that enter my inbox, store away those that I plan to develop into their own stories, and then release the ephemera (or those I fail to convert to stories) via these Corinthiaka posts. Here are a few from the last month–a small selection of the news, stories, and blogs about the Corinthia.

UnionpediaArchaeology and Classics:

New Testament:

Modern Greece:

 

Corinthiaka, July 31, 2015

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Here is this Friday’s dose of Corinthiaka–the ephemeral material, news, and blogs to go online over the last two weeks. Or at least the material that my alerts captured.

Archaeology and Classics:

  • One of those sweet 3D video fly-overs from Lechaion to Corinth in the Second century. Lots of inaccuracy combined with imaginative reconstruction here, but also some value. I love the view down the road from Lechaion (Georgios Terzis, “History in 3D” @DailyMotion)

Corinth3D_1

Corinth3D_2

 

 

 

New Testament:

Modern Greece: