Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Religion, St. Paul

On Phoebe, Honored Courier of St. Paul (Michael Peppard)

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We’ve mentioned Phoebe of Kenchreai here at Corinthian Matters as an individual who was not simply a “helper” to St. Paul — one translation of the Greek diakonos) — but also a prostasis, an influential member of some wealth and authority in the earliest Christian community of the region.

Michael Peppard has recently published an article in Commonweal  (“Household Names: Junia, Phoebe, & Prisca in Early Christian Rome“) about Phoebe and two other significant women named in the final chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Peppard’s piece discusses the high status of these women and their importance in the mission of Paul. It’s a thoughtful piece of which I include a few snippets below.

But pay closer attention to whom Paul addresses and a surprise emerges: the status of women in the early church in Rome. Specifically, three women: Junia, Phoebe, and Prisca. They are not household names. They are not mentioned from pulpits on Sunday morning. But they were undeniably important to Paul—and to the Christian assemblies in Rome and Corinth, where they were authoritative leaders….

…Back to the first-century Phoebe: a more powerful translation than “benefactor” for prostatis would also be more faithful to the Greek term in its social context. When used in the masculine form prostatês, its semantic range covers “leader,” “ruler,” “presiding officer,” “administrator,” “protector,” “guardian,” or “patron.” Certainly the possession of wealth and the concomitant powers of benefaction could be related to one’s role as a leader, presider, or protector. But generosity alone does not capture the meaning of the term that Paul uses for Phoebe…

…As an honored and trusted courier, Phoebe could have had the sender’s blessing to explain her letter and its author’s intention as well. The social context thus suggests that, in addition to being a diakonos, a prostatis, and the courier of the most important theological text in Christian history, Phoebe may also have been its first authorized interpreter….

Thus when Phoebe arrived in Rome with Paul’s letter, it was into Prisca’s hand she most likely placed the scroll. Prisca had known Paul for years, and she was one of his most trusted partners, just as Phoebe was a trusted courier. So when we envision the very first discussion of the letter to the Romans, both scriptural and historical evidence suggest the same thing: it was women who were doing the talking.

 

 

Holy Fools in Corinth

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Corinth always gets the spotlight this time of year in homilies and op-ed pieces about the significance of Christian Holy Week, especially that three-day period known as the “Triduum,” which begins on Maundy Thursday (celebrating Jesus’ last supper), proceeds to Good Friday (the crucifixion), and culminates in Easter Sunday (the resurrection).

Corinth is front and center in this annual cycle largely because of the disbelief and difficulties of the first Christ followers living in the city in the mid-first century, whom the apostle Paul took time to address in a fulsome letter now known as 1 Corinthians. In Chapter 1, Paul seeks to correct the perspective of some in his community who viewed power, status, wealth, and education as the most important values in shaping and structuring their relationships: Paul highlights, rather, how Christ’s death by crucifixion — the “foolishness” of the cross — turned the Roman world, in its orientation to power and dominance, upside down. In Chapter 11, the apostle deals with division and disorder in community meals by reminding them of Jesus’ words on the night of his betrayal: “the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread….” And in the final chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses disbelief of some in the Corinthian community about the Resurrection of Christ.

The letter itself, then, frames the content celebrated in the Triduum, and Christians today hear plenty of reflections on the Corinthian situation between Maundy Thursday and Resurrection Sunday.

This year western and eastern churches celebrated holy week in quick succession, and western Easter coincided with April Fool’s Day for the first time in 70 years. Many of the Easter homilies and op-eds I read concerned the foolishness of the cross. Among the better ones I read:

Performing 1 Corinthians

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Creating-a-scene.jpgAmong the thousands of publications on St. Paul’s letters to the Christians in Corinth, Creating a Scene in Corinth: A Simulation (MennoMedia 2013) stands out for its unique approach to biblical study through simulation and performance. Written by Reta Finger and George McClain, the work invites its readers to experience 1 Corinthians by directly entering into conversation and even debate with the apostle and his conflicted Christian communities. Creating a Scene is designed to give students and small groups of 15-25 an immersive experience in studying Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And while this is a work written for church groups, not academics, the authors have attempted to make accessible to their readers an extensive and complex scholarly literature related to Corinth, Pauline studies, and ancient religion.

Like A Week in the Life of Corinth (discussed last week), Creating a Scene is based on imaginative play around a series of characters—some historical, some fictive—such as the individuals known from the Pauline letters and local elite known from inscriptions (e.g., Babbius Italicus and Junia Theodora). But the main purpose of the work is less a primer for bible study than simulating the conflicts of 1 Corinthians through creative role playing. As the publisher page notes,

Creating a Scene imaginatively draws readers into Chloe’s house church, which has just received a letter from their church planter, the apostle Paul. Using group simulation, the book brings to life scholarly research on how the gospel penetrated the Roman Empire. As participants role-play early believers and debate with each other, they gain new insights and will never read 1 Corinthians the same way again.

First-century Corinthians were just as human as church people today. They did not consider Paul’s letters authoritative Scripture when he wrote them, so lively group discussion and debate are encouraged. This method of Bible study works for many levels, from youth groups to Sunday school classes, or in college and seminary courses.

While Creating a Scene frequently moves between simulation and character development, commentary, and voices from the authors themselves, the work consistently interweaves social and historical background content with role playing. One constantly feels while reading this that the community in Corinth had problems (and the leaders of the church just seem a lot less saintly than they do in A Week in the Life of Corinth). The first part of the work (pp. 11-94) includes an introduction to the idea of simulation as well as important matters for understanding Corinth, such as the conflicts in 1 Corinthians, the archaeology and history of the Roman city, the values of a Roman society in the first century, polytheism and religion, social status and inequality, among others. The second part (The Play Begins! Reenacting Chloe’s House Church, pp. 95-209) takes readers into the heart of the simulation, with each successive chapter working through the major points of commentary and conflict in the letter, as for example:

    • Hidden Persuasions in Paul’s Greeting—1 Corinthians 1:1-9
    • The Wisdom of the World versus the Wisdom of God—1 Corinthians 1:10-3:4
    • Field Hands and Master Builders: Images of Unity—1 Corinthians 3:5-4:21

Each of these chapters include background information, commentary, photographs and plans, rubric for simulation, and concluding sections inviting the four different groups—the factions of Christ, Apollos, Paul, and Peter—to respond to and apply what they have learned through reenactment (e.g., “What impact does this topic of resurrection have on you and your faction?…How does Paul’s view of bodily resurrection challenge common assumptions about the afterlife held among Christians today?”). The final chapter includes a simulation exercise for recreating a Corinthian agape meal including prayers, hymns, readings, dialogue, and even recipes! The two appendixes are devoted to additional reenactment (Corinthian elite gathered at the Isthmian games) and a leader’s guide.

Beyond the book, the publisher page makes available a number of extra digital resources including lengthy slide presentations about Corinth with plans and images, imaginary speeches from members in Chloe’s house church, supplemental material for character development, and recommendations for implementing the simulation in churches and seminary classes (based on Finger’s previous simulations carried out in her bible classes). Creating a Scene is intended for study by small groups in churches or introductory academic classes to 1 Corinthians (who can act their way through the book in 10-15 sessions), but it may be of interest  to  anyone interested in learning about the backgrounds of First Corinthians.

For full contents, see the table of contents at Amazon.

Additional reviews of Creating a Scene in Corinth are available here:

This is the eighth 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.

On the Churches and Saints of Corinth

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Kodratos of CorinthTomorrow marks the feast day of Kodratos, Corinth’s most famous ancient country saint martyred during the reign of the Emperor Decius. As I noted a number of years ago when I paraphrased a Latin version of his life, Kodratos was Corinth’s quintessential rural saint: an orphan raised by his Father God in the fields and mountains after his parents’ early death. When he descended into the city of sin and pleasure as an adult, smelling of the country (in a good way — as his biographer notes), he preached with eloquence and attracted a small group of like-minded associates (the famous Leonidas of Lechaion was a friend of his) until he and a few others were martyred by Jason the provincial governor. When confronted with torture, Kodratos responded: “Bring it on!”

The stories and biographies of Corinth’s martyrs and saints such as Kodratos remain largely inaccessible to an anglophone public today because they have rarely been translated, let alone paraphrased, from their Byzantine Greek and Medieval Latin sources (or the modern Greek summaries). In a similar way, most of the late antique churches around Corinth associated with Corinth’s martyrs were excavated by Greek archaeologists (Dimitrios Pallas, especially) who published their findings in Greek (or French and German), rarely in English.

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Church of Kodratos in Ancient Corinth

Strangely, then, an English-speaking public is somewhat disconnected from the abundant early Christian remains in the Corinthia and the description of martyrs noted in Byzantine martyrologies and the Acta Sanctorum. This is unfortunate given both the popular interest in religion in Corinth and a healthy tourist industry oriented specifically around St. Paul and Christian pilgrimage.

 

There is, however, a growing body of scholarship in English discussing the churches around Corinth. These include:

  • William Caraher, “Church, Society, and the Sacred in Early Christian Greece,” PhD Dissertation, Columbus, 2003: Ohio State University. See also his two recent articles on the Lechaion basilica, which he has discussed and posted on his blog.
  • Brown, Amelia R. “Medieval Pilgrimage to Corinth and Southern Greece.” HEROM: Journal on Hellenistic and Roman Material Culture 1 (2012): 197–223.
  • Brown, Amelia R. “The City of Corinth and Urbanism in Late Antique Greece,” PhD Dissertation, Berkeley, 2008: University of California- Berkeley. Available as PDF here.
  • Richard Rothaus, Corinth: The First City of Greece, Leiden, 2000: Brill. See especially his chapter on Christianizing the city. Snippet view of part of the book available via Google Books
  • G.D.R. Sanders, “Archaeological Evidence for Early Christianity and the End of Hellenic Religion in Corinth,” in Schowalter and S.J. Friesen (eds.), Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Cambridge, MA, 2005, 419-42. Freely available via Academia
  • V. Limberis, “Ecclesiastical Ambiguities: Corinth in the Fourth and Fifth Century,” in Schowalter and Friesen (eds.), Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Cambridge, MA 2005, 443-457.
  • Sweetman, Rebecca J. “Memory, Tradition, and Christianization of the Peloponnese.” American Journal of Archaeology 119, no. 4 (2015): 501–31. Available for free download here.
  • Sweetman, Rebecca. “The Christianization of the Peloponnese: The Topography and Function of Late Antique Churches.” Journal of Late Antiquity 3, no. 2 (2010): 203–61.

I hope to work with a student or two at Messiah College next year to produce DIY English translations of some of these lives and perhaps descriptions of the churches. That would be a fun project.

This marks the fourth in a (mostly) Wednesday 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.

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: