A Culture of Quarrel

Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.  1 Corinthians 1:10  NASB

Made complete– Perhaps the greatest sin of exegetical bias is the sin of interpreting the text as if it belonged in our time and culture. The result of this tragic misreading is the belief that letters like Paul’s are about our issues and were intended (by God through inspiration) to be applied directly to our circumstances.  When we make this kind of mistake, we end up imagining that the exhortations and instructions given to the initial recipients of a letter like this were somehow supernaturally also meant for us. We forget entirely the situation of the original audience and we end up trying to apply these instructions to current circumstances.  So, for example, we take Paul’s comments about speaking in tongues or about women being silent or about not wearing jewelry as if what he said then is for us as well.  We don’t bother to discover what was happening in Corinth (or Ephesus or Galatia) when these letters were written because we imagine that God actually knew we would read them thousands of years later and He knew we needed the same advice.

Let’s see if we can correct some of this.  We start by recognizing what kind of place Corinth was in the first century.

“The Greek rhetorician Alciphron wrote in his memoirs, ‘Never yet have I been to Corinth, for I know pretty well the beastly kind of life the rich enjoy there and the wretchedness of the poor’,”

“ . . . there stood a temple to the goddess Aphrodite, which according to the Greek historian Strabo employed the services of some one thousand prostitutes.”[1]

Corinth was rebuilt by the Romans after they destroyed the ancient Greek city.  It became an important city of imperial cult worship, populated by Romans, Greeks, Jews and other ethnic groups.  A painting of the Battle of Corinth gives you an idea of what activities dominated the city.  CLICK HERE

In this city, those who joined the Hebraic assembly brought a good deal of cultural ideas with them.  In fact, it’s startling that Paul even addresses the members of the assembly as “saints called by God,” since their behavior would have shocked any Torah group.  When Paul says that they have been “made complete,” our moral outrage should flame red-hot.  How is this even possible let alone be a true statement?  Out of this mixed bag grew all kinds of personal divisions, claims of power, theological disputes and moral failures.  Buechner makes the point concerning just one of the issues:

“There had also sprung up a group of charismatics, or pheumatikoi, who claimed to have such spiritual gifts as speaking in tongues and ‘prophecy’ and who seem to have been given not only to playing at spiritual one-upmanship with each other but to looking down their noses at pretty much everybody else.”[2]

Imagine, if you can, what kind of people Paul has to deal with in letters to this assembly. No wonder his appeals for unity and harmony are so vociferous.  When we read his words, we must keep in mind the environment of his audience. A port city filled with pagan gods, sexual license, animosity, lack of compassion, and moral turpitude—the population of Corinth brought all of this into the synagogue.  Paul does his best to correct it, with limited success.

Now imagine the mistake of pretending that what Paul says to this audience is what he would say to us, or that he even intended his words to these people to be applied to any other group.  Perhaps this is why some issues that we have made so much of in Corinthians simply don’t appear in any of his other letters.

What’s the lesson?  Exegesis starts with, “Who’s the audience?”  Unless you know this, it’s virtually impossible to know why the text was written.  But one thing is abundantly clear.  It wasn’t written for you!

Topical Index: Corinth, exegesis, 1 Corinthians 1:10

[1]Frederick Buechner  Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons(HarperOne, 2006), p. 195.

[2]Ibid., p. 197.