MetaCatholic

Discussion of biblical texts is regularly anachronistic. This certainly affects heated and ongoing debates carried out at a non-specialist level such as what the Bible says about “homosexuality”, when in fact it knows of no such category (which is bound up with the 19th century medicalisation of behaviour). But it happens at every level. Here’s an example from the careful (to the point of obsessiveness) and hermeneutically sophisticated Tony Thiselton accepting an element of social-scientific criticism:

I now perceive how this [the Corinthians] theological misperception [over “being spiritual” – which Thiselton had argued for previously as a key unifying theme of 1 Corinthians] combined with the seductive infiltration into the Christian church of cultural attitudes derived from secular or non-Christian Corinth as a city.¹ 

There are two overwhelming anachronisms in this. The idea of applying the word “secular” to first-century Corinth as a synonym for non-Christian is completely misplaced. From the household gods, to the meat-markets, to the many temples around the forum, to the burgeoning imperial cult no Roman city was “secular”. This is, however, the less significant anachronism, and arguably just a matter of linguistic carelessness.

More seriously problematic is the idea that the church is sufficiently well established and developed for ideas to “infiltrate it” as alien, or that what Paul thinks is “church culture” and what the Corinthians think are alien cultural misperceptions. Partly the Corinthians are new converts, and conversion of mind, practice and culture is always a long drawn out and imperfect process, however impassioned the conversion of commitment and heart is. Partly Paul is one of many people trying to work out what a Christian vision is (and other equally prominent people in the new movement are articulating rather different ones). 

Paul comes from a long-standing Jewish communal tradition which has considerable experience of singing the Lord’s song in strange land, and is working out how that is transformed by his Messiah Jesus. The Corinthians have no real idea they are living in a strange land, and in so far as they might think in these terms it is not an idea of being in exile, but one of being a colony, there to teach everyone else to sing the Roman song.

Finally, there is nothing other than personal charisma and persuasive argument to say who is doing any misperceiving: Paul or the Corinthians. There is no orthodoxy for the Corinthians to be seduced away from. What will later (in varying degree) become orthodox emerges in part from Paul thinking on his feet. It is not apparent to me that if the Corinthians hadn’t provoked Paul to argument, the church would ever have so strongly committed to belief in the resurrection of the body. It is equally arguable that in some historical periods aspects of the Corinthian view of the body and sex, say,   have been at least as close to mainstream Christianity as Paul’s. (“It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” 1 Cor 7:1)

In short, Thiselton makes it sound as though what was happening on the ground was straightforward and obvious. I think it was a mess, in which people (especially in this context) Paul and the Corinthians are contending for the appropriate cultural forms of Christian practice and thought in a non-Jewish culture, one partly alien to Paul, in which the Corinthians are fully at home. I also think that’s much more like most of our own situations, whether in the traditional “mission-field” situation or in our very non-traditional one, where the culture has changed under our feet, and there are competing visions about how much to change with it. 

Reading this particular scriptural case as the “seductive infiltration into the Christian church of cultural attitudes” encourages us to do the same today, and engage in name-calling our opponents. Me Paul, you Corinthian. I argue that the reality of what’s going on is more complex, then and now, and if we’re less anachronistic about then, we might be more constructive about now.

1. First Epistle to the Corinthians NIGTC Eerdmans / Paternoster 2000. I use Thiselton here as an example of widespread practice, and indeed an instance of how even Homer nods [↩]